by Anne Holt
She grabbed a mineral water, opened it, and drank straight from the bottle.
“Perineal rupture,” she said to herself as she sat down at the table again and looked through the final postmortem report in the Fiona Helle case.
A rupture was some kind of tear or another.
“Periscope,” she mumbled, chewing her pencil. “Periphery. Peri . . .”
She slapped her forehead lightly. A good thing she hadn’t asked anyone. It was embarrassing for a grown woman not to know what it meant immediately. Even though both her children had been born by cesarean, Johanne had plenty of friends who had described the problem to her in great detail.
Little Fiorella had left her mark.
Okay.
She lay the document to one side and focused on the reconstruction report. It told her nothing that she didn’t know already. She kept on leafing through the papers impatiently. As the case had already generated several hundred, if not more than a thousand, documents, she obviously didn’t have access to them all.
Adam selected and prioritized. She read.
Without finding anything.
The papers contained nothing but endless repetitions, a round dance of the obvious. No secrets were uncovered. There were no contradictions, nothing surprising, nothing to spend more time on in the hope of seeing things from another angle.
Exasperated, she slapped the covers together.
She had to learn to say no more often.
Like when her mother called earlier in the day and invited the whole family to lunch next Sunday. With Isak, of course.
It had been nearly six years since their divorce. Although she often worried and was irritated by Isak’s lenience with regard to Kristiane, with no set bedtimes and fast food and candy on weekdays, it made her genuinely happy to see them together. Kristiane and Isak had the same physical build and were on the same wavelength, even though the girl suffered from an inexplicable handicap that had never been diagnosed. She found it harder to accept that her ex-husband still spent time with her parents. More time than she did, if she was honest.
That hurt, and she blamed him for her shame.
“Get a grip!”
Without knowing why, she pulled out the post-mortem report again.
Strangulation, it stated.
She already knew the cause of death.
The tongue was described in clinical terms.
Nothing new there.
Abrasions on both wrists. No sign of sexual trauma. Blood type A. A tumor in her mouth, on the left cheek, about the size of a pea and benign. Scars, in several places. All old. From an operation on the shoulder, the removal of four moles, and a cesarean. And a five-pointed, relatively big but almost invisible mark on her right upper arm. Probably a cut from way back. One earlobe was inflamed. The nail on her left index finger was blue and had been about to come off at the time of death.
The report, for all its precise details, still told her nothing. She was just left with the vague feeling that there was something important there, something that had caught her eye, the impression that something didn’t add up.
Her concentration was failing. She was annoyed with Isak, with her mother, by their friendship.
A waste of energy. Isak was Isak. Her mother was the same as she had always been: scared of conflict, hard to understand, and extremely loyal to those she cared for.
“Stop letting it bother you,” Johanne thought, exhausted, but couldn’t stop all the same.
“Focus,” she said out loud to herself. “You have to fo—”
There.
Her finger stopped at the bottom of the page.
It didn’t make sense.
She swallowed, then lifted her hand to go through the report, furiously looking for something that she had just read in passing. She noticed that her hand was shaking. Her pulse was racing, and she was breathing through her mouth.
There.
She was right. It couldn’t be right. She grabbed the phone and discovered that her hand was sweaty.
On the other side of Oslo, Adam Stubo was babysitting his grandson, who was nearly six. The boy was asleep on his grandfather’s lap. Adam buried his nose in the boy’s dark hair. The smell of baby soap was soft and warm. The boy should really be in bed. His father was an easygoing, flexible sort of guy, but he was adamant that the boy should sleep on his own. But Adam couldn’t resist his round, dark eyes. He had smuggled one of Ragnhild’s bottles from home. The look on Amund’s face when he realized that he was going to be allowed to sit on his grandfather’s knee with a bottle was priceless.
Strangely enough, the boy had never been jealous of Kristiane. Quite the contrary, he was fascinated by the strange girl who was four years older than he was. But it was very different when he was told that his grandfather was going to be a daddy again. He had clearly decided to ignore Ragnhild’s arrival three weeks ago.
The telephone rang.
Amund didn’t wake up. His grip on the baby bottle loosened when Adam carefully leaned over to the table to answer the phone.
“Hello,” he said quietly, holding the telephone between his chin and shoulder as he reached for the remote control.
“Hello, my dear. Are you boys having a good time?”
He smiled. The eagerness in her voice gave her away.
“Yep. We’ve had a great time. Played a silly card game and made some Lego houses. But that’s not why you called.”
“I won’t keep you long if you’re—”
“Amund’s asleep. I’ve got all the time in the world.”
“Could you . . . tomorrow, or as soon as possible, could you check a couple of things for me?”
“Of course.”
He pressed the wrong button on the remote control. The newscaster shouted out that four American soldiers had been killed in Basra before Adam managed to find the right button. Amund grunted and buried his head in his grandfather’s arm.
“I’ve been sitting a while . . . hang on a second.”
