What Never Happens

by Anne Holt

  As she hadn’t bothered to subscribe to a local server, she was charged extortionate fees to surf the net. She got stressed when she thought of all that money being eaten up while she waited for a connection on the slow, analog line to Norway. She could, of course, go to Chez Net. They charged five euros for fifteen minutes and had broadband. But unfortunately the place was full of drunk Australians and braying Brits, even now in winter. So she didn’t bother, not now anyway.

  There had been remarkably little fuss in the first days after the murder. The little princess had the full attention of the media circus. The world truly wanted to be deceived.

  But then it started to get more coverage.

  The woman with the laptop simply could not stand Fiona Helle. It was an unbearably politically correct response, but there wasn’t much to be done about that. She read phrases like “loved by the people” in the papers. Which was fair enough, given that the program had been watched by well over a million viewers every Saturday, for five seasons in a row. She had only seen a couple of shows, just before she went away. But that was more than enough to realize that for once she agreed with the cultural snobs’ usual, unbearably arrogant condemnation of popular entertainment. In fact, it was just one such vitriolic criticism in Aftenposten, written by a professor of sociology, that made her sit down in front of the television one Saturday evening and waste one and a half hours watching On the Move with Fiona.

  But it hadn’t been a total waste of time. It was ages since she had felt so provoked. The participants were either idiots or deeply unhappy. But they could hardly be blamed for being either. Fiona Helle, on the other hand, was successful, calculating, and far from true to her love of the common people. She waltzed into the studio dressed in creations that had been bought worlds away from H&M. She smiled shamelessly at the camera while the poor creatures revealed their pathetic dreams, false hopes, and not least extremely limited intelligence. Prime time.

  The woman, who now got up from the desk by the window and walked around the unfamiliar living room without knowing quite what she wanted, did not normally join in public debate. But after watching one episode of On the Move with Fiona, she’d been tempted. Halfway through writing a letter from an “outraged reader,” she’d stopped and laughed at herself before deleting it. She had been in a good mood for the rest of the evening. As she couldn’t sleep, she allowed herself to indulge in a couple of TV3’s terrible late-night films and had even learned something from them, if she remembered correctly.

  At least feeling angry was a form of emotion.

  Readers’ letters in newspapers were not her chosen form of expression.

  Tomorrow she would go into Nice and see if she could find some Norwegian papers.

  Two

  It was night in the two-family house in Tåsen. Three sad streetlights stood on the small stretch of road behind the picket fence at the bottom of the garden, the bulbs long since broken by excited children with snowballs in their mittens. It seemed that the neighborhood was taking the request to save electricity seriously. The sky was clear and dark. To the northeast, over Grefsenåsen, Johanne could make out a constellation she thought she recognized. It made her feel that she was totally alone in the world.

  “You standing here again?” asked Adam with resignation.

  He stood in the doorway, sleepily scratching his groin. His boxer shorts were stretched tight over his thighs. His naked shoulders were so broad that he almost touched both sides of the doorway.

  “How much longer is this going to keep up, honey?”

  “Don’t know. Go back to bed.”

  Johanne turned back to the window. The transition from living in an apartment house to a house in this neighborhood had been harder than she’d expected. She was used to complaining water pipes, babies’ cries that traveled through the walls, quarreling teenagers, and the drone of late-night programs from downstairs, where the woman on the first floor who was nearly stone-deaf often fell asleep in front of the TV. In an apartment, you could make coffee at midnight. Listen to the radio. Have a conversation, for that matter. Here, she barely dared open the fridge. The smell of Adam’s nocturnal leaks lingered in the bathroom in the morning, as she had forbidden him to disturb the neighbors below by flushing before seven.

  “Why do you creep around like this?” he said. “Can’t you at least sit down?”

  “Don’t talk so loud,” Johanne whispered.

  “Give me a break. It’s not that loud. And you’re used to having neighbors, Johanne!”

