Читать книгу Thomas Quick - Hannes Råstam - Страница 29

RECONNAISSANCE IN ØRJE FOREST

IN SEPTEMBER 2008, the photographer Lars Granstrand and I crossed the border at the same place as the Quick investigators during their journey to Norway twelve years earlier.

At Drammen police station we met with Håkon Grøttland, who had participated in all of Quick’s trips to Norway.

‘He’s not like us – he’s not rational or logical,’ said Grøttland.

He explained the specific difficulties investigators had faced in their dealings with Thomas Quick.

‘Quick says “yes” and shakes his head at the same time! And he says “left” when he means right. There are simpler things in God’s world than trying to figure out Thomas Quick.’

Personally, he hadn’t been able to understand him, Grøttland explained. But Seppo Penttinen and Birgitta Ståhle knew what Quick meant.

Håkon Grøttland had worked on the Therese Johannesen investigation when she disappeared in July 1988. After that, he was part of a Norwegian police unit investigating Thomas Quick and he was still convinced that Quick had murdered Therese Johannesen.

‘What is it that really convinces you?’ I wondered.

‘Just imagine Quick sitting there in a psychiatric clinic in Sweden, having all this detailed knowledge about Therese and Fjell and Ørje Forest. So we go out and check what he has said, and we find that it’s actually true.’

I agreed it was difficult to find any other plausible explanation than the fact that Quick was guilty.

Grøttland gave us a lift to Fjell, where Therese had lived with her mother. We drove past the Fjell Centre and the video rental store where Therese had gone to buy sweets with the sixteen crowns and fifty öre she had in her pocket. Grøttland parked the car and showed us a wide-open area of grass, with a high-rise apartment block towering against the sky – Lauritz Hervigsvei 74. Grøttland pointed to the row of windows on the fifth floor.

‘That’s where she lived. And Quick stood here when Therese came walking from over there,’ said Grøttland, pointing at a slope leading down to the road we had just driven along. ‘It was here he took her.’

I counted the eight floors of the block, thirty-five large windows on each floor.

So Thomas Quick had supposedly abducted Therese in front of 280 large windows, right under the eyes of her mother, who had described how she stood on the balcony keeping an eye out for her the whole time.

‘Christ, it’s like abducting a child right in front of the main stand at Råsunda Stadium,’ the photographer whispered into my ear.

Thomas Quick was never seen by anyone in connection with any of the thirty murders to which he had confessed and had never left any signs of his presence. That was why I had assumed he must always have exercised extreme caution.

During the investigation into Therese’s murder, as we know, some 1,721 people were questioned by the police, but none of them had seen anything that could be related in any way to Thomas Quick. Nor did any of the 4,645 tip-offs that came in have any connection with Thomas Quick. I looked up at Therese’s balcony and confirmed to myself that everything must have happened in full and public view.

‘Then he smashed her head against a boulder on that slope, went and got his car and put her inside,’ Grøttland explained.

‘Seems incredibly risky,’ I said.

‘Yes, obviously,’ answered the inspector.

*

The following day I met Grøttland’s colleague, Ole Thomas Bjerknes, who had also worked on the Quick investigation. He showed me Hærland Church, where supposedly Quick had killed Therese. Then we went to Ørje Forest and drove several kilometres down bumpy forest tracks before reaching the area where Quick had disposed of Therese’s body.

Bjerknes was teaching at the Norwegian police high school. That same day he had given a lecture about the Quick investigation, and he happened to have brought along three video tapes of raw footage from the Norwegian reconnaissance trips with Quick. I tried not to sound too keen when I asked if there was any chance of being able to have a look at the tapes. To my surprise, he readily handed them over. I took the coveted tapes, promising to return them to him before leaving Norway.

The same evening I sought out a television production company in Drammen and managed to hire the equipment needed to copy the tapes. I started at eight o’clock in the evening, in my hotel room. There were about ten hours of reconnaissance on the three tapes. The tapes to which I was transferring the material had to be changed every hour.

The most interesting footage was of Thomas Quick sitting in the car, while another camera filmed out of the windscreen. The camera pointed at Quick – from time to time also taking in Seppo Penttinen on his right-hand side – but the road was shown in a little superimposed box on the top left of the screen.

Quick’s eyes rolled about. Sometimes they seemed to drop or stare with a crazed expression. It was extremely perplexing and unpleasant. The Thomas Quick of these recordings was an altogether different person from the one I had met at Säter Hospital about a week before. I wondered what could have triggered this personality transformation. Even his way of talking was different.

