Four

The woman in seat 16A seemed nice. She was reading the British papers and was obviously in need of a coffee. The flight attendant found it difficult to guess where she was from. Most of the passengers were Swedish, though everyone was being disturbed by a noisy Danish family with small children in the second to last row. He had also registered several Norwegians. It was by no means the high season, but lots of people were more than happy to get on a direct flight to Nice when the prices were so ridiculously low.

He should really stop working as a flight attendant. His weight had always been a problem, and now his colleagues had begun to make comments. No matter how hard he tried or how little he ate, the bathroom scales threatened to tip past 220 pounds at any moment.

It was good to have people like the lady in 16A on flights like this.

She was darker than most Scandinavians. Her eyes were brown and she had no reason to be happy about her weight either. She was big and heavy, but the first impression was one of strength. Powerful, he thought after a while. She was an Amazon.

And she certainly liked her coffee.

What’s more, she didn’t have any children, thank goodness, and didn’t complain about anything.

The body was still warm.

The attendant at the Galleria multistory parking lot figured that it couldn’t be more than a couple of hours since the prostitute had said her good-byes. Maybe he was wrong. He was no expert, he had to admit, though it was the second time in under three months that he’d had to call the police because some poor woman had chosen to inject what would be her last hit somewhere sheltered from the biting wind that whipped through the winter streets of Stockholm, forcing everyone to dress like polar explorers. As it was quite warm in the stairwell, it was difficult to say.

But she couldn’t have been lying there long.

If you can’t see forward and you can’t look back—then look up in life.

The words of wisdom were written in red marker on the wall. The whore had obviously taken them literally. She was lying on her side with her head on her right arm, legs bent, as if someone had put her in the recovery position so that death would come gently. But she was looking up, with open eyes and an astonished, almost happy expression.

Peace, the attendant thought to himself, and took out his cell phone. The woman looked like she’d found peace. The man was tired of having to chase the prostitutes out of the huge parking lot, but deep down he felt for them. Their tiresome existence reminded him of the joys of his own life. His job was boring and monotonous, but he had a good wife, and the children seemed to be turning out okay. He could afford a beer or two on Friday night and prided himself on always paying his bills before they were due.

The reception for cell phones was terrible down here.

He recognized her. She was one of the regulars. She seemed to live down here, at the bottom of the stairwell, in a space that was barely fifty square feet. The blue and red stripes on the wall were no doubt meant to conjure up movement and light. A bag lay flung in the corner, and three papers and a magazine had been stuck underneath a rolled-up sleeping bag just under the stairs. A bottle of mineral water had fallen down behind her back.

The attendant trudged up the stairs. His asthma was bothering him, and he had to stop for a minute to draw a breath. Finally he got to the top and opened a drab door out onto Brunkebergs Torg.

The woman’s colleagues were already at work. He spotted a couple of them, shivering and emaciated; one of them got into a BMW that immediately accelerated toward Sergels Torg.

He eventually got ahold of the police. They promised to be there within half an hour.

“Sure,” he muttered and hung up. Last time he had been alone with the dead prostitute for over an hour.

He lit a cigarette. The other woman, in thin tights and faux fur coat, got an offer on the other side of the square.

The dead whore wasn’t that thin. Quite the contrary, he thought as he took a long drag on his cigarette. She was the plumper type. There weren’t many of those. Prostitutes normally shrank over the years. They got smaller and skinnier for every shot they took, every pill they swallowed. Maybe this woman remembered to eat, in between tricks and drugs.

He should go back down again to keep an eye on her.

Instead he lit another cigarette and stood out there in the cold until the police finally came. They took a few seconds to confirm what the attendant already knew, that the woman was dead. An ambulance was called, and the body was taken away.

Katinka Olsson was cremated three days later, and no one bothered to erect a stone to mark the remains of the late-thirty-something prostitute. The four children she had brought into the world before she was thirty would never know that their biological mother carried baby pictures of them in her otherwise empty wallet, faded photographs with worn, uneven edges; Katinka Olsson’s only treasure.

She died of an overdose, and no one would ever ask about her. No one grieved for Katinka Olsson, and no one wondered why the dead prostitute smelled fresh and clean and had on newly washed, if worn, clothes.

No one.

Victoria Heinerback’s home surprised him.

Standing in the middle of the relatively large living room, he got the impression of a far more interesting person than the media had ever managed to portray.

