It was too big a job.
Johanne Vik wrinkled her nose at her tea. It had steeped for too long and was dark and bitter. She spat the yellowish brown liquid back into the cup.
“Ugh,” she muttered. She felt glad to be alone as she put down the cup and opened the fridge.
She should have refused. The two murder cases were hard enough to crack for professional policemen working in a team, with access to modern technology, advanced data programs, progress reports, breaking news, and all the time in the world.
Johanne had none of that. She had bitten off more than she could chew. The children ruled her days. Sometimes she felt she moved on autopilot, from the washing machine to helping Kristiane with her homework, making food and trying to snatch a few moments’ peace on the sofa while feeding the baby. Even when Kristiane wasn’t at home, there was plenty to do.
But the nights were long.
They passed slowly, the hours she spent poring over the copies of documents that Adam took home with him every afternoon, which was highly irregular for him. It was as if the clock also felt it deserved a rest after a tiring day.
She grabbed a mineral water, opened it, and drank straight from the bottle.
“Perineal rupture,” she said to herself as she sat down at the table again and looked through the final postmortem report in the Fiona Helle case.
A rupture was some kind of tear or another.
“Periscope,” she mumbled, chewing her pencil. “Periphery. Peri . . .”
She slapped her forehead lightly. A good thing she hadn’t asked anyone. It was embarrassing for a grown woman not to know what it meant immediately. Even though both her children had been born by cesarean, Johanne had plenty of friends who had described the problem to her in great detail.
Little Fiorella had left her mark.
Okay.
She lay the document to one side and focused on the reconstruction report. It told her nothing that she didn’t know already. She kept on leafing through the papers impatiently. As the case had already generated several hundred, if not more than a thousand, documents, she obviously didn’t have access to them all.
Adam selected and prioritized. She read.
Without finding anything.
The papers contained nothing but endless repetitions, a round dance of the obvious. No secrets were uncovered. There were no contradictions, nothing surprising, nothing to spend more time on in the hope of seeing things from another angle.
Exasperated, she slapped the covers together.
She had to learn to say no more often.
Like when her mother called earlier in the day and invited the whole family to lunch next Sunday. With Isak, of course.
It had been nearly six years since their divorce. Although she often worried and was irritated by Isak’s lenience with regard to Kristiane, with no set bedtimes and fast food and candy on weekdays, it made her genuinely happy to see them together. Kristiane and Isak had the same physical build and were on the same wavelength, even though the girl suffered from an inexplicable handicap that had never been diagnosed. She found it harder to accept that her ex-husband still spent time with her parents. More time than she did, if she was honest.
That hurt, and she blamed him for her shame.
“Get a grip!”
Without knowing why, she pulled out the post-mortem report again.
Strangulation, it stated.
She already knew the cause of death.
The tongue was described in clinical terms.
Nothing new there.
Abrasions on both wrists. No sign of sexual trauma. Blood type A. A tumor in her mouth, on the left cheek, about the size of a pea and benign. Scars, in several places. All old. From an operation on the shoulder, the removal of four moles, and a cesarean. And a five-pointed, relatively big but almost invisible mark on her right upper arm. Probably a cut from way back. One earlobe was inflamed. The nail on her left index finger was blue and had been about to come off at the time of death.
The report, for all its precise details, still told her nothing. She was just left with the vague feeling that there was something important there, something that had caught her eye, the impression that something didn’t add up.
Her concentration was failing. She was annoyed with Isak, with her mother, by their friendship.
A waste of energy. Isak was Isak. Her mother was the same as she had always been: scared of conflict, hard to understand, and extremely loyal to those she cared for.
“Stop letting it bother you,” Johanne thought, exhausted, but couldn’t stop all the same.
“Focus,” she said out loud to herself. “You have to fo—”
There.
Her finger stopped at the bottom of the page.
It didn’t make sense.
She swallowed, then lifted her hand to go through the report, furiously looking for something that she had just read in passing. She noticed that her hand was shaking. Her pulse was racing, and she was breathing through her mouth.
There.
She was right. It couldn’t be right. She grabbed the phone and discovered that her hand was sweaty.
On the other side of Oslo, Adam Stubo was babysitting his grandson, who was nearly six. The boy was asleep on his grandfather’s lap. Adam buried his nose in the boy’s dark hair. The smell of baby soap was soft and warm. The boy should really be in bed. His father was an easygoing, flexible sort of guy, but he was adamant that the boy should sleep on his own. But Adam couldn’t resist his round, dark eyes. He had smuggled one of Ragnhild’s bottles from home. The look on Amund’s face when he realized that he was going to be allowed to sit on his grandfather’s knee with a bottle was priceless.
Strangely enough, the boy had never been jealous of Kristiane. Quite the contrary, he was fascinated by the strange girl who was four years older than he was. But it was very different when he was told that his grandfather was going to be a daddy again. He had clearly decided to ignore Ragnhild’s arrival three weeks ago.
The telephone rang.
Amund didn’t wake up. His grip on the baby bottle loosened when Adam carefully leaned over to the table to answer the phone.
“Hello,” he said quietly, holding the telephone between his chin and shoulder as he reached for the remote control.
“Hello, my dear. Are you boys having a good time?”
He smiled. The eagerness in her voice gave her away.
“Yep. We’ve had a great time. Played a silly card game and made some Lego houses. But that’s not why you called.”
“I won’t keep you long if you’re—”
“Amund’s asleep. I’ve got all the time in the world.”
“Could you . . . tomorrow, or as soon as possible, could you check a couple of things for me?”
“Of course.”
He pressed the wrong button on the remote control. The newscaster shouted out that four American soldiers had been killed in Basra before Adam managed to find the right button. Amund grunted and buried his head in his grandfather’s arm.
“I’ve been sitting a while . . . hang on a second.”
“I’ll be quick,” she insisted. “You have to get me Fiona Helle’s medical records, about Fiorella’s birth. From when her daughter was born.”
“Okay,” he said. “Why exactly?”
“I don’t like talking about this kind of thing on the phone,” Johanne said with some hesitation. “You either have to come home from Bjarne and Randi’s first thing tomorrow morning so we can talk, or—”
“I won’t have time. I promised Amund I’d take him to day care.”
“Trust me then. It might be important.”
“I always trust you.”
“And with good reason.” Her laughter rattled down the phone line.
“What about the other thing?” he said. “You wanted me to do two things?”
“You have to let me . . . from the papers it’s clear that Fiona’s mother is very ill, and—”
“Yes, I questioned her myself. MS. Sharp as a tack upstairs, but wasting away otherwise.”
“So she was all there?”
