The Final Murder (3 page)

much else about Fiona Helle was old-fashioned. Her eyes were defiant, her full lips smiled confidently at the lens. She was wearing heavy eye make-up, but somehow managed to avoid looking

vulgar. In fact, there was actually something quite captivating about the picture, an obvious glamour that contrasted sharply with the down-to-earth, family-friendly programme profile she had so successfully built up.

‘What do you have to admit?’ asked Adam.

‘That…’

‘That you think this case is bloody interesting too,’ smirked Adam, banging around with the cups. ‘I’m just going to get a pair of trousers.’

Fiona Helle’s background was no less fascinating than the portrait.

She graduated in History of Art, Johanne noted as she read.

Married Bernt Helle, a plumber, when she was only twenty-two; they took over her grandparents’ house in L0renskog and lived there without children for thirteen years. The arrival of little Fiorella in 1998 had obviously not put any brakes on either her ambition or her career. Quite the opposite in fact. Having gained cult status as a presenter for the arty Cool Culture on NRK2, she was then snapped up by the entertainment department. After a couple of seasons on a late-night chat show on Thursdays, she finally made it. At least, that was the expression she used herself, in the numerous interviews she had given over the past three years. On the Move with Fiona was one of national TV’s greatest successes since the sixties, when there was little else for people to do other than gather round their TV screens to watch the one channel and share the experience of what a Saturday night was in Norway.

‘You liked those programmes! A grown man sitting there

crying!’

Johanne smiled at Adam, who had come back wearing a bright

red fleece, grey tracksuit bottoms and orange woollen socks.

‘I did not cry,’ Adam protested, pouring the coffee into the cups. ‘I was touched, though, I admit that. But cry? Never!’

He moved a stool in closer to her.

‘It was that episode about the war baby whose father was a

German soldier,’ he remembered quietly. ‘You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by her story. Having been persecuted and bullied throughout her childhood, she goes to the US

and gets a job cleaning floors in the World Trade Center when it was first built. Then she took her first and only day off sick on the eleventh of September. And she had always remembered the little Norwegian boy next door who …’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Johanne, wetting her lips with the steaming hot coffee. ‘Shhh!’

She froze.

‘It’s Ragnhild,’ she said tersely.

‘It’s not,’ he started, trying to catch her before she ran into the bedroom.

Too late. She rushed across the floor without a sound and disappeared.

Only her anxiety remained. A bitterness gripped his

stomach and made him pour more milk in his coffee.

His story was worse than hers. But to compare was not only

mean, it was impossible. Pain cannot be measured and loss cannot be weighed. All the same, he couldn’t help it. When they first met one dramatic spring, nearly four years ago now, he had found himself getting irritated a little too often by Johanne’s sorrow at

Kristiane’s strangeness.

She had a child, after all. A child that was alive and had a voracious appetite for life. Different from most, but in her own way

Kristiane was a lovely and very alert young child.

‘I know,’ Johanne said suddenly. She had come round the corner from the hall without him noticing. ‘You’ve had to deal with more than me. Your child is dead. I should be grateful. And I am.’

A quiver in his lower lip, barely visible in the dim light, made her stop. His hand covered his eyes.

‘Was Ragnhild OK?’ Adam asked.

She nodded.

‘I just get so frightened,’ she whispered. ‘When she’s asleep, I’m scared that she’ll die. When she’s awake, I think she’s going to die. Or that something will happen.’

‘Johanne,’ he said, helplessly, and patted the chair beside him.

‘Come here and sit down.’

She sank down beside him. His hand rubbed her back, up and

down, just a bit too roughly.

‘Everything’s fine,’ he said.

‘You’re angry,’ she whispered.

‘No.’

‘You are.’

His hand stopped, and he squeezed her gently on the neck.

‘No, I said. But now …’

‘Can’t I just be …’

‘D’you know what?’ he interrupted with forced jolliness. ‘Let’s just agree that the children are fine. Neither of us can sleep. So now we can take an hour or so to look at this …’ He tapped Fiona Helle’s face with his stubby fingers. ‘And then we can see

whether it’s possible to sleep. OK?’