When he thought about it, he couldn’t remember having seen any features about Victoria Heinerback’s house. Adam Stubo had used the early hours of the morning to go through a large pile of interviews and other press cuttings, sensational and glamorous tales of an apparently successful life.

When her boyfriend proposed to her, the couple traveled to Paris with Hello! The pictures of the two of them, embracing in front of the Eiffel Tower, under the Arc de Triomphe, outside well-known shops on the Champs d’Elysées, and on the streets of Montmartre reminded him of advertisements from the seventies. Victoria and Trond were both bottle blondes and inoffensively well groomed. They had an aura of self-confidence and matching psychedelic pastel shirts. Only the wineglasses that were raised in a couple of the photographs broke the illusion. They should have been Coca-Cola bottles.

When Victoria Heinerback was elected as Norway’s youngest party leader, members of the press had been invited to follow her to her room when she retired after the national conference. The papers and magazines were waxing rhapsodic about her evening bath. Victoria raised a glass of champagne to the readers from a sea of pink bubbles, with her smooth, beautifully shaped left leg hanging over the edge of the bath. According to the picture captions, she was absolutely exhausted.

The setting for the photographs was a hotel room.

Victoria Heinerback was the ultimate example of young Scandinavian success. She only managed to complete a couple of years at the Norwegian School of Management before politics completely took over her life. She walked through the winter slush down Karl Johan in high heels, but also let herself be photographed wearing boots in the woods. She was always suitably dressed in the Storting, the Norwegian parliament. She adhered to a strict dress code when she participated in debates that were to be televised, but when she took part in programs that were less important, her style had earned her third place in a list of the country’s best-dressed women. She has a real eye for sexy details, the jury said in admiration. Naturally, she was going to have children. But not yet, she smiled to the impertinent journalists, and kept on climbing up the ladder of a party that, on good days, gloried in being the country’s leading party (barely) in the opinion polls.

As he looked around the living room for the third time, Adam felt a twinge of guilt at his own prejudices. His eyes fixed on a beautiful lamp shade in milky glass. The glass was held in place by three metal tubes, and the whole thing looked a bit like a fifties B-movie UFO. It was an impressive room. A cream corner sofa sat behind a steel and glass table. The chairs were upholstered in an intense orange fabric that was mirrored in small speckles on a huge abstract painting on the opposite wall. All the surfaces were clean. The only ornament in the room was an Alvar Aalto vase on the austere sideboard, where a colorful bunch of tulips was dying of thirst.

The woven steel magazine rack was overflowing with magazines and tabloids. Adam picked up a gossip magazine. Two divorces, a celebrity anniversary, and a singer’s tragic decline into alcoholism graced the front cover.

To the extent that Adam had ever paid attention to Victoria Heinerback, he had admired, somewhat reluctantly, her instinctive understanding of people’s need for easy solutions. On the other hand, he had never detected any real political understanding or overriding moral conviction in her. Victoria Heinerback believed that gasoline prices should be cut and that the country should be ashamed of its care of the elderly. She called for lower taxes and more police. She thought that shopping in Sweden was a justified protest by the Norwegian people; if the politicians chose to have the highest alcohol prices in Europe, it was all they could expect.

He had seen her as simple, superficial, and politically savvy. Not well read, he thought, and in one interview she seemed to think that Ayn Rand, whom she claimed was her favorite author, was a man.

It must have been the journalist who got it wrong, Adam thought, as he looked around the living room in more detail. Certainly not Victoria Heinerback.

He slowly ran his fingers over the book spines in the full shelves that lined two of the walls from floor to ceiling. A worn and well-read copy of The Fountainhead stood beside a paperback copy of Atlas Shrugged. An extensive biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, the eccentric architect and author, was in such a sorry state that several of the pages fell out when Adam tried to check the Ex Libris label.

Jens Bjørneboe and Hamsun, P. O. Enquist, Günter Grass and Don DeLillo, Lu Xun and Hannah Arendt. New and old side by side, in something that vaguely resembled a system. In order of love, Adam suddenly realized.

“Look,” he said to Sigmund Berli, who had just come back in from the bedroom. “She’s got all her favorite books between hip and head level! The books down toward the floor or above are almost untouched.”

He stretched up and pointed to an anthology of Chinese authors he had never even heard of. Then he hunkered down, took out a book from the bottom shelf, and blew the dust off before he read out loud, “Mircea Eliade.” He shook his head and put the book back. “That’s the sort of thing Johanne’s sister reads. But I would never have guessed that Miss Heinerback did.”

“There’s a lot of crime here too.”

