What Never Happens (13 page)

“I wouldn’t have . . . Not the book. The watch perhaps, that might have been left somewhere else, but I—”

“Come on,” Adam said. “I’ll find out what’s happened. They’ve probably just been put somewhere else. Come on, let’s go.”

Trond Arnesen opened the drawer again. It was empty. Then he went over to the other side of the bed. But he didn’t find anything there either. He had a slightly crazed look in his eyes as he stormed into the bathroom. Adam stayed where he was. He heard the sound of drawers and cabinets being opened and shut, the banging of what could be the lid of the trash can.

Then the boy was there again, in the doorway, holding out his empty hands.

“I must’ve made a mistake,” he said in a hoarse voice.

His eyes were downcast as he followed Adam out of the bedroom.

“Victoria was always saying that, that I was an airhead.”

Evil is an illusion, she thought.

She was standing by the bronze bust of Jean Cocteau. In her opinion it looked slapdash, with the features running into each other as if a child had been playing with melted wax and suddenly decided to make a bust and dedicate it to someone. The sculpture stood on the edge of the quay, a short distance from the small chapel that Cocteau himself had decorated. You had to pay to get in, so she only caught a glimpse of the frescos. It was Christmas, and she had been overwhelmed by a nostalgic desire to visit a church. St. Michel, the church on the hill behind her, had been unbearable with all its Catholic kitsch and the monotonous mumblings of the priest. She had backed her way out.

But paying to meet a God she had never believed in was even worse. She had the urge to remind the fat old woman inside the chapel door of Christ’s rampage in the temple. The sour-faced old witch sat behind a table of simple but outrageously overpriced souvenirs and demanded an entrance fee of two euros. It was irritating that her French didn’t stretch to anything more than mild swearing under her breath.

It was late in the day on Friday, February 13. The spring tides that afternoon had caused considerable damage. The panorama windows of restaurants along the promenade had been broken by the high seas. Shivering young men in white shirts ran backwards and forwards with plywood that they nailed up without much skill, temporary protection against the wind and weather. Chairs had been smashed to kindling. A table was floating some distance from the quay. Most of the boats in the bay were loosely moored and had survived the storm, but four or five dinghies that had been moored by the jetty had fared worse, and now only driftwood and the remains of some rope could be seen in the turbulent, murky waters.

She leaned toward Jean Cocteau and once again thought to herself, “Evil is an illusion.”

The dark side of humanity was her bread and butter. She was never sloppy. To the contrary. She knew more about betrayal, malice, and spiritual bankruptcy than most.

She had once felt some pride in that.

To begin with, nineteen years ago, when she was still in her twenties and had newly discovered how easy it was for her to use this hidden and surprising talent, she had been excited by it. Enthusiastic. Even happy. At least, that is how she remembered it. She wasn’t even bitter about all the years of education she would never use, all the conscientious effort in college that had only helped to pass the time. It was all a waste. But that didn’t matter anymore, once she found her niche in life at the age of twenty-six.

The cliché made her smile.

One March evening in 1985, she sat with a copy of her bank statement in front of her, a beer in her hand, and tried to imagine what her niche was, her special place on the imaginary bookcase of life. This niche would make her special and valuable, completely unique. She had laughed at the well-worn metaphor and imagined everyone creeping around, searching for their niche on some vacant corner.

The sea was calmer now. The temperature was no more than a few degrees above freezing, and what little warmth there was was cut through by the gusts of wind that continued to blow from the south. The boys in shirts had managed to patch up the worst holes and obviously couldn’t be bothered to do any more. A young couple in dark clothes walked toward her. They giggled and whispered something she didn’t understand as they passed. She turned around and followed them with her eyes as they slipped on the wet cobbles and then disappeared into the dark.

They looked Norwegian. He had a backpack on.