“As far as I know, the brain is not affected by multiple sclerosis,” he said.
“Don’t be like that!”
Amund stuck his thumb in his mouth and turned in toward Adam again.
“I’m not like that,” he said and smiled. “I’m just teasing you.”
“I need to talk to her.”
“You?”
“I’m working for you, Adam.”
“Very unofficially and without any form of recognition. It’s bad enough that I have to sneak around with the documents. The boss has given a kind of silent consent to that. But I can’t really give you—”
“But surely no one can prevent me from visiting an old lady in a nursing home as a private individual?” she said.
“Why are you asking me then?”
“Ragnhild. I don’t think it would be a good idea to take her with me. Is there any chance of you coming home early tomorrow?”
“Early,” he repeated. “What’s that?”
“One, two?”
“I might be able to tear myself away around half past two. Would that be okay?”
“It’ll have to be. Thank you.”
“Are you sure you can’t tell me anything? I have to admit I’m dying of curiosity now.”
“And I’m dying to tell you,” she said and took a drink of something. Her voice almost vanished. “But it was you who taught me to be careful on the phone.”
“I’ll have to contain myself then. Until tomorrow.”
“Now put Amund to bed,” she said.
“He is in bed,” he said, crestfallen.
“He’s not, he’s sleeping in your lap with Ragnhild’s baby bottle.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Put the boy to bed, Adam. And sleep well. You’re the best in the world.”
“You are—”
“Wait. If you get time, could you check one more thing? Could you try to find out whether Fiona was away from school for any long periods of time while she was in high school?”
“What?”
“If she went on an exchange or something like that. Language course, or a long-lasting illness, or if she visited an aunt in Australia, for that matter. It should be easy enough to find out.”
“You can ask her mother,” he sighed, “as you’re going to see her anyway. She’s probably the best one to ask.”
“I’m not sure that she’d answer. Ask the husband. Or an old friend or someone. Will you do it?”
“Yes, yes. Go to bed.”
“Good night, darling.”
“I mean it. Go to bed. Don’t sit up reading those documents. They’re not going to run away. Good night.”
He put down the receiver and got up as carefully as he could from the overly soft sofa. He struggled to get his balance and hugged Amund too tight. The boy whimpered but continued to lie in his arms like a rag doll.
“I don’t know why everyone assumes that I spoil you,” Adam whispered. “I just don’t understand it.”
He carried the boy into the guest room, put him down in the middle of the bed, undressed quietly, put on his own pajamas, and lay down with his back to the child.
“Gramps,” the boy murmured in his sleep. A hand stroked Adam’s neck.
They slept soundly for nine hours, and Adam got to work nearly an hour late.
Trond Arnesen had made sure that the lights by the gate and in the porch were both working before he moved back into the small house that he would now inherit. His brother had offered to stay with him for the first few days. Trond said no. He didn’t want to make the transition to a life alone in stages. It was his home, even if he’d only moved in a couple of months ago. Victoria was quite old-fashioned and had not agreed to living together until a date had been set for the wedding.
He tried to avoid the windows. He drew the curtains before it got really dark. The gaps were threatening, black strips of emptiness.
The TV flickered but there was no sound. Victoria had bought him a forty-two-inch plasma screen for his birthday. She was far too generous, and they couldn’t afford it after all the work they’d done on the house. “So you can watch football,” she had smiled, opening an expensive bottle of champagne. He turned thirty that day, and they had decided to make babies in the fall.
He didn’t feel like watching TV, he was far too restless, but the silent people on the screen were a friendly presence. He had wandered from room to room for several hours now, sat down, touched some object or other, got up, moved on, anxious about what he might find behind the next door. He felt safe in the bathroom. It had no windows and was warm, and at around six o’clock, he had locked the door and stayed in there for about an hour. In desperation, he had taken a bath, as if he had to legitimize his need to feel secure in a house that he, at that precise moment, half past ten on Monday, February 16, did not think he would be able to live in.
He heard a noise from outside.
It came from the back of the house, he thought, from the slope going down to the small stream, fifty yards behind the garden, where a picket fence marked the boundary to an abandoned scrap yard.
He froze, listening.
The silence was overwhelming. He couldn’t even hear the usual clicking of the thermostat on the heater under the window.
Just his imagination, no doubt.
“You’re a grown man,” he thought to himself in irritation and took down a random book from the shelf.
He looked at the title page. An author he’d never heard of. Must be new. He put it back, horizontally across the top of the other books. It struck him that that kind of thing always annoyed Victoria, so he took it out again to put it back properly between two books.
The noise had sounded like something breaking; now he heard it again.
His brother had always called him a coward. That wasn’t true. Trond Arnesen wasn’t a coward, he was just cautious. If his brother (younger than him by fifteen months) had climbed past him on trees, it was simply because common sense told him that to climb any further was stupid. When his brother was seven and jumped from the roof of a twelve-foot-high garage with a parachute made from a sheet and four bits of rope, Trond stood on the ground and advised him not to do it. His brother broke his leg.
Trond was not a coward. He always assessed the consequences.
The fear that gripped him now had nothing to do with the future. The unfamiliar taste of iron clung to his tongue, which immediately felt dry and too big. When the fear reached his eardrums, he had to shake his head if he wanted to hear anything other than the blood pumping through his body.
He looked quickly around the room.
Victoria’s furniture.
Victoria’s things here and there. A copy of Her magazine with a Post-it to mark an article about young families struggling to find enough time to get everything done. A steel and plastic lighter he had given her for Christmas to show that she didn’t need to hide her cigarettes from him anymore.
Victoria’s things.
His home.
He was no coward. Although the sound had come from behind the house, he now ran toward the front door without even looking out the living room window to check if it was an animal, a confused elk or one of the many skinny feral cats.
Without a moment’s hesitation, he pulled open the front door.
“Hello,” said an obviously startled Rudolf Fjord. “Hello, Trond.”
He was standing with his foot on the first step up to the porch.
“Hi,” he said again, pathetically.
“You idiot,” hissed Trond. “What the hell do you think you’re doing sneaking around in the garden like that? What the fuck are you—”
“I just wanted to see if anyone was home,” Rudolf Fjord said. His voice was louder now but still feeble, as if he was trying to pull himself together without succeeding. “May I offer my condolences.”
Trond Arnesen threw out his hands and went forward onto the steps.
“Condolences? You’ve come here at”—with a swift movement he pulled up his left sleeve. His diving watch had still not reappeared—“It’s pretty late on a Monday night,” he continued furiously, “to give your condolences. Again! You’ve already done it! What the hell . . . You frightened . . . Just go!”