Sigmund Berli ran his fingers over the shelves closest to the kitchen door. Adam squinted at the titles. They were all there. The Grand Old Dames of British literature and the arrogant Americans from the eighties. And here and there a French-sounding name popped up. Judging by the covers, with big cars and lethal weapons in gray stylized strokes, they had to be from the fifties. She had such classics as Chandler and Hammett in American presentation copies, alongside an almost complete catalog of Norwegian crime novels published in the last ten years.

“Do you think they’re her boyfriend’s books?” Sigmund asked.

“He just moved in recently. These have been here for a while. I wonder why she . . . why she never mentioned this.”

“What? That she read?”

“Yes. I mean, I’ve gone through a pile of interviews today that all gave the impression of a rather uninteresting person. A political animal, true enough, but someone who is more interested in banal individual issues than in putting things into context. Even in the”—Adam drew a square in the air before continuing—“boxes, is that what they’re called? The frames with standard questions, she never said anything about . . . this. When they asked if she read, she said newspapers. Five newspapers a day, and not much time for anything else.”

“Maybe she read more before. Before she became a politician, I mean. Just didn’t have enough time anymore.”

Sigmund had moved out into the kitchen. “Wow! Take a look at this.”

The kitchen was a bizarre mix of old and new. The front- angled wall cabinets looked like they were made just after the war. But when Adam opened a door, it glided silently and easily on modern plastic and metal fittings. The sink was enormous, with faucets straight out of a thirties film. The porcelain buttons that indicated warm and cold in red and blue calligraphy had become unreadable with age. The countertops were dark and matte.

“Slate,” Adam said and rapped the stone with his knuckles. “She’s obviously restored a lot of the old features and mixed in some new ones.”

“Classy,” Sigmund hesitated. “It’s pretty cool, isn’t it?”

“Yes, and expensive.”

“How much do they earn in the Storting, do you think?”

“Not enough,” Adam said and pinched his nose. “When were the police here?”

“About seven o’clock this morning. Her boyfriend, his name is Trond Arnesen, had destroyed any evidence at the scene of the crime. Had thrown up everywhere and moved things around. He pulled her out of the bed and stuff like that. Have you seen the bedroom?”

“Mmm.” Adam moved over to the kitchen window. Dusk was settling in the east, and heavy clouds hung over Lillestrøm in the distance, with the promise of snow during the night. He shifted a curved kitchen table with great care and put his face right up to the window, without touching the glass. He stood like that for a while, lost in his own thoughts, without responding to Sigmund’s comments, which sounded more distant and muffled as his colleague moved around the house.

He looked at the compass on his sophisticated watch. He drew a map in his mind. Then he took a step back, closed one eye, and looked at the view again.

If you were to fell the three spruce trees at the bottom of the garden and demolish the small housing development a few hundred yards away, you could see the house where Fiona Helle was murdered only a week ago.

There couldn’t be more than a mile between the two places.

“Is there any chance at all? I mean, that the cases are linked?”

Adam helped himself to a healthy portion of the fried potatoes before reaching for the Heinz bottle.

“Do you have to put ketchup on absolutely everything?”

“Do you think there is? A connection?”

“I’m going now,” Kristiane shouted from the hall.

“Shit,” Johanne exclaimed and ran to the stairs with Ragnhild in her arms, “she’s not asleep.”

Kristiane’s nose was squashed up against the front door. Her red down jacket was zipped up. Her scarf was wound tightly around her neck, and her hat was hanging down over her eyes. She had her boots on the wrong feet. She was clutching a mitten in each hand. She leaned her whole body against the locked door and announced, “I’m going.”

“Not now, you’re not,” Johanne called and handed the baby to Adam. “It’s too late. It’s past nine o’clock. You were in bed and . . . Do you want to hold Ragnhild for a while? Isn’t she sweet and funny?”

“Horrible,” hissed Kristiane. “Horrible child.”

“Kristiane!” Adam Stubo’s voice was so sharp that Ragnhild started to cry. He rocked her in frustration and murmured into the soft blanket that was wrapped around her. Kristiane started to howl. She rocked from foot to foot and banged her forehead against the wood. Her howling changed into desperate, rasping sobs.

“Daddy,” she growled in between the sobs. “My daddy. I’m going to my daddy.”

Johanne threw up her hands and turned around to face Adam, who was standing halfway up the stairs. “It might be best,” she started. “I think maybe . . .”

“No way,” Adam stopped her. “She’s been with Isak for a week. So now she’s going to stay with us. It’s important for her to feel included. That she’s part of the family. That . . .”

