The Final Murder (4 page)

Ragnhild burped and then fell asleep.

She would never have chosen this place herself.

The others, notorious cheapskates, had suddenly decided to

treat themselves to three weeks on the Riviera. What you were supposed to do in the Riviera in December was a mystery to her, but she said yes all the same. At least it would be a change.

Her father had become unbearable since her mother died.

Whining and complaining and clinging to her all the time. He smelt like an old man, a combination of dirty clothes and poor bladder control. His fingers, which scraped her back when he gave the most unwanted goodbye hugs, were now disgustingly thin.

Obligation forced her to visit him once month or so. The flat in Sandaker had never been palatial, but now that her father was living on his own it had really gone downhill. She had finally managed, after many letters, furious phone calls and a lot of bother, to get him a home help, but it didn’t help much. The underside of the toilet seat was still splattered with shit. The food in the fridge was still well past its sell-by date and you couldn’t open the door without gagging. It was unbelievable that the local council could offer an old, loyal taxpayer nothing more than an unreliable girl who had could scarcely turn on a washing machine.

The idea of Christmas without her father tempted her, even

though she was sceptical about travelling. Especially as the children were going too. It irritated her beyond reason that children today seemed to be allergic to any form of healthy food. ‘Don’t like, don’t like,’ they kept on whingeing. A mantra before every meal. Not surprising they were skinny when they were little and then ballooned out when they hit their amorphous puberty, ravaged by modern eating disorders. The youngest, a girl of three or four, still had some charm. But the woman with the laptop was not particularly fond of her siblings.

But the house was big and the room they thought she should

have was impressive. They had shown her the brochures with

great enthusiasm. She suspected they were relying on her to pay more than her fair share of the rent. They knew that she had money, even though they had absolutely no idea how much.

Truth be told, she had chosen not to keep in touch with most of her acquaintances. They scurried around in their small lives, making mountains out of molehills, problems that in no way

would interest anyone but themselves. The red figures in her social accounts, which she had eventually decided it was necessary to draw up, screamed out at her. Sometimes, when she

thought about it, she realized that she had really only met a handful of people of any merit.

They wanted her to come with them and she could not face

another Christmas with her father.

So she was standing at Gardemoen airport, with her tickets in her hand, when her mobile phone rang. The little one, the girl, had suddenly been admitted to hospital.

She was furious. Of course her friends couldn’t leave their little girl, but did they have to wait until three quarters of an hour before the flight was due to depart to tell her? After all, the child had fallen ill four hours earlier. But she still had a choice.

She went.

The others would still have to pay their share of the rent, she made that absolutely clear to them on the phone. She had actually found herself looking forward to spending three weeks with the people who she had, after all, known since she was a child.

After nineteen days down there, the landlord had offered to let her stay until March. He hadn’t managed to find any tenants for the winter and didn’t like the house to stand empty. Of course, it helped that the woman had tidied and cleaned just before he

came. He probably also noticed that only one of the beds had been used, as he prowled from room to room, pretending to look at the electrics.

It was as easy to write on her laptop here as at home. And she had free accommodation.

The Riviera was overrated.

Villefranche was a sham town for tourists. In her opinion, any reality that might have been there had disappeared a long time ago-even the several-hundred-year-old castle by the sea looked as if it had been built from cardboard and plastic. When French taxi drivers can speak half-decent English, there has to be something seriously wrong with the place.

It annoyed her immensely that the police had got nowhere.

But then, it was a difficult case. And the Norwegian police had never been anything to boast about, provincial, weaponless

eunuchs that they were.

She, on the other hand, was an expert.

The nights had closed in.

Seventeen days had passed since Fiona Helle was murdered

and it was now the 6th of February.

Adam Stubo sat in his office in the dreariest part of Oslo’s east end, staring at the grains of sand running through an hourglass.

The beautifully shaped object was unusually large. The stand was handmade. Adam had always thought it was made of oak, good old Norwegian woodwork that had darkened and aged over hundreds

of years. But a visiting French criminologist, who had been there just before Christmas, had studied the antique with some interest.