Fortunately, the last photograph of her had been taken twelve years ago. Almost exactly. She was slimmer then. Much slimmer, and she had long hair. The picture, which she sometimes looked at by mistake, looked like someone else. That was what she had to think. She wore glasses now. Long hair didn’t look good on her anymore. When she looked in the mirror, she saw that life had shown no mercy in leaving its mark on what was once a very ordinary face. Her nose, which was as small back then as it was now, looked like a button. Her eyes had never been big, but they were brown and therefore not like everyone else’s. They were now almost entirely hidden by her glasses and bangs that were far too long.

The idea that anyone was unique was an illusion.

People were so damned alike.

She didn’t know when the truth had dawned on her. She figured it must have been a gradual realization. She became impatient with the repetitiveness of her work without really knowing what she wanted to change. Of course, every plan was special, every crime had its own value. The circumstances varied, the victims were never the same. She put in tremendous effort. She was never sloppy in her work. But she still couldn’t think of it as anything other than an enervating, endless repetition.

She could no longer make time pass.

It just happened, of its own accord.

“Until now,” she thought and drew breath.

Everyone was the same.

Time, which everyone was so keen on “filling,” was a meaningless concept, created to give false meaning to what was meaningless: simply being alive.

The woman pulled her hat down over her head and slowly climbed the steps that were squeezed in between the old stone houses. The narrow alleys were unusually dark. Maybe the storm had knocked out the electricity.

By studying people’s behavior, she had at some point understood that consideration, solidarity, and goodness were no more than empty expressions. Virtues of model behavior, as given by God and set in stone, extolled by aged monks and in the prophecies of an Arab warrior, in the musings of philosophers and tales from the mouths of persecuted Jews.

Evil was the true human nature, she thought.

Evil was not the work of the devil or the result of original sin, nor was it a dialectical consequence of material need and injustice. If a lioness abandoned a sick cub to a painful, loveless death, no one would say she was evil. The male alligator was not judged in zoological terms because he sired more children than he instinctively knew the environment could support.

She stopped in the alley by the insignificant door into St. Michel’s church. She hesitated for a moment. She was breathing heavily after climbing all the stairs. She gently put her hand on the door handle but then pulled back and kept going. It was time to get home. It had started to rain again, a fine, light rain that covered her skin in a moist film.

There was no point in stigmatizing natural behavior, she thought. That was why animals were free. Humans were likely to exterminate themselves if there was no culture, no order, bans, or threats of corrective punishment, so it might possibly be expedient to brand anyone who deviated from the norm and followed their true nature with the mark of Cain.

“It’s still not evil,” she whispered and gasped for breath in the Place de la Paix.

The pharmacy’s bright green cross winked at the deserted, closed café over the street. She stopped in front of a real estate office.

Her thighs ached, a dull pain, even though she had not climbed more than a couple hundred steps. She could taste the sweat on her upper lip. A blister was stinging on her left heel. It was a long time since she’d known the pleasure of physical exercise. The dull pain gave her a sense of being alive. She lifted her face to the sky and felt the rain run down the inside of her collar, over her skin and down her shoulder; she felt her nipples harden.

Everything had changed. Life had taken on a palpable, tangible intensity that she had never experienced before.

At last, she was unique.

Seven

I
t was too big a job.

Johanne Vik wrinkled her nose at her tea. It had steeped for too long and was dark and bitter. She spat the yellowish brown liquid back into the cup.

“Ugh,” she muttered. She felt glad to be alone as she put down the cup and opened the fridge.

She should have refused. The two murder cases were hard enough to crack for professional policemen working in a team, with access to modern technology, advanced data programs, progress reports, breaking news, and all the time in the world.

Johanne had none of that. She had bitten off more than she could chew. The children ruled her days. Sometimes she felt she moved on autopilot, from the washing machine to helping Kristiane with her homework, making food and trying to snatch a few moments’ peace on the sofa while feeding the baby. Even when Kristiane wasn’t at home, there was plenty to do.

But the nights were long.

