by Anne Holt
He went over to the window. He could feel the draft. He ran his finger around the window frame.
“Damn me if it’s not blowing straight through the wall,” he muttered. “We’ll have to get that fixed soon. Can’t be good for the kids.”
“A bit of draft just makes it cooler and fresher indoors,” Johanne said and waved her hand. “Go on.”
“No . . .” He pulled and fiddled with the old-fashioned insulation tape that was about to fall off.
“I just can’t believe that Bernt is a liar,” he said slowly and turned to face her again. “The guy’s behavior has been fine throughout the investigation. Even though he’s no doubt sick and tired of our constant questions that never seem to come to anything, he always answers and does what we want him to. He answers the phone, he comes in when we ask him to, he seems to be well-adjusted and intelligent. So I’m sure he would have understood that information like that would be relevant for us. Wouldn’t he?”
Johanne wrinkled her nose.
“Um, yes,” she said. “He probably would. I think we can at least assume that the child wasn’t born after they became a couple. Gossip is rife in small towns. They married quite quickly too, and I can’t imagine that a normal, if very young, couple would have any reason to hide a pregnancy. In fact, I think the answer to this mystery is simple. It must have been a very unwanted pregnancy, when she was very young.”
“Please don’t say it was incest,” Adam warned. “That’s all this case needs now.”
“Well, it certainly couldn’t have been Fiona’s father. He died when she was nine. And I think we can safely say that she wasn’t that young. But she must have been young enough to disappear or be sent away for a while without it causing a stir. Fiona was a teenager in”—she mouthed the numbers as she calculated—“at the end of the seventies,” she finished. “She was sixteen in seventy-eight.”
“That late,” Adam said, disappointed. “It wasn’t exactly a catastrophe to be a teenage mom then.”
“Huh,” exclaimed Johanne and rolled her eyes. “Typical man! I was terrified of getting pregnant before I was sixteen, and that was in the mid-eighties.”
“Sixteen,” Adam said. “Were you only sixteen—”
“Forget it,” Johanne swiftly interrupted. “Can we just concentrate on the case?”
“Yes, but sixteen . . .” He sat down and scratched Jack behind the ear. “Fiona didn’t go abroad,” he said. “Not for any length of time, anyway. I checked with Bernt. And I guess he would have known that. Even though not everyone I know likes to talk on and on about time spent studying abroad, I doubt that Fiona would have kept her mouth shut about—”
“Stop it,” Johanne said and leaned over to him.
She kissed him lightly.
“So, a child was born,” she continued. “It isn’t necessarily relevant to the investigation, but, on the other hand, it does bear an uncanny resemblance to her show—”
“That she hosted so successfully for several years, and that gave her such a high profile.”
“Adopted children and grieving mothers. Reunited or rejected. That sort of thing.”
Jack lifted his head and pricked one ear. The house groaned in the strong wind. The rain was hurled against the window from the south. Johanne bent down over Ragnhild and tucked the blanket more snugly around the child, who slept on undisturbed. The stereo clicked on and off by itself several times, and the main light above the table flickered.
Then everything went dark.
“Damn,” said Adam.
“Ragnhild,” said Johanne.
“Take it easy.”
“That’s why I went to see Yvonne Knutsen,” Johanne said in the dark. “She knows what happened. You can be sure of that.”
“Presumably,” Adam replied. His face was covered in great flickering shadows as he struck a match.
“Maybe that’s why she didn’t want to speak to me,” Johanne mused. “Maybe the child has turned up, maybe—”
“A lot of maybes there now,” Adam pointed out. “Hold on a minute.”
He finally managed to find a candle.
She followed him with her eyes. He was so lithe, despite his size. When he walked, he stepped heavily, as if he wanted to make a point of being so big. But as he crouched in front of the fireplace, tearing newspaper into strips, then reaching out for wood from the metal basket and building a fire, there was something light and easy about his movements, a fascinating softness in his solid body.
The flames licked the paper.
She clapped quietly and smiled.
“I’ll cheat a bit, just to be on the safe side,” he said and pushed in a couple of fire starters between the wood. “I’ll just go down to the cellar for some more wood. Power outages can last a while in weather like this. Where’s the flashlight?”
She pointed to the hall. He went out.
The flames crackled warmly and threw a golden red light into the living room. Johanne could already feel the heat on her face. Once again she tucked the blanket in around her daughter and was grateful that Kristiane was at Isak’s. She took the woolen blanket that was lying over the back of the sofa and wrapped it around her legs, then leaned back and shut her eyes.
Adam should talk to the doctor who was there at the birth. Or the midwife. They would both cite patient confidentiality but would give in in the end. They always did in cases like this.
It would take time though, Johanne realized.
If there was actually a living adult descendant of Fiona Helle, they might be getting close to something that resembled a clue. A pretty flimsy one, to be sure, and it might lead to nothing. He or she wouldn’t be the first child in history born out of wedlock and adopted into a loving family. Probably a perfectly normal twentysomething person—maybe a student, or a carpenter with a Volvo and two snotty children. Not a cold-blooded murderer with a need to avenge the rejection a quarter of a century earlier.