To keep myself awake through the night I forced myself to watch all three video tapes as I was copying. Often it was uneventful and excruciatingly dull, moving along without a word being uttered for half an hour, or with long sequences in which the cameraman had put down the camera and it had continued filming the car seat. Because I was copying I couldn’t fast-forward; I had to suffer every minute of it.

It was already past midnight as I slotted in a new tape. We were now with a hand-held camera in the car behind Thomas Quick’s van. Quick had requested that the car should stop but the camera kept rolling. In the recording, you can hear a care assistant coming into Quick’s car and offering him medicine.

CARE ASSISTANT: Are you taking your Xanax?

TQ: Mm.

CARE ASSISTANT: Can you get it down without water?

TQ: I have . . . Coca-Cola . . .

On the tape, Thomas Quick speaks with a sluggish voice as if he is finding it difficult to formulate words at all.

CARE ASSISTANT: Put it in your mouth . . . Is one enough? . . . Shouldn’t you have another one right away?

TQ: Yes, maybe . . .

Thomas Quick’s answer is something between crying and talking, a sound made by a person going through terrible suffering.

I hear Quick taking another pill and after that the journey can go on.

The clinical drug Xanax is a tranquilliser classed as a narcotic, of a type known as a benzodiazepine, notorious for being extremely addictive and with a number of serious side effects.

What I had just seen convinced me that Thomas Quick was as high on drugs as he looked. I also recalled Göran Källberg’s insinuations. Could this be what he had been alluding to, namely that Quick had been medicated with such strong drugs that his confessions must be viewed as unreliable? I watched the material with renewed interest. My tiredness had been swept away.

*

Again I changed the tape. Now Thomas Quick is in the first car in a convoy of four or five, heading towards Ørje Forest. He is leading a procession that includes a chief prosecutor, a police interrogator, a lawyer, a psychotherapist, a memory expert, several drivers and nurses, as well as a large number of Swedish and Norwegian police officers. Quick has announced that he will show them the way to a gravel pit where Therese Johannesen’s body has been buried. The gravel pit is in Ørje Forest – he knows the way.

The convoy moves east along Highway E18 towards Sweden, and Quick complains about all the houses. He says that this also disturbed him after murdering Therese. Finally the situation becomes critical. The road signs indicate that the Swedish border is getting very close, and Quick has been quite clear about Therese’s body being buried in Norway.

TQ: . . . we’re approaching the border and I have to find a road before . . .

PENTTINEN: Before we get to the border?

TQ: Yes.

PENTTINEN: Yes, that’s how you described it earlier.

TQ: Yes.

PENTTINEN: Do you recognise that, Thomas?

TQ: Yes.

What Quick claims to recognise is Klund Church. After a good deal of conferring they decide to turn off onto a forest track on the right.

There is a road barrier and Quick says it was also there the last time round, but ‘then there was no problem getting past it’.

Seppo Penttinen nonetheless has his doubts and he asks if there is really such a place as the one Quick has described down this road.

TQ: It should be a sort of levelled area, of that characteristic, and then there should be . . . as if at some point it has been a kind of, of . . . I’ve had trouble describing it during questioning as well . . . like a gravel pit or soil pit or . . .

penttinen: You mean like someone’s been removing some kind of gravel?

TQ: Yes.

The convoy heads down the forest track, which proves very long. They shake and rattle, kilometre after kilometre. It already seems quite inconceivable that this track made for forestry vehicles should lead to a gravel pit.

Quick had said earlier that the church could be used as a marker to gauge how far down the road they should drive, but the steeple has long since disappeared from view.

TQ: Mm. I’m feeling that we have gone very far in relation to my memory of the distance I went.

PENTTINEN: Yes. Have we gone too far?

TQ: I don’t know.

Quick says that he’s had certain ‘points of recognition’ along the road, so they continue. I note that Quick is now noticeably slurring his words. He says that it is difficult for him to go down this road. After a while he starts flapping his arms.

PENTTINEN: You’re waving your hand. What are you trying to say?

TQ: I don’t know.

PENTTINEN: Should we carry on?

TQ: Yes, let’s carry on. The fox must be red.

PENTTINEN: I can’t hear what you’re saying.

TQ: The fox must be dead.

PENTTINEN: The fox?

TQ: The Jewish boy.

PENTTINEN: The Jewish boy must be dead?

Thomas Quick seems to be lost in the mists, and Penttinen is concerned.

PENTTINEN: Are you with us, Thomas?

TQ: Mm.

