The storm had died down. The wind was still blowing strong, but the clouds had opened to reveal light blue stripes to the south. Old, dirty snow lay compacted and rotting in gardens and by the roadside after the rain. Johanne tried to avoid the worst puddles as she maneuvered the carriage on the narrow pavement along Maridalsveien. Heavy traffic and buses thundered past. She didn’t like it, so she crossed the road at Badebakken to cut down to the Aker River. Jack was pulling at the leash and wanted to sniff at everything.
The temperature was dropping, and snow was forecast for the evening. Johanne stopped and tightened her scarf, then kept going. Her nose was freezing. She sniffed. She should have put a hat on. At least Ragnhild was warm enough, snug in her Baby Grobag with a sheep fleece under her and extra woolen blankets on top. When Johanne gently pulled back the edge of the bag, she could only just see her little face tightly tucked in. Her pacifier was pulsing, and Johanne could tell from the movements behind the thin, fine eyelids that Ragnhild was dreaming.
She sat down on a bench just by the day care at Heftyeløkka and let Jack off the leash. He shot off down to the river and barked at the ducks, which paid no attention to him. They just swam around in the open channels in the ice. The King of America whimpered and barked and stuck an adventurous paw into the water.
“Stop it,” she muttered, scared of waking Ragnhild.
The cold wind ripped through her duffel coat, but she liked sitting here, on her own, rocking the carriage, back and forth, back and forth with one hand. It was Tuesday, February 17. She could make the call at midday. In eight minutes, she discovered when she looked at her cell phone. Fiona Helle’s best friend had said that she would be back in the office by then. She seemed puzzled but happy to talk. Johanne had not introduced herself as a policewoman, but her choice of words may have given Sara Brubakk the impression that her inquiry was of an official nature.
Not good.
It wasn’t like her. In fact, she wanted to pull out of the case, or at least not get in any deeper, and certainly not use methods that verged on the unethical.
Johanne blew her nose. She was getting a cold, as expected.
There were no people around. Then a jogger came puffing by in a cloud of condensation. He nodded and smiled, but then jumped when Jack came tearing out of some bushes and snapped at his heels.
“Keep your dog on a leash,” he shouted and raced on.
“Come here, Jack.”
He wagged his tail as she tied him to the carriage. Then he lay down.
It was twelve o’clock. She dialed the number.
“Hi, this is Johanne Vik,” she started. “We spoke earlier this morning and . . .”
“Oh yes, hello again. Just a minute while I sit down. I’ve just got in the door and—”
Scraping. Scratching. A bang.
“Hello?”
“I’m still here,” Johanne confirmed.
“There. I’m ready. Now, how can I help you?”
“I’ve just got a couple of questions about Fiona Helle’s time in high school. You were in her class, weren’t you?”
“Yes. As I said when I was questioned, Fiona and I were at school together from elementary school on. We were inseparable. Always friends. It’s just been so awful since . . . I couldn’t face coming back to work until a week ago, in fact. I got bereavement leave. My boss is so—”
“I understand,” Johanne assured her. “And I definitely won’t keep you long. I just wanted to find out if Fiona was ever . . . away from school? For a long period of time, I mean.”
“Away from school—”
“Yes. Not just for a few days because she had a cold, I mean, something longer.”
“She was away at Modum Bad in our first year. For quite a while.”
“Sorry?” Johanne wasn’t cold anymore. She switched the phone to her right hand and asked again. “Excuse me, what did you just say?”
“Fiona had some kind of nervous breakdown, I think. It was never really talked about. We were about to go back to school after the summer break. I remember I’d been in France all summer with my family, so I was really looking forward to seeing Fiona again. We . . . She didn’t come. She was in the hospital.”
“At Modum Bad?”
“Well . . . to tell the truth, I’m not sure. I’ve always just presumed it was Modum Bad because I didn’t know of anywhere else you could go for that sort of thing. Breakdowns, I mean.”
“How do you know it was a breakdown?”
Silence.
More scraping, not as loud this time.
