What Never Happens (17 page)

“Here,” he said with determination and took the baby. “She’s full. Drink up so you don’t catch anything. Do you want a shot of something?”

“No thank you. It was so awful to see.”

“I agree. I had to talk to her just after the murder.”

Johanne lifted the cup to her mouth.

“Tell me about it,” Adam said, and sat down on the sofa facing her.

She pulled up her feet and tucked the cushions behind her back.

“Fiona has two children,” she said.

“Fiona, she’s . . . she’s got a daughter.”

“Yes, but she definitely gave birth to two children.”

Ragnhild burped. Adam put her over his shoulder and stroked her tiny back.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“Nor do I, in fact,” she retorted.

She reached out for the papers he had given her when she got home, soaking wet and grumpy. The bottom page was still damp and soft.

“In the medical records from Fiona’s pregnancy and birth, she is constantly referred to as a first-time mother. And I can assure you”—she dropped the papers back onto the table and made herself more comfortable—“a doctor or a midwife can easily identify whether a woman has had a child before or not. It’s routine. But nothing like that is written in the records. Fiorella was delivered by cesarean, and it was planned. As far as I can tell from Fiona’s records, she suffered from anxiety in connection with giving birth, which they obviously took seriously. A cesarean on a set date, for no reason other than the psychological.”

“Yes, but . . .”

Adam put Ragnhild down in the crib, which had been moved back into the living room. He was rocking it gently with his feet.

“I don’t understand.”

“Not so strange. Everyone thinks that Fiorella was Fiona’s first child. The doctors too, even though they must have known it wasn’t the case.”

“But you”—Adam’s brow was wrinkled with skepticism—“you know better than everyone else.”

“Not me, the pathologist.”

She went into the kitchen and came back with the teapot in one hand and the autopsy report in the other.

“Perineal rupture,” she read out loud.

“Which means?”

“Think about it.”

“I’m thinking. What does it mean?”

“Listen to the words,” she said impatiently and helped herself to more tea and honey. “I’m coming down with a cold.”

“Oh give it up,” Adam said. “Tell me what you’re getting at. How can you—”

“Perineum,” she interrupted, “is the medical term for the area between the vagina and the anus. A perineal rupture can occur during childbirth, when you get torn from—”

“Enough,” he said and made a face. “I understand. But why the hell haven’t we seen that? If it’s there in black and white . . .”

He was put out and leaned over the coffee table, grabbed the autopsy report from her, and started to read.

“You just didn’t get what it meant,” Johanne said. “You simply ignored it. You were blinded by looking for some sort of sexual motive, so—”

“Ignored it,” Adam asked, raising his voice. “Ignored it?”

“You’re in good company. It’s been revealed that in the Knutby case, the Swedish police shelved a possible murder because they didn’t know what ‘toxic mass’ meant. Don’t you read the papers?”

“Preferably not,” he retorted, leafing frantically through the report trying to find something. “But these new . . . What about that medical report there?”

He tapped the other papers with his finger. “Why would the doctors lie? Are the records fake?”

“Probably not. I called my cousin, Evan—the doctor you met—”

“I remember Evan. What did he say?”

Adam sat down in the sofa opposite her again.

“There can be only one reason why the records don’t include details that are so relevant for doctors and midwives, and so easy to verify,” Johanne explained.

“And that is?”

“If it would cause considerable distress to the patient to include it. Considerable distress, Evan said. And as far as I understood, doctors attach great importance to that.”

They sat in silence. Adam scratched his neck. The craving for a cigar had returned. He swallowed and stared out the window, distracted. The rain was drumming on the windowpane. A car had stopped. “Kids,” he thought. The engine revved up again and again. Someone shouted something, the others laughed. A door slammed, and the car jangled down the road and vanished.

Ragnhild was fast asleep. Jack trotted in from the hall. He stood for a moment with his head to one side, ears pricked, as if he couldn’t quite believe how quiet it was. Then he buried his snout in Adam’s lap and pawed his thighs.

“Not the sofa,” Adam mumbled. “Lie down on the floor. Down, boy.”

The dog appeared to shrug his shoulders and then crept lithely under the table and jumped up onto the other sofa, beside Johanne.