But Thomas is not with them. Mentally he is in an entirely different place.

PENTTINEN: (repeats) Are you with us, Thomas?

Quick again hums an answer.

PENTTINEN: We’re coming up to a crossing here. Now you have to decide the way, Thomas. Should we go to the right? You’re nodding to the right.

The car turns right.

PENTTINEN: Here there’s a turn to the left.

TQ: Keep going straight.

PENTTINEN: Shall we carry on?

TQ: Mm.

PENTTINEN: Straight on.

TQ: We can go where you find . . . so we can . . .

PENTTINEN: Turn round?

TQ: Mm.

Thomas Quick’s droning voice now only hums his answers and soon he closes his eyes.

PENTTINEN: Now you’re closing your eyes. How are you?

TQ: Stop a while. Over there.

The convoy stops. Quick sits in silence with his eyes closed. The terrain where the car has stopped does not correspond in any way to the description given earlier by Quick. There is no levelled piece of land here and certainly no gravel pit. The van has stopped on a long slope in a rolling Norwegian forest.

Quick sees a hill. He decides to walk to the top and is accompanied by Seppo Penttinen, Birgitta Ståhle, Claes Borgström and Detective Inspector Anna Wikström.

PENTTINEN: Are we within walking distance now of the place where Therese is?

TQ: Yes.

Quick is so unsteady on his legs now that Ståhle and Penttinen have to keep him on his feet by taking an arm each. You can see that they’ve done this before. They make their way up to the top of the hill, where the whole group stands in silence. Finally Penttinen speaks up.

PENTTINEN: You’re looking down at the road, by that curve down there. And now you nod. Is there something special about that place? Try to describe it.

TQ: (in a monotone, almost whispering) The curve leads . . . up steps.

PENTTINEN: What did you say? The curve what?

TQ: Leads steps up.

It is difficult to make much sense of Quick, who seems completely drugged.

PENTTINEN: Can you see the place from here?

Quick is immobile. He closes his eyes.

PENTTINEN: You’re nodding and closing your eyes at the same time.

Quick has opened his eyes and sees something at the bottom of the slope. They agree it’s a shoulder of rock.

‘Shall we try to get down to that spruce tree?’ Quick suggests at long last.

They walk towards a little spruce tree and, when they get there, stand in silence once again. Quick whispers something inaudible. He’s helped to light a cigarette.

‘Is the curve in that direction?’ he wonders, pointing with his arm.

‘It is,’ Birgitta Ståhle confirms.

‘I want to have a look at it,’ says Quick, and starts moving in the direction he has just been indicating.

The ground is covered in old branches and it is difficult to make much progress. Quick starts stamping on the branches. Penttinen grabs him.

Quick has a total freak-out and starts shouting, ‘You bastard! Bloody bastard swine! You bloody bastard swine! Bloody bastard swine!’

Quick stamps and thrashes with his arms but is quickly overpowered. He ends up at the bottom of a heap of police and care assistants. Seppo Penttinen turns to the camera, as if to make sure that this is being properly documented. There is something triumphant about Penttinen’s expression when he looks into the camera, filming this dramatic moment.

Someone has indicated to Christer van der Kwast that dramatic things are unfolding in the Norwegian undergrowth. He comes running into shot, wearing a shiny black suit. Quick is lying down, growling intently, a low, rhythmical sound.

Everyone in the company knows that Quick has undergone a transformation; he has assumed one of the multiple personalities he harbours within. This is a figure referred to by him and his therapist as Ellington – the evil figure of the father, the murderer – who has taken over Quick’s psyche and body.

‘Thomas,’ says Penttinen in a pleading tone, while Quick continues making his noises.

Birgitta Ståhle tries to connect with her patient. ‘Sture! Sture! Sture! Sture! Sture!’ she says.

But Quick carries on being Ellington, and he growls back. ‘Gone for ever,’ he says in a thick, dark voice. ‘Gone for ever!’

He growls again. ‘And people will step on your slut snout,’ he roars.

Ståhle makes another attempt to gain access to her patient, who is now calming down.

Quick is helped onto his feet and the whole group moves silently towards a height, where Quick sits down with his back to the camera. Penttinen, Ståhle and Anna Wikström are holding him. They remain sitting in silence for a long time.

‘Tell us now,’ Penttinen asks.

‘Wait a moment,’ says Quick, irritated. ‘I have to . . .’

‘What are you going to tell us?’ Birgitta wonders.

‘No, no! Don’t disturb me!’