But when she died, Fiona’s tongue had been split and cut out.
The child was Fiona’s great lie.
Victoria Heinerback had been nailed to the wall.
Two women. Two cases.
An illegitimate child.
Johanne sat up suddenly. She was just about to nod off when a feeling of déjà vu ran through her again, the uncomfortable feeling that there was something important she couldn’t grasp. She lifted Jack closer and laid her face on the dog’s fur.
“Can we talk about something else?” she asked when Adam came back with his arms full of wood.
He put down the wood.
“Of course we can,” he said and kissed her on the head. “We can talk about whatever you want to. The fact that I want a new horse, for example.”
“New horse? I’ve said it a thousand times: no new horse.”
“We’ll see,” Adam laughed as he went into the kitchen. “Kristiane’s on my side. And I’m sure Ragnhild is too. And Jack. That’s four against one.”
Johanne wanted to respond to his laughter, but the feeling of unease still clung to her body, the remnants of a fleeting premonition of danger.
“Forget it,” she said. “You can just forget the horse.”
Eight
The storm had died down. The wind was still blowing strong, but the clouds had opened to reveal light blue stripes to the south. Old, dirty snow lay compacted and rotting in gardens and by the roadside after the rain. Johanne tried to avoid the worst puddles as she maneuvered the carriage on the narrow pavement along Maridalsveien. Heavy traffic and buses thundered past. She didn’t like it, so she crossed the road at Badebakken to cut down to the Aker River. Jack was pulling at the leash and wanted to sniff at everything.
The temperature was dropping, and snow was forecast for the evening. Johanne stopped and tightened her scarf, then kept going. Her nose was freezing. She sniffed. She should have put a hat on. At least Ragnhild was warm enough, snug in her Baby Grobag with a sheep fleece under her and extra woolen blankets on top. When Johanne gentl
y pulled back the edge of the bag, she could only just see her little face tightly tucked in. Her pacifier was pulsing, and Johanne could tell from the movements behind the thin, fine eyelids that Ragnhild was dreaming.
She sat down on a bench just by the day care at Heftyeløkka and let Jack off the leash. He shot off down to the river and barked at the ducks, which paid no attention to him. They just swam around in the open channels in the ice. The King of America whimpered and barked and stuck an adventurous paw into the water.
“Stop it,” she muttered, scared of waking Ragnhild.
The cold wind ripped through her duffel coat, but she liked sitting here, on her own, rocking the carriage, back and forth, back and forth with one hand. It was Tuesday, February 17. She could make the call at midday. In eight minutes, she discovered when she looked at her cell phone. Fiona Helle’s best friend had said that she would be back in the office by then. She seemed puzzled but happy to talk. Johanne had not introduced herself as a policewoman, but her choice of words may have given Sara Brubakk the impression that her inquiry was of an official nature.
Not good.
It wasn’t like her. In fact, she wanted to pull out of the case, or at least not get in any deeper, and certainly not use methods that verged on the unethical.
Johanne blew her nose. She was getting a cold, as expected.
There were no people around. Then a jogger came puffing by in a cloud of condensation. He nodded and smiled, but then jumped when Jack came tearing out of some bushes and snapped at his heels.
“Keep your dog on a leash,” he shouted and raced on.
“Come here, Jack.”
He wagged his tail as she tied him to the carriage. Then he lay down.
It was twelve o’clock. She dialed the number.
“Hi, this is Johanne Vik,” she started. “We spoke earlier this morning and . . .”
“Oh yes, hello again. Just a minute while I sit down. I’ve just got in the door and—”
Scraping. Scratching. A bang.
“Hello?”
“I’m still here,” Johanne confirmed.
“There. I’m ready. Now, how can I help you?”
“I’ve just got a couple of questions about Fiona Helle’s time in high school. You were in her class, weren’t you?”
“Yes. As I said when I was questioned, Fiona and I were at school together from elementary school on. We were inseparable. Always friends. It’s just been so awful since . . . I couldn’t face coming back to work until a week ago, in fact. I got bereavement leave. My boss is so—”
“I understand,” Johanne assured her. “And I definitely won’t keep you long. I just wanted to find out if Fiona was ever . . . away from school? For a long period of time, I mean.”
“Away from school—”
“Yes. Not just for a few days because she had a cold, I mean, something longer.”
“She was away at Modum Bad in our first year. For quite a while.”
“Sorry?” Johanne wasn’t cold anymore. She switched the phone to her right hand and asked again. “Excuse me, what did you just say?”
“Fiona had some kind of nervous breakdown, I think. It was never really talked about. We were about to go back to school after the summer break. I remember I’d been in France all summer with my family, so I was really looking forward to seeing Fiona again. We . . . She didn’t come. She was in the hospital.”
“At Modum Bad?”
“Well . . . to tell the truth, I’m not sure. I’ve always just presumed it was Modum Bad because I didn’t know of anywhere else you could go for that sort of thing. Breakdowns, I mean.”
“How do you know it was a breakdown?”
Silence.
More scraping, not as loud this time.