“Can you get that kind of injury from rape or something like that?” Adam eventually asked, without commenting on how badly trained the shit brown dog was.

“Adam, really.”

“But—”

“Imagine a birth. A child’s head. Why do you think women get torn?”

Adam stuck his fingers in his ears.

“The answer is no,” Johanne said. “Not from rape.”

“But”—Adam tried again and swallowed—“wouldn’t a man . . . Wouldn’t Bernt have noticed if—”

“No,” Johanne replied. “At least, that’s what Evan said. Not necessarily. Not during intercourse or . . . other such pleasure.”

He smiled. “Strange.”

She smiled back. “But it’s the truth.”

Jack growled in his sleep.

“So, to sum up,” Adam said and stood up again. He stroked his chin with his thumb and index finger. “We can confirm the following: Fiona Helle was pregnant twice. The first child was born under circumstances in which she tore badly. It must have been a long time ago, as there is nothing to indicate that Bernt Helle knows anything about the child. And nor does anyone else. Fiona publicly expressed her delight at being a late first-time mother. She would hardly have dared to say something like that if there was anyone out there who knew . . .”

He went over to the window. He could feel the draft. He ran his finger around the window frame.

“Damn me if it’s not blowing straight through the wall,” he muttered. “We’ll have to get that fixed soon. Can’t be good for the kids.”

“A bit of draft just makes it cooler and fresher indoors,” Johanne said and waved her hand. “Go on.”

“No . . .” He pulled and fiddled with the old-fashioned insulation tape that was about to fall off.

“I just can’t believe that Bernt is a liar,” he said slowly and turned to face her again. “The guy’s behavior has been fine throughout the investigation. Even though he’s no doubt sick and tired of our constant questions that never seem to come to anything, he always answers and does what we want him to. He answers the phone, he comes in when we ask him to, he seems to be well-adjusted and intelligent. So I’m sure he would have understood that information like that would be relevant for us. Wouldn’t he?”

Johanne wrinkled her nose.

“Um, yes,” she said. “He probably would. I think we can at least assume that the child wasn’t born after they became a couple. Gossip is rife in small towns. They married quite quickly too, and I can’t imagine that a normal, if very young, couple would have any reason to hide a pregnancy. In fact, I think the answer to this mystery is simple. It must have been a very unwanted pregnancy, when she was very young.”

“Please don’t say it was incest,” Adam warned. “That’s all this case needs now.”

“Well, it certainly couldn’t have been Fiona’s father. He died when she was nine. And I think we can safely say that she wasn’t that young. But she must have been young enough to disappear or be sent away for a while without it causing a stir. Fiona was a teenager in”—she mouthed the numbers as she calculated—“at the end of the seventies,” she finished. “She was sixteen in seventy-eight.”

“That late,” Adam said, disappointed. “It wasn’t exactly a catastrophe to be a teenage mom then.”

“Huh,” exclaimed Johanne and rolled her eyes. “Typical man! I was terrified of getting pregnant before I was sixteen, and that was in the mid-eighties.”

“Sixteen,” Adam said. “Were you only sixteen—”

“Forget it,” Johanne swiftly interrupted. “Can we just concentrate on the case?”

“Yes, but sixteen . . .” He sat down and scratched Jack behind the ear. “Fiona didn’t go abroad,” he said. “Not for any length of time, anyway. I checked with Bernt. And I guess he would have known that. Even though not everyone I know likes to talk on and on about time spent studying abroad, I doubt that Fiona would have kept her mouth shut about—”

“Stop it,” Johanne said and leaned over to him.

She kissed him lightly.

“So, a child was born,” she continued. “It isn’t necessarily relevant to the investigation, but, on the other hand, it does bear an uncanny resemblance to her show—”

“That she hosted so successfully for several years, and that gave her such a high profile.”

“Adopted children and grieving mothers. Reunited or rejected. That sort of thing.”

Jack lifted his head and pricked one ear. The house groaned in the strong wind. The rain was hurled against the window from the south. Johanne bent down over Ragnhild and tucked the blanket more snugly around the child, who slept on undisturbed. The stereo clicked on and off by itself several times, and the main light above the table flickered.

Then everything went dark.

“Damn,” said Adam.

“Ragnhild,” said Johanne.

“Take it easy.”

