The Final Murder (2 page)

For the first time since Sigmund Berli arrived at the scene of the crime, the uniformed policeman at the door turned towards them. He looked like a teenager, with an open face and spots. He ran his tongue over his lips, again and again, while his Adam’s apple jumped up and down above his tight collar.

‘Can I go now?’ he whimpered. ‘Can I go?’

‘Throneowning,’ the young girl said and smiled.

The half-dressed man drew the razor slowly down his throat

before rinsing it and turning round. The child was sitting on the floor, pulling her hair through the holes in an old swimming cap.

‘You can’t go like that, love,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s take it off.

We can find the hat you got for Christmas, instead. You want to look beautiful when you meet your sister for the first time, don’t you?’

‘Throneowning,’ Kristiane repeated and pulled the swimming

cap on even further. ‘Hairgrowing. Throne hair.’

‘Do you mean heir to the throne?’ asked Adam Stubo, rinsing

off what was left of the shaving foam on his face. ‘That’s someone who’s going to be a king or queen in the future.’

‘My sister’s going to be a queen,’ Kristiane replied. ‘You’re the biggest man in the world, really’

‘You think so?’

He lifted the girl up and held her on his hip. Her eyes roamed uncertainly, as if eye contact and touch at the same time would be too much. She was nearly ten and small for her age.

‘Heir to the throne,’ Kristiane said to the ceiling.

‘That’s right. We’re not the only ones who had a little girl today.

So did …’

‘Princess Mette-Marit is so pretty,’ the child interrupted and clapped her hands. ‘She is on TV. We had cheese on toast for breakfast.

Leonard’s mummy said a princess had been born. My sister!’

‘Yes,’ Adam said, and put her down again before carefully trying to remove the swimming cap without pulling her hair too much.

‘Our baby is a beautiful princess. But she’s not heir to the throne.

What do you think she should be called?’

The cap came off eventually. Her long hair clung to the inside, but Kristiane didn’t seem to feel any pain as he loosened the rubber from her head.

‘Abendgebet,’ she said.

‘That means evening prayers,’ he explained. ‘That’s not her

name. The girl in the picture above your bed, I mean. It’s German for what the girl is doing …’

‘Abendgebet,’ Kristiane said.

‘Let’s see what Mummy says,’ Adam said, and pulled on his

trousers and shirt. ‘Go and find the rest of your clothes. We have to get a move on.’

‘Move on,’ Kristiane repeated, and went out into the hall. ‘Hoof on. Cows and horses and small pussy cats. Jack! King of America!

Do you want to visit the baby too?’

A big mongrel with yellowy-brown fur and a tongue hanging

out of his smiling mouth came tearing out of the girl’s bedroom.

He whined eagerly and scampered in circles round the girl.

‘Jack will have to stay at home,’ Adam told her. ‘Now, where’s your hat?’

‘Jack’s coming with us,’ Kristiane said cheerfully and tied a red scarf round the dog’s neck. ‘The heir to the throne is his sister too.

Leonard’s mummy says we’ve got equality in Norway, so girls can do what they want. And you’re not my daddy. Isak’s my daddy. So there.’

‘All very true,’ Adam laughed. ‘But I love you lots. And now we have to go. Jack has to stay at home. Dogs aren’t allowed in hospitals.’

‘Hospitals

are for sick people,’ Kristiane said as he put on her

coat. ‘The baby’s not sick. Mummy’s not sick. But they’re still in hospital. Spot the pill.’

‘You’re a little rationalist, you are.’

He kissed her and pulled her hat down over her ears. Suddenly she looked him straight in the eye. He stiffened, as he always did in these rare moments of openness, unexpected glimpses into a mind that no one could fully grasp.

‘An heir to the throne has been born,’ she quoted ceremoniously from the morning’s announcements on TV, before taking a

breath and continuing: ‘A great event for the nation, but most of all, for the parents. And we are delighted that it is a bonny princess this time.’

A muffled ringing interrupted from the coat rack.

‘Mobile telephone,’ she said mechanically. ‘Dam-di-rum-ram.’

Adam Stubo stood up and frantically felt all the pockets in the chaos of jackets and coats until he finally found what he was looking for.