“I’ll be quick,” she insisted. “You have to get me Fiona Helle’s medical records, about Fiorella’s birth. From when her daughter was born.”
“Okay,” he said. “Why exactly?”
“I don’t like talking about this kind of thing on the phone,” Johanne said with some hesitation. “You either have to come home from Bjarne and Randi’s first thing tomorrow morning so we can talk, or—”
“I won’t have time. I promised Amund I’d take him to day care.”
“Trust me then. It might be important.”
“I always trust you.”
“And with good reason.” Her laughter rattled down the phone line.
“What about the other thing?” he said. “You wanted me to do two things?”
“You have to let me . . . from the papers it’s clear that Fiona’s mother is very ill, and—”
“Yes, I questioned her myself. MS. Sharp as a tack upstairs, but wasting away otherwise.”
“So she was all there?”
“As far as I know, the brain is not affected by multiple sclerosis,” he said.
“Don’t be like that!”
Amund stuck his thumb in his mouth and turned in toward Adam again.
“I’m not like that,” he said and smiled. “I’m just teasing you.”
“I need to talk to her.”
“You?”
“I’m working for you, Adam.”
“Very unofficially and without any form of recognition. It’s bad enough that I have to sneak around with the documents. The boss has given a kind of silent consent to that. But I can’t really give you—”
“But surely no one can prevent me from visiting an old lady in a nursing home as a private individual?” she said.
“Why are you asking me then?”
“Ragnhild. I don’t think it would be a good idea to take her with me. Is there any chance of you coming home early tomorrow?”
“Early,” he repeated. “What’s that?”
“One, two?”
“I might be able to tear myself away around half past two. Would that be okay?”
“It’ll have to be. Thank you.”
“Are you sure you can’t tell me anything? I have to admit I’m dying of curiosity now.”
“And I’m dying to tell you,” she said and took a drink of something. Her voice almost vanished. “But it was you who taught me to be careful on the phone.”
“I’ll have to contain myself then. Until tomorrow.”
“Now put Amund to bed,” she said.
“He is in bed,” he said, crestfallen.
“He’s not, he’s sleeping in your lap with Ragnhild’s baby bottle.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Put the boy to bed, Adam. And sleep well. You’re the best in the world.”
“You are—”
“Wait. If you get time, could you check one more thing? Could you try to find out whether Fiona was away from school for any long periods of time while she was in high school?”
“What?”
“If she went on an exchange or something like that. Language course, or a long-lasting illness, or if she visited an aunt in Australia, for that matter. It should be easy enough to find out.”
“You can ask her mother,” he sighed, “as you’re going to see her anyway. She’s probably the best one to ask.”
“I’m not sure that she’d answer. Ask the husband. Or an old friend or someone. Will you do it?”
“Yes, yes. Go to bed.”
“Good night, darling.”
“I mean it. Go to bed. Don’t sit up reading those documents. They’re not going to run away. Good night.”
He put down the receiver and got up as carefully as he could from the overly soft sofa. He struggled to get his balance and hugged Amund too tight. The boy whimpered but continued to lie in his arms like a rag doll.
“I don’t know why everyone assumes that I spoil you,” Adam whispered. “I just don’t understand it.”
He carried the boy into the guest room, put him down in the middle of the bed, undressed quietly, put on his own pajamas, and lay down with his back to the child.
“Gramps,” the boy murmured in his sleep. A hand stroked Adam’s neck.
They slept soundly for nine hours, and Adam got to work nearly an hour late.
Trond Arnesen had made sure that the lights by the gate and in the porch were both working before he moved back into the small house that he would now inherit. His brother had offered to stay with him for the first few days. Trond said no. He didn’t want to make the transition to a life alone in stages. It was his home, even if he’d only moved in a couple of months ago. Victoria was quite old-fashioned and had not agreed to living together until a date had been set for the wedding.
He tried to avoid the windows. He drew the curtains before it got really dark. The gaps were threatening, black strips of emptiness.
The TV flickered but there was no sound. Victoria had bought him a forty-two-inch plasma screen for his birthday. She was far too generous, and they couldn’t afford it after all the work they’d done on the house. “So you can watch football,” she had smiled, opening an expensive bottle of champagne. He turned thirty that day, and they had decided to make babies in the fall.
He didn’t feel like watching TV, he was far too restless, but the silent people on the screen were a friendly presence. He had wandered from room to room for several hours now, sat down, touched some object or other, got up, moved on, anxious about what he might find behind the next door. He felt safe in the bathroom. It had no windows and was warm, and at around six o’clock, he had locked the door and stayed in there for about an hour. In desperation, he had taken a bath, as if he had to legitimize his need to feel secure in a house that he, at that precise moment, half past ten on Monday, February 16, did not think he would be able to live in.
He heard a noise from outside.
It came from the back of the house, he thought, from the slope going down to the small stream, fifty yards behind the garden, where a picket fence marked the boundary to an abandoned scrap yard.
He froze, listening.
