Thomas Quick. Hannes Råstam
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