The baby had finally stopped crying. Some gunk from her eyes ran down her rosy cheek. Her soft hair stuck to her skull. Suddenly she blinked her eyes, reluctantly, as if she had just woken up from a long, deep sleep. She made a face that bared her gums.

“. . . that this is her sister,” he finished quietly, and his lips brushed the child’s skin. “Kristiane must stay here. She can go to Isak’s again in a few days.”

“Daddy! I want to go to my daddy!”

Adam descended into the small porch they had on the first floor. He could feel the under-floor heating burning through his wool socks. He was worried that the electricians had done something wrong when they were building the house. God knows when he would have time to check it. He carefully gave the baby back to Johanne.

“Here comes Tiddly the Wriggling Tadpole,” he said and threw Kristiane over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, before marching back up the stairs.

“Don’t,” giggled Kristiane, against her will, as he pulled one of her boots off and planted it in a flowerpot. “Don’t!”

“This will grow into a boot flower in a week or two. And this one . . .”

He threw the other boot into the wastepaper basket.

“Haven’t got any use for this one,” he said and maneuvered her into a firm hold. “Tadpoles don’t need shoes.”

He kicked open the door to her bedroom with a bang. Then he pulled off her clothes quick as a flash. Fortunately she still had her pajamas on underneath.

“Quick,” he puffed. “Or the troll will sweat to death. I’m going to start counting now.”

“Don’t,” shrieked Kristiane with delight as she buried herself under the duvet.

“One,” he started. “Two, three. The magic is working now. Tiddly the Tadpole is fast asleep.”

Then he pulled the door shut and shrugged his shoulders. “There!”

Johanne stood with a blank face and Ragnhild over her shoulder.

“That’s what we usually do when you’re not here,” he excused himself. “Fast and effective. Do you think there’s a connection? Between Fiona Helle’s and Victoria Heinerback’s murders?”

“That’s how you put the girl to bed?” Johanne looked at him in disbelief.

“So what! Forget it! She’s asleep now. Magic. Come on.” He padded into the living room and started to clear the dinner table. Leftovers were thrown out, apart from the fried potatoes, which he ate as he cleared. The grease ran down his fingers, and when he tried to pour himself more wine, the bottle nearly slid out of his hand.

“Oops . . . do you want any? You don’t need to worry anymore, you know. I’m sure a small glass won’t hurt Ragnhild.”

“No thanks. Actually . . .”

Gently, she lay Ragnhild down in her crib, which Adam had eventually agreed could be moved in and out of the living room, depending on where they were themselves. It was by the end of the sofa now.

“Maybe a small glass,” she said and sat down at the empty table.

“Can you wipe the table with the cloth, please?”

With an everyday, almost casual expression on her face, she grabbed the papers that Adam had thrown down when he came home. It was a thin file. This time there were no pictures. A couple of police reports, two handwritten memorandums, and a map of Lørenskog with a red cross over Victoria Heinerback’s address were stapled together. Johanne couldn’t figure out any system to it.

“I see that you haven’t much to go on here, either.”

“The murder was only discovered this morning.”

“And you’ve censored the file. Did you want to spare me the photographs?”

“No.” He seemed to be sincere and sat down and scratched his head. “They haven’t made enough copies yet,” he added, yawning. “But you’re not missing anything. Horrible sight. Especially the . . .”

“Enough, thank you.” She shook her head and put up her hand. “You gave me enough details on the phone. And there are certainly similarities. Brutal murders. Both bodies have been mutilated.”

Adam knitted his brow. He cocked his head and his mouth moved, as if he wanted to say something but didn’t know quite what.

“Mutilated,” he repeated in the end. “Cutting out someone’s tongue definitely qualifies as mutilation. But Victoria Heinerback . . .”

Again, his expression was one of doubt. He narrowed his eyes, blinked, and almost imperceptibly shook his head, as if the scenario of a killer on a deadly hunt for female celebrities was too much to take in. He glanced over at the crib.

“Do you think she can understand any of this?”

“She’s only three weeks old.”

“Yes, but the brain’s like a sponge, you know. Maybe she’s subconsciously taking it all in and storing it. And it will affect her, later I mean.”

“Don’t be a fool.” She stretched her hand over the table and stroked his cheek. “You’re scared that the press is right, aren’t you?” she said. “Have you seen the special editions?”

He shook his head. She cupped his jaw with her hand.

