Punishment (5 page)

She looked over at her daughter.

‘In any case . . . Her son had died. The case was hushed up by the police and prosecuting authorities. The woman was more or less dismissed as hysterical. But whatever happened, our friend Aksel Seier was released only a few weeks later. Discreetly. Nothing was written in the papers. Alvhild never heard any more about it.'

The mist was clearing; some low cloud drifted slowly over the treetops to the east. But now it had started to rain properly.
A soaking-wet English setter circled round Kristiane, barking and running to fetch the stones she threw with delighted screams.

‘But why is this Alvhild Sofienberg telling you?'

‘Hmm?'

‘Why is she telling you about this now? Thirty . . . thirty-five years later?'

‘Because something strange happened last year. The case has been bothering her for years. And now that she's a pensioner, she decided to study the case in detail again. She contacted the regional state archives and the National Archives to get hold of the documents. And they no longer exist.'

‘What?'

‘They've vanished. They are not in the National Archives. Not in the regional state archives. Oslo Police Force can't find them and nor can Romerike Police. More than a metre of case documents has simply disappeared.'

Kristiane had got up from her puddle. She pottered towards them, wet and filthy from head to toe.

‘I'm glad you are not getting in my car,' said Isak, and squatted down in front of her. ‘But I'll see you on the seventeenth of May, OK?'

‘Aren't you going to give Daddy a hug before we go?' asked Johanne.

Kristiane reluctantly allowed herself to be hugged; her eyes were miles away.

‘Do you think you'll manage, Isak?'

His eyes were firmly fixed on Kristiane.

‘Of course I will. I'm a wizard, don't you know. If Aksel Seier is still alive, I'll find out where he lives in less than a week. Guaranteed.'

‘There are no guarantees in life,' retorted Johanne. ‘But thank you for trying. If anyone was going to manage it, it would be you.'

‘Sure thing,' said Isak and slipped into his TT. ‘See you on Wednesday.'

*

She stared after him until the car disappeared over the brow of the hill down towards Kringsjå.

Isak would never be anything other than a big boy. She had just not realised it soon enough. Before, before Kristiane, she had envied him his quickness, his enthusiasm, his optimism; the childish belief that everything could be sorted. He had built an entire future on boundless self-confidence; Isak started a dot.com company before most people even knew what they were and had had the sense to sell it in time. Now he enjoyed playing around with a computer for a few hours every day, he sailed in regattas half the year and helped the Salvation Army to look for missing persons in his spare time.

Johanne had fallen in love with the way he embraced the world with laughter. The shrug of his shoulders when things got a bit complicated that made him so different and attractive to her.

And then along came Kristiane. The first years were swallowed up by three heart operations, sleepless nights and anxiety. When they finally woke up from their first night of uninterrupted sleep, it was too late. They limped on together for another year in some semblance of marriage. A two-week family stay at the National Centre for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in a futile attempt to find a diagnosis for Kristiane had resulted in them separating. If not exactly as friends, at least with a relatively intact mutual respect.

They never found a diagnosis. Kristiane wandered around in her own little world and the doctors shook their heads. Autistic, perhaps, they said, then frowned at the child's obvious ability to develop emotional attachments and her great need for physical contact. Does it matter? Isak asked. The child is
fine and the child is ours and I don't give a shit what's wrong with her. He didn't understand how much it mattered. To find a diagnosis. To make arrangements for her. To make it possible for Kristiane to achieve her full potential.

He was so bloody irresponsible.

The problem was that he never had accepted that he was the father of a mentally handicapped child.

*

Isak glanced back in the mirror. Johanne looked older now. Tired. She took everything so seriously. He desperately wanted to suggest that Kristiane could live with him all the time, not just every other week like now. He could see it every time: when he handed Kristiane back after a week, Johanne was in a good mood and rested. When he picked up his daughter the following Sunday, Johanne was grey, drawn and impatient. And it wasn't good for Kristiane. Nor was the perpetual round of specialists and self-appointed experts. Surely it wasn't that important to find out what was wrong with the child. The main thing was that her heart functioned properly, she ate well and was happy. His daughter was happy. Isak was sure of that.