‘Hallo,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Stubo here.’

Kristiane calmly started to take off her outdoor clothes again.

First the hat, then the coat.

‘Hold on a moment,’ Adam said into the phone. ‘Kristiane!

Don’t… Wait a moment.’

The girl had already taken off most of her clothes and was

standing in her pink pants and vest. She pulled her tights down over her head.

‘No way,’ Adam Stubo said. ‘I’ve got fourteen days’ paternity

leave. I’ve been awake for over twenty-four hours, Sigmund.

Jesus, my daughter was born less than five hours ago and now Kristiane arranged the legs of her tights like two long plaits down her front.

‘Pippi Longstocking,’ she said, pleased with herself. ‘Diddle, diddle, tra la la la la.’

‘No,’ Adam said so brusquely that Kristiane got a fright and started to cry. ‘I’ve got time off. We’ve just had a child. I…’

Her crying morphed into a long howl. Adam never got used to

this slight child’s howling.

‘Kristiane,’ he said in desperation. ‘I’m not angry with you. I was talking to… Hallo? I can’t. No matter how spectacular the whole thing is, I can’t leave my family right now. Goodbye. And good luck.’

He snapped the phone shut and sat down on the floor. They

should have been at the hospital a long time ago.

‘Kristiane,’ he said again. ‘My little Pippi. Can you show me Mr Nelson?’

He knew better than to hug her. Instead, he started whistling.

Jack lay down on his lap and fell asleep. A damp patch grew on his trousers under the dog’s open, snoring mouth. Adam whistled and hummed and sang all the children’s songs he could think of. The girl stopped crying after forty minutes. Without looking at him, Kristiane pulled the tights off her head and slowly started to get dressed.

‘Time to visit the heir to the throne,’ she said flatly.

The mobile phone had rung seven times.

He hesitated before turning it off, without listening to the messages.

A

week had passed and the police were obviously no further forwards.

It didn’t surprise her.

‘Internet reports are useless,’ the woman with the laptop said to herself.

As she hadn’t bothered to subscribe to a local server, it was also extortionate to surf the net. She got stressed when she thought of all that money being eaten up while she waited for a connection on the slow, analogue line to Norway. She could, of course, go to Chez Net. They charged five euros for fifteen minutes and had broadband. But unfortunately the place was full of drunk

Australians and braying Brits, even now in winter. So she didn’t bother, not now anyway.

There was remarkably little fuss in the first days after the murder. The little princess had the full attention of the media circus. The world truly wanted to be deceived.

But then it started to get more coverage.

The woman with the laptop simply could not stand Fiona

Helle. It was an unbearably politically correct response, but there wasn’t much to be done about that. She read phrases like ‘loved by the people’ in the papers. Which was fair enough, given that the programme had been watched by well over a million viewers every Saturday, for five series in a row. She had only seen a couple of shows, just before she came away. But that was more than

enough to realize that for once she agreed with the cultural snobs’

usual, unbearably arrogant, condemnation of popular entertainment.

In fact, it was just one such vitriolic criticism in Aftenposten, written by a professor of sociology, that made her sit down in front of the television one Saturday evening and waste one and a half hours watching On the Move with Fiona.

But it hadn’t been a total waste of time. It was ages since she had felt so provoked. The participants were either idiots or deeply unhappy. But they could hardly be blamed for being either. Fiona Helle, on the other hand, was successful, calculating, and far from true to her love of the common people. She waltzed into the

studio dressed in creations that had been bought worlds away from H&M. She smiled shamelessly at the camera, while the poor creatures revealed their pathetic dreams, false hopes and, not least, extremely limited intelligence. Prime time.

The woman, who now got up from the desk by the window and

walked around the unfamiliar sitting room without knowing quite what she wanted, did not normally join in public debate. But after watching one episode of On the Move with Fiona she had been

tempted. Halfway through writing a letter from an ‘outraged

reader’, she’d stopped and laughed at herself before deleting it.

She had been in a good mood for the rest of the evening. As she couldn’t sleep, she allowed herself to indulge in a couple of TV3’s terrible late-night films and had even learnt something from them, if she remembered rightly.