“Okay, okay, calm down.”
Rudolf Fjord had managed to pull himself together. He put out his hand in a conciliatory gesture, but Trond showed no signs of taking it.
“I was just checking whether you were at home,” Rudolf tried again. “I didn’t want to disturb you if you were already asleep. That’s why I went around the house. But you’ve blacked out all the windows, so it was only when I saw a sliver of light from the living room that I knew you were at home. I was just about to ring the bell when—”
“What do you want? What the hell do you want, Rudolf?”
Trond had never really liked Victoria’s colleague. Nor had she. The few times he’d asked her about the man, she got a stern look on her face and said that he wasn’t to be trusted. She wouldn’t say anymore. Trond didn’t know whether Rudolf Fjord was trustworthy or not, but he didn’t like the way the guy treated women. Trond thought he was good-looking, tall, well-built with a prominent chin and rather intense blue eyes, but Rudolf used women. Exploited them.
“Like I said, I just wanted—”
“I’ll give you one more chance.” Trond was shouting now. “People don’t turn up to give their condolences in the middle of the night. You’re not fooling me. What do you want?”
“I’d also thought,” Rudolf Fjord started and then looked as if he was literally trying to catch a word on the tip of his tongue. His eyes darted aimlessly around the garden. “I just thought I would ask you if I could look for some important papers Victoria took home with her from the office. She was going to bring them back on that Monday, the one after she was murdered, that is. I think—”
“For God’s sake!”
Trond Arnesen was laughing now, a loud, joyless laughter.
“Are you completely . . . stupid? Are you soft in the head or what?”
He laughed again in desperation.
“The police have taken all the papers. Are you . . . Don’t you understand anything? Do you have no idea about what happens when someone is murdered? Hmm?”
He took a step forward and remained standing at the top of the steps. He covered his ears with his hands, as if trying to block out a catastrophe. Then he lowered his arms, took a deep breath, and said, “Talk to the police. Good night.”
He went back into the house and was just about to shut the door when Rudolf Fjord leaped up the steps. He put his foot in the door to stop it from closing, his lower leg caught between the door and the frame. Trond stared at it. He was surprised by his own outburst of rage when he slammed the door shut with all his might.
“Ow, shit, Trond! Ow. Listen . . . listen . . . ow!”
“Move your foot,” Trond said and let go of the door for a moment.
“My laptop,” Rudolf said and stuck his leg in the door a bit further. “And . . . and . . .”
Trond didn’t back down. He had both his hands on the door handle.
“Your leg will break soon,” he said, very calmly. “Move.”
“I need those papers. And the laptop.”
“You’re lying. The laptop was hers. She got it from me.”
“But the other one, then—”
“There wasn’t another one.”
“But—”
Trond gathered all his strength and pushed hard.
“Ow! Oooowww! She’d also borrowed a book from me.”
His leg was badly twisted now. Trond stared at the black boot with fascination. The door was cutting into the leather just by the ankle.
“Which book?” he asked without looking up.
“The latest one by Berger,” Rudolf groaned.
That at least was true. Trond had noticed the Ex Libris label and had been surprised that the two of them borrowed books from each other.
“It’s disappeared,” he said.
“Disappeared?”
“Jesus, Rudolf! The book’s not here, and right now that’s the least of my worries. And yours for that matter! Buy a paperback.”
“Let me go.”
Trond gave him a few inches of slack. Rudolf Fjord edged his leg out. He let out a pathetic whimper as he carefully tried to massage the blood back into his lower leg.
“Good night,” he said weakly.
He limped down the steps. Trond stood in the doorway and watched him. The man nearly collapsed on the gravel driveway. Rudolf Fjord looked pathetic as he limped out to the road, despite his broad shoulders and his expensive camel-hair coat. His car was parked some distance away. Trond could just see the roof, a silver disk under the streetlight, at the top of the hill. For a moment he felt sorry for him. But he didn’t know why.
“Pathetic man,” he said to himself and realized that he was no longer scared of being alone.
Rudolf Fjord sat in the car until the windows steamed up. Everything was quiet. His foot ached intensely. He didn’t dare take off his boot to see if there was any real damage, in case he couldn’t get it back on again. He tried to push down the clutch. Luckily the pain was bearable. He’d been afraid he wouldn’t be able to drive.
At best, nothing would happen.
The police had the papers. They wouldn’t find anything. It wasn’t what they were looking for.
Rudolf Fjord wasn’t even sure that there was anything to find. Victoria had never told him what she had seen. Her hints were subtle, her threats vague. But she must have found something.
Rudolf Fjord had hoped he would find the house empty. He couldn’t understand why, because now the whole venture seemed absurd. Breaking in was out of the question. He was neither dressed nor equipped to break into a house. Maybe he had hoped that they could have a rational conversation. That Trond would give him what he asked for, without asking any questions. That it would be possible to draw a line through the whole thing; the whole depressing, aggravating affair would be over for good.
He could feel the tiredness behind his eyes, which were dry from lack of sleep.
He had never known that it was physically painful to be frightened.
Maybe she just made it up.
Of course she hadn’t, he argued with himself.
His foot was getting steadily worse. He had a cramp in his calf. Frustrated, he wiped the condensation from the windshield and started the car.
At best, nothing would happen.
Three dull meetings were finally over. Adam Stubo sank into his chair and looked despondently at the pile of mail. He quickly flicked through the letters and memorandums. Nothing urgent. His hourglass was standing perilously close to the edge of the desk. He carefully pushed it to a safer place. The grains of sand formed a silver peak in the bottom glass. He set the sand in motion, and more and more grains moved faster and faster.
Time was running out.
That was becoming increasingly apparent with each day that passed. No one said much. They all still had a false confidence, and people still accepted overtime without any protest, but with waning enthusiasm. There were still moments of optimism among the investigators. After all, new discoveries were made every day, even though they proved to be insignificant later.
It couldn’t go on like this much longer.
Three weeks or so, Adam reckoned. Dissatisfaction would spread fast once it took hold. He knew the score from earlier cases when no tangible evidence was forthcoming. Today was exactly four weeks since Fiona Helle was murdered. After twenty-eight days of intense investigation, they should at least have an idea of a possible suspect, an indication of a possible killer, a hint, a direction to follow.
But there was nothing in the folders that lay on Adam Stubo’s desk. And soon people would get fed up. Despondency was seeping into the most recent case too, as if they all, despite repeated warnings not to, just assumed that Victoria Heinerback had been killed by the same person as Fiona Helle and that the man had quite simply gotten away with it.