‘You’re so good,’ she said and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. ‘And this case is worse than you fear.’

‘Right.’

He finished his coffee and pushed the cup out of the way

before spreading the papers over the large counter. The photograph lay between them. He ran his finger over Fiona Helle’s

nose, circled her mouth and paused a moment before picking up the picture and looking at it closely.

‘What exactly do you think we’re worried about?’

‘No clues whatsoever” she said lightly. ‘I skimmed through all the papers.’

She was looking for a document without finding it.

‘To begin with,’ she sniffed, ‘the footprints in the snow are as good as useless. OK, there were three prints on the driveway that probably belong to the killer, but the combination of the temperature, wind and snow makes their value limited. The only

thing that is certain is that whoever did it had socks on over their shoes.’

‘Ever since the Orderud case, every bloody petty thief has used that trick,’ he grumbled.

‘Watch your language.’

‘They’re asleep.’

‘The shoe size is between forty-one and forty-five, in other words the same as around ninety per cent of the male population.’

‘And a small share of the female population,’ he smiled.

Johanne tucked her feet in under the bar stool.

‘In any case, using shoes that are too big for you is another well known trick. And it’s not possible to gauge the killer’s weight from the footprints. He was simply very lucky with the weather.’

‘Or she.’

‘Could be a she. But to be honest, you’d need to use quite a lot of force to overpower Fiona Helle. A fit lady in her prime.’

They looked at the picture again. The woman looked good for

her age. Her forty-two years were apparent around the eyes, there were visible wrinkles around her mouth, and her lipstick had bled.

But there was still something vibrant about her face, the direct look in her eyes, the firm skin on her neck and cheeks.

‘Her tongue was cut out while she was still alive,’ Adam said.

‘The theory so far is that she lost consciousness through strangulation and then her tongue was cut out. The bleeding was so

heavy that she can’t have been dead. Maybe the killer chose his method with care, or maybe …’

‘It’s almost impossible to say,’ Johanne said and frowned.

‘Strangled her until she lost consciousness rather than died, I mean. He must have thought she was dead.’

‘Well, at least we know that the cause of death was strangulation.

He must have finished her off with his hands. After he’d cut out the tongue.’

Adam shuddered and added: ‘Have you seen these?’

He fished out a manila envelope and looked at it for moment

before obviously changing his mind and leaving it unopened.

‘Just a peek,’ Johanne said. ‘Normally pictures of the scene of the crime don’t bother me. But now, since Ragnhild was born, I …’ Tears welled up in her eyes and she hid her face in her hands. ‘I cry for no reason,’ she said in a loud voice, nearly shouting, before pulling herself together and whispering:

‘Pictures like that really don’t bother me. Normally. I’ve

seen …’

She dried her eyes with abrupt, harsh movements and forced a smile.

‘The husband,’ she said, ‘he’s got a watertight alibi.’

‘No alibi is watertight,’ answered Adam.

Again, he put his hand on her back. The warmth spread

through the thin silk.

‘That’s true,’ Johanne said. ‘But as good as. He was at his

mother’s with Fiorella. Had to sleep in the same room as his daughter, because his sister and her husband were also staying the night. And on top of that, his sister had a tummy bug and was up all night. And another thing

She brushed her hand under her right eye once more. Adam

smiled and ran his thumb under her nose and then dried it on his trouser leg.

‘And another thing, there’s nothing to indicate anything other than the ordinary marital problems,’ she finished. ‘No relationship problems and certainly no financial problems. They’re fairly equal on that score. He earns more than her, she owns a bigger share of the house. His firm seems to be sound.’

She took his free hand. The skin was coarse and his nails were short. Their thumbs met and moved in circles.

‘And what’s more, eight days have passed,’ she continued,

‘without you finding anything. All you’ve done is rule out a couple of obvious suspects.’

‘It’s a start,’ he said lamely, and pulled back his hand.

‘A very weak one.’

‘What are your thoughts then?’

‘I’ve got lots.’

‘About what?’

‘The tongue,’ she replied and got up to get more coffee.

A car snailed its way down the street. The slow throb of the engine made the glass in the corner cabinet rattle. The beam of light danced about on the ceiling, a moving cloud of light in the big, dark room.

