The Final Murder (45 page)

thinner, studied the name but didn’t open it. A moment later she put it back and locked the cupboard.

Vegard Krogh deserved to die. She could hardly bear the

thought of him. Now he was gone.

Wencke Bencke went out into the sitting room. It was tidier

now. Some flowers had been standing for a few days too many and were giving off a potent smell; she had been given them by the committee of the Students’ Association for taking part in a debate on chemical castration.

She opened the balcony door. The cold air caressed her face; it felt like it was wiping away all the wrinkles she had just been examining in the mirror.

For some reason, she couldn’t quite come to terms with having sacrificed that whore in Stockholm. One prostitute more or less on Brunkebergstorg was, of course, neither here nor there. But there had been a kind of bond between them. Maybe it was the physical likeness. It hadn’t taken long to find her; whores come in most colours and shapes. The woman was large, despite her obviously poor diet. Her hair was curly and dry. Even her glasses, which were so exclusive that they must have been stolen, were like hers.

And the woman fell for it.

She hadn’t run away with the credit card. She could have spent as much as she liked before the card was blocked, then disappeared.

But she had believed the promise that she would get lots

of cash in return for doing what she was asked: to eat a good meal.

Take a taxi. Buy something in a kiosk or two and be back at the hotel just before midnight. Be seen, but not say a word.

When they met again the next morning, the prostitute was

almost happy. She was clean. She had eaten well. Had a good

night’s sleep in a warm bed, with no customers.

Of course she didn’t get the money.

As expected she threatened to go to the police; she was smart enough to realize there was something suspicious about the offer she’d been made. As expected, she didn’t do anything before

injecting the heroin that Wencke Bencke had given her, a gesture of good will in return for her work well done.

As expected, she died of an overdose.

Now she was dead, cremated and no doubt laid to rest in an

unmarked grave.

Wencke Bencke stood on the balcony and frowned at the

thought of the dead whore. Then she lifted her face to the sky and decided never to give her another thought.

A light rain started to fall. It smelt of spring in Oslo, exhaust fumes and rotting rubbish.

Havard Stefansen’s death was simply a necessity. Johanne Vik had disappointed her; she didn’t understand the pattern. She had to make it clearer, and Wencke Bencke finally stepped into the spotlight.

And she stayed there.

People recognized her on the street now. They smiled at her

and some people asked for her autograph. One of the tabloids had run a three-page profile of the crime expert and international bestselling writer in its Saturday magazine: Wencke Bencke, photographed at her computer in her chaotic study, in front of a large,

beautifully set dining table with a raised glass, on her balcony with a view over the town, smiling at the photographer. She’d had help from a stylist with the make-up.

She hadn’t let them into the bedroom.

She went back into the sitting room. The smell of the flowers was nauseating. She took the vase out into the kitchen. Emptied out the water and put the flowers in a plastic bag.

The book would soon be finished.

At the bottom of her cupboard, where it wouldn’t be found

until she died, lay the most important file. On the cover, in big, regular capital letters, she had written:

ALIBIS.

For seventeen years, she had studied and researched. A good

alibi was a prerequisite for a successful crime, the very foundations of a good thriller. She created and constructed, considered

and discarded. The file grew slowly. Before she went to France, she had counted. Thirty-four documents. Thirty-four plausible alibis. She had already used some of them, others lay waiting for a new book, a more suitable story. None of them were perfect, because there was no such thing as a perfect alibi.

But her constructions were very, very good.

Three of them could never be used in a book.

They had been put to better use.

As they were not perfect, they kept her alive and on her toes.

Every morning she felt that thrilling fear. When the doorbell rang, when the phone went, when a stranger stopped on the other side of the street, looked twice and then crossed the road towards her, she felt the fear; she was reminded of how valuable life had become.