“That’s why I went to see Yvonne Knutsen,” Johanne said in the dark. “She knows what happened. You can be sure of that.”

“Presumably,” Adam replied. His face was covered in great flickering shadows as he struck a match.

“Maybe that’s why she didn’t want to speak to me,” Johanne mused. “Maybe the child has turned up, maybe—”

“A lot of maybes there now,” Adam pointed out. “Hold on a minute.”

He finally managed to find a candle.

She followed him with her eyes. He was so lithe, despite his size. When he walked, he stepped heavily, as if he wanted to make a point of being so big. But as he crouched in front of the fireplace, tearing newspaper into strips, then reaching out for wood from the metal basket and building a fire, there was something light and easy about his movements, a fascinating softness in his solid body.

The flames licked the paper.

She clapped quietly and smiled.

“I’ll cheat a bit, just to be on the safe side,” he said and pushed in a couple of fire starters between the wood. “I’ll just go down to the cellar for some more wood. Power outages can last a while in weather like this. Where’s the flashlight?”

She pointed to the hall. He went out.

The flames crackled warmly and threw a golden red light into the living room. Johanne could already feel the heat on her face. Once again she tucked the blanket in around her daughter and was grateful that Kristiane was at Isak’s. She took the woolen blanket that was lying over the back of the sofa and wrapped it around her legs, then leaned back and shut her eyes.

Adam should talk to the doctor who was there at the birth. Or the midwife. They would both cite patient confidentiality but would give in in the end. They always did in cases like this.

It would take time though, Johanne realized.

If there was actually a living adult descendant of Fiona Helle, they might be getting close to something that resembled a clue. A pretty flimsy one, to be sure, and it might lead to nothing. He or she wouldn’t be the first child in history born out of wedlock and adopted into a loving family. Probably a perfectly normal twentysomething person—maybe a student, or a carpenter with a Volvo and two snotty children. Not a cold-blooded murderer with a need to avenge the rejection a quarter of a century earlier.

But when she died, Fiona’s tongue had been split and cut out.

The child was Fiona’s great lie.

Victoria Heinerback had been nailed to the wall.

Two women. Two cases.

An illegitimate child.

Johanne sat up suddenly. She was just about to nod off when a feeling of déjà vu ran through her again, the uncomfortable feeling that there was something important she couldn’t grasp. She lifted Jack closer and laid her face on the dog’s fur.

“Can we talk about something else?” she asked when Adam came back with his arms full of wood.

He put down the wood.

“Of course we can,” he said and kissed her on the head. “We can talk about whatever you want to. The fact that I want a new horse, for example.”

“New horse? I’ve said it a thousand times: no new horse.”

“We’ll see,” Adam laughed as he went into the kitchen. “Kristiane’s on my side. And I’m sure Ragnhild is too. And Jack. That’s four against one.”

Johanne wanted to respond to his laughter, but the feeling of unease still clung to her body, the remnants of a fleeting premonition of danger.

“Forget it,” she said. “You can just forget the horse.”

Eight

T
he storm had died down. The wind was still blowing strong, but the clouds had opened to reveal light blue stripes to the south. Old, dirty snow lay compacted and rotting in gardens and by the roadside after the rain. Johanne tried to avoid the worst puddles as she maneuvered the carriage on the narrow pavement along Maridalsveien. Heavy traffic and buses thundered past. She didn’t like it, so she crossed the road at Badebakken to cut down to the Aker River. Jack was pulling at the leash and wanted to sniff at everything.

The temperature was dropping, and snow was forecast for the evening. Johanne stopped and tightened her scarf, then kept going. Her nose was freezing. She sniffed. She should have put a hat on. At least Ragnhild was warm enough, snug in her Baby Grobag with a sheep fleece under her and extra woolen blankets on top. When Johanne gently pulled back the edge of the bag, she could only just see her little face tightly tucked in. Her pacifier was pulsing, and Johanne could tell from the movements behind the thin, fine eyelids that Ragnhild was dreaming.

She sat down on a bench just by the day care at Heftyeløkka and let Jack off the leash. He shot off down to the river and barked at the ducks, which paid no attention to him. They just swam around in the open channels in the ice. The King of America whimpered and barked and stuck an adventurous paw into the water.