  “Yes, lots. But they’re more anonymous. You’re so close here. It’s just them and us, so it’s more . . . I don’t know.”

  “But we get along so well with Gitta and Samuel! Not to mention little Leonard! If it wasn’t for him, Kristiane would hardly have any—”

  “I mean, look at these!” Johanne stuck out a foot and laughed quietly. “I’ve never had slippers before in my life. Hardly dare to get out of bed without putting them on now!”

  “They’re sweet. Remind me of little toadstools.”

  “They’re supposed to look like toadstools, that’s why! Couldn’t you have gotten her to pick something else? Rabbits, bears? Or even better, completely normal brown slippers?”

  The parquet creaked with every step he took toward her. She made a face before turning back to the window again.

  “It’s not exactly easy to get Kristiane to change her mind,” he said. “Please stop being so anxious. Nothing is going to happen.”

  “That’s what Isak said when Kristiane was a baby too.”

  “That was different. Kristiane—”

  “No one knows what’s wrong with her. So no one can know if there’s anything wrong with Ragnhild.”

  “Oh, so we’re agreed on Ragnhild, then?”

  “Yes,” Johanne said.

  Adam put his arms around her. “Ragnhild is a perfectly healthy eight-day-old baby,” he whispered. “She wakes up three times a night for milk and then goes straight back to sleep. Just like she should. Do you want some coffee?”

  “Okay, but be quiet.”

  He was about to say something. He opened his mouth, but then imperceptibly shook his head instead, picked up a sweater from the floor, and pulled it on as he went into the kitchen.

  “Come and sit down in here,” he called. “If you absolutely must stay awake all night, let’s at least do something useful.”

  Johanne pulled up a bar stool to the island in the middle of the kitchen and tightened her robe. She absentmindedly picked through a thick file that shouldn’t have been lying around the kitchen.

  “Sigmund doesn’t give up, does he?” she said as she rubbed her eyes behind her glasses.

  “No, but he’s right. It’s a fascinating case.” He turned around so quickly that the water in the coffee pot spilled over the rim. “I was only at work for an hour,” he said defensively. “From the time I left here until I got back was only—”

  “Okay, okay, don’t worry. That’s fine. I understand that you have to go in every now and then. I have to admit . . .”

  On the top of the pile was a photograph, a flattering portrait of a soon-to-be murder victim. The shoulder-length hair parted in the middle made her narrow face look even thinner. Not much else about Fiona Helle was old-fashioned. Her eyes were defiant, her full lips smiled confidently at the lens. She was wearing heavy eye makeup but somehow managed to avoid looking vulgar. In fact, there was actually something quite captivating about the picture, an obvious glamour that contrasted sharply with the down-to-earth, family-friendly program image she had so successfully constructed.

  “What do you have to admit?” asked Adam.

  “That—”

  “That you think this case is damned interesting too,” smirked Adam, banging around with the cups. “I’m just going to get a pair of pants.”

  Fiona Helle’s background was no less fascinating than the portrait. She graduated with a degree in art history, Johanne noted as she read. Married Bernt Helle
, a plumber, when she was only twenty-two; they took over her grandparents’ house in Lørenskog and lived there without children for thirteen years. The arrival of little Fiorella in 1998 had obviously not put any brakes on either her ambition or her career. Quite the opposite, in fact. Having gained cult status as a presenter for the arty Cool Culture on NRK2, she was then snapped up by the entertainment department. After a couple of seasons on a late-night talk show on Thursdays, she finally made it. At least, that was the expression she used herself in the numerous interviews she had given over the past three years. On the Move with Fiona was one of national TV’s greatest successes since the sixties, when there was little else for people to do other than gather around their TV screens to watch the one channel, doing the exact same thing as every other person in Norway.

  “You liked those programs! A grown man sitting there crying!”

  Johanne smiled at Adam, who had come back wearing a bright red fleece, gray sweatpants, and orange woolen socks.

