What Never Happens

by Anne Holt

  “I don’t mean them, specifically,” she smiled. “I mean the general public.”

  “Dear God,” groaned Adam.

  “Fiona Helle was one of the most high profile TV stars in the country. I doubt there are many people who don’t have an opinion about what she did, and therefore also about who they thought she was, right or wrong.”

  “Over four million suspects, you mean.”

  “Yep.”

  She took a sip of coffee before putting down her mug.

  “You can forget everyone under fifteen or over seventy, and the million or so who really adored her.”

  “And that leaves how many, do you reckon?”

  “No idea. A couple of million, maybe?”

  “A couple of million suspects—”

  “Who possibly have never even spoken to her,” she added. “There doesn’t need to be any direct link between Fiona and the man who killed her.”

  “Or woman.”

  “Or woman,” she agreed. “Good luck. And, looking at the tongue. . . . Shhh!”

  A feeble cry could be heard from the newly decorated children’s room. Adam got up before Johanne had time to react.

  “She just wants food,” he said and made her sit down. “I’ll get her. Go and sit down on the sofa.”

  She tried to pull herself together. The fear was physical, like a shot of adrenaline. Her pulse quickened, her cheeks flushed hot. When she lifted her hand and studied her palm, she saw the light from the ceiling reflected in the sweat in her lifeline. She dried her hands on her robe and sat down heavily on the sofa.

  “Is my little munchkin hungry?” she heard Adam murmuring into the baby’s hair. “You’ll get some food from Mommy. There, there.”

  The baby’s half-open eyes and eager mouth made Johanne cry again, with relief.

  “I think I’ve gone crazy,” she whispered and adjusted her breast.

  “You’re not crazy,” said Adam. “Just a bit tense and frightened, that’s all.”

  “The tongue,” mumbled Johanne.

  “We don’t need to talk about that now. Relax.”

  “The fact that it was split.”

  “Shhhh.”

  “Liar,” she sniffed and looked up.

  “Liar?”

  “Not you, silly.”

  She whispered to the child before she met his eye again. “The split tongue can really only mean one thing. That someone thought that Fiona Helle was a liar.”

  “Well, we all tell a lie now and then,” Adam said and gently stroked the baby’s soft head with his finger. “Look, you can see the pulse in her fontanel!”

  “Someone believed that Fiona Helle was lying,” Johanne repeated. “That her lying was so blatant and brutal that she deserved to die.”

  Ragnhild let go of her mother’s nipple. Something that could easily be mistaken for a smile flitted across her face, and Adam knelt down and put his cheek against her damp cheek. The blister on her upper lip from sucking was pink and full of fluid. Her tiny eyelashes were nearly black.

  “It must have been some lie, in that case,” Adam mumbled. “A bigger lie than I could ever make up.”

  Ragnhild burped and then fell asleep.

  She would never have chosen this place herself.

  The others, notorious cheapskates, had suddenly decided to treat themselves to three weeks on the Riviera. What you were supposed to do on the Riviera in December was a mystery to her, but she said yes all the same. At least it would be a change.

  Her father had become unbearable since her mother died. Whining and complaining and clinging to her all the time. He smelled like an old man, which was due to a combination of dirty clothes and poor bladder control. His fingers, which scraped her back when he gave the most unwanted good-bye hugs, were now disgustingly thin. Obligation forced her to visit him once a month or so. The apartment in Sandaker had never been palatial, but now that her father was living on his own, it had really gone downhill. She had finally managed, after many letters, furious phone calls, and a lot of bother, to get him a home aide, but it didn’t help much. The underside of the toilet seat was still splattered with shit. The food in the fridge was still well past its sell-by date, and you couldn’t open the door without gagging. It was unbelievable that the local council could offer an old, loyal taxpayer nothing more than an unreliable girl who could scarcely turn on a washing machine.