“Now that you ask,” Sara Brubakk said slowly, “I’m actually not sure about any of it. Except that she wasn’t there. For a long time. I seem to remember that she wasn’t back until after Christmas. Or no . . . she came back just before. We always had a school show and started rehearsals at the beginning of December.”
“School show? Right after a nervous breakdown?”
Jack growled at an overconfident drake. It puffed out its feathers and tried to take a piece of bread that was only a couple of yards from the dog’s snout.
“Quiet,” Johanne said.
“Excuse me?”
“Sorry. I’m talking to the dog. So, did Fiona take part? Did she tell you why she’d been away?”
“Yes. Well, not . . . Oh, it was all so long ago.”
Her voice sounded slightly apologetic. But it also sounded as if she really wanted to help.
“Like I said, we were best friends. Talked about everything and anything, like best friends do. But I remember that I was a bit put out, hurt, that Fiona didn’t really want to tell me where she’d been and what was actually wrong with her. That I’m sure about. I remember my mother said I should just let it lie. That kind of . . . sickness was never easy.”
“But Modum Bad and the nervous breakdown could easily be your own conclusions, not necessarily something you know or are certain about,” Johanne summarized.
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
“Could you just give me an idea of what she was like when she came back?”
“No . . . what she was like? Just normal, really. Like before. I hadn’t seen her for, well . . . five months, it must have been. From midsummer until the end of November. And at that age you grow up so fast. But we were best friends. Still, I should say.”
A group from the day care walked by, two by two, hand in hand, waddling down the path in their oversized winter clothes. A little boy with his hat down over his eyes and a snotty nose was crying. A woman took him by the arm and called, “Not far to go now, children. Come along!”
“Do you think she might have been pregnant?” asked Johanne.
“Pregnant? Pregnant?” Sara Brubakk laughed lightly. “No, you can forget that. Goodness, time showed that it was extremely difficult for her to get pregnant at all. You know that Fiorella was a test-tube baby?”
Johanne didn’t know. In fact, there was a bit too much about Fiona Helle’s life that hadn’t found its way into the NCIS investigation files.
“In any case,” Sara Brubakk added, “I’m a hundred percent certain that Fiona would’ve told me if it was anything like that. We were like two peas in a pod. Pregnant? No, never.”
“But you didn’t see her for five months,” Johanne argued.
“No. But pregnant? Absolutely not.”
“Okay. Well, thank you very much for your time.”
“Was that all?”
“For the moment, yes. Thank you.”
“Are you getting anywhere with the case?”
“We generally manage to solve them,” Johanne said evasively. “It just takes time. I realize that it must be very difficult for you all. Family and friends.”
“Yes. Just give me a call if there’s anything else I can do. I am more than willing to help.”
“Thank you, I understand. Good-bye.”
The line of children had turned into Mor Go’hjertasvei and disappeared between the apartment buildings. The ducks had settled down. They were sitting in groups on the ice, their legs underneath them and their beaks tucked into the heat of their breast feathers.
Johanne started to wander up the path along the river.
“For a long time there were no secrets in this case,” she thought to herself. Jack lollopped obediently along beside her. “It was remarkably free of hate and secrets. But then they popped up. As they always do, in all cases, after all murders. Lies. Half-truths. Veiled facts and forgotten, hidden stories.”
Ragnhild started to cry. Johanne looked into the carriage. Her toothless gums were bared in a furious howl. Her mother filled the gaping hole with the pacifier. All was quiet.
She had pondered it for a long time. Why both cases, Fiona’s and Victoria’s, were so strangely free of contradictions and underlying conflicts.
She picked up speed. The wind was bitter and biting. Ragnhild would fully wake up soon. They had to get home.
“Maternal rejection has ended in murder before this,” she mused as she struggled with the curb in Bergensgate. “But why nearly twenty-six years later? Had the child, now an adult, only just found out the truth? Could the revelation of a past betrayal have stirred such hate? Could it be the driving force behind a murder like this, a gruesome, symbolic execution? Or . . .”
She stopped. Jack looked at her in surprise, with his tongue hanging out of his slavering mouth. A bus drove past. The exhaust made Johanne cough and turn away.