On the way out to throw the flowers down the rubbish chute,

she stopped and hesitated. The book she had taken from Vibeke Heinerback’s bedroom was in the shoe cupboard in the hall. She had looked at it only last night. Felt the pages, felt the excitement of touching the paper that the young politician had taken to bed with her read on the bus; maybe she had even sneaked a few

pages during boring plenary sessions and the endless waiting around in the Storting.

It was Rudolf Fjord’s copy.

She wanted to throw it away. She snatched it up and dropped it down the chute with the flowers. She stood there listening to the sound of the heavy book banging on metal, duller and duller until it ended in a muffled, nearly inaudible thump.

Someone might find it. Someone might wonder what a book

belonging to Rudolf Fjord was doing in the rubbish room of the flats where Wencke Bencke lived and wrote. She hadn’t destroyed it, hadn’t torn out the page with the owner’s name on it. She could have burnt the book or thrown it away somewhere else.

But there wouldn’t be any excitement in that.

Wencke Bencke lived on a continuous high. She had thrown

herself off the highest cliff.

‘Three weeks,’ Sigmund Berli said. ‘Our three weeks are up.’

‘Yes,’ Adam Stubo replied. ‘And we’ve got nothing. Nothing at all.’

On the desk in front of him there were two piles of printouts.

One contained statements for Wencke Bencke’s three accounts

from the period 1 January to 2 March, when Havard Stefansen was murdered. The other was an itemized log from Telenor.

‘When Vibeke Heinerback was killed,’ Adam said, ‘Wencke

Bencke was in Stockholm. Just as she’s said in several of these …’

He kicked a pile of newspapers and magazines on the floor.

‘.. . Bloody interviews. About how shocked she was when she

read about the murder, how … She’s so damned cunning.’

For three weeks, Sigmund and Adam had worked alone. They

had got their court order for compulsory disclosure, on the basis of a creatively modified and in part false petition. And since then, they had worked day and night, looked at Wencke Bencke’s every move under a magnifying glass, only going home to change and get a few hours of unsettled sleep before returning to the

painstaking work of reconstructing the woman’s life by studying her money withdrawals, phone calls and where she had surfed the Internet.

Wencke Bencke was well off, but used surprisingly little

money. She had renewed her wardrobe just before coming home, but even around Christmas her spending was absurdly low. She seldom rang anyone and was hardly ever contacted by anyone

other than her various publishers in Europe. She hadn’t spoken to her father since before Christmas.

She told the papers that she’d had a meeting with her publishers in Stockholm, a quick trip to plan the autumn’s book launch

and a tour. Sigmund rang and pretended to be a journalist; he fished for confirmation of the meeting. He was disturbingly unaffected by the growing number of lies that they had to tell. Adam,

on the other hand, was deeply affected. Not only were they pushing the limits of what was permissible, they were doing the

opposite of everything he had learnt and stood for in his years with the police.

Wencke Bencke had become an obsession.

They had used a week trying to work out the different ways in which she could have got from Stockholm to Oslo on the 6th of February. They had juggled with possible times, studied maps and combed the passenger lists that Sigmund had managed to extract from the various carriers, using charm, threats and lies. At night they tramped around in the corridors, sticking yellow Post-it notes on the walls, with times on. Tried moving them closer together.

Tried to find holes and weak points, a tiny opening in the solid wall of impossible times in Wencke Bencke’s bank statements.

‘Just can’t get it to work,’ Sigmund had concluded at around four o’clock every morning. ‘I just can’t get it to work.’

She had checked in at the hotel at three in the afternoon.

Bought something in a kiosk at seventeen minutes past five. She took a taxi just before seven in the evening. At twenty-five to twelve, roughly the time that Vibeke Heinerback was murdered in her home in L0renskog, Wencke Bencke had paid a substantial amount for a meal at a restaurant near the Dramaten theatre in the centre of Stockholm.

