What Never Happens (37 page)

“Have you considered taking some time off?” she asked lightly as she started to stack the dirty plates in the dishwasher.

“Time off?”

“Yes, take your paternity leave. For real.”

“As if we can afford that . . .”

He chewed and chewed and stared at the green, half-eaten stick.

“I could start working again,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be good to have this case off your hands? To forget it? Let someone else take over, someone else take—”

“No way.”

He scratched his groin.

“Isn’t it strange,” he said with his eyes narrowed. “Isn’t it strange to choose death rather than—”

“Don’t change the subject. Have you actually considered it?”

“You’re entitled to more leave, Johanne. Which is only fair and reasonable. You’ve just given birth, you’re breast-feeding. It’s good for Ragnhild. So it’s good for us.”

He threw the remains of the celery at the garbage can in the cabinet under the sink, as if to underscore that the conversation was over. He missed.

“But isn’t it peculiar,” he continued and opened out his hands, “that a person should choose to take his life because he risks being outed as a homosexual? In 2004? For Christ’s sake, they’re everywhere! We’ve got hordes of lesbians at work, and they don’t seem to feel persecuted or bothered, and we—”

“Actually, strictly speaking, you don’t know much about that,” she said as she picked up the celery. “You barely know them.”

“Come on, the finance minister of Norway is gay, for Christ’s sake. And no one seems to be too bothered about that!”

Johanne smiled, and it annoyed him.

“The finance minister is a . . . soigné gentleman from the west end,” she said. “Discreet, professional, and according to what little we know of him, an excellent cook. He’s lived with the same man for centuries. That’s a
bit
”—she held her index finger and thumb together in an exaggerated gesture—“different,” she continued, “from someone who buys sex from young boys while parading around with blondes on his arm whenever there’s a camera nearby.”

Adam said nothing. He put his head down on his arms.

“Why don’t you get a little sleep?” she said quietly and stroked his back. “You were up all night.”

“I’m not tired,” he said into his sleeve.

“What are you then?”

“Depressed.”

“Can I do anything for you?”

“No.”

“Adam—”

“The worst thing is that Rudolf was cleared as a suspect so early on in the case,” he said angrily and sat up. “His alibi was fine. There was nothing to indicate that he was behind it. Quite the opposite—according to his colleagues in the Storting, he was devastated. So why couldn’t we just leave the man in peace? What the hell does it matter to us who he’s fucking?”

“Adam,” she tried again and held his neck between her hands.

“Listen to me,” he said and pushed her away.

“I’m listening. It’s just a bit difficult to answer when what you’re saying isn’t very sensible. You had every reason to investigate Rudolf Fjord in more detail. Especially after the argument you heard between him and Kari Mundal. At the memorial service out at—”

“I remember it well enough,” he cut her off, cross. “But it can’t be more than five days since you sat here and drew a profile of a killer that was nothing like Rudolf Fjord. Why did I then have to pursue—”

“You never believed in that profile,” she said curtly and got out the dish soap. “Not then and not now. And to be honest, I think you should stop moping.”

“Moping? Moping!”

“Yes, you’re moping. Feeling sorry for yourself. You can just stop it now.”

She slammed the dishwasher shut, put the box of detergent back on the shelf in the cabinet, and turned to face him, with her right hand on her hip. And grinned.

“Meanie,” he mumbled and smiled reluctantly back. “Anyway, you said yourself that the profile had a number of weak points. Vegard Krogh didn’t fit. He wasn’t well-known enough.”

Johanne picked up Sulamit the fire engine, which had been abandoned on the floor. The eyes on the radiator grill had lost their pupils and stared blindly at her. She fidgeted with the broken ladder.

“I’ve been doing some more thinking,” she said.

“And?”

“Do you remember . . . do you remember when we were sitting here with Sigmund? Not last Tuesday, but a few weeks ago?”

“Of course.”

“He asked me what would be the worst imaginable murder.”

“Yes.”

“And I answered that it would have to be something like a killer without a motive.”

“Yes.”

“They don’t exist.”

“Right. So what did you mean then?”