  The idea of Christmas without her father tempted her, even though she was skeptical about traveling. Especially as the children were going too. It irritated her to no end that children today seemed to be allergic to any form of healthy food. “Don’t like, don’t like,” they kept on whining. A mantra before every meal. Not surprising they were skinny when they were little and then ballooned out when they hit their amorphous puberty, ravaged by modern eating disorders. The youngest, a girl of three or four, still had some charm. But the woman with the laptop was not particularly fond of her siblings.

  But the house was big, and the room they thought she should have was impressive. They had shown her the brochures with great enthusiasm. She suspected they were relying on her to pay more than her fair share of the rent. They knew that she had money, even though they had absolutely no idea how much.

  Truth be told, she had chosen not to keep in touch with most of her acquaintances. They scurried around in their small lives, making mountains out of molehills, problems that in no way would interest anyone but themselves. The red figures in her social accounts, which she had eventually decided it was necessary to draw up, screamed out at her. Sometimes, when she thought about it, she realized that she had really only met a handful of people of any merit.

  They wanted her to come with them, and she could not face another Christmas with her father.

  So she was standing at Gardemoen Airport, with her tickets in her hand, when her cell phone rang. The little one, the girl, had suddenly been admitted to the hospital.

  She was furious. Of course her friends couldn’t leave their little girl, but did they have to wait until three quarters of an hour before the flight was due to depart to tell her? After all, the child had fallen ill four hours earlier. But she still had a choice.

  She went.

  The others would still have to pay their share of the rent, she made that absolutely clear to them on the phone. She had actually found herself looking forward to spending three weeks with the people who she had, after all, known since she was a child.

  After nineteen days down there, the landlord had offered to let her stay until March. He hadn’t managed to find any tenants for the winter and didn’t want the house to be empty. Of course, it helped that the woman had straightened up and cleaned just before he came. He probably also noticed that only one of the beds had been used as he prowled from room to room, pretending to look at the electrical outlets.

  It was as easy to write on her laptop here as at home. And she had free accommodation.

  The Riviera was overrated.

  Villefranche was a fake town, existing only for tourists. In her opinion, any reality that might have been there had disappeared a long time ago; even the several-hundred-year-old castle by the sea looked as if it had been built from cardboard and plastic. When French taxi drivers can speak half-decent English, there has to be something seriously wrong with the place.

  It annoyed her immensely that the police had gotten nowhere.

  But then, it was a difficult case. And the Norwegian police had never been anything to boast about, provincial, weaponless eunuchs that they were.

  She, on the other hand, was an expert.

  The nights had closed in.

  Three

  Seventeen days had passed since Fiona Helle was murdered, and it was now February 6.

  Adam Stubo sat in his office in the dreariest part of Oslo’s east end, staring at the grains of sand running through an hourglass. The beautifully shaped object was unusually large. The stand was handmade. Adam had always thought it was made of oak, good old Norwegian woodw
ork that had darkened and aged over hundreds of years. But a visiting French criminologist, who had been there just before Christmas, had studied the antique with some interest. Mahogany, he declared, and shook his head when Adam told him that the instrument had been in his seafaring family for fourteen generations.

  “This,” the Frenchman said in perfect English, “this little curiosity was made sometime between 1880 and 1900. I doubt it has even been on board a ship. Many of them were made as ornaments for well-to-do people’s homes.”

  Then he shrugged his shoulders.

  “But by all means,” he added, “a pretty little thing.”

  Adam chose to believe in the family story rather than some Frenchman he barely knew. The hourglass had stood on his grandparents’ mantelpiece, out of reach of anyone under twenty-one. A treasured object that his father would turn over for his son every now and then, so he could watch the shiny grains of silver gray sand in the beautiful, hand-blown glass as they ran through a hole that his grandmother claimed was smaller than a strand of hair.

  The files that were piled up along the walls and on the desk on both sides of the hourglass told another, more tangible story. The story of Fiona Helle’s murder had a grotesque start but nothing that resembled an end. The hundreds of witness statements, the endless technical analyses, special reports, photographs, and tactical observations seemed to point in all directions but led nowhere.

