by Anne Holt
When she finally got home, she locked the door and put on the security chain before taking off her coat and boots.
Trond Arnesen couldn’t sleep. It was two o’clock on Wednesday morning. He had been up a couple of times to get water. His mouth felt like sandpaper, but he didn’t know why. There was nothing on TV. At least nothing that caught his interest, or stopped him from worrying, or gave him a few minutes’ respite from his brain that was churning things over and over and keeping sleep at bay.
He gave up. Got up for the fourth time. Got dressed.
He thought he would take a walk, get some air.
The snow had started to fall at around eight. It lay like a clean, light blanket over the ground, over the rotting leaves and winter remains, dirty gray snow banks and sludgy roads. The gravel crunched under his feet, and the gate squealed when he opened it. He walked aimlessly up the hill, as if lured by the streetlight.
There was no way he could tell the truth.
He couldn’t even have told the truth right away, at the time, when he still had a chance, in that sweaty room with the policeman who looked like he was about to burst out laughing.
It had definitely been the last time that Friday, and it had been so easy to forget.
Then Bård came.
Idiot.
Trond thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his down jacket. He walked fast. There was no else around at this time of night, and people had gone to bed hours ago in the dark houses along the road. A cat darted across the road, stopped for a moment, and stared at him with yellow, luminescent eyes before disappearing between the trees on the other side.
He missed Victoria. There was a vacuum behind his ribs, a longing that he couldn’t remember ever having felt before, but it was like missing his mom when he went to camp as a boy.
Victoria was so strong. She would have figured things out.
The tears left frozen tracks on his cheeks.
He sniffed, blew his nose in his fingers, and then stood still. This was where the taxi had stopped for him to throw up. He prodded the snowdrift with the toes of his boots. It was lighter up here, with streetlights every five yards or so. The snow shimmered like blue white diamonds when he kicked it.
His watch suddenly appeared.
Puzzled, he bent down.
It was his watch. He blew on it and shook off the snow, held it up to his eyes. Ten past three. The second hand ticked loyally on, and the date showed the 18th.
When he put the watch on, the plastic burned ice-cold against his skin.
He was glad and smiled. The watch reminded him of Victoria, and he put his hand around the black watchband and squeezed it.
He should tell them.
He’d made such a fuss about the diving watch that he should let Adam Stubo know that he’d found it. Trond had simply been mistaken. He hadn’t left it at home but had worn it to the party, and it’d fallen off when he was bent double, puking up his guts.
The policeman might have moved heaven and earth to try and find the watch. And Trond didn’t want heaven and earth to be moved. He wanted peace and quiet, and to have as little as possible to do with the police.
He could send a text message. That was the solution. Stubo had given him his number and assured him that he could call whenever he wanted. Texting would be safest. It was ordinary and undramatic, the modern way to communicate trivial messages and minor events.
Found my watch. Had dropped it in the snow. Sorry about the fuss! Trond Arnesen.
There, it was done. He turned around. Couldn’t wander the streets all night. Maybe he could find a DVD to kill time. He could take one of Victoria’s sleeping pills. He’d never tried one before. It would probably knock him out completely. The idea was very appealing.
He didn’t care about the book that had disappeared. Rudolf Fjord could buy a new copy.
“Adam.”
She prodded him.
“Hmmm.”
“I’m scared.”
“Don’t be scared. Go to sleep.”
“I can’t.”
He gave a demonstrative sigh and pulled the pillow down over his face.
“We have to sleep sometime,” was Adam’s muffled response. “Every now and then.”
He peeped out from behind the pillow and yawned.
“What are you frightened of now?”
“I woke up because your phone was beeping and then—”
“Did my phone ring? Crap, I should’ve . . .”
His hands fumbled around trying to find the light switch on the bedside table. He knocked over a glass of water.
“Shit,” he groaned. “Where . . . ?”
The light exploded in his face. He squinted and sat up in bed.
“It didn’t ring,” Johanne explained quickly. “Just beeped. And then—”
“Jesus,” he mumbled. “Great time to send a text. Poor boy. Guess he can’t sleep either. Seems a bit pathetic, to tell the truth.”
“Who?”
“Trond Arnesen. Forget it. Nothing important.”
He got out of bed and pulled on his boxer shorts.
“It’s good that you’ve finally agreed to let Ragnhild sleep in her own bed. Otherwise we’d all be going around like zombies. As if we don’t already.”
“Don’t be angry. Where are you going?”
“Water,” he grumbled and pointed. “Have to get a towel.”
“Just leave it. It’s only water.”
He hesitated for a moment. Then he shrugged his shoulders and crept back under the duvet. He turned down the light and held out an arm toward Johanne. She snuggled up to him.
“What are you frightened of?” he asked again. “Ragnhild’s just fine.”
“It’s not that. It’s these cases—”
“I knew it,” he sighed and made himself more comfortable.
The light still hurt his eyes.
“Should never have gotten you involved in this mess. I’m an idiot. Can I turn off the light?”
“Mmm. I just don’t think you’ve got much time.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said.”