Quick isn’t ready to start talking yet. No one has asked him what happened to that gravel pit he promised them. Or what he meant when he said that Therese would be found in an area of ‘levelled ground’.

Quick starts whispering and, in a scarcely audible voice, speaks of how Therese ‘was gone for ever when I left her’. The boys were still here but she was gone for ever. Therese’s body is within an area between the spruce tree and the hilltop, he says.

‘It’s not enough, Thomas,’ says Penttinen. ‘It’s too big.’

They reach a stalemate. Quick has not been able to deliver a body, nor a gravel pit and not even a levelled area of ground. And Penttinen is not accepting a vague suggestion that Therese is somewhere in the forest. He is demanding more than that.

Quick asks to speak privately with Claes Borgström. They step aside and the camera is turned off.

When recording is resumed fifteen minutes later, Quick disjointedly slurs something about ‘a boy is mutilated by a car on packed earth’. He says that he has just been up on a hill and seen a boggy pond ‘with certain stones’. This is the spot where ‘the broken girl has been hidden’, he says.

Quick wants to mark out a triangle in the forest where Therese’s body may be found. Together they establish the outline of this triangle, the base of which is formed by a line from a spruce tree to ‘almost down to the pond’. From this baseline, the tip of the triangle reaches ‘two-thirds of the way up to the top of the hill’.

When the group has completed this time-consuming exercise, they start walking in the direction of the pond. Penttinen explains how he has to hold on to Quick, ‘in view of what happened earlier’.

Quick growls by way of an answer.

‘Are you having difficulties looking at the pond, Thomas?’ asks Penttinen.

Quick growls.

‘Talk so we can understand,’ says Penttinen.

By now, they have reached the pond.

‘When you walk by this pond, you start reacting to something,’ says Penttinen. ‘Do you recognise it in some way? Yes, you’re nodding. What does that mean?’

‘I want us to go a little further,’ says Quick. ‘I might need a bit of support.’

Quick is now so heavily drugged that he is walking with great difficulty. He has clearly been given more tranquillisers.

‘I can’t carry you, you have to understand that,’ says Penttinen.

However, Quick doesn’t seem to be understanding very much at all at this point. What he says is almost impossible to make out, and although he’s being propped up he is struggling to make forward progress.

‘We’re waiting, Thomas, there’s no hurry. We’ll keep going for as long as you can stay on your feet.’

‘Can I have a look at the pond?’ asks Quick.

‘But you have your eyes closed, Thomas!’ says Penttinen. ‘Try to open them. We’re right here.’

Quick asks if Gun is there. Gun is Sture’s twin sister, whom he has not seen for a number of years.

Anna Wikström explains that she is not Gun.

‘It’s Anna standing here,’ she says.

Quick keeps his eyes shut.

‘I’m going to look at the pond,’ he says.

‘We’re here,’ says Penttinen.

‘Try to look,’ Wikström urges.

‘I’m looking,’ says Quick.

‘Why do you react like that?’ Penttinen wonders.

‘Because those boulders there . . .’

Again Quick runs out of words. A moment later he asks to speak to Birgitta Ståhle without the camera and microphone. By the time the video camera is turned back on after a twenty-minute interval, Quick has made a new statement. Claes Borgström has to explain what he has said. Quick will not answer any further questions.

Penttinen seems overwhelmed by the gravity of the moment, if also slightly concerned that Quick, in the last hour, has given several different versions of what happened to Therese. He knows that it is Quick’s normal pattern of behaviour to make ‘conscious deviations’ from things that are difficult, in a psychological sense, to approach. Now he wants to assure himself that this emerging version is the truth.

‘Before Claes explains I want some clarification,’ says Penttinen.

He leans towards Quick and talks to him intimately.

‘These two places we’ve filmed here which you’ve distinctly pointed out, are they 100 per cent certain for you? Without any variations, in the sense of deviations?’

Quick, speaking with difficulty, assures him that this time he is telling the truth: ‘The deviations have partly been about this story about gravel . . .’

He sounds as if his batteries have run out mid-sentence.

‘The gravel pit?’ Penttinen fills in.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ says Quick.

As soon as Quick has stepped aside it is time for Claes Borgström to give a little presentation to camera, with the boggy pond in the background.

‘So what’s happened here is that at point one, this crotch-like formation, he massacred Therese’s body. In other words there are no whole body parts left. No larger pieces of bone. Then he’s taken the body parts, after massacring the body, into this depression here. Then finally he’s swum out into the middle of the pond and let go of them, then gone back and fetched more. Some of them have sunk to the bottom and others have floated off in various directions. So there’s a point three in his story and it’s the pond.’