  “I did not cry,” Adam protested, pouring the coffee into the cups. “I was touched, though, I admit that. But cry? Never!”

  He moved a stool in closer to her. “It was that episode about the war baby whose father was a German soldier,” he remembered quietly. “You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by her story. Having been persecuted and bullied throughout her childhood, she goes to the United States and gets a job cleaning floors in the World Trade Center when it was first built. Then she took her first and only sick day on September eleventh. And she had always remembered the little Norwegian boy next door who—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Johanne, wetting her lips with the steaming hot coffee. “Shhh!”

  She froze. “It’s Ragnhild,” she said tersely.

  “It’s not,” he started, trying to catch her before she ran into the bedroom.

  Too late. She rushed across the floor without a sound and disappeared. Only her anxiety remained. A bitterness gripped his stomach and made him pour more milk into his coffee.

  His story was worse than hers. But to compare them was not only cruel, it was impossible. Pain cannot be measured, and loss cannot be weighed. All the same, he couldn’t help it. When they first met one dramatic spring, nearly four years ago now, he had found himself getting irritated a little too often by Johanne’s sorrow over Kristiane’s strangeness.

  She had a child, after all. A child who was alive and had a voracious appetite for life. Different from most, but in her own way Kristiane was a lovely and very alert young child.

  “I know,” Johanne said suddenly. She had come around the corner from the hall without him noticing. “You’ve had to deal with more than me. Your child is dead. I should be grateful. And I am.”

  A quiver in his lower lip, barely visible in the dim light, made her stop. His hand covered his eyes.

  “Was Ragnhild okay?” Adam asked.

  She nodded.

  “I just get so frightened,” she whispered. “When she’s asleep, I’m scared that she’ll die. When she’s awake, I think she’s going to die. Or that something will happen.”

  “Johanne,” he said helplessly, and patted the chair beside him. “Come here and sit down.”

  She sank down beside him. His hand rubbed her back, up and down, just a bit too roughly.

  “Everything’s fine,” he said.

  “You’re angry,” she whispered.

  “No.”

  “You are.”

  His hand stopped, and he squeezed her gently on the neck.

  “No, I said. But now—”

  “Can’t I just be—”

  “Do you know what?” he interrupted with forced jolliness. “Let’s just agree that the children are fine. Neither of us can sleep. So now we can take an hour or so to look at this”—he tapped Fiona Helle’s face with his stubby fingers—“and then we can see whether we can get to sleep. Okay?”

  “You’re so good,” she said and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “And this case is worse than you fear.”

  “Right.”

  He finished his coffee and pushed the cup out of the way before spreading the papers across the large counter. The photograph lay between them. He ran his finger over Fiona Helle’s nose, circled her mouth, and paused a moment before picking up the picture and looking at it closely.

  “What exactly do you think we’re worried about?”

  “No clues whatsoever,” she said lightly. “I skimmed through all the papers.”

  She was looking for a document without finding it.

  “To begin with,” she sniffed, “the footprints in the snow are as good as useless. Okay, there were three prints in the driveway that probably belong to the killer, but the combination of the temperature, wind, and snow makes their value limited. The only thing that’s certain is that whoever did it had socks on over their shoes.”

  “Ever since the Orderud case, every damn petty thief has used that trick,” he grumbled.

  “Watch your language.”

  “They’re asleep.”

  “The shoe size is between 10 and 13, in other words the same as around ninety percent of the male population.”

  “And a small share of the female population,” he smiled.

  Johanne tucked her feet in under the bar stool.

  “In any case, wearing shoes that are too big for you is another well-known trick. And it’s not possible to gauge the killer’s weight from the footprints. He was simply very lucky with the weather.”

  “Or she.”

  “Could be a she. But to be honest, you’d need to use quite a lot of force to overpower Fiona Helle. A physically fit lady in her prime.”

