The Final Murder (14 page)

It just happened, of its own accord.

Until now, she thought and drew breath.

Everyone was the same.

Time, which everyone was so keen on ‘filling’, was a meaningless concept, created to give false meaning to what was

meaningless: simply being alive.

The woman pulled her hat down over her head and slowly

climbed the steps that were squeezed in between the old stone houses. The narrow alleys were unusually dark. Maybe the storm had damaged the electricity supply.

By studying people’s behaviour, she had at some point understood that consideration, solidarity and goodness wTere no more

than empty expressions. Virtues of model behaviour, as given by God and set in stone, extolled by aged monks and in the prophecies of an Arab warrior, in the musings of philosophers and tales from the mouths of persecuted Jews.

Evil was true human nature, she thought.

Evil was not the work of the devil, or the result of original sin, nor was it a dialectical consequence of material need and injustice.

If a lioness abandoned a sick cub to a painful, loveless death, no one would say she was evil. The male alligator was not judged in zoological terms because he sired more children than he instinctively knew the environment could support.

She stopped in the alley by the insignificant door into StMichel’s church. She hesitated for a moment. She was breathing

heavily after climbing all the stairs. She gently put her hand on the door handle, but then pulled back and carried on. It was time to get home. It had started to rain again, a fine light rain that covered her skin in a moist film.

There was no point in stigmatizing natural behaviour, she

thought. That was why animals were free. Humans were likely to exterminate themselves if there was no culture, no order, bans or threats of corrective punishment, so it might possibly be expedient to brand anyone who deviated from the norm and followed

their true nature with the mark of Cain.

‘It’s still not evil,’ she whispered, and gasped for breath in the Place de la Paix.

The Pharmacie’s bright-green cross winked at the deserted,

closed cafe over the street. She stopped in front of the estate agents.

Her thighs ached, a dull pain, even though she had not climbed more than a couple of hundred steps. She could taste the sweat on her upper lip. A blister was stinging on her left heel. It was a long time since she’d known the pleasure of physical exercise. The dull pain gave her a sense of being alive. She lifted her face to the sky and felt the rain run down the inside of her collar, over her skin and down her shoulder: she felt her nipples harden.

Everything had changed. Life taken on a palpable, tangible

intensity that she had never experienced before.

At last, she was unique.

It was too big a job.

Johanne Vik wrinkled her nose at her tea. It had stewed for too long and was dark and bitter. She spat the yellowish brown liquid back into the cup.

‘Ugh,’ she muttered. She was glad she was 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, a full overview 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 Kristiane’s

homework, making food and trying to snatch a few moments’

peace on the sofa while feeding a baby. Even when her oldest daughter wasn’t at home, there was plenty to do.

But the nights were long.

They passed slowly, the hours that she spent poring over the copies of documents that Adam took home with him every afternoon, which was highly irregular. 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 post-mortem 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 Caesarean, Johanne had plenty of friends who had

described the problem to her in great detail.

Little Fiorella had left her mark.

OK.

She lay the document to one side and focused on the reconstruction report. It told her nothing that she didn’t know already.

She carried 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 was no contradiction, 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 rang earlier in the day and invited the whole family to lunch next Sunday. With Isak, of course.

It was nearly six years since their divorce. Although she often worried and was irritated by Isak’s leniency with regard to

Kristiane, with no set bedtimes, fast food and sweets 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 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 interference. Blood type A. A tumour 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 Caesarean.

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 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 by Isak, by 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, ambiguous 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 for his grandson, who was nearly six. The boy was asleep on his grandfather’s lap. The grandfather buried his nose in the 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 bloke, 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 leant over to the table to answer the phone.

‘Hallo,’ he said quietly, holding the telephone between his chin and shoulder as he reached for the remote control.

‘Hallo, 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 phoned.’

‘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 newsreader 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’m sitting a bit… Hang on a moment.’

‘I’ll be quick,’ she insisted. ‘You have to get me Fiona Helle’s journal, about Fiorella’s birth. From when her daughter was born.’

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Why exactly?’

‘I don’t like talking about this sort of thing on the phone,’

Johanne said with some hesitation. ‘As you’re staying at Bjarne and Randi’s, you either have to come home first thing tomorrow morning so we can talk, or …’

‘I won’t have time. I promised Amund I’d take him to nursery’

‘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. Clear as a bell 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 towards

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 OK?’

‘It’ll have to be. Thank you.’

‘Are you sure that 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.’

‘Rubbish.’

‘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 secondary?’

‘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 find 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 pyjamas 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.