Maybe the rejection wasn’t that long ago.
The thought had struck her the night before, when Adam warned her against unfounded speculation. Maybe Fiona Helle’s secret child had only recently traced his or her biological mother. Ironic, she thought to herself, if Fiona herself had become an object of desire, like those she had exploited for entertainment, on which she had built her career. “Don’t speculate. Adam was right. This is too vague. And if the child really does exist, what the hell would that person have to do with Victoria Heinerback?” she asked herself aloud and then shook her head.
It had to be two murderers.
Or maybe not.
Yes, two. Or one.
“I’ve got to stop,” she thought. “This is crazy. Unprofessional. A profiler uses sophisticated data programs. Works in a team. Has access to archives and know-how. I am not a profiler. I’m an ordinary woman out walking with her baby and dog. But there’s something, there’s something that . . .”
She started to run. Ragnhild was screaming in the carriage, which rattled and shook and nearly turned over when Johanne slid on some ice as she turned the corner into Haugesvei.
When she finally got home, she locked the door and put on the security chain before taking off her coat and boots.
Trond Arnesen couldn’t sleep. It was two o’clock on Wednesday morning. He had been up a couple of times to get water. His mouth felt like sandpaper, but he didn’t know why. There was nothing on TV. At least nothing that caught his interest, or stopped him from worrying, or gave him a few minutes’ respite from his brain that was churning things over and over and keeping sleep at bay.
He gave up. Got up for the fourth time. Got dressed.
He thought he would take a walk, get some air.
The snow had started to fall at around eight. It lay like a clean, light blanket over the ground, over the rotting leaves and winter remains, dirty gray snow banks and sludgy roads. The gravel crunched under his feet, and the gate squealed when he opened it. He walked aimlessly up the hill, as if lured by the streetlight.
There was no way he could tell the truth.
He couldn’t even have told the truth right away, at the time, when he still had a chance, in that sweaty room with the policeman who looked like he was about to burst out laughing.
It had definitely been the last time that Friday, and it had been so easy to forget.
Then Bård came.
Idiot.
Trond thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his down jacket. He walked fast. There was no else around at this time of night, and people had gone to bed hours ago in the dark houses along the road. A cat darted across the road, stopped for a moment, and stared at him with yellow, luminescent eyes before disappearing between the trees on the other side.
He missed Victoria. There was a vacuum behind his ribs, a longing that he couldn’t remember ever having felt before, but it was like missing his mom when he went to camp as a boy.
Victoria was so strong. She would have figured things out.
The tears left frozen tracks on his cheeks.
He sniffed, blew his nose in his fingers, and then stood still. This was where the taxi had stopped for him to throw up. He prodded the snowdrift with the toes of his boots. It was lighter up here, with streetlights every five yards or so. The snow shimmered like blue white diamonds when he kicked it.
His watch suddenly appeared.
Puzzled, he bent down.
It was his watch. He blew on it and shook off the snow, held it up to his eyes. Ten past three. The second hand ticked loyally on, and the date showed the 18th.
When he put the watch on, the plastic burned ice-cold against his skin.
He was glad and smiled. The watch reminded him of Victoria, and he put his hand around the black watchband and squeezed it.
He should tell them.
He’d made such a fuss about the diving watch that he should let Adam Stubo know that he’d found it. Trond had simply been mistaken. He hadn’t left it at home but had worn it to the party, and it’d fallen off when he was bent double, puking up his guts.
The policeman might have moved heaven and earth to try and find the watch. And Trond didn’t want heaven and earth to be moved. He wanted peace and quiet, and to have as little as possible to do with the police.
He could send a text message. That was the solution. Stubo had given him his number and assured him that he could call whenever he wanted. Texting would be safest. It was ordinary and undramatic, the modern way to communicate trivial messages and minor events.
Found my watch. Had dropped it in the snow. Sorry about the fuss! Trond Arnesen.
There, it was done. He turned around. Couldn’t wander the streets all night. Maybe he could find a DVD to kill time. He could take one of Victoria’s sleeping pills. He’d never tried one before. It would probably knock him out completely. The idea was very appealing.