The cases would not be shelved. Of course not. But grumblings about resources, insufficient results, and too much overtime would gradually turn into sharp protest. Everyone knew what no one dared to say: for every hour that passed, the solution to the murders was slipping away.
The NCIS probably had the most motivated staff in the country. There was no doubt that it was the most competent. All of the investigators involved were therefore painfully aware of the depressing time-to-solution ratio.
Adam was dying for a cigar.
He picked up his phone and dialed a number that was written on a scrap of paper at the bottom of the corkboard.
The craving for a cigar was stronger than it had been for a long time.
“Bernt Helle? This is Adam Stubo from the NCIS.”
“Hi,” said the voice at the other end of the line.
Then it was quiet.
“I hope that everything’s going well, given the circumstances.”
“Yep.”
More silence.
“I called because there’s something I want to ask you, but I won’t keep you long,” Adam explained, and pressed the conference call button before putting the receiver down and patting his breast pocket. “Just a minor detail, really.”
“Okay,” Bernt Helle said and coughed. “I was actually just on my way out . . .”
Scraping. A loud cough.
“Fire away,” he said eventually. “What’s it about?”
His cigar tube had dents in it.
“I don’t really know whether it’s of any significance or not,” Adam said and tried to remember how long he’d been carrying the same tube around. “But could you tell me . . . Was Fiona ever an exchange student?”
“Exchange student?”
“Yes, you know, programs where—”
“Yes, I know what an exchange student is,” Bernt Helle said indignantly and coughed again. “Fiona didn’t go abroad in high school. I’m fairly sure of that. Even though I didn’t know her particularly well at the time. She was in high school, and I was at polytechnic. But, you know . . .”
Adam knew.
And he felt like an idiot. If he had waited until the next day, he would know why he was phoning him. But Johanne had insisted.
With great care, he pulled the cigar out of its aluminum tube.
“Yes,” Adam said. “If she had spent any time studying abroad, she would of course have talked about it later.”
“Yeah, I’m sure she would have.”
There were some silver scissors on the shelf behind Adam, a miniature guillotine. When he cut the end off the cigar, the noise made his mouth water. He took his lighter and rotated the cigar slowly over the flame.
“Not abroad at all,” he summed up. “No language schools in England? Summer vacations? Long stays with friends or family abroad?”
“No . . . listen”—a terrible coughing fit rattled in the receiver—“Sorry,” Bernt Helle sniffed.
The cigar tasted better than Adam had ever dreamed it could. The smoke was blue and dry on his tongue and not too hot. The smell stung his nose.
Bernt Helle continued, “Obviously I can’t know everything Fiona did when she was in school, in detail that is. Like I said, we didn’t hang around together then. We only really met later, after”—a loud sneeze—“Sorry.”
“No problem. You should get to bed,” Adam said.
“I run a business. And I’ve got a little girl who has just lost her mother. I don’t really have time to go to bed.”
“Now it’s my turn to say sorry,” Adam apologized. “I won’t keep you any longer. Hope you feel better soon.”
Adam hung up. A delicate, light gray fog was starting to fill the room. He smoked slowly. A drag every half-minute or so allowed the taste to settle and stopped the cigar from getting too hot.
He would never manage to quit. He took breaks, long periods when he didn’t enjoy a good cigar, the taste of pepper and leather, with perhaps an undertone of sweet cocoa. He often wondered whether the masculine aroma on the odd Friday night would really do the children any harm. Cuban cigars were best, of course, but he could also enjoy a mild Sumatra after dinner on a Friday evening, with his cognac or preferably a good calvados.
But those days were over.
He ran his finger over his lower lip. The cigar was a bit dry after lying in his breast pocket for weeks. It didn’t matter. He already felt lighter and leaned back in his chair and blew out three perfect smoke rings. They floated slowly up to the ceiling and then vanished.
“Weren’t you going to go home early?”
Adam’s feet, which had been crossed on his desk, now slammed to the floor.
“What time is it?” he asked, putting out the cigar carefully in a mug with some coffee still in it.
“Half past two.”
“Shit.”
“It smells all the way down the corridor,” Sigmund Berli remarked and sniffed the air disapprovingly. “The boss’ll be pissed off, Adam. Didn’t you read the last newsletter about—”
“Yeah. Have to run.”
He knocked over the coat stand as he tried to get his coat off the hook.
“I should’ve been home by now,” he said and rushed past Sigmund without bothering to pick the coat stand back up. “I’m really late.”
“Wait,” shouted Sigmund.
Adam slowed down and stopped as he tried to get his arm into a twisted sleeve.
“This just came in,” Sigmund said and handed him an envelope.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” hissed Adam between clenched teeth, his coat half on while he fumbled with the rest. “Has this stupid thing gone to pieces?”
Sigmund laughed. He patiently straightened the sleeve, as if he was helping an overgrown schoolboy. Then he held the coat by the collar and helped Adam put in his arm.
“There,” Sigmund chuckled and thrust the envelope under Adam’s nose.
“You said it was urgent.”
“You can say that. Express delivery.”
Adam gave a fleeting smile, stuffed the envelope in his pocket, and dashed out. Sigmund could feel the floor heaving under his heavy steps.
“One day you’ll get into trouble for all these papers you keep dragging backwards and forwards,” Sigmund said to himself. “It’s not right.”
The smell of Adam’s cigar hung heavy in the air, sour and unpleasant.
Vegard Krogh drank the flat beer and felt happy.
There must be something wrong with the taps at Coma, the only decent lunch place in Grünerløkka. He held the glass up toward the window. The head was thin and pathetic. The afternoon light barely managed to filter through the tepid beer. Golden brown reflections played on the table in front of him, and he grinned before taking another drink.
The bungee jump stunt had been a disaster.
The film was fine until about halfway through the jump. Then Vegard Krogh disappeared from the picture. The lens wavered around, up to the sky. Slipped past a crane. Tipped back toward the ground. Suddenly, for a split second, it caught Vegard Krogh on the rebound. Straight up. With the background music of sirens and the photographer’s desperate attempt to get away from the place. The rest of the film showed only earth, stones and building materials.
But it didn’t matter now.
The invitation arrived yesterday.
Vegard Krogh had hoped and waited. At times he was absolutely certain. It would come. He thought about the invitation in the evenings. His last conscious image before he fell asleep was of a beautiful card with a monogram and his name, written in neat calligraphy.
Then it came.
His hands were shaking as he opened the envelope, thick, stiff, eggshell-colored paper. The card was just as he’d imagined it. A dream card waiting for him in his mailbox, just when he needed it most.
Vegard Krogh had finally arrived.