The silence was overwhelming. He couldn’t even hear the usual clicking of the thermostat on the heater under the window.
Just his imagination, no doubt.
“You’re a grown man,” he thought to himself in irritation and took down a random book from the shelf.
He looked at the title page. An author he’d never heard of. Must be new. He put it back, horizontally across the top of the other books. It struck him that that kind of thing always annoyed Victoria, so he took it out again to put it back properly between two books.
The noise had sounded like something breaking; now he heard it again.
His brother had always called him a coward. That wasn’t true. Trond Arnesen wasn’t a coward, he was just cautious. If his brother (younger than him by fifteen months) had climbed past him on trees, it was simply because common sense told him that to climb any further was stupid. When his brother was seven and jumped from the roof of a twelve-foot-high garage with a parachute made from a sheet and four bits of rope, Trond stood on the ground and advised him not to do it. His brother broke his leg.
Trond was not a coward. He always assessed the consequences.
The fear that gripped him now had nothing to do with the future. The unfamiliar taste of iron clung to his tongue, which immediately felt dry and too big. When the fear reached his eardrums, he had to shake his head if he wanted to hear anything other than the blood pumping through his body.
He looked quickly around the room.
Victoria’s furniture.
Victoria’s things here and there. A copy of Her magazine with a Post-it to mark an article about young families struggling to find enough time to get everything done. A steel and plastic lighter he had given her for Christmas to show that she didn’t need to hide her cigarettes from him anymore.
Victoria’s things.
His home.
He was no coward. Although the sound had come from behind the house, he now ran toward the front door without even looking out the living room window to check if it was an animal, a confused elk or one of the many skinny feral cats.
Without a moment’s hesitation, he pulled open the front door.
“Hello,” said an obviously startled Rudolf Fjord. “Hello, Trond.”
He was standing with his foot on the first step up to the porch.
“Hi,” he said again, pathetically.
“You idiot,” hissed Trond. “What the hell do you think you’re doing sneaking around in the garden like that? What the fuck are you—”
“I just wanted to see if anyone was home,” Rudolf Fjord said. His voice was louder now but still feeble, as if he was trying to pull himself together without succeeding. “May I offer my condolences.”
Trond Arnesen threw out his hands and went forward onto the steps.
“Condolences? You’ve come here at”—with a swift movement he pulled up his left sleeve. His diving watch had still not reappeared—“It’s pretty late on a Monday night,” he continued furiously, “to give your condolences. Again! You’ve already done it! What the hell . . . You frightened . . . Just go!”
“Okay, okay, calm down.”
Rudolf Fjord had managed to pull himself together. He put out his hand in a conciliatory gesture, but Trond showed no signs of taking it.
“I was just checking whether you were at home,” Rudolf tried again. “I didn’t want to disturb you if you were already asleep. That’s why I went around the house. But you’ve blacked out all the windows, so it was only when I saw a sliver of light from the living room that I knew you were at home. I was just about to ring the bell when—”
“What do you want? What the hell do you want, Rudolf?”
Trond had never really liked Victoria’s colleague. Nor had she. The few times he’d asked her about the man, she got a stern look on her face and said that he wasn’t to be tr
usted. She wouldn’t say anymore. Trond didn’t know whether Rudolf Fjord was trustworthy or not, but he didn’t like the way the guy treated women. Trond thought he was good-looking, tall, well-built with a prominent chin and rather intense blue eyes, but Rudolf used women. Exploited them.
“Like I said, I just wanted—”
“I’ll give you one more chance.” Trond was shouting now. “People don’t turn up to give their condolences in the middle of the night. You’re not fooling me. What do you want?”
“I’d also thought,” Rudolf Fjord started and then looked as if he was literally trying to catch a word on the tip of his tongue. His eyes darted aimlessly around the garden. “I just thought I would ask you if I could look for some important papers Victoria took home with her from the office. She was going to bring them back on that Monday, the one after she was murdered, that is. I think—”
“For God’s sake!”
Trond Arnesen was laughing now, a loud, joyless laughter.
“Are you completely . . . stupid? Are you soft in the head or what?”
He laughed again in desperation.
“The police have taken all the papers. Are you . . . Don’t you understand anything? Do you have no idea about what happens when someone is murdered? Hmm?”
He took a step forward and remained standing at the top of the steps. He covered his ears with his hands, as if trying to block out a catastrophe. Then he lowered his arms, took a deep breath, and said, “Talk to the police. Good night.”
He went back into the house and was just about to shut the door when Rudolf Fjord leaped up the steps. He put his foot in the door to stop it from closing, his lower leg caught between the door and the frame. Trond stared at it. He was surprised by his own outburst of rage when he slammed the door shut with all his might.
“Ow, shit, Trond! Ow. Listen . . . listen . . . ow!”
“Move your foot,” Trond said and let go of the door for a moment.
“My laptop,” Rudolf said and stuck his leg in the door a bit further. “And . . . and . . .”