‘The tongue,’ he repeated, despondently, as if she had

reminded him of an unpleasant fact that he would rather forget.

‘Yes, the tongue. The method. Hate. It was deliberate. The

vase …’ Johanne signalled quote marks with her fingers. ‘It was made beforehand. There was no red paper in the house. I

saw in your papers that it takes about eight minutes to make something like that. And that’s when you know what you’re

doing.’

For the first time, she seemed to be really fired up. She opened a cupboard and took two sugar cubes from a silver bowl. The

spoon scratched on the ceramic of the mug as she stirred.

‘Coffee when we can’t sleep,’ she mumbled. ‘Smart move.’

She looked up. ‘Cutting someone’s tongue out is such a loaded symbol, so aggressive and horrific that it’s hard to imagine that it’s motivated by anything other than hate. A pretty intense hate.’

‘And Fiona Helle was loved by all,’ came Adam’s dry retort. ‘I think you’ve stirred the sugar enough now, dear.’

She licked the spoon and sat down again.

‘The problem is, Adam, that it’s impossible to know who hated her. As long as her family, her friends, acquaintances, colleagues … everyone around her seemed to like the woman, you’ll

have to look out there for the murderer.’

She pointed out of the window. One of the neighbours had

turned a light on in the bathroom.

‘I don’t mean them, specifically,’ she smiled. ‘I mean the general public’

‘Dear God,’ groaned Adam.

‘Fiona Helle was one of the most high-profile TV stars in the country. I doubt there’s many people who don’t have an opinion about what she did, and therefore also about who they thought she was, right or wrong.’

‘Over four million suspects, you mean.’

‘Yep.’

She took a sip of coffee before putting down her mug.

‘You can forget everyone under fifteen or over seventy, and the million or so who really adored her.’

‘And that leaves how many, d’you reckon?’

‘No idea. A couple of million, maybe?’

‘A couple of million suspects …’

‘Who possibly have never even spoken to her,’ she added.

‘There doesn’t need to be any direct link between Fiona and the man who killed her.’

‘Or woman.’

‘Or woman,’ she agreed. ‘Good luck. And, looking at the tongue … Shhh!’

A feeble cry could be heard from the freshly decorated children’s room. Adam got up before Johanne had time to react.

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‘She just wants food,’ he said and made her sit down. ‘I’ll get her. Go and sit down on the sofa.’

She tried to pull herself together. The fear was physical, like an adrenalin shot. Her pulse rose, her cheeks flushed hot. When she lifted her hand and studied her palm, she saw the light from the ceiling reflected in the sweat in her lifeline. She dried her hands on her dressing gown and sat down heavily on the sofa.

‘Is my little munchkin hungry?’ she heard Adam murmuring

into the baby’s hair. ‘You’ll get some food from Mummy. There, there …’

The half-open eyes and eager mouth made Johanne cry again,

with relief.

‘I think I’ve gone mad,’ she whispered and adjusted her breast.

‘Not mad,’ said Adam, ‘just a bit tense and frightened, that’s all.’

‘The tongue,’ mumbled Johanne.

‘We don’t need to talk about that now. Relax.’

‘The fact that it was split.’

‘Shhhh.’

‘Liar,’ she sniffed and looked up.

‘Liar?’

‘Not you, silly’

She whispered to the child before she met his eye again.

‘The split tongue. Can really only mean one thing. That someone thought that Fiona Helle was a liar.’

‘Well, we all tell a lie now and then,’ Adam said, and gently stroked the soft baby’s head with his finger. ‘Look, you can see the pulse in her fontanelle!’

‘Someone believed that Fiona Helle was lying,’ Johanne

repeated. ‘That her lying was so blatant and brutal that she deserved to die.’

Ragnhild let go of the nipple. Something that could easily be mistaken for a smile flitted across her face and Adam knelt down and put his cheek against her damp cheek. The blister on her upper lip from sucking was pink and full of fluid. Her tiny eyelashes were nearly black.

‘It must have been some lie, in that case,’ Adam mumbled. ‘A bigger lie than I could ever make up.’