“But you didn’t feel anything?”
“No. Apart from those panic attacks. And seeing as they were the alternative to not feeling anything, it felt fine not to feel anything.”
“ ‘Comfortably Numb.’ ”
“What?”
“Sorry. Go on.”
“When I was first made aware that I was showing signs of PTSD — insomnia, irritability, rapid heart rate, lots of little things — it didn’t really bother me much. Everyone in Special Forces knew about PTSD, obviously, but even if the official version is that we take it very seriously, it wasn’t something we ever spoke about much. No one said out loud that PTSD was for weaklings, but Special Forces troops are pretty self-aware, we know perfectly well that we have higher NPY levels and all that.”
Madsen nodded. There was research that suggested the way soldiers were recruited to specialist units like Special Forces filtered out those with average or low levels of neuropeptide Y, or NPY, a neurotransmitter that lowers stress levels. Some Special Forces troops believed that this genetic disposition, together with their training and strong camaraderie, made them immune to PTSD.
“It was OK to admit you’d had a few nightmares,” Bohr said. “That proved you weren’t a complete psychopath. But apart from that I think we regarded PTSD a bit like our parents regarded smoking: as long as almost everyone had a go, it couldn’t be that dangerous. But then it got worse...”
“Yes,” Madsen said, leafing back through his notes. “We talked about that. But you also said that it got better at one point.”
“Yes. It got better when I finally managed to kill someone.”
Erland Madsen looked up. He took his glasses off, without it being a particularly dramatic gesture.
“Who did you kill?” Madsen could have bitten his tongue. What sort of question was that for a professional therapist? And did he really want to know the answer?
“A rapist. It doesn’t really make much difference who he was, but he raped and killed a woman named Hala. She was my interpreter in Afghanistan.”
A pause.
“Why do you say ‘rapist’?”
“What?”
“You say he killed your interpreter. Isn’t that worse than rape? Wouldn’t it be more natural to say that you’d killed a murderer?”
Bohr looked at Madsen as if the psychologist had said something he’d never thought of himself. He moistened his lips as if he was about to say something. Then he did it again.
“I’m searching,” he said. “I’m searching for the man who raped Bianca.”
“Your younger sister?”
“He needs to make amends for what he did. We all need to make amends for what we’ve done.”
“Do you need to make amends for what you’ve done?”
“I need to make amends for the fact that I didn’t manage to protect her. The way she protected me.”
“How did your sister protect you?”
“By holding on to her secret.” Bohr took a deep, shaky breath. “Bianca was ill when she finally told me that she’d been raped when she was seventeen years old, but I knew it was true, it all fitted. She told me because she was convinced she was pregnant, even though it was several years later. She said she could feel it, it was growing very slowly, that it was like a swelling, a stone, and that it would kill her in order to get out. We were at the cabin, and I said I would help her to get rid of it, but she said that then he — the rapist — would come and kill her, like he’d promised. So I gave her a sleeping pill, and the next morning I told her it was an abortion pill, that she was no longer pregnant. She became hysterical. Later, when she was in hospital again and I went to visit her, the psychiatrist showed me a sheet of paper where she’d drawn an eagle calling my name, and told me she’d said something about an abortion and that she and I had killed me. I chose to keep our secret. I don’t know if it made any difference. Either way, Bianca would rather die herself than let me, her big brother, die.”
“And you were unable to prevent that. So you had to make amends?”
“Yes. And I could only do that by avenging her. By stopping men who rape. That was why I joined the Army, why I applied to Special Forces. I wanted to be prepared. And then Hala was raped as well...”
“And you killed the man who did the same thing to Hala that had been done to your sister?”
“Yes.”
“And how did that make you feel?”
“Like I said. Better. Killing someone made me feel better. I’m no longer a freak.”
Madsen looked down at the blank page in his notebook. He had stopped writing. He cleared his throat.
“So... have you made amends now?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I haven’t found the man who took Bianca. And there are others.”
“Other rapists who have to be stopped, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“And you’d like to stop them?”
“Yes.”
“Kill them?”
“Looks like it. It makes me feel better.”
Erland Madsen hesitated. Here was a situation that needed to be dealt with, from both a therapeutic and a judicial perspective.
“These killings, are they something you mostly just like to think about, or are they something you’re actively planning to carry out?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Would you like someone to stop you?”
“No.”
“What would you like, then?”
“I’d like you to tell me if you think it will help next time as well.”
“Killing someone?”
“Yes.”
Madsen looked at Roar Bohr. But all his experience told him that you could never find answers in faces, expressions, body language, too much of that is learned behaviour. It was in people’s words that you found the answers. And now he had been asked a question that he couldn’t answer. Not openly. Not honestly. Madsen looked at his watch.
“Time’s up,” he said. “Let’s continue with this on Thursday.”
“I’m going now,” a woman’s voice said from the doorway.
Erland Madsen looked up from the folder he had found in his clients’ archive that was now lying on his desk. It was Torill, the receptionist shared by the six psychologists in the practice. She had her coat on, and was looking at Erland with an expression he knew meant there was something he needed to remember, but that she was too tactful to broach directly.
Erland Madsen looked at the time. Six o’clock. He remembered what it was. He was supposed to be putting the children to bed that evening; his wife was helping her mother clear out her loft.
But first he needed to figure this out.
Two clients. There were several points of contact. They had both worked in Kabul, partly overlapping there. Both had been referred to him because they had shown signs of PTSD. And now he had found it in the notes: they had both had a close relationship with someone called Hala. Obviously it could be a common woman’s name in Afghanistan, but the chance that there could be more than one Hala working as an interpreter for Norwegian forces in Kabul struck him as unlikely.
With Bohr it had been the usual thing when it came to his relationships with women who were either his subordinates or younger than him: he felt responsible for them, in the same way he had for his younger sister, a responsibility that bordered on the obsessive, a form of paranoia.