He was now someone who mattered. From now on he would be one of them. One of the chosen few who answered “no comment” when the tabloids called as they did relentlessly on the couple’s friends.
“I’m going to be hounded,” he mumbled to himself, drowning his euphoric grin in the pint glass.
The young royals in Sweden surrounded themselves with the upper classes, aristocracy, and decadence. It was completely different in Norway. In Norway, it was culture that mattered. Music. Literature. Art.
It was six years now since he had first bought wine for a dandy young man with doe eyes and feminine clothes. The boy was sitting in a corner, surrounded by girls. Vegard was shitfaced but had always had a nose for where the girls were. The man thanked him politely and chatted away until Vegard picked up a brunette and left.
They bumped into each other every now and then. Had a drink. Shared stories. Until the young man’s circle of friends was purged a couple of years ago, for obvious reasons, and Vegard was dropped.
Bungee Jump must have made an impression.
He had sent a signed copy. Not one review of the book had been written yet, eight days after publication. But it had had an impact on the most important critic of all.
From one bungee jumper to another. To dare! From your friend, Vegard.
It had taken him an hour to find the right words. It was important not to be too pushy.
Vegard Krogh downed the rest of his beer in one gulp, a great, satisfied draft.
The glass of cheap merlot was finally starting to kick in.
Dress: casual & sharp, it said on the invite.
He would have to swallow his pride and borrow money from his mother.
She wouldn’t be angry this time.
“You say this Stubo guy’s okay.”
Bård Arnesen leaned over the table and gave his brother an encouraging slap on the shoulder. Then he scratched his head before saving a lettuce leaf from drowning in dressing at the bottom of the glass bowl.
“Lying to the cops isn’t very smart, Trond.”
Trond didn’t answer. He just stared straight ahead without looking at anything. His plate was half empty. He moved the leftovers from side to side, meat and fried potatoes. He listlessly picked up a piece of asparagus and put it in his mouth, then chewed it slowly without swallowing.
“Hello, planet earth calling. You look like a cow.”
Bård waved a hand in front of his brother’s face.
“It’ll be much worse if they find out themselves,” he said earnestly. “In fact, it’s pretty strange that they haven’t—”
“Don’t you understand?” Trond exclaimed. “I can’t say anything to Stubo. For a start, I’d blow a hole in my alibi. And then I’m in shit up to here”—his hand made an aggressive cut across his forehead—“just for having lied. They’d pull me in immediately, Bård. Immediately.”
“Yeah, but you said that they knew you were innocent. That Stubo guy said you were the first one they crossed off from the list. You said that—”
“Said! What the fuck does it matter what I said!”
His fist hit the table. He was struggling to hold it together, his lower lip trembled, his nostrils flared, and his eyes had nearly receded into his skull. He pushed the plate away, then pulled it back, balanced his knife on the fork, and folded his napkin so many times that he couldn’t fold it anymore.
Bård kept quiet. The smell of his brother’s fear added a sweet edge to the greasy, heavy fried potato scent that filled the kitchen. Bård had never seen his brother like this before. He had been a scaredy cat for as long as Bård could remember. Wary of everything. A real mama’s boy. Cried whenever he got hurt, which he seldom did.
But now he wasn’t worried or nervous.
His brother was terrified, and he couldn’t swallow the piece of asparagus.
“Hey,” Bård said in a friendly voice and gave him another gentle push. “There’s no one who would seriously believe you murdered Victoria. For Christ’s sake, she was a real catch. Good-looking, fun, with money and a house and things like that. Can’t you just . . . hello, Trond!” He clicked his fingers in resignation. “Listen to me at least!”
“I’m listening.”
“Spit out that damned stuff.”
Trond spat it out. A gray green lump of mulch dropped onto the leftovers on his plate.
“You trust me, don’t you, Trond?”
The question got no reaction.
“You’re my brother, Trond.”
Still no reaction.
“Oh, god damn it!”
Bård got up suddenly, and the chair fell back. It slammed into the fridge door and scraped off some of the paint. Perplexed, he put his finger on the green patch in the middle of all the white.
“I’ll fix that,” he said in a flat voice. “I’ll paint it later, sometime.”
His brother still didn’t react. He just brushed his hand over his eyes quickly.
“What did you do during those hours?” Bård asked. “Can’t you at least tell me? Eh? I’m your brother, for fuck’s sake!”
“It was an hour and a half.”
“Whatever.”
“You said hours. It wasn’t several hours. It was an hour and a half. Barely one and a half hours.”
Trond Arnesen had managed to forget that tiny bit of secret time. It had been easier than he’d expected. Surprisingly easy. He left the whole episode behind on the way home. When the taxi that picked him up from the bus stop at twenty past six in the morning on Saturday, February 7, stopped so he could throw up by the roadside, he’d tried to focus on the vomit in the snow. Bent double, with his hands on his knees, he recognized an undigested peanut in all the red-wine redness. When he saw the shreds of meat, he threw up again. The taxi driver shouted impatiently. Trond stood there. That was the last time, he thought to himself in a haze. He studied his own spew, fascinated, the revolting remains of everything he had consumed in the past twenty-four hours. And it was out now. Gone. Done with.
Never again.
He scraped the snow with the tip of his boots, wanting to cover the puke, but he lost his balance. The taxi driver helped him into the car. Took him home. Everything was forgotten, and it was the last time ever.
Since then, no one had asked.
The bachelor party, from which he eventually crawled home, had grown during the course of the night. At six o’clock on Friday evening, nineteen men dressed immaculately in tuxedos had headed into town. Then they met Bård’s football team, with dirty red shirts and a victory to celebrate. The party grew in size. Things started to warm up. Ten or twelve of Bård’s colleagues appeared at around eight o’clock, when the bridegroom was selling French kisses from a stall on Karl Johan for fifty krone a shot. By the time his brother slurred that Trond had to help him to the bathroom to release the pressure at around half past ten, the party had turned into a blind drunk, random, rowdy bunch of men: the Skeid team, some economists from Telenor, a gang of cricket players from Hokksund that had tagged along since about nine, and the odd drunk whom they didn’t know from Adam.
At least fifty people, Trond thought.
And no one had noticed.
No one had told the police anything other than that Trond was at his brother’s bachelor party from six o’clock on Friday evening until someone put him on the first bus to Lørenskog the next morning.
Everyone had said that. Everything was forgotten.
“What makes you say that?” he finally asked.
“Can’t you just tell me where you were?”
His voice was no longer impatient. His brother was pleading with him now, a whining, demanding little brother voice that Trond recognized from childhood and that still annoyed him.
