The Final Murder

The Final Murder

by

Anne Holt.

All over Oslo, celebrities are turning up dead in the most macabre of situations: a talk show host with her tongue cut out, a politician crucified with a copy of the Koran stuffed up her private parts, a literary critic stabbed in the eye. It’s clear that the killer seeks some sort of retribution, but for what?

Adam Stubo and Johanna Vik, recently new parents, are reluctantly drawn into the investigation. As Stubo leads the inquiry, Johanna is exhausted by the new baby. But she is haunted by a pattern she discovers from a time long ago when she was in the FBI, a time she has tried to forget … and time is running out to stop the killer from completing this chilling series of murders.

Anne Holt is one of Europe’s most popular and respected authors.

She has worked as a lawyer, a Minister of Justice, an assistant district attorney, a TV news anchor and a journalist. She lives in Norway.

Praise for Punishment.

‘A thoughtful, tense novel… This is the first of a new series. I look forward to the subsequent ones’

Observer

A genuinely puzzling and deeply unsettling thriller. Anne Holt is the latest crime writer to reveal how truly dark it gets in Scandinavia’

Val McDermid

Also by Anne Holt Punishment

Translated by Kari Dickson

sphere

First published in Norway in 2004 by Pirat

First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Sphere

This paperback edition published in 2008 by Sphere

Copyright Š Anne Holt 2004

Translation Š Kari Dickson 2007

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All characters and events in this publication,

other than those clearly in the public domain,

are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons,

living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed

on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-7515-3715-4

For people today, only one radical shock remains - and it is always the same: death.

Walter Benjamin, Central Park

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She no longer knew how many people she had killed. It didn’t really matter anyway. Quality was more important than quantity in most professions. And that was true of her business too,

although the pleasure she once gained from an innovative twist had dwindled over the years. More than once, she’d considered what else she might do. Life was full of opportunities for people like her, she thought to herself every now and then. Rubbish. She was too old, she felt tired. This was the only thing she could really do. And it was a lucrative business. Her hourly rate was sky-high now, naturally, but so it should be. It took a while to recover afterwards.

The only thing she really enjoyed was doing nothing. And

where she was now, there was nothing to do. But she still wasn’t happy.

Perhaps it was a good thing that the others hadn’t come, after all.

She wasn’t sure.

The wine was certainly overrated. It was expensive and left a sour taste in her mouth.

One

To the east of Oslo, where the hills flatten out down towards L0renskog, a station town by the Nita River, cars had frozen solid overnight. People on foot pulled their hats down over their ears and wrapped their scarves tighter round their necks as they trudged the few perishing kilometres to the bus stop on the main road. The houses in the small cul-de-sac fended off the frost with drawn curtains and snowdrifts that blocked the driveways. Huge icicles hung from the eaves of an old wooden villa at the end of the road down by the woods, disasters in waiting.

The house was white.

Inside the front door with its lead glass and moulded brass

handle, at the end of the unusually spacious hall, to the left in a study, dominated by minimalist art and lavish furniture, sitting behind an imposing desk between boxes of unopened letters, was a dead woman. Her head had fallen back and her hands rested on the arms of her chair. A track of dried blood ran from her lower lip, down her bared neck, split round her breasts and then joined again on her impressively flat stomach. Her nose was also bloody.

In the light from the ceiling lamp, it looked like an arrow pointing to the dark hole that had once been a mouth. Only a stump

remained of her tongue, which had obviously been carefully

removed. The cut was clean and sharp.

It was warm in the room, almost too hot.

Detective Inspector Sigmund Berli from the Norwegian

National Criminal Investigation Service, the NCIS, finally closed his mobile phone and looked over at a digital thermometer just inside the southeast-facing panorama window. Outside, it was nearly 22 degrees below freezing.

‘Amazing that the windows don’t break,’ he said, carefully tapping the windowpanes. ‘Forty-seven degrees difference between

inside and outside. Incredible.’

No one seemed to pay him any attention.

Under her silk dressing gown with its golden collar, the dead woman was naked. The belt lay on the floor. A youngish policeman from the Romerike Police took a step back when he saw the

yellow coil.

‘Shit,’ he gasped, then ran his fingers through his hair in embarrassment.

‘I thought it was a snake, like.’

The woman’s missing body part lay beautifully wrapped in paper on the blotter on the desk in front of her, only the tip protruding from the middle of all the red. A plump, exotic plant; pale flesh with even paler taste buds and purple red wine stains in the folds and cracks. A half-empty glass was balanced on a pile of papers near the edge of the desk. The bottle was nowhere to be seen.

The detective sergeant cleared his throat. ‘Can’t we at least cover her tits? It just seems mean that she has to …’

‘We’ll have to wait,’ Sigmund Berli replied as he put his mobile back into his breast pocket. ‘I’m going to keep trying.’

He went down on one knee to get a closer look at the dead

woman.