He didn’t care about the book that had disappeared. Rudolf Fjord could buy a new copy.
“Adam.”
She prodded him.
“Hmmm.”
“I’m scared.”
“Don’t be scared. Go to sleep.”
“I can’t.”
He gave a demonstrative sigh and pulled the pillow down over his face.
“We have to sleep sometime,” was Adam’s muffled response. “Every now and then.”
He peeped out from behind the pillow and yawned.
“What are you frightened of now?”
“I woke up because your phone was beeping and then—”
“Did my phone ring? Crap, I should’ve . . .”
His hands fumbled around trying to find the light switch on the bedside table. He knocked over a glass of water.
“Shit,” he groaned. “Where . . . ?”
The light exploded in his face. He squinted and sat up in bed.
“It didn’t ring,” Johanne explained quickly. “Just beeped. And then—”
“Jesus,” he mumbled. “Great time to send a text. Poor boy. Guess he can’t sleep either. Seems a bit pathetic, to tell the truth.”
“Who?”
“Trond Arnesen. Forget it. Nothing important.”
He got out of bed and pulled on his boxer shorts.
“It’s good that you’ve finally agreed to let Ragnhild sleep in her own bed. Otherwise we’d all be going around like zombies. As if we don’t already.”
“Don’t be angry. Where are you going?”
“Water,” he grumbled and pointed. “Have to get a towel.”
“Just leave it. It’s only water.”
He hesitated for a moment. Then he shrugged his shoulders and crept back under the duvet. He turned down the light and held out an arm toward Johanne. She snuggled up to him.
“What are you frightened of?” he asked again. “Ragnhild’s just fine.”
“It’s not that. It’s these cases—”
“I knew it,” he sighed and made himself more comfortable.
The light still hurt his eyes.
“Should never have gotten you involved in this mess. I’m an idiot. Can I turn off the light?”
“Mmm. I just don’t think you’ve got much time.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said.”
“We all know that time is our worst enemy,” he said and gave a long yawn. “But then again, as we haven’t even found one hot lead, it’s better to be painstaking. Turn over stone after stone.”
“But what if—”
He suddenly pulled himself away and sat up.
“It’s nearly three in the morning,” he groaned. “I want to sleep! Can’t we leave this until the morning?”
“What if the murderer was only out to get one of the victims?” she said slowly. “If, for example, it was Fiona he wanted to get, and then Victoria was killed to camouflage his real motive.”
“Hello,” Adam exclaimed and filled his cheeks with air. “We’re living in Norway. Camouflage killings! Have you ever even heard about that sort of thing?”
“Yes, lots of times.”
“But not here!”
His hands hit the duvet with a dull thud.
“Not in the tiny kingdom of Norway, where people generally kill each other with knives in drunken brawls! And in any case, one more murder is a pretty pathetic camouflage, I must say! But now we have to go to sleep!”
“Shhh,” she whispered.
“I will talk as loud as I like.”
“I agree that one killing is a poor camouflage. But that’s why you don’t have much time.”
He stood up abruptly. The floorboards creaked under his weight. The water spilled even more, and he swore under his breath. The glass rolled slowly under the bed. He pulled off the duvet and walked toward the door.
“You seem to get by on remarkably little sleep,” he snapped. She could have sworn that his voice trembled, as if he was holding back tears. “But I can’t. If you’re frightened . . .”
His shoulders sank. He struggled with the bedclothes. Then he took a deep breath and continued, “You can wake me, of course. But then you have to be really frightened. Absolutely terrified. Since Kristiane is at her father’s, I’m going to sleep in her bed. Good night.”
The door slammed, and Ragnhild started to cry.
“No,” she heard a groan from the hall. “Dear God, noooooo!”
Vegard Krogh had never liked the woods that he had to go through to get to his mother’s house. When he was little, he never dared to take the path unless it was broad daylight, and then preferably with someone else. There was a story that a ghost lived there. Supposedly the place had once been a graveyard. It had been leveled in the eighteenth century, with no respect for the dead. The poltergeists were taking their revenge—that was what the children in the neighborhood said—and would hound anyone who dared to go into the woods after dark.