“What makes you say that, and why are you asking me now?”
After all, he was the oldest.
Bård shrugged his shoulders.
“What with everything that’s happened . . . I’ve had other things to think about. But now, now that . . . You just disappeared! I looked for you everywhere. After I’d taken a leak. You helped me. Do you remember?”
Trond nodded but said nothing.
“You were the only who wasn’t absolutely trashed. I wanted to borrow some money. Spent over three thousand krone. Think I bought rounds for everyone. You weren’t there. Couldn’t find you anywhere.”
“Did you ask anyone where I was?”
“Everyone was asking where everyone was all the time! Don’t you remember? We just about had the run of the place. It was crazy.” He grinned, then pulled himself together. “The next time I saw you, it was three minutes past twelve. And I’m sure about that, because you made such a big thing about your watch, the one you got from—”
“My watch? I didn’t have my watch on.”
“Yeah you did, cut the crap. When we had that beer-drinking competition, you stood on the bar and took the time with that monstrosity on your arm.”
Trond flushed. And then got hotter. He could smell his own body odor, sharp and bitter. His bladder was bursting. He wanted to get up. He wanted to go to the bathroom, but his knees refused to help him.
“Why did I admit it?” he thought. “Why didn’t I just deny it? Bård was shitfaced. He might have made a mistake. Confused the times. There were so many people there. Everyone said that I was just mingling and drinking. Showing off. I should have denied it. I had every chance to deny it. I’ll deny it.”
“You’re getting it all confused,” he said and clutched the table with both hands. “I didn’t go anywhere. You fell asleep on the toilet. Don’t know how long you—”
“What the hell are you saying? I know I didn’t fall asleep! I didn’t get to bed until eight the next morning. I was pretty drunk that night, but not enough not to notice . . .”
Trond forced himself out of the chair. He took a deep breath. Pushed out his chest and held his shoulders back. He was the big brother. Bigger, too, several inches taller than his brother.
“I need to piss,” he barked.
“Right?”
“You’re my brother. We’re brothers.”
“Right,” Bård repeated with a puzzled, slightly irritated look, as if Trond was wasting his energy trying to convince him that the world was around and circled the sun. “And?”
“You’re wrong. I was there all the time.”
“Do you think I’m a complete idiot, or what?”
He slipped around the table and stood in front of Trond, his fists balled. Bård was shorter than his brother but much stronger. Their faces were barely a hand apart.
“You admitted it ten minutes ago,” he hissed, his eyes narrowed. Trond felt a fine shower of spit on his skin.
“I admitted nothing.”
“You said that you couldn’t say anything to Stubo. You said that you’d lied. Isn’t that admitting, or what?”
“I really need to piss.”
“Admit it.”
Bård punched his brother on the shoulder. Hard, with his fist.
“Admit.”
Suddenly, without warning, Trond grabbed him around the waist. Bård struggled to keep his balance, holding onto his brother’s shirt with his left hand as he tried to find something solid to hold onto with his right. A bit too late, he noticed that Trond’s foot was in the way as he tried to take a step sideways. They fell over. As they went down, Bård got caught on the electric cord of the mixer. A survival instinct made him move his head when he saw the heavy Kenwood. The steel edge caught his ear. He howled and tried to lift his hand to feel the wound. His arms were pinned down. Only his head was free, and he threw it from side to side as he shouted.
Trond punched him.
Trond sat with a knee on each of his brother’s arms and let rip.
He closed his eyes and laid into his brother.
When he was exhausted, he got up quickly. He smoothed down his hair, as if he couldn’t quite believe what had just happened and wanted to pretend that nothing had. His brother groaned. Blood was pouring from his ear. One eye had already started to swell up. His upper lip was split. His shirt was torn. His upper groin was soaking, a dark butterfly-shaped patch on the khaki material of his pants.
“You’ve pissed yourself,” Bård slurred, holding his ear. “You’ve fucking pissed on me.”
He sat up, stiff and unsure if anything was broken. He studied his damned hand and then put it over his ear again.
“Is the lobe still there?” he asked. His voice was hoarse, and he spat out some blood. “Did I lose my earlobe, Trond?”
His big brother crouched down and looked at the wound.
“No. Nasty cut. The ear’s all there.”
Bård started to laugh. At first Trond thought he was crying. But his brother was laughing, he laughed until he coughed, holding his knees, roaring with laughter and spitting blood.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” he groaned. “You’ve never beaten me up before. You’ve never even managed to tackle me to the ground. Have you ever been in a fight before?”
“Here,” Trond said and gave him a hand.
“Wait. Hurts everywhere. Have to do it myself.”
It took him a few minutes to get to his feet. Trond stood helplessly by, watching him, hands hanging by his side. He scratched his thigh uncertainly.
“Worst thing is the piss,” Bård said, and carefully shook a leg. “In any case, you’ve still got an alibi.”
“What?”
“An hour and a half,” Bård said and gently tested one of his front teeth.
“What?”
“I can swear on the Bible that you were in the center of Oslo at half past ten and around midnight. You wouldn’t make it out here and back. Not without anyone seeing you, anyway.”
“I could’ve taken a taxi.”
“The driver would’ve told the police ages ago.”
“I could’ve driven.”
“Your car was at Mom and Dad’s. All the boys know that; they picked us up there.”
“I might’ve stolen one.”
“Aw shit, this ear,” Bård said and closed his eyes as he tried to move one of his shoulders. “It’s really hurting. Do I need stitches?”
Trond bent down closer.
“Maybe. I’ll drive you down to the emergency room.”
“You still have an alibi, Trond.”
“Yes, I was at Smuget. All evening.”
Bård bit himself gently on his split lip.
“Okay,” he said and nodded.
They looked at each other. It’s like looking into my own eyes, thought Trond, even though his brother was beaten and damned. The same slightly slanting left eye. Green specks in the blue iris. The epicanthic fold in the corner of the eye, which his mother always said was so unusual in this country. Even their eyebrows, which were so fair that their foreheads almost looked naked, were the same. He had beaten up his brother. He couldn’t understand why. And he found it even harder to believe that he’d managed to do it—Bård was stronger, faster, and much bolder.
“Okay,” Bård said and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “You were at Smuget. All night. Fine.”
He limped toward the living room door.
“I won’t say anymore,” he said and stopped. “But—”
He turned around and took a breath.
“No one is going to think you killed Victoria, Trond. I think you should tell the police everything. I can come with you, if you want.”
“I was at Smuget all night,” Trond repeated. “So it’s not necessary.”
Bård shrugged and limped on.