That was all Claes Borgström had to say on behalf of his client. The reconnaissance in Ørje Forest was over and the last video tape had come to an end.

Noise and static started on the TV and I felt almost as divorced from reality as Thomas Quick when I looked around my room, brightening now in the light of early morning, at the First Hotel Ambassadeur in Drammen. The copying had taken almost twelve hours and it was eight in the morning. I was bewitched by what I had seen in the films: a sizeable delegation of Swedish civil servants allowing themselves to be led about by a drugged psychiatric patient who clearly had no idea where he was. Could they really not have understood? No, I thought. It wasn’t possible. Could they really have believed he knew where Therese was? Even though he first spoke of a gravel pit; then, finding there was no gravel pit, a spruce tree; then within a certain triangle in the forest. Finally, she was ‘massacred’ and submerged in a pond.

It was difficult to accept that these highly educated representatives of a range of academic disciplines had not seen through the performance. With assumed or actual naivety they all took Quick’s information seriously, and it was determined that the pond would be drained.

A very large number of police constables from several of Norway’s districts took part in this work for seven weeks, with additional support from home guard personnel and external experts. First, the top layers of soil in the areas pointed out by Quick were peeled back and all the material manually sieved and examined by cadaver dogs and forensic archaeologists. After this unproductive Sisyphean task had been concluded, the even more laborious job of draining the small boggy pond commenced. Thirty-five million litres of water were pumped out and filtered; the bottom sediments were vacuumed until layers that were estimated to be 10,000 years old were reached. When nothing at all was found, everything was filtered a second time, but still not even the tiniest fragment of Therese was found.

Once again, the extremely costly investigation led to the inevitable conclusion that what Quick had said was untrue.

The fact that nothing was found after the pond had been drained called for an explanation from Quick. At this point he changed his mind and said that he had hidden Therese’s body in a gravel pit.

While the Norwegians continued scouring the forest and surrounding terrain, Quick was repeatedly questioned by Seppo Penttinen. And so the investigation continued to focus on Ørje Forest until the technicians – finally! – found the remains of a few fires, in which there were burnt pieces of bone.

One of those who examined the finds in Ørje Forest was the Norwegian professor Per Holck, who soon reached the decision that some of the bone fragments were human in origin and came from a person aged between five and fifteen.

How could you challenge a professor at the anatomical department of Oslo University, who had confirmed that these were indeed the body parts of a child, found precisely where Quick claimed to have disposed of a nine-year-old girl’s body by cremation? And still . . .

The story was too odd for me to be able to believe it.

I had set myself the task of scrutinising the prosecutor’s strongest case, Therese Johannesen, and afterwards I tried to summarise my position. What I had seen had pretty well convinced me that Quick did not murder Therese. It was worrying but also exceptionally impractical. It was becoming increasingly difficult to talk to the protagonists on the opposing sides of the Quick feud.

I had also discovered another thing, which no one else seemed to be aware of: Sture Bergwall, the person I had met at Säter, had nothing at all in common with the drugged mental patient who, under the name of Thomas Quick, had stumbled about in various forests, muttering incoherently about how he had murdered, chopped up, desecrated and eaten his victims. I had also hit upon the only reasonable explanation, namely that Quick had been encouraged to take large amounts of narcotic-strength medications.

I realised I had to control myself. So far, insights and information were still little more than hypotheses. Many questions remained to be answered. Above all I was thinking about that burnt piece of child’s bone, found in Ørje Forest, exactly where Quick had said that he burned Therese’s remains.

I went back to Sweden filled with a great sense of doubt, well aware that I had now joined the side of the sceptics.

After my return I phoned Sture Bergwall, who was very curious about how my work was going. I told him about my trip to Fjell and Ørje Forest and about my meetings with Norwegian police officers.

‘Oh, you’re really putting a lot of work into this! So you’ve been in Norway and Ørje Forest?’

Sture was deeply impressed by my endeavours, but more than anything he seemed interested in the conclusions I had reached.

‘So what do you think about it?’ he wondered.

‘To be honest I have to say that this whole trip to Norway and what I saw there have made me rather hesitant.’

‘In that case I’d like you to tell me what’s on your mind next time you come up here,’ said Sture.

I cursed my own loose tongue, which would most likely mean that my next meeting with Sture would also be the last. We decided that I would come to Säter one week later, on 17 September 2008.

I was going to be honest. If he chose to throw me out, so be it.