“They’re having a field day. It must be annoying for them that the murder wasn’t discovered until this morning and only announced later on in the day. The special editions are botch jobs. Full of inaccuracies, incredible speculation, incorrect facts, from what I can see. They’re calling him the celebrity killer.”

“Or her,” said Adam and grabbed her hand. He lifted it to his lips and kissed it.

“Or her. Okay. Don’t be such a pedant. Fortunately they were more reserved on the TV news, but there’s still speculation that there’s a madman on the loose who’s got it in for beautiful, successful women. VG even managed to get a well-known psychologist to outline a profile of a sexually frustrated woman-hater with a disability who was rejected by his mother.” She laughed quietly and took a sip from her glass. “You know, it’s only now that I realize how good this actually is. Having not tasted wine for ten months, that is.”

“You are—”

“Lovely,” she concluded for him and her smile broadened. “What do you think?”

“About you?”

“About there being a link. You must have given it some thought. You and Sigmund and several others are working on both cases. Both murders—”

“Took place in Lørenskog, both victims are women, both are well known, both are high-profile celebrities, both—”

“Are good looking. Were, at least.” She swiveled the glass in her hand and continued, “And in both cases, the killer left a message, a highly symbolic violation of the body.”

She was talking more slowly now, and her voice dropped, as if she was alarmed by her own reasoning.

“The press doesn’t know about the book yet,” he said. “About the Koran. It was actually taped between her legs. It would appear that the intention was to stuff it up her cunt, but . . .”

“Don’t use that word!”

“Sorry, vagina. The book was taped to her thighs, right up by the vagina.”

“Or anus.”

“Or anus,” he repeated, somewhat surprised. “Hmm, that’s probably what he meant. Up yours, or something like that.”

“Maybe. You want some more?”

He nodded, and she poured the rest of the bottle into his glass. She had only taken a sip from her own.

“If you were to look for similarities, apart from the obvious ones, which could be purely coincidental, I think the power of the symbolism is one of the most striking features,” she said. “Cutting out someone’s tongue and splitting it in two is such an unambiguous statement with such obvious symbolism that you could almost imagine that the killer read too many Red Indian books as a boy. The Muslim bible up her butt is hardly a divine message.”

“I don’t think our new compatriots would appreciate you calling the Koran a bible,” said Adam, massaging his neck. “Would you mind?”

With an exasperated smile she got up and stood behind him. She leaned back against the kitchen island and took a firm grip of Adam’s neck muscles.

He was so broad. So big. She could feel that his muscles were knotted under the surprisingly soft skin. It was his size that had first attracted her. She was captivated by this man, who must have weighed 250 pounds without actually appearing to be fat. Just after they moved in together, she had tried to put him on a diet. “Just thinking of your health,” she said, but gave up after three weeks. Adam didn’t get irritable when he ate less, he got desperate. She had stopped her project one afternoon when he wiped away something that could have been tears when faced with a plate of boiled cod with not a trace of fat, one potato, and a spoonful of steamed carrots. Then he disappeared into the bathroom and stayed there for the rest of the meal. He had butter with everything, sauces and gravy with most things, and believed that a proper meal should always be finished off with dessert.

“Obviously, it’s too early to say,” Johanne said and pressed her thumbs into the muscles between his shoulder blades and spine. “But I would advise against assuming it’s the same killer.”

“Of course we’re not assuming anything,” he groaned. “More. A bit further up. But the truth is, just the thought is enough to frighten the life out of me. I mean—Ow! There, right there.”

“You mean if there really is only one murderer, you can expect more,” Johanne said. “Victims, that is. More murders.”

His muscles stiffened under her fingers. Adam straightened his back, pushed her gently away, and rearranged his shirt. Ragnhild’s light breathing and snuffles could be heard from the living room. A cat was obviously courting outside somewhere. The yowling cut through the evening quiet, and Johanne was convinced she could smell cat spray all the way up to the second floor.

“I hate those semiferal beasts,” she said and sat down.

“Can you help me?” Adam asked in an urgent voice, almost insistent. “Can you get anything at all out of the papers?”

“There’s too little. You know that. I need to look through . . . I need to have . . .” She laughed feebly and shrugged her shoulders. “Good God, of course I can’t help you. I’ve got a newborn to look after! I’m on maternity leave! Obviously we can talk about it—”

“There’s no one as good as you in the country. There are no real profilers here, and we—”

“I am not a profiler,” she said, agitated. “How many times do I have to tell you? I’m fed up with—”

“Okay,” he interrupted and held up his hands in a gesture of peace. “But you damn well know enough about profiling to be one. And I don’t know anyone other than you who has been taught by the FBI’s best—”

“Adam!”