“We all know that time is our worst enemy,” he said and gave a long yawn. “But then again, as we haven’t even found one hot lead, it’s better to be painstaking. Turn over stone after stone.”
“But what if—”
He suddenly pulled himself away and sat up.
“It’s nearly three in the morning,” he groaned. “I want to sleep! Can’t we leave this until the morning?”
“What if the murderer was only out to get one of the victims?” she said slowly. “If, for example, it was Fiona he wanted to get, and then Victoria was killed to camouflage his real motive.”
“Hello,” Adam exclaimed and filled his cheeks with air. “We’re living in Norway. Camouflage killings! Have you ever even heard about that sort of thing?”
“Yes, lots of times.”
“But not here!”
His hands hit the duvet with a dull thud.
“Not in the tiny kingdom of Norway, where people generally kill each other with knives in drunken brawls! And in any case, one more murder is a pretty pathetic camouflage, I must say! But now we have to go to sleep!”
“Shhh,” she whispered.
“I will talk as loud as I like.”
“I agree that one killing is a poor camouflage. But that’s why you don’t have much time.”
He stood up abruptly. The floorboards creaked under his weight. The water spilled even more, and he swore under his breath. The glass rolled slowly under the bed. He pulled off the duvet and walked toward the door.
“You seem to get by on remarkably little sleep,” he snapped. She could have sworn that his voice trembled, as if he was holding back tears. “But I can’t. If you’re frightened . . .”
His shoulders sank. He struggled with the bedclothes. Then he took a deep breath and continued, “You can wake me, of course. But then you have to be really frightened. Abso
lutely terrified. Since Kristiane is at her father’s, I’m going to sleep in her bed. Good night.”
The door slammed, and Ragnhild started to cry.
“No,” she heard a groan from the hall. “Dear God, noooooo!”
Vegard Krogh had never liked the woods that he had to go through to get to his mother’s house. When he was little, he never dared to take the path unless it was broad daylight, and then preferably with someone else. There was a story that a ghost lived there. Supposedly the place had once been a graveyard. It had been leveled in the eighteenth century, with no respect for the dead. The poltergeists were taking their revenge—that was what the children in the neighborhood said—and would hound anyone who dared to go into the woods after dark.
Total crap, of course, and Vegard Krogh couldn’t be bothered to walk all the way around. It was late in the evening on Thursday, February 19. The snow that had fallen over the past couple of days still lay on the bare branches and covered the ground in a thin blanket between the trees, and thankfully gave off some light. He could at least see his feet in front of him.
He was carrying two desirable designer bags. His mother had lent him fifteen thousand krone without any hesitation and without the usual complaints that he was grown up now and a married man, so he had to figure out his own finances. Quite the opposite—she had handed him the money with a twinkle in her eye. In return, he had promised to spend a couple of evenings with her. Which was easy enough, with good food on the table and free wine in his glass.
Fifteen thousand didn’t go far. But he was happy. When he was writing his daily blog entry, he was tempted to say something about the invitation. But he didn’t. Discretion, he thought to himself, and stuck to giving an account of his shopping trip. It was an ironic epistle about shops where there were only five garments and two assistants who seemed so bored with life that they might at any moment put guns to their heads.
The most important readers would perhaps understand why he, who normally only wore jeans and hooded sweatshirts, had suddenly spent a fortune at Kamikaze and Ferner Jacobsen, the shops where he had eventually found something that he believed was both casual and sharp.
He had released three of the essays from Bungee Jump on his Web site. He hadn’t asked the publishers about it. They didn’t make any effort to get the material distributed anyway, so what did it matter? He’d release another two tomorrow morning. People had devoured them. It was only a couple of hours before the first discussions started. The piece about established popular culture, in particular, had generated debate. He used the milk carton as a metaphor for the welfare state’s excessive mass production. They tasted of nothing, were of no benefit to anyone, were to be found everywhere in easily recognizable branded packaging, and were politically correctly recycled ad nauseam. The essay was called “Skimmed Culture,” and once he added a link on Dagbladet’s literature pages, things really took off.
Vegard Krogh walked with a light step. His new boots fit him like a glove. The solid soles meant that it was no problem to walk on the muddy path.
Maybe he should do a bit more to get a freelance contract with NRK television. Big Studio was not exactly his thing. Too fluffy, obviously, and far too superficial. But the show was fast and at times could be quite hard-hitting and urban, and Anne Lindmo was a babe.
He would push harder for the job.
Soon he would be out of the woods. He just needed to go around the corner, over the crest of the hill where he had once built a tree house in an old oak tree, and then he would be at his old childhood home by the edge of the woods. His mother had promised to make him food, even if he was late.
Someone was walking behind him. Fear constricted his throat; he recognized the terror he had felt as a boy, when he ran through the woods, out of breath, with ghosts at his heels.
He turned around slowly. He noticed he was gripping his bags even harder, as if the worst thing that could happen to him was to be robbed of his new clothes.
He realized now that the person wasn’t behind him. The person emerged from the woods, from between the trees, where there was no path, leaving a necklace of black, uneven footsteps in the new snow. It was difficult to see anything other than the outline of the body. Vegard Krogh was nearly blinded by the beam from a powerful flashlight.