Total crap, of course, and Vegard Krogh couldn’t be bothered to walk all the way around. It was late in the evening on Thursday, February 19. The snow that had fallen over the past couple of days still lay on the bare branches and covered the ground in a thin blanket between the trees, and thankfully gave off some light. He could at least see his feet in front of him.
He was carrying two desirable designer bags. His mother had lent him fifteen thousand krone without any hesitation and without the usual complaints that he was grown up now and a married man, so he had to figure out his own finances. Quite the opposite—she had handed him the money with a twinkle in her eye. In return, he had promised to spend a couple of evenings with her. Which was easy enough, with good food on the table and free wine in his glass.
Fifteen thousand didn’t go far. But he was happy. When he was writing his daily blog entry, he was tempted to say something about the invitation. But he didn’t. Discretion, he thought to himself, and stuck to giving an account of his shopping trip. It was an ironic epistle about shops where there were only five garments and two assistants who seemed so bored with life that they might at any moment put guns to their heads.
The most important readers would perhaps understand why he, who normally only wore jeans and hooded sweatshirts, had suddenly spent a fortune at Kamikaze and Ferner Jacobsen, the shops where he had eventually found something that he believed was both casual and sharp.
He had released three of the essays from Bungee Jump on his Web site. He hadn’t asked the publishers about it. They didn’t make any effort to get the material distributed anyway, so what did it matter? He’d release another two tomorrow morning. People had devoured them. It was only a couple of hours before the first discussions started. The piece about established popular culture, in particular, had generated debate. He used the milk carton as a metaphor for the welfare state’s excessive mass production. They tasted of nothing, were of no benefit to anyone, were to be found everywhere in easily recognizable branded packaging, and were politically correctly recycled ad nauseam. The essay was called “Skimmed Culture,” and once he added a link on Dagbladet’s literature pages, things really took off.
Vegard Krogh walked with a light step. His new boots fit him like a glove. The solid soles meant that it was no problem to walk on the muddy path.
Maybe he should do a bit more to get a freelance contract with NRK television. Big Studio was not exactly his thing. Too fluffy, obviously, and far too superficial. But the show was fast and at times could be quite hard-hitting and urban, and Anne Lindmo was a babe.
He would push harder for the job.
Soon he would be out of the woods. He just needed to go around the corner, over the crest of the hill where he had once built a tree house in an old oak tree, and then he would be at his old childhood home by the edge of the woods. His mother had promised to make him food, even if he was late.
Someone was walking behind him. Fear constricted his throat; he recognized the terror he had felt as a boy, when he ran through the woods, out of breath, with ghosts at his heels.
He turned around slowly. He noticed he was gripping his bags even harder, as if the worst thing that could happen to him was to be robbed of his new clothes.
He realized now that the person wasn’t behind him. The person emerged from the woods, from between the trees, where there was no path, leaving a necklace of black, uneven footsteps in the new snow. It was difficult to see anything other than the outline of the body. Vegard Krogh was nearly blinded by the beam from a powerful flashlight.
Unusual outfit, he noticed.
A white coverall.
It rustled quietly.
His fear receded somewhat.
“God damn it,” Vegard Krogh said, holding up his arm to shield his eyes from the bright light. “You’ll scare people sneaking around like that.”
The flashlight was lowered and turned; now it lit up the other person’s face—from below, like the big boys had done when they tried to frighten the younger kids on those dusky summer nights, when they dared each other to make a terrifying dash over the living dead.
“You?” Vegard Krogh said in surprise and irritation; he squinted and looked at the face more closely. “You? Is this . . . ?”
He leaned forward, furious now.
“What are you . . . you’ve got a damned . . .”
He didn’t die when the four-pound flashlight hit him with great force on the temple. He simply collapsed and sank to his knees.
The flashlight struck him again, this time on the back of the head, with a cracking, fleshy sound that would possibly have fascinated him had he been able to hear. But Vegard Krogh was deaf to it. He died before his body hit the freezing, muddy ground.