The Final Murder (10 page)

He was never actually sued.

When he got the job working in the culture department of

TV2, everything looked set to improve. For a brief year he

achieved a sort of cult status among the angry young men who voiced their views about the state of the nation and what direction Norway should take. Vegard Krogh was one of them, even if he was a bit old, he was one of them. He had first become known as a stunt reporter for Young and Urban and was given his own irate ten-minute slot on Absolute Entertainment every Thursday.

Then after one too many legal suits, which never made it to the courtroom thanks to the jolly and apologetic executive director, he lost the slot. TV2 was not as open as Klassekampen to what they ignorantly called shit in an internal review. Vegard Krogh was actually glad, when he thought about it. TV2 was a totally commercial channel, just like the worst American ones.

Finally he dared to look down.

‘Can you see it?’ his friend shouted. ‘On the orange target?’

Vegard Krogh looked down. The wind had blown his anorak up

into a balloon, a great big bubble that made it difficult to see.

‘OK, let’s go,’ he spluttered.

‘We have to go further out on to the arm,’ his friend shouted and let go of him. ‘Can you do it?’

He finally managed to get to where he was supposed to be. He tried to relax. Ignore the cold. Forget the height. Fixed his eyes on the book down there, an almost invisible rectangle on a large orange target. Tears streamed down his face. He blamed the wind and tried to muster his own inner strength. The camera had been positioned to the left on a pile of foundation blocks. The photographer had pulled a hood over his head. Vegard Krogh raised his

arm as a signal. A bright light blinded him and it took him a few seconds to fix his eyes on the target.

The harness was properly fixed. His friend checked one last

time.

‘There,’ he said loudly. ‘You can jump.’

‘Are you sure the bungee rope will hold?’ Vegard Krogh

shouted back, even though he didn’t need to.

‘To the last gram,’ shouted his friend. ‘I weighed you three times before choosing the bungee rope, for God’s sake! And I measured this crane only yesterday! Jump! I’m fucking freezing!’

Vegard Krogh shot a glance at the photographer one last time.

His hood, with its wolfskin trim, covered half the camera. The lens was focused on the two of them up there. He could hear

sirens in the distance. They were getting closer.

Vegard Krogh took aim for the book. It was his latest collection of essays, an almost invisible speck on a round orange disc.

He jumped.

The fall was too slow.

He had time to think. He thought about the fact that he would soon be forty. He thought that his wife didn’t appear to be very fertile. They’d been trying to have children for three years now, without any results other than the monthly disappointment,

which they didn’t talk about any more. He thought about the fact that they still lived in a one-bedroom flat in Gr0nland and that they never managed to save anything more than a pittance.

When he was halfway through the fall, he stopped thinking.

It was happening too fast.

Far too fast, thought the photographer, his lens following the man’s descent towards the ground.

The book grew in front of Vegard’s eyes. He couldn’t blink,

couldn’t see anything other than the white cover that just kept growing. He stretched his arms down and out, he was plummeting towards the ground and at last thought: this is happening too fast.

The wind pulled off his hat and his fair hair, which was stuck to his sweaty forehead, brushed the orange target at the same

moment that Vegard Krogh realized it was over. With great care, as if he had all the time in the world, he picked up his book and pressed it to his heart; his forehead brushed the ground, his fringe kissed the wood of the target.

The bungee rope recoiled. The movement rippled through his

body, a powerful jolt from the soles of his feet, an oppressive pulse through his calves to his legs. It felt like his spine was being stretched by the tension.

He laughed.

He roared as he bounced up and down, from side to side. The

laughter caught in his throat when the police car turned into the building site and the photographer tried to pack away all his equipment as he ran towards the hole in the fence that protected the area.

Vegard Krogh had never felt so alive. As long as the film was OK, this would be perfect. The jump had been just as he had

wanted, just like the book, just like Vegard Krogh believed he had always been: daring, dangerous and provocative, bordering on what was permissible.

He didn’t die that Monday in the middle of February. On the

contrary, he felt immortal as he hung there, upside down below a bright-yellow crane, above an orange target, in the sharp blue light of the police car that howled towards him on the ground. Vegard Krogh swung between two bright colours that grey, windy afternoon, clutching the first copy of his new book:

Bungee Jump.