He was on his way to the bedroom to lay claim to Trond’s most expensive pants. He could have Theresa, his fiancée, hem them. He had a right to take at least his best pants.
“You gave me a good beating,” he muttered, impressed.
The visit to Yvonne Knutsen was not a success. Johanne had already been warned in the corridor. The nurse whispered that she was suffering from severe MS and refused to see most people. Only her son-in-law and granddaughter were always welcome.
The woman in white was right. Yvonne Knutsen clammed up the minute Johanne walked into the room. She lay rigid in her bed, which stood in the center of the room. Otherwise the room was more or less empty. A faded lithograph hung askew in a broken frame on one wall, and there was a wooden chair by the bed. Through the dirty, streaked windowpanes, the sharp light of the low sun that had blinded Johanne as she drove the last stretch to the nursing home had been reduced to a dull disk above the horizon. Johanne got nothing out of Yvonne Knutsen other than “Please go away” before the sick woman turned her head and pretended to fall asleep.
“I’m so sorry,” the nurse had said while resting a comforting hand on her shoulder when she came out, as if it was Johanne’s mother who lay there motionless, waiting to die.
The journey home was awful. One of her tires went flat on the E18 on the way back to Oslo. It took a while to find a rest stop where she could pull over, and when she finally inspected the tire, she could see that it was frayed to shreds. It was raining buckets and was stormy, and by the time she got the jack out, she was soaked to the skin.
She finally got home, an hour late.
“MS is a horrible disease,” she muttered and rearranged the cushions to get more comfortable. She was sitting on the sofa in her sweats, with Ragnhild half asleep at her breast.
“You think all illnesses are horrible,” replied Adam.
“No, I don’t.”
“Oh, yes you do.”
He put a large spoon of honey in her tea and stirred it.
“Drink up. I’ve put some ginger in, so that should help.”
“It’s too hot. What if Ragnhild moved suddenly and I spill—”
“Here,” he said with determination and took the baby. “She’s full. Drink up so you don’t catch anything. Do you want a shot of something?”
“No thank you. It was so awful to see.”
“I agree. I had to talk to her just after the murder.”
Johanne lifted the cup to her mouth.
“Tell me about it,” Adam said, and sat down on the sofa facing her.
She pulled up her feet and tucked the cushions behind her back.
“Fiona has two children,” she said.
“Fiona, she’s . . . she’s got a daughter.”
“Yes, but she definitely gave birth to two children.”
Ragnhild burped. Adam put her over his shoulder and stroked her tiny back.
“I don’t get it,” he said.
“Nor do I, in fact,” she retorted.
She reached out for the papers he had given her when she got home, soaking wet and grumpy. The bottom page was still damp and soft.
“In the medical records from Fiona’s pregnancy and birth, she is constantly referred to as a first-time mother. And I can assure you”—she dropped the papers back onto the table and made herself more comfortable—“a doctor or a midwife can easily identify whether a woman has had a child before or not. It’s routine. But nothing like that is written in the records. Fiorella was delivered by cesarean, and it was planned. As far as I can tell from Fiona’s records, she suffered from anxiety in connection with giving birth, which they obviously took seriously. A cesarean on a set date, for no reason other than the psychological.”
“Yes, but . . .”
Adam put Ragnhild down in the crib, which had been moved back into the living room. He was rocking it gently with his feet.
“I don’t understand.”
“Not so strange. Everyone thinks that Fiorella was Fiona’s first child. The doctors too, even though they must have known it wasn’t the case.”
“But you”—Adam’s brow was wrinkled with skepticism—“you know better than everyone else.”
“Not me, the pathologist.”
She went into the kitchen and came back with the teapot in one hand and the autopsy report in the other.
“Perineal rupture,” she read out loud.
“Which means?”
“Think about it.”
“I’m thinking. What does it mean?”
“Listen to the words,” she said impatiently and helped herself to more tea and honey. “I’m coming down with a cold.”
“Oh give it up,” Adam said. “Tell me what you’re getting at. How can you—”
“Perineum,” she interrupted, “is the medical term for the area between the vagina and the anus. A perineal rupture can occur during childbirth, when you get torn from—”
“Enough,” he said and made a face. “I understand. But why the hell haven’t we seen that? If it’s there in black and white . . .”
He was put out and leaned over the coffee table, grabbed the autopsy report from her, and started to read.
“You just didn’t get what it meant,” Johanne said. “You simply ignored it. You were blinded by looking for some sort of sexual motive, so—”
“Ignored it,” Adam asked, raising his voice. “Ignored it?”
“You’re in good company. It’s been revealed that in the Knutby case, the Swedish police shelved a possible murder because they didn’t know what ‘toxic mass’ meant. Don’t you read the papers?”
“Preferably not,” he retorted, leafing frantically through the report trying to find something. “But these new . . . What about that medical report there?”
He tapped the other papers with his finger. “Why would the doctors lie? Are the records fake?”
“Probably not. I called my cousin, Evan—the doctor you met—”
“I remember Evan. What did he say?”
Adam sat down in the sofa opposite her again.
“There can be only one reason why the records don’t include details that are so relevant for doctors and midwives, and so easy to verify,” Johanne explained.
“And that is?”
“If it would cause considerable distress to the patient to include it. Considerable distress, Evan said. And as far as I understood, doctors attach great importance to that.”
They sat in silence. Adam scratched his neck. The craving for a cigar had returned. He swallowed and stared out the window, distracted. The rain was drumming on the windowpane. A car had stopped. “Kids,” he thought. The engine revved up again and again. Someone shouted something, the others laughed. A door slammed, and the car jangled down the road and vanished.
Ragnhild was fast asleep. Jack trotted in from the hall. He stood for a moment with his head to one side, ears pricked, as if he couldn’t quite believe how quiet it was. Then he buried his snout in Adam’s lap and pawed his thighs.
“Not the sofa,” Adam mumbled. “Lie down on the floor. Down, boy.”
The dog appeared to shrug his shoulders and then crept lithely under the table and jumped up onto the other sofa, beside Johanne.
“Can you get that kind of injury from rape or something like that?” Adam eventually asked, without commenting on how badly trained the shit brown dog was.
“Adam, really.”
“But—”
“Imagine a birth. A child’s head. Why do you think women get torn?”
Adam stuck his fingers in his ears.
“The answer is no,” Johanne said. “Not from rape.”
“But”—Adam tried again and swallowed—“wouldn’t a man . . . Wouldn’t Bernt have noticed if—”
“No,” Johanne replied. “At least, that’s what Evan said. Not necessarily. Not during intercourse or . . . other such pleasure.”
He smiled. “Strange.”