  Adam could not remember another case like it, where they had absolutely nothing to go on.

  He was heading toward fifty. He had been on the police force since he was twenty-two. He had trudged the streets on the beat; hauled in down-and-outs and drunk drivers as a constable; considered joining the canine unit out of sheer curiosity; been extremely unhappy behind a desk in ØKOKRIM, the economic and environmental crime unit; and then finally ended up in the Criminal Investigation Service, by chance. It felt like a couple of lifetimes ago. Naturally, he couldn’t remember all his cases. He had given up trying to keep a mental record a long time ago. The murders were too numerous, the rapes too callous. The figures were meaningless after a while. But one thing was certain and irrefutable: sometimes everything went wrong. That’s just the way it was, and Adam Stubo didn’t waste time dwelling on his defeats.

  This was different.

  This time he hadn’t seen the victim. For once he hadn’t been involved from the start. He had limped into the case, disoriented and behind. But in a way that made him more alert. He thought differently from the others and noticed it most clearly in meetings, gatherings of increasing collective frustration, in which he generally kept his mouth shut.

  The others got bogged down in clues that weren’t really there. With care and precision, they tried to piece together a puzzle that would never be solved, simply because the police only found clear blue skies wherever they looked for dark, murky shadows. They had found a total of twenty-four fingerprints in Fiona Helle’s house, but there was nothing to indicate that any had been left by the murderer. An unexplained cigarette butt by the front door didn’t lead to anything either; according to the latest analyses, it was at least several weeks old. They might as well cross out the footprints in the snow with a thick red pen, as they couldn’t be linked to any other information about the killer. The blood at the scene of the crime gave no more clues either. The saliva traces on the table, hair on the carpet, and greasy, faint red lip marks on the wineglass told a very ordinary story of a woman sitting at her desk in peace and quiet, going through her weekly mail.

  “A phantom killer,” Sigmund Berli grinned from the doorway. “I can’t believe I’m starting to believe the grumblings of the Romerike guys, that it’s a suicide.”

  “Impressive,” Adam smiled back. “First she half strangles herself, then she cuts out her tongue, before sitting down nicely to die from blood loss. But before she dies, she musters up enough energy to wrap the tongue up in a beautiful red paper package. If nothing else, it’s original. How’s it all going, by the way? Working with them, I mean?”

  “The guys from Romerike are nice enough. Big district, you know. Of course they like to throw their weight around a bit. But they seem to be pretty happy that we’re involved in the case.”

  Sigmund Berli sat down on the spare chair and pulled it closer to the desk.

  “Snorre’s been selected for a big ice-hockey tournament for ten-year-olds this weekend,” he said and nodded meaningfully. “Only eight, and he’s being selected for the top team with the ten-year-olds!”

  “I didn’t think they ranked teams for such young age groups.”

  “That’s just some garbage the sports confederation has come up with. Can’t think like that, can you? The boy lives for ice hockey, twenty-four/seven—he slept with his skates on the other night. If they don’t learn the importance of competition now, they’ll just get left behind.”

  “Fair enough. He’s your child. I don’t think I’d—”

  “Where are we going?” Sigmund interrupted, casting his eye over all the files and piles of documents. “Where the hell are we going with this case?”

  Adam didn’t answer. Instead he picked up the hourglass, turned it over again, and tried to count the seconds. The sand took one minute and four seconds to run through the glass neck; he’d known that since he was a boy. A production flaw, he assumed, and said out loud, “Fifty-two. Fifty-three. Ahh, it’s finished. I always get it wrong.”

  He turned the hourglass yet again. “One. Two. Three.”

  “Adam, stop it. Are the sleepless nights getting to you, or what?”

  “No. Ragnhild’s great. Nine. Ten.”