Vegard Krogh’s death was postponed by one week and three

days, but he didn’t know that himself, of course.

No matter how hard she tried, Johanne could not get herself to like Sigmund Berli. The man was disgusting. He openly picked his nose, he farted constantly without even apologizing, he

cleaned his ears and bit his nails in front of everyone. Right now he was sitting there tearing a dirty serviette to shreds without even thinking that the pieces would be caught on a draught and blown to the floor.

‘He’s a good lad,’ Adam usually said, exasperated by Johanne’s cool attitude. ‘Just doesn’t have many manners. Sigmund was the only one who actually spoke to me after Elisabeth and Trine died.’

She couldn’t argue with the last statement. The terrible death of his first wife and daughter had nearly finished him off. He was about to drop out of working life and disappear into a serious and destructive depression when Sigmund, with a mixture of sudden authority and touching care, had managed to pull him back to a form of normality, but which didn’t really take shape until he met Johanne two years later and started over again.

‘You can’t measure a bit of snot on someone’s trousers against true loyalty,’ Adam said. Consequently the man was now sitting on a bar stool in Johanne’s kitchen, having just enjoyed three helpings of Stange chicken and rocket salad.

‘You make great food,’ he said and smiled broadly.

He was looking at Adam.

‘Thank you,’ Johanne said.

‘I made the dressing,’ laughed Adam. ‘The dressing is the most important part. But you’re right. Johanne is the cook in this house. I’m just a gourmet. I take care of the details. Everything that makes an ordinary meal more …’

He laughed when she hit him with the kitchen towel.

‘Can’t take being teased,’ he said and pulled her to him. ‘But good at heart.’

He kissed her and didn’t want to let go.

‘That argument in the kitchen,’ Sigmund started, self-consciously folding the serviette before pushing it away from him, not

knowing what he should do with the torn remains. ‘It could’ve been about anything.’

‘Yes,’ Adam said, and let go of Johanne. ‘But I still think we should make a note that there might be something to it. Not only were Kari Mundal and Rudolf Fjord at loggerheads, but the

argument was so important that they also missed Kjell Mundal’s well-prepared speech. It’s not like Kari to miss an opportunity to praise and support her husband. And Rudolf Fjord was pretty

worked up.’

“Politics,’ Johanne said,’… is no Sunday school, as you know. If angry disagreements on the political sidelines were grounds for suspecting murder, you’d have your work cut out.’

‘Yes, but…’

Adam pulled another bar stool up to the island unit and made himself comfortable. With his legs apart and his arms leaning on the counter.

‘There was just something about the whole situation,’ he said quietly. ‘Something …’ Then he shook his head. ‘It has been noted,’ he said lightly. ‘But we’ll leave it at that. We’ve got plenty else to do. Certainly at the moment.’

‘At the moment we’ve got next to nothing,’ Sigmund sulked.

‘In either of the cases. Nada”

‘You’re exaggerating a bit,’ Adam said. ‘We have got some leads.’

‘Some,’ muttered Sigmund.

‘But nothing that fits together,’ Adam continued. ‘Nothing that leads anywhere. I agree with you there. We established almost straight away that there weren’t any links between the two

women, other than the obvious. And we’ve been over it a thousand times. The brutality of the murder. The sex of the victims.

The fact that they were both in the public eye. Where they lived.’

He gave a long yawn and continued:

‘But it’s doubtful that we’re looking for a killer who’s got something against L0renskog. Vibeke and Fiona didn’t know each

other, had no mutual friends or acquaintances other than what is normal in such a small country. They weren’t involved in any of the same work. They lived very different lives. One was single and loved parties and the other had a family and a young child. To me, it seems…’

‘.. . That we’re looking at two separate cases, all the same,’

Johanne said. She was holding the kettle under the tap. ‘But both murderers must have been strong. Vibeke was killed outside her house and lifted into the bedroom. Fiona was overpowered.’

‘Do you often talk like that?’ Sigmund asked.

‘Like what?’