One morning, after working for sixteen hours with no results, Sigmund got on a plane to Stockholm, in a rage. He came back that afternoon defeated; the night porter was absolutely certain that he had seen Wencke Bencke returning to the hotel at around midnight on the night in question. He had nodded at the picture Sigmund showed him. No, they hadn’t spoken, but he seemed to remember that the woman in room 237 had taken some ice from

the machine in reception. It had something wrong with it, so he had to mop up the water on the floor after she’d gone. She had also dropped some clothes into the laundry that afternoon, and when he left them outside her door first thing next morning, he heard loud music coming from the room.

She had checked out at around ten o’clock.

The only thing that was odd about Wencke Bencke’s trip to

Stockholm was that she splashed out on herself, which was very unusual.

Otherwise, everything was just as it should be. Adam and

Sigmund had given their all and got nothing in return. The deadline had passed.

‘What do we do now?’ Sigmund asked quietly.

‘Yes, what do we …’

Adam played with the statements. When Vegard Krogh was

killed, Wencke Bencke was apparently in France. Two days earlier, she’d withdrawn a substantial amount from her account and

then didn’t touch it for four days. The next transaction was in a fishmonger’s in the old town in Nice.

Sigmund and Adam had been encouraged by this unaccounted

for period and used several days to investigate. Theoretically it was possible for her to have got to and from Norway using the cash. But her name did not appear on any of the passenger lists, nor was it registered with any of the car rental firms in Nice.

It was harder to get hold of the lists from Stockholm. She could easily have stolen a car. After three weeks’ intensive work in the office, the only thing the two investigators knew was what they had been convinced of to begin with: Wencke Bencke had been in Oslo when the murders happened.

But they didn’t know how she’d managed it.

They could carry on looking, investigating further.

That’s what they should do. That’s what they both wanted to

do.

But to do that, it would have to be official.

Their deadline was already past and their colleagues had begun to make fun of them. They grinned when Adam and Sigmund

came to lunch, pale and drawn. They sat by themselves and ate in silence.

When Havard Stefansen was killed, Wencke Bencke had been

sitting at her computer working, one floor below. She had given her witness statement and a very detailed statement at that.

Hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual, she was so engrossed in her work. She had been on the Internet for several hours, trying to find out more about South American spiders. It was only when she went to take her suitcases up into the loft, after her prolonged stay abroad, that she noticed the open door, stuck her head into the hallway and discovered the body. Then she rang the police. The story was consistent with the log from Telenor. It could hardly be called an alibi, but it didn’t give them anything to go on either.

And Wencke Bencke blossomed. She was everywhere, and

there was great anticipation about her new novel in the autumn.

Adam stood up abruptly. He gathered all the papers and

stacked them together as one great document.

‘We’ve lost,’ he declared, and threw the pile into a box for shredding.

He stroked his hand over his head and added: ‘Wencke Bencke

has won. The only thing that we have after all these weeks of hard work is proof that

He laughed, quietly and reluctantly; he didn’t want to finish the sentence.

‘… That the woman is innocent,’ Sigmund concluded slowly.

‘We’ve worked day and night for three weeks without proving

anything other than that… the woman’s innocent. We have proved Wencke Bencke’s innocence!’

‘That is precisely what we have done,’ Adam said, and gave a long yawn. ‘And that’s exactly what she intended. She knew this would happen. And you…’

He came round the desk. For a moment he stood looking hard

at Sigmund, who had lost weight. His face was still round. His chin was still chubby, but his clothes were too loose. The lines around his nose were clearer and deeper than before. His eyes were bloodshot and he smelt of stale sweat when Adam gave him his hand, pulling him out of the chair.

‘You are my best friend,’ he said and gave him a hug. ‘You are truly my Sancho Panza.’

Thursday 4 June 2004

Summer was just around the corner.

April and May had been and gone and the weather had been

unusually warm and sunny. The leaves on the trees and flowers had sprung early this year, making spring hell on earth for people with allergies. The crown princes in Denmark and Spain had

both married. Preparations were under way in Portugal for the European Cup and the Athenians were working against the clock to get ready for the Olympic Games in August. The world had