She smiled back. “But it’s the truth.”
Jack growled in his sleep.
“So, to sum up,” Adam said and stood up again. He stroked his chin with his thumb and index finger. “We can confirm the following: Fiona Helle was pregnant twice. The first child was born under circumstances in which she tore badly. It must have been a long time ago, as there is nothing to indicate that Bernt Helle knows anything about the child. And nor does anyone else. Fiona publicly expressed her delight at being a late first-time mother. She would hardly have dared to say something like that if there was anyone out there who knew . . .”
He went over to the window. He could feel the draft. He ran his finger around the window frame.
“Damn me if it’s not blowing straight through the wall,” he muttered. “We’ll have to get that fixed soon. Can’t be good for the kids.”
“A bit of draft just makes it cooler and fresher indoors,” Johanne said and waved her hand. “Go on.”
“No . . .” He pulled and fiddled with the old-fashioned insulation tape that was about to fall off.
“I just can’t believe that Bernt is a liar,” he said slowly and turned to face her again. “The guy’s behavior has been fine throughout the investigation. Even though he’s no doubt sick and tired of our constant questions that never seem to come to anything, he always answers and does what we want him to. He answers the phone, he comes in when we ask him to, he seems to be well-adjusted and intelligent. So I’m sure he would have understood that information like that would be relevant for us. Wouldn’t he?”
Johanne wrinkled her nose.
“Um, yes,” she said. “He probably would. I think we can at least assume that the child wasn’t born after they became a couple. Gossip is rife in small towns. They married quite quickly too, and I can’t imagine that a normal, if very young, couple would have any reason to hide a pregnancy. In fact, I think the answer to this mystery is simple. It must have been a very unwanted pregnancy, when she was very young.”
“Please don’t say it was incest,” Adam warned. “That’s all this case needs now.”
“Well, it certainly couldn’t have been Fiona’s father. He died when she was nine. And I think we can safely say that she wasn’t that young. But she must have been young enough to disappear or be sent away for a while without it causing a stir. Fiona was a teenager in”—she mouthed the numbers as she calculated—“at the end of the seventies,” she finished. “She was sixteen in seventy-eight.”
“That late,” Adam said, disappointed. “It wasn’t exactly a catastrophe to be a teenage mom then.”
“Huh,” exclaimed Johanne and rolled her eyes. “Typical man! I was terrified of getting pregnant before I was sixteen, and that was in the mid-eighties.”
“Sixteen,” Adam said. “Were you only sixteen—”
“Forget it,” Johanne swiftly interrupted. “Can we just concentrate on the case?”
“Yes, but sixteen . . .” He sat down and scratched Jack behind the ear. “Fiona didn’t go abroad,” he said. “Not for any length of time, anyway. I checked with Bernt. And I guess he would have known that. Even though not everyone I know likes to talk on and on about time spent studying abroad, I doubt that Fiona would have kept her mouth shut about—”
“Stop it,” Johanne said and leaned over to him.
She kissed him lightly.
“So, a child was born,” she continued. “It isn’t necessarily relevant to the investigation, but, on the other hand, it does bear an uncanny resemblance to her show—”
“That she hosted so successfully for several years, and that gave her such a high profile.”
“Adopted children and grieving mothers. Reunited or rejected. That sort of thing.”
Jack lifted his head and pricked one ear. The house groaned in the strong wind. The rain was hurled against the window from the south. Johanne bent down over Ragnhild and tucked the blanket more snugly around the child, who slept on undisturbed. The stereo clicked on and off by itself several times, and the main light above the table flickered.
Then everything went dark.
“Damn,” said Adam.
“Ragnhild,” said Johanne.
“Take it easy.”
“That’s why I went to see Yvonne Knutsen,” Johanne said in the dark. “She knows what happened. You can be sure of that.”
“Presumably,” Adam replied. His face was covered in great flickering shadows as he struck a match.
“Maybe that’s why she didn’t want to speak to me,” Johanne mused. “Maybe the child has turned up, maybe—”
“A lot of maybes there now,” Adam pointed out. “Hold on a minute.”
He finally managed to find a candle.
She followed him with her eyes. He was so lithe, despite his size. When he walked, he stepped heavily, as if he wanted to make a point of being so big. But as he crouched in front of the fireplace, tearing newspaper into strips, then reaching out for wood from the metal basket and building a fire, there was something light and easy about his movements, a fascinating softness in his solid body.
The flames licked the paper.
She clapped quietly and smiled.
“I’ll cheat a bit, just to be on the safe side,” he said and pushed in a couple of fire starters between the wood. “I’ll just go down to the cellar for some more wood. Power outages can last a while in weather like this. Where’s the flashlight?”
She pointed to the hall. He went out.
The flames crackled warmly and threw a golden red light into the living room. Johanne could already feel the heat on her face. Once again she tucked the blanket in around her daughter and was grateful that Kristiane was at Isak’s. She took the woolen blanket that was lying over the back of the sofa and wrapped it around her legs, then leaned back and shut her eyes.
Adam should talk to the doctor who was there at the birth. Or the midwife. They would both cite patient confidentiality but would give in in the end. They always did in cases like this.
It would take time though, Johanne realized.
If there was actually a living adult descendant of Fiona Helle, they might be getting close to something that resembled a clue. A pretty flimsy one, to be sure, and it might lead to nothing. He or she wouldn’t be the first child in history born out of wedlock and adopted into a loving family. Probably a perfectly normal twentysomething person—maybe a student, or a carpenter with a Volvo and two snotty children. Not a cold-blooded murderer with a need to avenge the rejection a quarter of a century earlier.
But when she died, Fiona’s tongue had been split and cut out.
The child was Fiona’s great lie.
Victoria Heinerback had been nailed to the wall.
Two women. Two cases.
An illegitimate child.
Johanne sat up suddenly. She was just about to nod off when a feeling of déjà vu ran through her again, the uncomfortable feeling that there was something important she couldn’t grasp. She lifted Jack closer and laid her face on the dog’s fur.
“Can we talk about something else?” she asked when Adam came back with his arms full of wood.
He put down the wood.
“Of course we can,” he said and kissed her on the head. “We can talk about whatever you want to. The fact that I want a new horse, for example.”
“New horse? I’ve said it a thousand times: no new horse.”
“We’ll see,” Adam laughed as he went into the kitchen. “Kristiane’s on my side. And I’m sure Ragnhild is too. And Jack. That’s four against one.”
Johanne wanted to respond to his laughter, but the feeling of unease still clung to her body, the remnants of a fleeting premonition of danger.
“Forget it,” she said. “You can just forget the horse.”