Johanne had been grown up too long. Before, before Kristiane, it had been attractive. Sexy. Johanne's ambition. The way she always took everything so seriously. Her plans. Her efficiency. He had fallen head over heels for her mature determination, her admirable progress in her studies, her work at the university.

Then along came Kristiane.

He loved that child. She was his child. There was nothing wrong with Kristiane. She wasn't like other children, but she was herself. That was all she needed to be. All the specialists' opinions on what was actually wrong with the child were irrelevant. But not for Johanne. She always had to get to the bottom of everything.

She was so bloody responsible.

The problem was that she had never accepted that she was mother to a mentally handicapped child.

D
etective Inspector Adam Stubo looked like an American football player. He was stocky, obviously overweight, and not much more than average height. The extra kilos were evenly distributed over his shoulders, neck and thighs. His ribcage was bursting from his white shirt. There were two metal tubes in the pocket above his heart. Before she realised they were cigar cases, Johanne Vik thought that the man actually went around with ammunition in his pocket.

He had sent a car for her. It was the first time that anyone had sent a car for Johanne Vik. She was very uncomfortable about it and had asked him not to. She could take the metro. She could take a taxi. Certainly not, insisted Stubo. He sent a Volvo, anonymous and dark blue, with a young man behind the wheel.

‘You'd think this was the security service.' She smiled tightly as she shook Stubo's hand. ‘Dark-blue Volvos and silent drivers with sunglasses.'

His laughter was as powerful as the throat it came from. His teeth were white, even, with a glimpse of gold from a molar on the right-hand side.

‘Don't worry about Oscar. He has a lot to learn.'

A faint smell of cigars hung in the air. But there were no ashtrays. The desk was unusually big, with tidy folders on one side and a PC that was switched off on the other. A map of Norway hung on the wall behind Stubo's chair, along with an FBI poster and a picture of a brown horse. It had been taken
in summer in a field of wild flowers. The horse tossed its head as the shutter clicked, its mane standing like a halo round its head, eyes looking straight into the camera.

‘Beautiful horse,' she said, pointing at the photograph. ‘Yours?'

‘Sabra,' he said and smiled again; this man smiled all the time. ‘Beautiful animal. Thank you for agreeing to come. I saw you on TV.'

Johanne wondered how many people had said that to her in the last few days. Typically, Isak was the only one who hadn't said a word about the incredibly embarrassing episode. But then he never watched television. Johanne's mother, on the other hand, had phoned five times in the first half-hour after the show; the answer machine hurled her screeching voice at Johanne as soon as she was inside the door. Johanne didn't call her back. Which resulted in four more messages, each one more agitated than the last. At work the day after, they had patted her on the shoulder. Some had laughed, others had been extremely put out on her behalf. The woman at the checkout in her local supermarket had leaned over to her conspiratorially and whispered so that the whole shop could hear, ‘I saw you on the telly!'

Viewer figures for News 21 must have been pretty good.

‘You were great,' said Stubo.

‘Great? I barely said anything.'

‘What you said was important. The fact that you left said far more than any of the other . . . people of limited talent managed to utter. Did you read my mail?'

She gave a brief nod.

‘But I think you're barking up the wrong tree. I don't see how I can help you. I'm not exactly . . .'

‘I've read your thesis,' he interrupted. ‘Very interesting. In my profession . . .'

He looked straight at her and fell silent. His eyes had an
apologetic look, as if he was embarrassed about what he actually did.

‘We're not that good at keeping ourselves up to date. Not unless things are directly relevant to investigation. Things like this . . .'

He opened a drawer and pulled out a book. Johanne recognised the cover immediately, with her name in small letters against a bleached winter landscape.

‘I should imagine I'm the only one here who has read it. Shame. It's very relevant.'

‘To what?'

Again, a despondent, partly apologetic expression passed over his face.

