What Never Happens (43 page)

And grew more and more invisible.

She didn’t care about the world, just as the world obviously did not care about her.

But that was then. Not now.

It was a waste of time trying to put on makeup. Her hands felt too big; she wasn’t used to the tiny brush in the eyeshadow compact. The lipstick was too brazen, too red.

It smelled of asphalt, she remembered, that evening in Villefranche. Wet, soft tar mixed with the brine of the sea and rain. She went to bed at dawn but couldn’t sleep. Somewhere in her head was a thought that kept evading her. It took a week before she grasped it. All these years, she had thought, all these years of futile work that had given her nothing but money and dissatisfaction. Then there it was, right in front of her, a shining new opportunity. All the preparations were made. She could just begin. Fiona Helle’s tongue had been cut out and beautifully wrapped. Wencke Berger smiled coldly when she read that; she laughed furiously and remembered another case, from another world, six years ago. She remembered a man with intense eyes, extreme energy, and fascinating stories, remembered how she had moved closer and closer to the front with every lecture, with questions and observant comments. He gave her a fleeting smile and then bent down over an elegant brunette, quoting Longfellow, and winked. Wencke Berger gave him a book with a respectful dedication in the front. He left it behind on the desk. In the evenings she followed him; he went to the pub where he was boisterous and told stories, surrounded by women who took turns taking him home.

She was already too old then. She was invisible, and he bragged about Johanne Vik.

All this came back to her, and she realized what she should do. She would no longer wait for something that would never happen. She would be the one who made it happen.

And she had succeeded.

And now she had to learn to put makeup on, to display her new self. She just had to stop thinking about the past so much, getting so emotional.

Forget Fiona Helle!

Wencke Berger closed the drawer in the bathroom and went into the bedroom. She picked up clothes on the way. Her wardrobe was steadily expanding. She shopped regularly, nearly every week; she was no longer afraid of asking sales clerks for advice.

More than a hundred people’s lives were stored in the filing cabinet by the wall. She stroked the ice-cold door handle. Put her finger on the lock. Leaned against the solid weight of steel.

People’s good and bad habits, rhythms, desires, and needs had been noted, analyzed and cataloged. Wencke Berger knew them better than they knew themselves; she was clinically neutral, the cold observer. She knew enough about over a hundred people to be able to disguise them lightly and then kill them with pen and paper. She knew their lives inside out. When she woke up that sunny January morning in Villefranche and decided to make fiction real, she had plenty to choose from.

She knew, both then and now, that she should select randomly. Arbitrary victims were the safest. But the temptation was too great. Victoria Heinerback had always irritated her, though she never really knew why. The most important thing was that she could be taken for a racist. Everything had to fit. Johanne Vik had to have a chance of understanding. If not after the first murder, then later.

And Rudolf Fjord would tumble in any case.

He was pathetic.

Wencke Berger opened the metal cabinet. Found a file. Read. She smiled at how good her memory was, how easy it was to recall all she had seen and written down.

Rudolf Fjord was despicable. He wouldn’t survive if the police turned a searchlight on his life. If he didn’t fall on one count, there were plenty of others that would nail him. His file was almost as extensive as Johanne Vik’s. For a while she considered choosing him as her first victim. But then she decided against it. That would be too easy. Rudolf Fjord would self- destruct on his own.

She was right. He couldn’t ride out a storm.

Wencke Berger closed the file. She pulled out another, much thinner, studied the name but didn’t open it. A moment later she put it back and locked the cabinet.

Vegard Krogh deserved to die. She could hardly bear the thought of him. Now he was gone.

Wencke Berger went into the living room. It was neater 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 Brunkebergs Torg 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 colors and shapes. The woman was large despite her obviously meager 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 cancelled, 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 Berger had given her, a gesture of goodwill 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 Berger 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 smelled of spring in Oslo, exhaust fumes and rotting garbage.

Håvard 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 Berger 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 best seller writer in its Saturday magazine: Wencke Berger, 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 makeup.

She hadn’t let them into the bedroom.

She went back into the living room. The smell of the flowers was nauseating. She took the vase 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 cabinet, 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 foundation 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 rang, when a stranger stopped on the other side of the street, looked twice, and then crossed the road toward her, she felt the fear; she was reminded of how valuable life had become.

On the way out to throw the flowers down the garbage chute, she stopped and hesitated. The book she had taken from Victoria Heinerback’s bedroom was in the shoe closet 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 garbage room of the apartment house where Wencke Berger lived and wrote. She hadn’t destroyed it, hadn’t torn out the page with the owner’s name on it. She could have burned the book or thrown it away somewhere else.

But there wouldn’t be any excitement in that.

Wencke Berger 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 from Wencke Berger’s three accounts from the period from January 1 to March 2, when Håvard Stefansen was murdered. The other was an itemized log from the phone company.

“When Victoria Heinerback was killed,” Adam said, “Wencke Berger was in Stockholm. Just as she’s said in several of these”—he kicked a pile of newspapers and magazines on the floor—“stupid 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 gotten a 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 Berger’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 Berger was well off but spent surprisingly little money. She had renewed her wardrobe just before coming home, but even around Christmas, her spending was absurdly low. She seldom called 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 called and pretended to be a journalist; he fished for confirmation of the meeting. He was disturbingly unaffected by the growing number of lies 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 learned and stood for in his years with the police.

Wencke Berger had become an obsession.

They had spent a week trying to work out the different ways in which she could have gotten from Stockholm to Oslo on February 6. 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 them. Tried moving them closer together. Tried to find holes and weak points, a tiny opening in the solid wall of impossible times in Wencke Berger’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 Victoria Heinerback was murdered in her home in Lørenskog, Wencke Berger had paid a substantial amount for a meal at a restaurant near the Dramaten theater in the center 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 Berger 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 gotten some ice from the machine in the reception area. 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 the 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 Berger’s trip to Stockholm was that she’d splurged on herself, which was very unusual.

Otherwise, everything was just as it should be. Adam and Sigmund had given their all and gotten 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 Berger 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.