At least feeling angry was a form of emotion.

Readers’ letters in newspapers were not her chosen form of

expression.

Tomorrow she would go into Nice and see if she could find

some Norwegian papers.

Two

It was night in the duplex villa in Tasen. Three sad street lights stood on the small stretch of road behind the picket fence at the bottom of the garden, the bulbs long since broken by excited children with snowballs in their mitts. It seemed that the

neighbourhood was taking the request to save electricity seriously.

The sky was clear and dark. To the northeast, over Grefsenasen, Johanne could make out a constellation she thought she recognized.

It made her feel that she was totally alone in the world.

‘You standing here again?’ asked Adam with resignation.

He stood in the doorway, sleepily scratching his groin. His boxer shorts were stretched tight over his thighs. His naked shoulders were so broad that he almost touched both sides of the doorway.

‘How much longer is this going to carry on, love?’

‘Don’t know. Go back to bed.’

Johanne turned back to the window. The transition from living in a block of flats to a house in this neighbourhood had been harder than she’d expected. She was used to complaining water pipes, babies’ cries that travelled through the walls, quarrelling teenagers and the drone of late-night programmes from downstairs, where the woman on the ground floor who was nearly

stone-deaf often fell asleep in front of the telly. In a flat you could make coffee at midnight. Listen to the radio. Have a conversation, for that matter. Here, she barely dared open the fridge. The smell of Adam’s nocturnal leaks lingered in the bathroom in the morning, as she had forbidden him to disturb the neighbours below by

flushing before seven.

‘Why do you creep around so?’ he said. ‘Can’t you at least sit down?’

‘Don’t talk so loud,’ Johanne whispered.

‘Give me a break. It’s not that loud. And you’re used to having neighbours, Johanne!’

‘Yes, lots. But they’re more anonymous. You’re so close here.

It’s just them and us, so it’s more … I don’t know.’

‘But we get on so well with Gitta and Samuel! Not to mention little Leonard! If it wasn’t for him, Kristiane would hardly have any.

“I mean, look at these!’

johanne stuck out a foot and laughed quietly.

‘I’ve never had slippers before in my life. Hardly dare to get out of bed without putting them on now!’

‘They’re sweet. Remind me of little toadstools.’

‘They’re supposed to look like toadstools, that’s why! Couldn’t you have got her to choose something else? Rabbits, bears? Or even better, completely normal brown slippers?’

The parquet creaked with every step he took towards her. She pulled a face before turning back to the window again.

it’s not exactly easy to get Kristiane to change her mind,’ he said- ‘Please stop being so anxious. Nothing is going to happen.’

That’s what Isak said when Kristiane was a baby too.’

That was different. Kristiane …’

‘No one knows what’s wrong with her. So no one can know if

there’s anything wrong with Ragnhild.’

“Oh, so we’re agreed on Ragnhild, then?’

‘Yes,’ Johanne said.

Adam put his arms round her.

‘Ragnhild is a perfectly healthy eight-day-old baby,’ he whispered.

‘She wakes up three times a night for milk and then goes

straight back to sleep. Just like she should. Do you want some coffee?’

‘OK, but be quiet.’

He was about to say something. He opened his mouth, but

then imperceptibly shook his head instead, picked up a sweater from the floor and pulled it on as he went out to the kitchen.

‘Come and sit down in here,’ he called. ‘If you absolutely must stay awake all night, let’s at least do something useful.’

Johanne pulled up a bar stool to the island in the middle of the kitchen and tightened her dressing gown. She absent-mindedly picked through a thick file that shouldn’t be lying in the kitchen.

‘Sigmund doesn’t give up, does he?’ she said and rubbed her

eyes behind her glasses.

‘No, but he’s right. It’s a fascinating case.’

He turned round so quickly that the water in the coffee jug

spilt.

‘I was only at work for an hour,’ he said defensively. ‘From the time I left here until I got back was only

‘OK, OK, don’t worry. That’s fine. I understand that you have to go in every now and then. I have to admit…’

On the top of the pile was a photograph, a flattering portrait of a soon-to-be murder victim. The shoulder-length hair with a

middle parting made her narrow face look even thinner. Not