Unusual outfit, he noticed.
A white coverall.
It rustled quietly.
His fear receded somewhat.
“God damn it,” Vegard Krogh said, holding up his arm to shield his eyes from the bright light. “You’ll scare people sneaking around like that.”
The flashlight was lowered and turned; now it lit up the other person’s face—from below, like the big boys had done when they tried to frighten the younger kids on those dusky summer nights, when they dared each other to make a terrifying dash over the living dead.
“You?” Vegard Krogh said in surprise and irritation; he squinted and looked at the face more closely. “You? Is this . . . ?”
He leaned forward, furious now.
“What are you . . . you’ve got a damned . . .”
He didn’t die when the four-pound flashlight hit him with great force on the temple. He simply collapsed and sank to his knees.
The flashlight struck him again, this time on the back of the head, with a cracking, fleshy sound that would possibly have fascinated him had he been able to hear. But Vegard Krogh was deaf to it. He died before his body hit the freezing, muddy ground.
Nine
The first thing that struck Adam Stubo as he followed Sigmund Berli and Bernt Helle in through the glass doors of the yellow nursing home just outside Oslo, on the morning of February 20, was the institutional smell. He could not fathom why people in need of nursing care should be forced to live with the reek of overcooked fish and strong detergents. The public sector might well be struggling, but fresh air was free, after all. When he came into the room where Yvonne Knutsen lay immobile in bed for the third year running, he could hardly resist the urge to open the window.
“Yvonne,” Bernt Helle said. “It’s me. I’ve got the police with me today. Are you asleep?”
“No.”
She turned her face toward her son-in-law. Her smile was reserved. Bernt Helle laid his hand on her lower arm and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. Then he pulled the only chair in the room over to the bed and sat down. Adam and Sigmund stayed standing just inside the door.
“I know that you don’t like talking to anyone,” Bernt Helle said and wrapped his great hand around Yvonne Knutsen’s emaciated hand, with blood vessels that traced blue just under the skin. “Apart from me and Fiorella, that is. But this is very important. You see . . .” He ran his hand over his hair and gave an audible sigh.
“What is it?” Yvonne asked.
“You see, something has happened . . .” Again he faltered. He fiddled with a tape measure that was poking out of one of the pockets in his khaki pants.
Adam approached the bed.
“Adam Stubo,” he said, raising his hand in greeting. “I’ve been here before. Just after—”
“Yes, I remember that,” Yvonne Knutsen said. “Unfortunately I’m not senile yet. As far as I can remember, you promised not to bother me again.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Adam nodded. “But I’m afraid the situation has changed.”
“Not for me,” Yvonne replied.
“There’s been another murder,” Adam told her.
“I see,” said the paralyzed woman.
“And once again, the victim is a celebrity.”
“Who?”
“Vegard Krogh,” Adam said.
“Never heard of the man.”
“Well, there’s famous and there’s famous. It’s all relative. The point is that we—”
“The point is that I’m lying here waiting to die,” Yvonne Knutsen said in a very calm voice, without a trace of hysteria or self-pity. “The sooner the better. And while I’m waiting, I don’t want to be disturbed. Or talk t
o anyone. A modest request, if you ask me, given my condition.”
Adam glanced swiftly up and down the quilt. There was not even the slightest movement to indicate that the person lying there was alive; not even her chest rose visibly beneath the covers. Only her face showed the traces of what had once been a beautiful woman, high forehead and big almond eyes. Her mouth was reduced to a slit between sunken cheeks. But there was still enough information in the pale death mask for Adam to catch a glimpse of Yvonne Knutsen as she must once have been, straight-backed, confident, and attractive.
“I understand,” he said. “Really I do. The problem is that I unfortunately can’t comply with your wish. The situation is now so serious that we have to follow what leads we have.”
“As I said, I don’t know anyone named Vegard Krag and can—”
“Krogh,” Sigmund corrected from where he was standing in the middle of the floor. “Vegard Krogh.”
“Krogh,” she repeated weakly without even looking in Sigmund’s direction. “I don’t know anyone by that name. So, I don’t see how I can help you.”
“I’ve got some questions about Fiona’s children,” Adam said quietly.
“Fiorella?” asked the woman in the bed, surprised, looking from Adam to Bernt and back. “What about her?”
“Not Fiorella,” Adam explained. “Her first child. I’d like to know a bit more about the baby Fiona had when she was a teenager.”
Yvonne Knutsen suddenly changed. Her nose reddened. Color spread quickly, like butterfly wings, over her gray skin. Her breathing was faster and deeper, and she made a vain attempt to sit up in bed. Her mouth grew. She licked her lips, and they became redder and plumper. Her eyes, which only a moment ago had looked like they’d died already, now sparked with great distress.
Bernt carefully laid his hand on her chest.
“Take it easy,” he said.
“Bernt,” she gasped.
“It’s alright.”
“But—”
“Relax.”
Adam Stubo moved even closer. He leaned against the high bed frame and bent down over the sick woman.
“I realize that this must be very distressing . . .”