‘Adam would be interested in this,’ he muttered. ‘So would his wife, for that matter.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Do we know anything about the timing yet?’

Berli stifled a sneeze. The silence in the room made his ears ring. He got up and needlessly brushed dust from his trousers with stiff movements. A uniformed policeman was standing by

the door to the hall. He had his hands behind his back and was shifting his weight from one foot to the other as he stared out of the window, away from the body. Some Christmas lights still hung in one of the spruce trees. Here and there, you could see the bulbs glowing dimly under the branches and tightly packed snow, where it was dark.

‘Does nobody know anything here?’ Berli barked in irritation.

‘Don’t you even have a provisional time of death?’

‘Yesterday evening,’ the other man eventually replied. ‘But it’s too early…’

‘To say,’ Sigmund Berli finished his sentence. ‘Yesterday

evening. Pretty vague, in other words. Where’s…?’

‘They’re away every Tuesday. The family, that is. Husband and daughter, who’s six. If that’s what you

The sergeant smiled uncertainly.

‘Yes,’ Berli said and walked halfway round the desk.

‘The tongue,’ he started and peered at the package on the

desk. ‘Was it cut off while she was still alive?’

‘Don’t know,’ the sergeant answered. ‘I’ve got all the papers for you here. As we’ve finished examining everything and everyone’s back at the station, you might…’

‘Yes,’ Berli said, but the sergeant wasn’t sure what he was agreeing with. ‘Who discovered the body, if the family was away?’

‘The cleaner. A Filipino who comes every Wednesday morning

at six. He starts down here, he said, so he doesn’t wake anyone too early, and then works his way up. The bedrooms are upstairs, on the first floor.’

‘Yes,’ Berli repeated with no interest. ‘Away every Tuesday?’

‘That’s what she said,’ the sergeant answered. ‘In all the interviews and suchlike. She sends her husband and daughter away

every Tuesday. Then she goes through all her letters herself. It’s a matter of principle …’

‘Right,’ mumbled Berli cynically, and stuck a pen into one of the boxes of letters. ‘I can believe that. It’d be impossible for one person to go through all of this.’

He pointed at the dead woman again.

‘Sic transit gloria mundi,’ he said and peered into her mouth.

‘Her celebrity status isn’t much good to her now’

‘We’ve already gathered lots of clips and cuttings and everything is ready

‘Yeah, yeah.’

Berli waved him away. The silence was overwhelming. No people could be heard on the street, no clocks ticked, the computer was turned off. The red cyclops eye of a radio stared at him mutely from the glass cabinet by the door. There was a Canada goose on the mantelpiece, frozen in flight. Its feet were faded and it had hardly any

feathers left in its tail. The ice-cold daylight painted a colourless rectangle on the carpet under the south-facing window. Sigmund Berli

could hear his blood pounding in his ears. The uncomfortable feeling of being in a mausoleum made him run his finger down his nose.

He couldn’t decide whether he was irritated or at a loss. The woman still sat in the chair with her legs open, bare breasts and a tongueless gaping hole. It was as if the horrendous crime had robbed her not only of an important body part, but also of her humanity.

‘You lot always get pissed off if you’re called in too late,’ the sergeant said eventually, ‘so we just left everything as it was, even though we’re done with most things …’

‘We will never be done,’ Berli said. ‘But thank you. Smart

thinking. Especially with this lady. Does the press …?’

‘Not yet. We hauled in the Filipino and we’ll hold him for

questioning for as long as we can. We’ve been as careful as possible outside. Securing the evidence is important though, especially in snow like this and suchlike, so I’m sure the neighbours are wondering what’s going on. But no one can have tipped off the press yet. And in any case, they’re all too busy with the new princess right now’

A fleeting smile became serious.

‘But then again, obviously … Fiona from On the Move with Fiona murdered. In her own home and in this way, well…’

‘In this way,’ Berli nodded. ‘Strangled?’

‘The doctor thinks so. No stab wounds, no bullets. Marks on

her throat, you can see…’

‘Mmmm. But take a look at this!’

Berli studied the tongue on the desk. The paper was elaborately folded, like a low vase with an opening for the tip of the

tongue and elegant, symmetrical wings.

‘Almost looks like a petal,’ the younger policeman said and

wrinkled his nose. ‘With something horrible in the middle.

Quite

‘Striking,’ Berli muttered. ‘Whoever did it must have made this beforehand. I can’t imagine you’d kill someone like this and then take time out to do a bit of origami.’

‘I don’t think there’s any suspicion of sexual abuse.’

‘Origami,’ Sigmund Berli repeated. ‘The Japanese art of paper folding. But

‘What?’

Berli bent down even closer to the severed organ. The sergeant did the same. The two policemen stood like this for a while, forehead to forehead, breathing in time with each other.

‘It’s not just been cut off,’ Berli said finally and straightened his back. ‘The tongue has been split. Someone has split the end in two.’