  “Where are we going, Adam?” Sigmund’s voice was insistent now, and he leaned toward his colleague and continued, “There isn’t a single fucking clue. Not technical at least. Nor tactical, as far as I can tell. I went through all the statements yesterday, then again today. Fiona Helle was well liked. By most people. Nice lady, they say. A character. Lots of people reckon it was her complexity that made her so interesting. Well-read and interested in marginal cultural expression. But she also liked cartoons and loved Lord of the Rings.”

  “People who are as successful as Fiona Helle always have . . .” Adam tried to find the right word.

  “Enemies,” Sigmund suggested.

  “No. Not necessarily. But people who aren’t friends. There’s always someone who feels overshadowed by people like that. Outshone. And Fiona Helle shone brighter than most. But I still find it hard to believe that some NRK employee with ambitions of hosting a Saturday night show, who might feel that he or she has been wronged, would go to such drastic lengths as to . . .” He nodded at the board, where a poster-sized picture of a bare-breasted, open-legged Fiona Helle screamed at them.

  “I think the answer is possibly somewhere in here,” Adam said, pulling out a pile of letters that had been carefully placed in a red folder. “I picked out twenty letters. At random, basically. To get an impression of what kind of people wrote to Fiona Helle.”

  Sigmund furrowed his brow in response and picked up the letter that lay on top.

  “Dear Fiona,” he read out loud. “I am a 22-year-old girl from Hemnesberget. Three years ago I found out my dad was a sallor from Venezuela. My mom says he was a shit who just left never got in touch again . . .”

  Sigmund scratched his ear. “She can’t fucking write,” he muttered before continuing to read:

  “When he found out I was dew. But there is a lady here at the Coop says that Juan Maria was a nice man and it was my mom who wanted . . .”

  Sigmund inspected his fingertip. A small dirty-yellow lump seemed to fascinate him. He paused for several seconds before wiping it off on his pants.

  “Are they all as hopeless as this?” he asked.

  “I wouldn’t say it was hopeless,” Adam said. “After all, she’s shown some initiative. Just because she can’t spell and has bad grammar doesn’t mean that she can’t do her own detective work. She actually knows where her father lives. The letter is
a plea for On the Move with Fiona to take her quest one step further. The girl is terrified of being rejected and thinks there’s a greater chance that her father will accept her if it’s all on TV.”

  “Jesus,” exclaimed Sigmund and picked up another letter.

  “That one is of a completely different caliber,” Adam said while his colleague glanced down the page. “An eloquent dentist who’s approaching retirement. He was just a boy during the war and lived on the east side of Oslo. In 1945, he was sent to the country as a weedy, anemic orphan to be fattened up. There he met—”

  “Fiona Helle was playing with fire,” Sigmund interrupted, leafing through the other letters. “This is—”

  “People’s lives,” Adam said lightly and shrugged his shoulders. “Every single letter that woman received—and believe me, it wasn’t just a couple—told stories of loss and grief. Despair. But she’s also been criticized for it. The usual debate in the end. On the one side, intellectual snobs who patronizingly argued against the exploitation of the ignorant masses. And on the other side, the People”—he drew a capital P with his finger—“who thought that the snobs could just shut up and turn off the TV if they didn’t like what they saw.”

  “That’s a fair point,” Sigmund mumbled.

  “Both camps had valid points, but as usual the debate didn’t amount to much. Except shouting and screaming and of course even better ratings for the program. In Fiona Helle’s defense, it must be said that the vetting of people who eventually made it onto the show was extremely rigorous. There were three psychologists on the production team, and every guest had to go through a kind of screening. Quite thorough preparations, as far as I’m aware.”

  “But what about the ones who didn’t make it, then?”

  “Exactly. There are people out there who poured their lives into a letter to Fiona Helle. Many of them had never told their story to anyone before. It must’ve been very painful, then, to be rejected, as most people were. Especially as the production team didn’t have the capacity to answer them all. Some of the critics have also claimed”—Adam fished a matte aluminum cigar case out of his breast pocket. He opened it carefully, pulled out the cigar, and ran it under his nose—“that Fiona Helle became God,” he sniffed. “A God who answered the prayers of desperate people with silence.”