  They looked at the picture again. The woman looked good for her age. Her forty-two years were apparent around the eyes, there were visible wrinkles around her mouth, and her lipstick had bled. But there was still something vibrant about her face, the direct look in her eyes, the firm skin on her neck and cheeks.

  “Her tongue was cut out while she was still alive,” Adam said. “The theory so far is that she lost consciousness from strangulation, and then her tongue was cut out. The bleeding was so heavy that she can’t have been dead. Maybe the killer chose his method with care, or maybe—”

  “It’s almost impossible to say,” Johanne said and frowned.

  “Strangled her until she lost consciousness rather than died, I mean. He must have thought she was dead.”

  “Well, at least we know that the cause of death was strangulation. He must have finished her off with his hands. After he’d cut out the tongue.”

  Adam shuddered and added, “Have you seen these?”

  He fished out a manila envelope and looked at it for a moment before obviously changing his mind and leaving it unopened.

  “Just a peek,” Johanne said. “Normally pictures of the scene of the crime don’t bother me. But now, since Ragnhild was born, I”—tears welled up in her eyes, and she hid her face in her hands—“I cry for no reason,” she said in a loud voice, nearly shouting, before pulling herself together and whispering, “Pictures like that really don’t bother me. Normally. I’ve seen . . .”

  She dried her eyes with abrupt, harsh movements and forced a smile. “The husband,” she said, “he’s got an airtight alibi.”

  “No alibi is airtight,” answered Adam. Again, he put his hand on her back. The warmth spread through the thin silk.

  “That’s true,” Johanne said. “But as good as. He was at his mother’s with Fiorella. He had to sleep in the same room as his daughter, because his sister and her husband were also staying the night. And on top of that, his sister had a stomach bug and was up all night. And another thing . . .” She brushed her hand under her right eye once more. Adam smiled and ran his thumb under her nose and then dried it on his pant leg.

  “And another thing. There’s nothing to indicate anything other than the ordinary marital problems,” she finished. “No relationship problems, and certainly no financial problems. They’re fairl
y equal on that score. He earns more than she, she owns a bigger share of the house. His firm seems to be sound.”

  She took his free hand. The skin was coarse, and his nails were short. Their thumbs met and moved in circles.

  “And what’s more, eight days have passed,” she continued, “without you finding anything. All you’ve done is rule out a couple of obvious suspects.”

  “It’s a start,” he said lamely and pulled back his hand.

  “A very weak one.”

  “What are your thoughts then?”

  “I’ve got lots.”

  “About what?”

  “The tongue,” she replied and got up to get more coffee.

  A car crawled down the street. The slow throb of the engine made the glass in the corner cabinet rattle. The beam of light danced on the ceiling, a moving cloud of light in the big, dark room.

  “The tongue,” he repeated despondently, as if she had reminded him of an unpleasant fact that he would rather forget.

  “Yes, the tongue. The method. Hate. It was deliberate. The ‘vase’”—Johanne made quote marks with her fingers—“It was made beforehand. There was no red paper in the house. I saw in your papers that it takes about eight minutes to make something like that. And that’s when you know what you’re doing.”

  For the first time, she seemed to be really fired up. She opened a cupboard and took two sugar cubes from a silver bowl. The spoon scratched on the ceramic of the mug as she stirred.

  “Drinking coffee when we can’t sleep,” she mumbled. “Smart move.” She looked up. “Cutting someone’s tongue out is such a loaded symbol, so aggressive and horrific that it’s hard to imagine that it’s motivated by anything other than hate. A pretty intense hate.”

  “And Fiona Helle was loved by all,” Adam dryly retorted. “I think you’ve stirred the sugar enough now, dear.”

  She licked the spoon and sat down again.

  “The problem is, Adam, that it’s impossible to know who hated her. As long as her family, her friends, acquaintances, colleagues . . . everyone around her seemed to like the woman, you’ll have to look out there for the murderer.” She pointed out the window at a neighbor’s home, where someone had turned on a bathroom light.