What Never Happens

by Anne Holt

  “Very dramatic.”

  “Or rather, melodramatic. Yes.” He returned the cigar to its case with equal care. “But just a tiny little bit true, as Kristiane says when we catch her lying.”

  Sigmund burst out laughing.

  “My boys just flatly deny it. Even if I catch them red-handed and the evidence is stacked against them. Tough little nuts. Especially Snorre.”

  He stroked the crown of his head in a shy gesture.

  “The youngest one,” he explained. “The one who looks like me.”

  “So there we have it,” Adam said and sighed. “An unknown number of people who might have good grounds for being at least disappointed with Fiona Helle.”

  “Disappointed,” Sigmund repeated. “That’s hardly . . .”

  They both looked up at the picture of the victim.

  “No. That’s why I’ve started a small investigation of my own. I want to find out what happened to the people who actually got help from Fiona. All of them had their fifteen minutes of fame and met their biological mother in South Korea, or their father who disappeared in Argentina, their daughter who was put up for adoption in Drøbak, and God knows what else—all of them had their lives turned upside down during prime time.”

  “Is there nothing like that already?”

  “No, in fact, there isn’t.”

  “But hasn’t NRK followed up with all those who—”

  “No.”

  Sigmund sank back in the chair. He stared at the cigar case that was back in place in Adam’s breast pocket.

  “Didn’t you quit?” Sigmund asked in a tired voice.

  “What? Oh, you mean this. I only sniff them. Old habit. Don’t smoke anymore. If I want to, I have to go out onto the veranda. Especially if it’s a cigar. It takes time to smoke one of these.”

  “But Adam . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you think all the technical work is wasted?”

  Adam gave a hoarse laugh and put his hand to his mouth as he coughed. “This is the result of all my damned smoking,” he explained. He grimaced, swallowed, and then continued. “No, of course not. Technical investigations are never wasted. But as we don’t seem to have come up with any results, not so far, I think we should start at the other end. Instead of working outward from the scene of the crime, we should start out there and work in. If we’re lucky, we may find a motive or two. A sufficiently strong motive, I mean.”

  “Are you leaving? This early?”

  Adam had stood up and was already over by his coat, which was hanging unwashed and creased on the coat stand by the window.

  “Yes,” he said seriously and pulled on his coat. “I’m a modern father. From now on, I have to leave work every day at three o’clock to spend quality time with my daughter. Every day.”

  “What?”

  “Just joking, you idiot.” Adam slapped his colleague on the shoulder and shouted as he disappeared down the corridor, “Have a good weekend, everyone!”

  “What the hell am I doing here?” Sigmund muttered and looked at the door that had just slammed shut behind Adam. “It’s not even my office.”

  Then he looked at his watch. It was already half past five. He couldn’t understand where the day had gone.

  The blonde woman in the Armani suit and sneakers felt good as she got out of the taxi. It was still a good half hour until midnight, and she was practically sober. In a portrait interview for tomorrow’s VG newspaper, it said that Victoria Heinerback had realized that she was grown up when she started to leave parties and receptions early because she was thinking about her productivity the next day. Tomorrow’s productivity. It was her own turn of phrase. It said something about her, both personally and politically.

  Her sneakers didn’t look quite right, given the rest of her outfit. But with a broken toe, her options were limited, and fortunately the TV producers hadn’t cut the part in the talk show where she commented on her own klutziness, flirtatiously saying that she was, after all, only twenty-six. And that she’d broken her toe while playing with her nephew. Not quite true, but white lies were allowed every now and then, when it was nothing serious. The studio audience had laughed and warmed to her. Victoria Heinerback smiled to herself as she struggled to get her key in the front door.

  It had been a good week.

  Politically. Personally. In every way.

  Despite the pain in her toe.

  It was annoyingly dark. She looked up. The outside light was not working, and she could just make out that the bulb had been broken. That made her a bit anxious, and she looked over her shoulder. The light by the gate was broken as well. She tried to keep all her weight on her good foot as she held her keys up to see if she’d found the wrong one.

  She never did manage to find out.