They passed slowly, the hours she spent poring over the copies of documents that Adam took home with him every afternoon, which was highly irregular for him. It was as if the clock also felt it deserved a rest after a tiring day.

She grabbed a mineral water, opened it, and drank straight from the bottle.

“Perineal rupture,” she said to herself as she sat down at the table again and looked through the final postmortem report in the Fiona Helle case.

A rupture was some kind of tear or another.

“Periscope,” she mumbled, chewing her pencil. “Periphery. Peri . . .”

She slapped her forehead lightly. A good thing she hadn’t asked anyone. It was embarrassing for a grown woman not to know what it meant immediately. Even though both her children had been born by cesarean, Johanne had plenty of friends who had described the problem to her in great detail.

Little Fiorella had left her mark.

Okay.

She lay the document to one side and focused on the reconstruction report. It told her nothing that she didn’t know already. She kept on leafing through the papers impatiently. As the case had already generated several hundred, if not more than a thousand, documents, she obviously didn’t have access to them all.

Adam selected and prioritized. She read.

Without finding anything.

The papers contained nothing but endless repetitions, a round dance of the obvious. No secrets were uncovered. There were no contradictions, nothing surprising, nothing to spend more time on in the hope of seeing things from another angle.

Exasperated, she slapped the covers together.

She had to learn to say no more often.

Like when her mother called earlier in the day and invited the whole family to lunch next Sunday. With Isak, of course.

It had been nearly six years since their divorce. Although she often worried and was irritated by Isak’s lenience with regard to Kristiane, with no set bedtimes and fast food and candy on weekdays, it made her genuinely happy to see them together. Kristiane and Isak had the same physical build and were on the same wavelength, even though the girl suffered from an inexplicable handicap that had never been diagnosed. She found it harder to accept that her ex-husband still spent time with her parents. More time than she did, if she was honest.

That hurt, and she blamed him for her shame.

“Get a grip!”

Without knowing why, she pulled out the post-mortem report again.

Strangulation, it stated.

She already knew the cause of death.

The tongue was described in clinical terms.

Nothing new there.

Abrasions on both wrists. No sign of sexual trauma. Blood type A. A tumor in her mouth, on the left cheek, about the size of a pea and benign. Scars, in several places. All old. From an operation on the shoulder, the removal of four moles, and a cesarean. And a five-pointed, relatively big but almost invisible mark on her right upper arm. Probably a cut from way back. One earlobe was inflamed. The nail on her left index finger was blue and had been about to come off at the time of death.

The report, for all its precise details, still told her nothing. She was just left with the vague feeling that there was something important there, something that had caught her eye, the impression that something didn’t add up.

Her concentration was failing. She was annoyed with Isak, with her mother, by their friendship.

A waste of energy. Isak was Isak. Her mother was the same as she had always been: scared of conflict, hard to understand, and extremely loyal to those she cared for.

“Stop letting it bother you,” Johanne thought, exhausted, but couldn’t stop all the same.

“Focus,” she said out loud to herself. “You have to fo—”

There.

Her finger stopped at the bottom of the page.

It didn’t make sense.

She swallowed, then lifted her hand to go through the report, furiously looking for something that she had just read in passing. She noticed that her hand was shaking. Her pulse was racing, and she was breathing through her mouth.

There.

She was right. It couldn’t be right. She grabbed the phone and discovered that her hand was sweaty.

On the other side of Oslo, Adam Stubo was babysitting his grandson, who was nearly six. The boy was asleep on his grandfather’s lap. Adam buried his nose in the boy’s dark hair. The smell of baby soap was soft and warm. The boy should really be in bed. His father was an easygoing, flexible sort of guy, but he was adamant that the boy should sleep on his own. But Adam couldn’t resist his round, dark eyes. He had smuggled one of Ragnhild’s bottles from home. The look on Amund’s face when he realized that he was going to be allowed to sit on his grandfather’s knee with a bottle was priceless.