The Whisperer (Inspector Sejer) by Karin Fossum

Author:Karin Fossum
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2018-12-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

‘Daddy always went to bed first,’ Ragna explained, ‘and early, as a rule. In summer he would go to bed when it was still light, without even closing the curtains. If the sun wanted to shine on him, he took it as a sign. He would be showered in gold, he believed, and if he could then gather enough sun energy, he would also be able to shine on others. The lights in the bedroom were always on, in both summer and winter. The ceiling light, the reading light above the bed and the lamp on the bedside table. It has a red shade, like a toadstool. I still have it. Daddy always lay next to the wall. My mother would go to bed a couple of hours later and always wore an eye mask. The bulb in the ceiling light was sixty watts, the one in the reading light, and the one in the toadstool were both twenty-five. Like an interrogation room.’

She smiled at the inspector.

‘Daddy would often lie and knock on the wall,’ she whispered, ‘with his knuckles. As though he were sending secret messages to the room next door, which was my room, and later Rikard’s room. My bed was next to the wall, which was no more than cardboard between us. In the evenings I lay awake and listened, there was something he wanted to tell me, and he obviously thought I could understand his secret code. That only he and I understood. He would knock lightly with long pauses in between, or he would knock hard and fast in a set rhythm, or without any rhythm at all. Sometimes he found a pattern that he would repeat over and over. And even though I understood nothing, Daddy’s tapping on the wall was an important sign. It meant that I was part of a pact, one of the chosen few. We had our own language. Daddy was trying to teach me the language, that was what we were doing every night. As time passed, I started to know some of the signals that he repeated and was able to answer back. Some were very short, others consisted of several phrases. But every time I learned a pattern, he found another. I spent a lot of time awake, befuddled by all the knocking and what it might mean. I so wanted Daddy and me to have our own special language that no one else understood. Sometimes when I was bored at school, I would sit tapping gently on the desk to see if anyone reacted. If someone else knew the special code, if someone would look up and send me a nod of acknowledgement, a sign that he belonged to the secret pact. You know what a lively imagination children can have. But no one did.’

‘And you never found an explanation? You never understood any of the signals?’ Sejer asked.

‘Yes, there were a few I understood,’ she whispered. ‘Every evening when we had been lying there tapping for a long time, he always finished with a short signal.

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