The evening before they got married, he had promised, with his hand on his heart, never to ask about Johanne’s time with the FBI. They had argued in a way that was harsh and unfamiliar to both of them; she had used words he never imagined she could use, and he was positively furious that such an important period of her life was closed off to him.

But she would not share it. Never, not with anyone. As a naive young psychology student in Boston, she had been given the opportunity to participate in one of the FBI’s profiler courses. The head of the course was Warren Scifford, already a legend in his fifties, as much for his knowledge as for his relentless bedding of promising young female students. They called him the Chief, and Johanne had trusted the man who was nearly thirty years her senior. In the end she started to believe that she was something special. That she had been chosen, by him and the FBI, and that of course he would divorce his wife as soon as their children were old enough.

It all went wrong and nearly cost her her life. She got on the first possible flight back to Oslo, started to study law three weeks later, and graduated from the university in record time. Warren Scifford was a name she had tried to forget for the past thirteen years. Her time in the FBI, her months with Warren, the catastrophic event that resulted in the Chief having to work behind a desk for six months as punishment until it all blew over and he was one of the big boys again, was a chapter in her life that occasionally came to mind, but she only thought about it reluctantly. It made her feel sick and she never, no matter what, wanted to talk about it again.

The problem was that Adam knew Warren Scifford. In fact, they’d met up again only last summer, when Adam went to an international police conference in New Orleans. When he came home and mentioned Warren’s name in passing over supper, Johanne smashed two plates in a sudden outburst of anger. Then she ran into the guest room, locked the door, and cried herself to sleep. For three days, he only managed to get monosyllabic replies out of her.

And now he was dangerously close to breaking his promise again.

“Adam,” she repeated harshly. “Don’t even go there.”

“Take it easy. If you don’t want to help, you don’t want to help.” He leaned back in the chair with an indifferent smile. “After all, it’s not your problem, all this.”

“Don’t be like that,” she said, dejected.

“Like what? I’m only stating the obvious. It’s not your problem that a couple of famous women have been killed and mutilated just outside Oslo.” He emptied his glass and put it down, a bit too hard.

“I’ve got children,” Johanne said with feeling. “I’ve got a demanding nine year old and a two-week-old baby and more than enough to keep me busy without taking on a major role in a difficult murder investigation!”

“Okay, okay, I said it was all right.” He stood up suddenly and got two dessert bowls out of the cabinet. “Fruit salad,” he said. “Do you want some?”

“Adam, honestly. Sit down. We can . . . I am perfectly willing to discuss the cases. Like now, in the evening, when the girls have gone to bed. But both you and I know that profiling work is extremely demanding, and so far-reaching that—”

“You know what,” he interrupted and banged a bowl of whipped cream down so hard on the table that the cream jumped. “Fiona Helle’s death is one thing. A tragedy. She was a mother and a wife and far too young to die. Victoria Heinerback didn’t have any children, but I still think that twenty-six is too young to die. But all that aside, people die. People get killed.” He stroked his nose, his straight, beautifully shaped nose with nostrils that quivered when he, on rare occasions, got really angry.

“For God’s sake, people are killed every second day in this country. But what upsets me, what really frightens me . . .”

Alarmed by his own choice of words, he hesitated before repeating himself. “Frightened. I’m frightened, Johanne. I don’t understand these cases. There are so many similarities between them that I can’t help wondering . . .”

“When the next victim will be killed,” Johanne helped him, as he still couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Exactly. And that’s why I’m asking for your help. I know that it’s a lot to ask. I know that you’ve got more than enough on your plate with Kristiane and Ragnhild and your mother and the house and—”

“Okay.”

“What?”

“Fine. I’ll see how much I can manage.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Yes. But then I need all the facts. About both cases. And I want it to be clear from the start that I can pull out at any point.”

“Whenever,” he nodded in confirmation. “Should I . . . I can catch a cab down to the office and—”

“It’s nearly half past ten.”

Her laughter was lame. But it was still laughter, Adam thought. He studied her face for signs of irritation, small twitches in her lower lips, a muscle that drew a shadow along her cheekbone. But all he could see was dimples and a long yawn.

“I’m just going to check the children,” she said.