Mahogany, he declared, and shook his head when Adam told him that the instrument had been in his seafaring family for fourteen generations.

‘This,’ the Frenchman said, in perfect English, ‘this little curiosity was made some time between 1880 and 1900. I doubt it has even been on board a ship. Many of them were made as ornaments for well-to-do people’s homes.’

Then he shrugged his shoulders.

‘But by all means,’ he added, ‘a pretty little thing.’

Adam chose to believe in the family story rather than some

wayward passing Frenchman. The hourglass had stood on his

grandparents’ mantelpiece, out of reach of anyone under twenty one. A treasured object that his father would turn over for his son every now and then, so he could watch the shiny grains of silver grey sand in the beautiful, hand-blown glass as they ran through a hole that his grandmother claimed was smaller than a strand of hair.

The files that were piled up along the walls and on the desk on both sides of the hourglass told another, more tangible story. The story of Fiona Helle’s murder had a grotesque start, but nothing that resembled an end. The hundreds of witness statements, the endless technical analyses, special reports, photographs and tactical observations seemed to point in all directions but led nowhere.

Adam could not remember another case like it, where they had absolutely nothing to go on.

He was getting on for fifty. He had worked in the police force since he was twenty-two. He had trudged the streets on the beat, hauled in down-and-outs and drunk drivers as a constable; he considered joining the dog unit out of sheer curiosity, had been

extremely unhappy behind a desk in 0KOKRIM, the economic

and environmental crime unit, and then finally ended up in the Criminal Investigation Service, by chance. It felt like a couple of lifetimes ago. Naturally, he couldn’t remember all his cases. He had given up trying to keep a mental record a long time ago. The murders were too numerous, the rapes too callous. The figures were meaningless after a while. But one thing was certain and irrefutable: sometimes everything went wrong. That’s just the way it was, and Adam Stubo didn’t waste time dwelling on his defeats.

This was different.

This time he hadn’t seen the victim. For once he hadn’t been involved from the start. He had limped into the case, disoriented and behind. But in a way that made him more alert. He thought differently from the others and noticed it most clearly in meetings, gatherings of increasing collective frustration, where he generally kept shtum.

The others got bogged down in clues that weren’t really there.

With care and precision, they tried to piece together a puzzle that would never be solved, simply because the police only found clear blue skies wherever they looked for dark, murky shadows. They had found a total of twenty-four fingerprints in Fiona Helle’s house, but there was nothing to indicate that any had been left by the murderer. An unexplained cigarette stub by the front door didn’t lead anywhere; according to the latest analyses it was at least several weeks old. They might as well cross out the footprints in the snow with a thick red pen, as they couldn’t be linked to any other information about the killer. The blood at the scene of the crime gave no more clues either. The saliva traces on the table, hair on the carpet and greasy, faint red lip marks on the wine glass told a very ordinary story of a woman sitting at her desk in peace and quiet, going through her weekly post.

‘A phantom killer,’ Sigmund Berli grinned from the doorway.

‘Buggered if I’m not starting to believe the grumblings of the Romerike guys, that it’s suicide.’

‘Impressive,’ Adam smiled back. ‘First she half strangles herself, then she cuts out her tongue, before sitting down nicely to

die from blood loss. But before she dies, she musters up enough energy to wrap the tongue up in a beautiful red paper package. If nothing else, it’s original. How’s it all going, by the way? Working with them, I mean?’

‘The guys from Romerike are nice enough. Big district, you

know. Of course they like to throw their weight around a bit. But they seem to be pretty happy that we’re involved in the case.’

Sigmund Berli sat down on the spare chair and pulled it closer to the desk.

‘Snorre’s been selected for a big ice-hockey tournament for tenyear-olds this weekend,’ he said and nodded meaningfully. ‘Only

eight and he’s being selected for the top team with the tenyear olds!’