‘The police profession. To anyone who wants to understand the essence of a crime.'

‘Essence of a crime? Are you sure you don't mean the criminal?'

‘Well noted, Professor. Well noted.'

‘I'm not a professor. I'm a university lecturer.'

‘Does that matter?'

‘Yes.'

‘Why?'

‘Why . . .'

‘Yes. Does it really matter what I call you? If I call you a professor it means nothing more than that I know you do research and teach at the university. Which is true, isn't it? That's exactly what you do, isn't it?'

‘Yes, but it's not right to call yourself . . .' ‘To make more of yourself than you are? To be a bit sloppy with formalities? Is that what you mean?'

Johanne blinked and took off her glasses. She slowly polished the left glass with the corner of her shirt. She was buying time. The man on the other side of the desk had been reduced to a grey fuzz, an indistinct figure without any distinguishing features.

‘Precision is my subject,' she heard the shapeless face continue. ‘In every detail. Good police work means placing one stone on top of another with millimetric precision. If I'm sloppy . . . If any of my men overlook a single hair, miss by a minute, take the smallest short cut because we believe we know something that strictly speaking we can't be sure of yet, then . . .'

Bang.

He clapped his hands together and Johanne put her glasses on again.

‘So we're not doing too well,' he added quietly. ‘And to be honest, I'm getting a bit sick of it.'

This was nothing to do with her. It was none of her business if a middle-aged detective from the NCIS was sick of his job. The man was obviously having an existential crisis and it had absolutely nothing to do with her.

‘Not of the job, per se,' he suddenly added, and offered her a sweet. ‘Not at all. Here, have one. Does it smell of cigar smoke in here? Should I open a window?'

She shook her head and smiled faintly.

‘No, it smells nice.'

He smiled back. He was good-looking. Good-looking in a nearly extreme way; his nose was too straight, too big. His eyes were too deep, too blue. His mouth was too sharp, too well formed. Adam Stubo was too old to have such a white smile.

‘You must be wondering why I wanted to talk to you?' he said cheerfully. ‘When you corrected me earlier . . . corrected essence of a crime to the essence of a criminal, you hit the nail on the head. That's what it's about.'

‘I don't understand . . .'

‘Just wait.'

He turned to the photograph of the horse.

‘Sabra here,' he said, clasping his hands behind his head, ‘is a good, old-fashioned riding horse. You can put a five-year-old
on her and she trots off with a careful step. But when I ride her . . . wow! I raced with her for years. Mostly for fun, of course, I was never particularly good. The point is . . .'

Suddenly he leaned towards her and she could smell a hint of sweets on his breath. Johanne was not entirely certain whether this sudden intimacy was comfortable or repulsive. She moved back.

‘I've heard people say that horses don't see colour,' he continued. ‘They may well be right. But no matter what they say, Sabra hates everything that is blue. And she doesn't like the rain, she loves wild mares, is allergic to cats and is far too easily distracted by cars with big engines.'

He hesitated a moment, tilted his head a touch before continuing.

‘The point is that I could always explain her results. Based on who she is. As . . . as a horse. If she pulled down a fence, I didn't need to do an in-depth analysis, like other people and more serious jockeys did. I knew . . .'

He looked up at the picture.

‘I could see it in her eyes. Her soul, if you like. In her character. Based on how I know she is.'

Johanne wanted to say something. She should make some comment or another.

‘That's not the way we work here,' he said before she could think of anything. ‘We go the other way.'

‘I've still no idea what it's got to do with me.'

Adam Stubo folded his hands again, this time as if in prayer, and then lowered them slowly on to the blotter.

‘Two abducted children and two devastated families. My people have already sent over forty different tests to the laboratories. We have several hundreds of photographs of crime scenes. We've gathered so many witness statements that you'd get a headache just hearing the number. Nearly sixty men are working on the case, or to be more precise, the cases.
And I'm afraid it's got me nowhere. I want to know more about the perpetrator. That's why I need you.'