“I meant . . . I still think my reasoning stands, by the way. A killer who chooses his victims completely arbitrarily, without a motive for the individual murders, would be extremely difficult to catch. Assuming that a number of other factors are in place, of course. Such as the killer doing a good job, to put it simply.”

“Aha . . .”

He nodded and put his hand on his stomach.

She put Sulamit down with a thump.

“You can’t actually be hungry again. You ate less than an hour ago. Now listen.”

“I’m all ears,” Adam said.

“The problem is that it’s difficult to imagine a completely random series of victims,” Johanne said and sat down on the stool beside him. “People never function in a vacuum! We’re never unbiased, we all have our likes and dislikes, we . . .”

She pressed her fingers together so that her hands looked like a tent, and then she put her nose in the opening.

“Let’s imagine,” she continued, in full concentration. Her voice sounded nasal when she sat like that. “. . . a murderer who decides to kill. For whatever reason. We’ll come back to that. But he decides to kill, not because he wants to take someone’s life, but because he—”

“It’s difficult to imagine that anyone can be murdered in cold blood, unless the murderer actually wants them dead.”

“Try to imagine it all the same,” she said impatiently. She folded her hands and clasped them together until the knuckles turned white. “The murderer would possibly choose the first victim fairly randomly. Like when we were children and spun the globe. Then, wherever your finger hit—”

“You would go in twenty-five years’ time,” he finished. “I even read a children’s book about something like that.
The Kept Promise
.”

“Do you remember what tended to happen the second time you tried?”

“I cheated,” he said and smiled. “Opened my eyes ever so slightly to make sure I got somewhere more exciting than my friend.”

“In the end I would stand there with open eyes and aim,” Johanne admitted. “I wanted to go to Hawaii.”

“And your point is . . .”

“I’ve read in the papers,” she said, letting him stroke the back of her hand, “that they’re calling these cases the perfect crime. Not so strange, really, considering how helpless the police seem to be. But I think perhaps we should shift focus and instead say that we’re in fact talking about the perfect murderer. But”—she chewed her lip and reached for a caper in one of the bowls—“the point is that there is no such thing,” she said, studying the stalk. “The perfect murderer is completely free of any context. The perfect murderer feels nothing—no fear, no horror, no hate, and certainly no love. People have a tendency to think that insane murderers have no feelings and are completely incapable of relating to other human beings. They forget that even Marc Dutroux, the epitome of a pedophile monster, was married. Hitler inflicted terrible suffering on the Jews and sent six million to their deaths, but it’s said that he was very fond of his dog. And presumably he was even kind to it.”

“Did he have a dog?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Think so. But you get my point, at least.”

“No.”

She got up slowly, still chewing on the stubborn caper. She looked around the room and then went over to Kristiane’s toy box.

“I am a person who has decided to kill,” she said and swallowed before stalling his objection. “Just forget why for the moment.”

She picked up a red ball and held it out in front of her in her right hand, in a dramatic pose, like Hamlet and the skull. Adam chuckled.

“Don’t laugh,” she said in a level voice. “This is my world. I know a lot about crime. It’s my subject. I know there’s a connection between the motive and how a case is solved. I know that I’m more likely to get away with murder if no one can find a connection between me and the victim. So, I spin the globe.”

She closed her eyes and blindly pressed her finger into the red rubber.

“I have chosen a completely random victim,” she said. “And I kill that person. Everything works out. No one suspects me. I get a taste for more.”

She looked up.

“But in some way, I’ve changed. All our actions, everything that happens, affects us. I feel . . . successful. I want to do it again. I feel . . . alive.”

She froze. Adam opened his mouth.

“Shh,” she said sharply. “Shh!”

They could hear the children running from room to room downstairs. Jack was barking angrily. Then they heard a muffled, cross grown-up voice through the floor.

“Maybe I should go down and get her,” Adam said. “Sounds like—”

“Shh,” she said again. She had a distant look in her eyes, and she had frozen in a theatrical comedy pose, with one leg tantalizingly in front of the other. The ball was still in her right hand.

“Alive,” she repeated, as if she was tasting the word.