He loved the way she walked. She was slim without being thin. Even now, only a couple of weeks after giving birth, she moved with a boyish lightness that made him smile. She had narrow hips, straight shoulders. When she bent down over Ragnhild, her hair fell across her face, soft and tangled. She pushed it back behind her ear and said something. Ragnhild was snoring gently.

He followed her into Kristiane’s room. She opened the door with great care. The little girl was asleep with her head at the foot of the bed, the duvet underneath her, and her down jacket over her like a duvet. Her breathing was steady and even. A faint smell of sleep and clean bed linens filled the room, and Adam put his arm around Johanne.

“Well, it certainly worked,” she whispered. He could hear she was smiling. “The magic worked.”

“Thank you,” he whispered back.

“For what?” Johanne stood still. Adam didn’t let go of her. A feeling of unease that she had tried to repress all afternoon overwhelmed her. She had first noticed it around one, when Adam called to explain why he would be so late, and she shrugged it off. She was always fretting. About the children, about her mother who had started to get confused after her father’s third heart attack and didn’t always remember what day it was, about whether she would ever get back to her research. About the mortgage and the bad brakes on the car. About Isak’s easygoing attitude when it came to discipline, and about the war in the Middle East. There was always something to worry about. This afternoon she had tried to find out in one of her many medical books whether the white flecks on Kristiane’s front teeth might be symptoms of too much milk or any other imbalance in her diet. Anxiety, bad conscience, and the feeling of never being good enough were all part of her normal frame of mind, and she had grown accustomed to living with it.

But this was different.

There in the dark, quiet room, with the heat from Adam’s body against her back and the barely audible breathing of her sleeping daughter to remind her of everyday joys and security, she couldn’t put her finger on what was making her uneasy, a feeling that she knew something she did not want to remember.

“What’s the matter?” Adam whispered.

“Nothing,” she said quietly and closed the bedroom door again gently.

It was years since she had dared to drink coffee on a plane. But the tempting aroma of coffee had filled the cabin so quickly that she wondered if they had a barista on board.

The flight attendant responsible for her row must have weighed well over two hundred pounds. He was sweating like a pig. Normally she would have been disgusted by the unsightly rings of damp that were visible on the pale shirt fabric. She had nothing against male stewards. But she would prefer the more feminine type, thought the large lady who was now standing and staring southeast from her panorama windows on the hills above Villefranche. Pants-wearing stewards often had a slight gay twist of the wrist and chose aftershaves that were more like light spring perfumes than masculine musks. This red-haired boar was therefore an obvious exception. She would normally have ignored him. But the smell of coffee had undone her. She had asked for a refill three times and smiled.

And even the wine tasted good.

She had recently discovered that the prices the wine monopoly in Norway charged for goods that had been so carefully and expensively imported were in fact the same as in any old wine shop in the Old Town. Unbelievable, she thought, but true. That afternoon she had opened a twenty-five-euro bottle of wine and drunk a glass. She couldn’t remember tasting a better wine. The man in the shop had assured her that the bottle could stand open for a day or two. She hoped he was right.

All these years, she thought, and stroked her hair. All the projects that had never given her more than money and a headache. All her knowledge that had never been used for anything other than entertaining other people.

This morning she had felt the edge of winter in the air. February was the coldest month on the Riviera. The sea was no longer azure blue. The dirty gray foam lapped tamely at her feet as she walked along the beaches and enjoyed the solitude. Most of the trees had finally lost their leaves. Only the odd pine tree shone green along the roads. Even the path to St. Jean, where noisy, well-dressed children with willowy mothers and wealthy fathers usually shattered the idyll, was empty and desolate. She stopped frequently. Sometimes she lit a cigarette, even though she had stopped smoking years ago now. A slight taste of tar stuck to her tongue. It tasted good.

She had started walking. The restlessness that had plagued her for as long as she could remember felt different now. It was as if she finally understood herself now, understood the feeling of existing in a vacuum of waiting. She had wasted years of her life waiting for something that would never happen, she thought to herself as she stood at the window, holding her hand up against the cool glass.

“For things just to happen,” she whispered and saw a brief gray hint of breath on the windowpane.

She still felt restless, a vague tension in her body. But the unease that had previously gotten her down and pulled her away had now been replaced by an invigorating fear.

“Fear,” she whispered with satisfaction and caressed the glass with slow hand movements.

She chose the word carefully. A good, exhilarating, bright fear was what she felt. She imagined it was like being in love.

Whereas before she felt down but couldn’t cry, tired but couldn’t sleep, she now accepted her existence so fully that she often burst out laughing. She slept well, although she frequently woke up with a feeling that could be mistaken for . . . happiness.