“Now that you ask,” Sara Brubakk said slowly, “I’m actually not sure about any of it. Except that she wasn’t there. For a long time. I seem to remember that she wasn’t back until after Christmas. Or no . . . she came back just before. We always had a school show and started rehearsals at the beginning of December.”
“School show? Right after a nervous breakdown?”
Jack growled at an overconfident drake. It puffed out its feathers and tried to take a piece of bread that was only a couple of yards from the dog’s snout.
“Quiet,” Johanne said.
“Excuse me?”
“Sorry. I’m talking to the dog. So, did Fiona take part? Did she tell you why she’d been away?”
“Yes. Well, not . . . Oh, it was all so long ago.”
Her voice sounded slightly apologetic. But it also sounded as if she really wanted to help.
“Like I said, we were best friends. Talked about everything and anything, like best friends do. But I remember that I was a bit put out, hurt, that Fiona didn’t really want to tell me where she’d been and what was actually wrong with her. That I’m sure about. I remember my mother said I should just let it lie. That kind of . . . sickness was never easy.”
“But Modum Bad and the nervous breakdown could easily be your own conclusions, not necessarily something you know or are certain about,” Johanne summarized.
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
“Could you just give me an idea of what she was like when she came back?”
“No . . . what she was like? Just normal, really. Like before. I hadn’t seen her for, well . . . five months, it must have been. From midsummer until the end of November. And at that age you grow up so fast. But we were best friends. Still, I should say.”
A group from the day care walked by, two by two, hand in hand, waddling down the path in their oversized winter clothes. A little boy with his hat down over his eyes and a snotty nose was crying. A woman took him by the arm and called, “Not far to go now, children. Come along!”
“Do you think she might have been pregnant?” asked Johanne.
“Pregnant? Pregnant?” Sara Brubakk laughed lightly. “No, you can forget that. Goodness, time showed that it was extremely difficult for her to get pregnant at all. You know that Fiorella was a test-tube baby?”
Johanne didn’t know. In fact, there was a bit too much about Fiona Helle’s life that hadn’t found its way into the NCIS investigation files.
“In any case,” Sara Brubakk added, “I’m a hundred percent certain that Fiona would’ve told me if it was anything like that. We were like two peas in a pod. Pregnant? No, never.”
“But you didn’t see her for five months,” Johanne argued.
“No. But pregnant? Absolutely not.”
“Okay. Well, thank you very much for your time.”
“Was that all?”
“For the moment, yes. Thank you.”
“Are you getting anywhere with the case?”
“We generally manage to solve them,” Johanne said evasively. “It just takes time. I realize that it must be very difficult for you all. Family and friends.”
“Yes. Just give me a call if there’s anything else I can do. I am more than willing to help.”
“Thank you, I understand. Good-bye.”
The line of children had turned into Mor Go’hjertasvei and disappeared between the apartment buildings. The ducks had settled down. They were sitting in groups on the ice, their legs underneath them and their beaks tucked into the heat of their breast feathers.
Johanne started to wander up the path along the river.
“For a long time there were no secrets in this case,” she thought to herself. Jack lollopped obediently along beside her. “It was remarkably free of hate and secrets. But then they popped up. As they always do, in all cases, after all murders. Lies. Half-truths. Veiled facts and forgotten, hidden stories.”
Ragnhild started to cry. Johanne looked into the carriage. Her toothless gums were bared in a furious howl. Her mother filled the gaping hole with the pacifier. All was quiet.
She had pondered it for a long time. Why both cases, Fiona’s and Victoria’s, were so strangely free of contradictions and underlying conflicts.
<
br /> She picked up speed. The wind was bitter and biting. Ragnhild would fully wake up soon. They had to get home.
“Maternal rejection has ended in murder before this,” she mused as she struggled with the curb in Bergensgate. “But why nearly twenty-six years later? Had the child, now an adult, only just found out the truth? Could the revelation of a past betrayal have stirred such hate? Could it be the driving force behind a murder like this, a gruesome, symbolic execution? Or . . .”
She stopped. Jack looked at her in surprise, with his tongue hanging out of his slavering mouth. A bus drove past. The exhaust made Johanne cough and turn away.
Maybe the rejection wasn’t that long ago.
The thought had struck her the night before, when Adam warned her against unfounded speculation. Maybe Fiona Helle’s secret child had only recently traced his or her biological mother. Ironic, she thought to herself, if Fiona herself had become an object of desire, like those she had exploited for entertainment, on which she had built her career. “Don’t speculate. Adam was right. This is too vague. And if the child really does exist, what the hell would that person have to do with Victoria Heinerback?” she asked herself aloud and then shook her head.
It had to be two murderers.
Or maybe not.
Yes, two. Or one.
“I’ve got to stop,” she thought. “This is crazy. Unprofessional. A profiler uses sophisticated data programs. Works in a team. Has access to archives and know-how. I am not a profiler. I’m an ordinary woman out walking with her baby and dog. But there’s something, there’s something that . . .”
She started to run. Ragnhild was screaming in the carriage, which rattled and shook and nearly turned over when Johanne slid on some ice as she turned the corner into Haugesvei.