Suddenly, she grabbed the ball with both hands and threw it to the floor. It bounced against the fireplace and knocked over a plant that was standing on the floor, without Johanne seeming to notice.

“Alive,” she said for the third time. “These murders are a form of . . . extreme sport.”

“What?”

Adam stared at Johanne. He tried to see beyond the unfamiliar, frightened expression, beyond her unfamiliar behavior; he tried to see inside her mind. She stood as if in a trance.

“Extreme sport,” she repeated without paying him any attention, “a way of feeling alive. That’s how people describe it. The adrenaline kick. The rush. The feeling of defying death and succeeding, time and again. Nearly dying is the most intense way of feeling alive. Actually feeling life. Understanding it better. The rest of us just ask why. Why push yourself to get to the top of Mount Everest when the journey is, in every sense, paved with dead bodies? What would drive someone to throw themselves from a high cliff in Mexico when the slightest misjudgment could mean that the waves below hurled them straight back into the cliff face?”

“Johanne,” Adam tried and put up his hand.

“They say it gives them the feeling of being alive.” She answered her own questions.

She still didn’t look at him. Instead she grabbed Kristiane’s rag doll from the windowsill. She pulled to it to her by the leg and then hugged it, long and hard.

“Johanne,” he tried again.

“I just don’t understand it,” she whispered, “but that’s the explanation they give. That’s what they say when it’s all over and they’re smiling at the camera, at their friends. They stick their middle fingers up at life. And laugh. And then they go and do it all over again. And again. And again . . .”

This time he got up and went over to her. Pulled the doll from her hands and put his arms around her. He didn’t know if she was crying, so he kept still.

“As if life isn’t valuable enough in itself,” she mumbled into his chest. “As if human triviality is not bad enough. As if loving someone, having children, getting old isn’t frightening enough.”

She pushed him away. He didn’t want to let go, but she was determined and forced him to. But she did look him straight in the eye when she continued.

“We can see it everywhere, Adam. More and more, new variations all the time. Jackass stunts for young people. They set themselves alight, dive from a roof on a bike. People are bored.
People are bored to death!
”

She was nearly screaming and slapped him on the chest. Her voice trembled.

“Did you know that some people play a kind of Russian roulette with HIV? Others heighten their orgasm through strangulation? And sometimes they die before they come. Die!”

She was laughing now, hysterically. She went over to the island and managed to perch on a stool. She covered her face with her hands.

“Death is the only real news for people today,” she said. “I can’t remember who said that, but it’s true. Death is extremely titillating, as it is the only thing we will never understand. It’s the only thing we know nothing about.”

“So what you’re saying,” Adam tried to bring her back to day-to-day reality, “is that we’re talking about a killer who’s . . . bored?”

“Yes. His motive has nothing to do with whom he kills but rather that they are killed.”

“Johanne . . .”

“It has to be,” she insisted. “Killing someone is the most extreme of all extreme actions you can take. The murderer . . . It fits, Adam. It fits with the theory that he didn’t kill Fiona Helle. He was just sitting there. Somewhere. Bored. Then Mats Bohus killed his mother, in a grotesque way, and everyone went crazy. The murder had all the right ingredients: a famous victim, the characteristics of ritual, strong symbolism. The reaction was deafening. I can hardly imagine anything more stimulating, a more exciting trigger than that murder. Especially as it had so many similarities to the first murder in another series, in another story about—”

“Now listen to what you’re saying,” Adam insisted. He had raised his voice now. “If we summarize your profile, we’ve got the following. A”—with his right index finger, he pointed to his left thumb—“The murderer knows everything that’s worth knowing about crime. B: At some point or another, he heard Warren’s lecture about proportional retribution.”

“Or heard about it,” corrected Johanne.

“Which means that he may not necessarily be Norwegian,” Adam added and grimaced. “Third: Killing for this person is a kind of hobby, a way to relieve a boring, humdrum life. He chooses—”

“his victims by apparently random criteria,” Johanne concluded. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes were shiny. “At least to begin with. He has only one criterion. The person has to be famous. He wants maximum effect. It’s the thrill he’s after. He’s playing, Adam.”