‘Finishing off each other’s sentences. Like my sister’s twins.’

‘We are of course spiritual twins,’ said Johanne, and smiled when Sigmund didn’t pick up on the irony. ‘Think the same, feel the same. Coffee?’

‘Yes please. But if…’ He put his hand in front of his mouth and tried to muffle a deep burp.’… If this really is two cases, is it possible that the second killer, the one who killed Vibeke

Heinerback, wanted to make it look like the work of a serial killer?’

‘Hardly, when there’s only been two murders,’ Adam said.

‘That’s almost pathetic. But first we have to agree that it isn’t the work of one killer.’

‘But that’s obviously not possible,’ Johanne said. ‘Not yet. But I agree, even though there are many similarities, the character of the similarities is not such that… well, the murders don’t exactly look like a series.’

‘I wondered,’ Sigmund started, and then blushed like a boy

with his head full of sex.

He scratched his thigh and cocked his head awkwardly. At that moment Johanne thought he was sweet. She poured the boiling

water into the cafetiere, filled a jug with milk and put out a bowl of brown sugar.

‘I just wondered,’ Sigmund tried again. ‘About how the whole profiling …’

He couldn’t decide whether to use the Norwegian or English

pronunciation and pinched his nose between his thumb and forefinger.

‘Just

say it in Norwegian,’ Johanne said. ‘It sounds like some

sort of detective film when you say it in English. Don’t you think?’

He filled his cup with too much coffee and had to put his lips to the rim and sip the boiling-hot liquid first before he dared to lift it up.

‘Ow. Ow.’ He rubbed his upper lip and snuffled on: ‘We know

quite a bit ourselves. A lot, in fact. But as you’ve actually trained with the FBI and all that, with that top guy well, I thought—’

‘Milk?’ interrupted Adam, and filled up Sigmund’s cup with

cream without waiting for an answer. ‘Sugar? Here.’

‘Profiling can mean so much,’ said Johanne, and handed

Sigmund a cloth. ‘Any murder will generally involve elements that point to some of the killer’s characteristics. In that sense, profiling is used in all investigations. You just don’t use the term.’

As he aimlessly wiped the surface in front of him, the milky coffee going everywhere, Sigmund said: ‘You mean, when we find a man in his own filthy home with a knife in his groin and the guy who called the police is standing in the corner pissed and snivelling, then we make a profile? The kind of “killer who’s drunk and

argued with a close relative and the knife just happened to be there but he didn’t mean to kill him and is really sorry now and would have rung for help later” type profile?’

Johanne burst out laughing and wiped away the remains of the coffee with kitchen roll.

‘I couldn’t have put it better myself,’ she said. ‘And the profile you just gave is so usual and easily constructed that it takes no more than thirty seconds to establish that the drunk in the corner is guilty. But you and Adam don’t deal with many cases like that.

The NCIS deals with much worse cases.’

‘But Johanne,’ Sigmund said, eager now. ‘I assume that you

analyse each case by picking it to pieces

‘You analyse the modus operandi,” Johanne said helpfully. ‘Take it to pieces, as you put it, look at all the elements of the crime.

Then we make deductions based on the various factors and the overall impression. When we’re analysing, we give a lot of importance to the victim’s background and behaviour prior to the crime, both subjective and objective, as well as the actual killing. A massive amount of work. And …’ The steam from her cup clouded

her glasses. ‘… It would be hard to find a science that is more uncertain, more difficult or unreliable than profiling.’

‘What you’re describing is basically the same as tactical investigation,’

Sigmund said, with a cynical frown.

‘It’s very similar,’ Johanne nodded, and added: ‘The main

difference is that tactical investigation, much more than profiling, deals with … how should I put it… undisputed fact. Profilers are often psychologists. A tactical investigator’s purpose is to find the killer, whereas a profiler’s job is to build up a psychological picture of the killer. So in a way, profiling is just a tool in the tactical investigation.’

‘So

if you were going to say something about Fiona Helle’s

murder alone,’ said Sigmund, wrhose cheeks were flushed with excitement, ‘forget Vibeke Heinerback for the moment, what