‘I didn’t think they ranked teams for such young age groups.’

‘That’s just some rubbish the sports confederation has come up with. Can’t think like that, can you? The boy lives for ice-hockey, twenty-four seven - he slept with his skates on the other night. If they don’t learn the importance of competitions now, they’ll just get left behind.’

‘Fair enough. He’s your child. I don’t think I’d …’

‘Where are we going?’ Sigmund interrupted, casting his eye

over all the files and piles of documents. ‘Where the hell are we going with this case?’

Adam didn’t answer. Instead he picked up the hourglass and

turned it round again.

‘Adam, stop it. Are the sleepless nights getting to you, or what?’

‘No. Ragnhild’s lovely.

‘Where are we going, Adam?’

Sigmund’s voice was insistent now, and he leant towards his

colleague and continued: ‘There isn’t a single fucking clue. Not technical at least. Nor tactical, as far as I can tell. I went through all the statements yesterday, then again today. Fiona Helle was well liked. By most people. Nice lady, they say. A character. Lots of people reckon it was her complexity that made her so interesting.

Well read and interested in marginal cultural expression. But also liked cartoons and loved Lord of the Rings’

‘People who are as successful as Fiona Helle always have…’

Adam tried to find the right word.

‘Enemies,’ Sigmund suggested.

‘No. Not necessarily. But people who aren’t friends. There’s always someone who feels overshadowed by people like that.

Outshone. And Fiona Helle shone brighter than most. But I still find it hard to believe that some NRK employee with ambitions to present a Saturday night show, who might feel that they’ve been wronged, would go to such drastic lengths as to…’

He nodded at the board, where a poster-sized picture of a bare breasted, open-legged Fiona Helle screamed at them.

‘I think the answer is possibly somewhere in here,’ Adam

said, pulling out a pile of letters which had been carefully placed in a red folder. ‘I picked out twenty letters. At random, basically.

To get an impression of what kind of people wrote to Fiona

Helle.’

Sigmund furrowed his brow in response and picked up the

letter that lay on top.

‘Dear Fiona” he read out loud. ‘
am a 22-year-old girl from Hemnesberget. Three years ago I found out my dad was a salor from Venezuela. My mum says he was a shit who just left never got in touch again …’p>

Sigmund scratched his ear. ‘She can’t bloody write,’ he muttered before continuing to read:

‘ When he found out I was dew. But there is a lady here at the Coop says Juan Maria was a nice man and it was my mum who wanted

Sigmund inspected his fingertip. A small dirty-yellow lump

seemed to fascinate him. He paused for several seconds before wiping it off on his trousers.

‘Are they all as hopeless as this?’ he asked.

‘I wouldn’t say it was hopeless,’ Adam said. ‘After all, she’s shown some initiative. Just because she can’t spell and has bad grammar doesn’t mean that she can’t do her own detective work.

She actually knows where her father lives. The letter is a plea for On the Move with Fiona to take her quest one step further. The girl is terrified of being rejected and thinks there’s a greater chance that her father will accept her if it’s all on TV

‘Jesus,’ exclaimed Sigmund and picked up another letter.

‘That one is of a completely different calibre,’ Adam said while his colleague glanced down the page. ‘An eloquent dentist who’s approaching retirement. He was just a boy during the war and lived on the east side of Oslo. In 1945, he was sent to the country as a weedy, anaemic orphan to be fattened up. There he met

‘Fiona Helle was playing with fire,’ Sigmund interrupted, leafing through the other letters. ‘This is …’

‘People’s lives,’ Adam said lightly and shrugged his shoulders.

‘Every single letter that woman received - and believe me, it wasn’t just a couple - told stories of loss and grief. Despair. But she’s also been criticized for it. The usual debate in the end. On the one side, intellectual snobs who patronizingly argued against the exploitation of the ignorant masses. And on the other side, the People …’ He drew a capital P with his finger. ‘. .. Who thought that the snobs could just shut up and turn off the TV if they didn’t like what they saw’