She chose the word happiness, even though it was perhaps a bit too strong at present.

Some people would, no doubt, say she was lonely. She was certain of that, but it didn’t bother her. If only they knew what she actually thought of the people who thought they knew her or what she did. So many of them had allowed themselves to be blinded by her success, despite living in a country where modesty was considered a virtue and superiority the deadliest of all deadly sins.

A nonspecific, unfamiliar anger flared up in her. Her skin crawled, and she ran her cold hand down her left arm and felt how firm she was, how compact her flesh was on her body, hard and dense, as if her skin was slightly too small.

It was a long time since she had bothered to think about the past. It wasn’t worth it. But things had changed so much in recent weeks.

She was born on a rainy Sunday evening in November 1958. Her mother died within twenty minutes of giving birth, and the way the state had treated the tiny, half-dead child made it crystal-clear that Norway was not a country where you should believe you were worth something.

Her father was abroad. She didn’t have any grandparents. One of the nurses had wanted to take her home to her family when she recovered a bit. She thought the baby needed more love and care than could be offered by a three-way shift at the hospital. But the egalitarian country of which the baby was now a citizen did not permit such special arrangements. So she was left in a corner of the children’s ward, where she was fed and had her diaper changed at fixed times, but otherwise was given very little attention until her father came to take her home three months later, to a life where her new mother was already installed.

“Bitterness is not in my nature,” the woman said out loud to her own diffuse reflection in the window. “Bitterness is not in my nature.”

She would never have used the expression “burning rage.” But that was the cliché that came to her all the same as she turned her back to the view and lay down on the far-too-soft sofa so she could breathe more easily. Her diaphragm was burning. She slowly raised her hands to her face. Big square hands with sweaty palms and short nails. She turned them around and noticed a scar on the back of one of them. Her thumb looked as though it had been broken. She tried to recall a story that she knew existed somewhere. She quickly pulled up the sleeves of her sweater, she pinched and touched her own skin. The heat was so extreme now that she could barely swallow. Suddenly she sat up and observed her body as if it belonged to someone else. She ran her fingers through her hair and felt the grease on her scalp against her fingertips. She scratched herself with small, sharp movements until her scalp started to bleed.

She sucked her fingers greedily. A vague taste of iron hung under the nails, and she tore them off, bit her skin, and swallowed. Everything was clearer now. It was important to reflect on the past; it was necessary to piece together her story, to make it whole.

She had tried once before.

She’d been thirty-five years old when she finally managed to argue her way into seeing a copy of the dry hospital report of her birth, full of terminology, and she couldn’t face dealing with it then. She had leafed through the yellowing pages that smelled of dusty archives and found confirmation of what she had feared, hoped, and expected. Her mother had not given birth to her. The woman she knew as Mommy was a stranger. An intruder. Someone she didn’t need to feel anything for.

She had felt neither anger nor sorrow. As she folded the handwritten pages, she simply felt flat. Or perhaps it was a sense of vague and almost indifferent irritation.

She had never challenged them about it.

She couldn’t be bothered.

The false mother died soon after anyway.

That was ten years ago now.

Victoria Heinerback had always irritated her.

Victoria Heinerback was a racist.

Though naturally she wasn’t open about it and wouldn’t acknowledge it. The woman was, after all, politically savvy and had an almost impressive understanding of how the media worked. Her fellow party members, however, were constantly dropping stupid and completely ignorant comments about immigrants. For them, Somalians and Chinese were cut from the same cloth. Well-integrated Chinese people were lumped together with lazy Somalians. Victoria Heinerback’s party believed that a conscientious Pakistani who ran his own corner shop was the same burden on society as a gold-digger from Morocco who had come to Norway thinking he could just help himself to the women and government money.

Victoria Heinerback was responsible for this.

The woman who was spending the winter alone on the Riviera got to her feet suddenly and stood up. She was a bit unsteady; a wave of dizziness forced her to hold on to something.

It was all so perfect, everything. Everything was working.

She laughed quietly to herself, astonished by the force of her mood swings.

Inspecting someone’s house can tell you more than a thousand interviews, she thought as the nausea ebbed away.

Evening was falling, and she wanted to pour herself another glass of the good wine from the Old Town. The beam from the lighthouse at Cap Ferrat swept over her in a pulsing stroke when she turned to stare out over the bay. To the north, streetlights lit the roads that cut through the steep terrain.

She was a master of her art, and from now on, she would not be judged by anyone other than herself.