  The next morning, Victoria Heinerback was found by her boyfriend, who had wound his weary way home from his brother’s bachelor party by bus and taxi.

  She was sitting in bed. She was naked. Her hands were nailed to the wall above the head of the bed. Her legs were splayed, and it looked as if someone had tried to stuff something up her vagina.

  Victoria Heinerback’s boyfriend didn’t see this detail at first. He tore her hands free, threw up violently all over the place, and then pulled the body out onto the floor, as if it was the bed itself that had attacked her so brutally. It wasn’t until half an hour later that he came to his senses and called the police.

  Then he discovered the green book that was still stuck between Victoria Heinerback’s thighs.

  The ensuing investigation would establish that it was a leather-bound copy of the Koran.

  Four

  The woman in seat 16A seemed nice. She was reading the British papers and was obviously in need of a coffee. The flight attendant found it difficult to guess where she was from. Most of the passengers were Swedish, though everyone was being disturbed by a noisy Danish family with small children in the second to last row. He had also registered several Norwegians. It was by no means the high season, but lots of people were more than happy to get on a direct flight to Nice when the prices were so ridiculously low.

  He should really stop working as a flight attendant. His weight had always been a problem, and now his colleagues had begun to make comments. No matter how hard he tried or how little he ate, the bathroom scales threatened to tip past 220 pounds at any moment.

  It was good to have people like the lady in 16A on flights like this.

  She was darker than most Scandinavians. Her eyes were brown and she had no reason to be happy about her weight either. She was big and heavy, but the first impression was one of strength. Powerful, he thought after a while. She was an Amazon.

  And she certainly liked her coffee.

  What’s more, she didn’t have any children, thank goodness, and didn’t complain about anything.

  The body was still warm.

  The attendant at the Galleria multistory parking lot figured that it couldn’t be more than a couple of hours since the prostitute had said her good-byes. Maybe he was wrong. He was no expert, he had to admit, though it was the second time in under three months that he’d had to call the police because some poor woman had chosen to inject what would be her last hit somewhere sheltered from the biting wind that whipped through the winter streets of Stockholm, forcing everyone to dress like polar explorers. As it was quite warm in the stairwell, it was difficult to say.

  But she couldn’t have been lying there long.

  If you can’t see forward and you can’t look back—then look up in life.

  The words of wisdom were written in red marker on the wall. The whore had obviously taken them literally. She was lying on her side with her head on her right arm, legs bent, as if someone had put her in the recovery position so that death would come gently. But she was looking up, with open eyes and an astonished, almost happy expression.

  Peace, the attendant thought to himself, and took out his cell phone. The woman looked like she’d found peace. The
man was tired of having to chase the prostitutes out of the huge parking lot, but deep down he felt for them. Their tiresome existence reminded him of the joys of his own life. His job was boring and monotonous, but he had a good wife, and the children seemed to be turning out okay. He could afford a beer or two on Friday night and prided himself on always paying his bills before they were due.

  The reception for cell phones was terrible down here.

  He recognized her. She was one of the regulars. She seemed to live down here, at the bottom of the stairwell, in a space that was barely fifty square feet. The blue and red stripes on the wall were no doubt meant to conjure up movement and light. A bag lay flung in the corner, and three papers and a magazine had been stuck underneath a rolled-up sleeping bag just under the stairs. A bottle of mineral water had fallen down behind her back.

  The attendant trudged up the stairs. His asthma was bothering him, and he had to stop for a minute to draw a breath. Finally he got to the top and opened a drab door out onto Brunkebergs Torg.

  The woman’s colleagues were already at work. He spotted a couple of them, shivering and emaciated; one of them got into a BMW that immediately accelerated toward Sergels Torg.

  He eventually got ahold of the police. They promised to be there within half an hour.

  “Sure,” he muttered and hung up. Last time he had been alone with the dead prostitute for over an hour.

  He lit a cigarette. The other woman, in thin tights and faux fur coat, got an offer on the other side of the square.

  The dead whore wasn’t that thin. Quite the contrary, he thought as he took a long drag on his cigarette. She was the plumper type. There weren’t many of those. Prostitutes normally shrank over the years. They got smaller and skinnier for every shot they took, every pill they swallowed. Maybe this woman remembered to eat, in between tricks and drugs.

  He should go back down again to keep an eye on her.

  Instead he lit another cigarette and stood out there in the cold until the police finally came. They took a few seconds to confirm what the attendant already knew, that the woman was dead. An ambulance was called, and the body was taken away.

  Katinka Olsson was cremated three days later, and no one bothered to erect a stone to mark the remains of the late-thirty-something prostitute. The four children she had brought into the world before she was thirty would never know that their biological mother carried baby pictures of them in her otherwise empty wallet, faded photographs with worn, uneven edges; Katinka Olsson’s only treasure.

  She died of an overdose, and no one would ever ask about her. No one grieved for Katinka Olsson, and no one wondered why the dead prostitute smelled fresh and clean and had on newly washed, if worn, clothes.

  No one.

  Victoria Heinerback’s home surprised him.

  Standing in the middle of the relatively large living room, he got the impression of a far more interesting person than the media had ever managed to portray.

  When he thought about it, he couldn’t remember having seen any features about Victoria Heinerback’s house. Adam Stubo had used the early hours of the morning to go through a large pile of interviews and other press cuttings, sensational and glamorous tales of an apparently successful life.

  When her boyfriend proposed to her, the couple traveled to Paris with Hello! The pictures of the two of them, embracing in front of the Eiffel Tower, under the Arc de Triomphe, outside well-known shops on the Champs d’Elysées, and on the streets of Montmartre reminded him of advertisements from the seventies. Victoria and Trond were both bottle blondes and inoffensively well groomed. They had an aura of self-confidence and matching psychedelic pastel shirts. Only the wineglasses that were raised in a couple of the photographs broke the illusion. They should have been Coca-Cola bottles.

  When Victoria Heinerback was elected as Norway’s youngest party leader, members of the press had been invited to follow her to her room when she retired after the national conference. The papers and magazines were waxing rhapsodic about her evening bath. Victoria raised a glass of champagne to the readers from a sea of pink bubbles, with her smooth, beautifully shaped left leg hanging over the edge of the bath. According to the picture captions, she was absolutely exhausted.

  The setting for the photographs was a hotel room.

  Victoria Heinerback was the ultimate example of young Scandinavian success. She only managed to complete a couple of years at the Norwegian School of Management before politics completely took over her life. She walked through the winter slush down Karl Johan in high heels, but also let herself be photographed wearing boots in the woods. She was always suitably dressed in the Storting, the Norwegian parliament. She adhered to a strict dress code when she participated in debates that were to be televised, but when she took part in programs that were less important, her style had earned her third place in a list of the country’s best-dressed women. She has a real eye for sexy details, the jury said in admiration. Naturally, she was going to have children. But not yet, she smiled to the impertinent journalists, and kept on climbing up the ladder of a party that, on good days, gloried in being the country’s leading party (barely) in the opinion polls.

  As he looked around the living room for the third time, Adam felt a twinge of guilt at his own prejudices. His eyes fixed on a beautiful lamp shade in milky glass. The glass was held in place by three metal tubes, and the whole thing looked a bit like a fifties B-movie UFO. It was an impressive room. A cream corner sofa sat behind a steel and glass table. The chairs were upholstered in an intense orange fabric that was mirrored in small speckles on a huge abstract painting on the opposite wall. All the surfaces were clean. The only ornament in the room was an Alvar Aalto vase on the austere sideboard, where a colorful bunch of tulips was dying of thirst.

  The woven steel magazine rack was overflowing with magazines and tabloids. Adam picked up a gossip magazine. Two divorces, a celebrity anniversary, and a singer’s tragic decline into alcoholism graced the front cover.

  To the extent that Adam had ever paid attention to Victoria Heinerback, he had admired, somewhat reluctantly, her instinctive understanding of people’s need for easy solutions. On the other hand, he had never detected any real political understanding or overriding moral conviction in her. Victoria Heinerback believed that gasoline prices should be cut and that the country should be ashamed of its care of the elderly. She called for lower taxes and more police. She thought that shopping in Sweden was a justified protest by the Norwegian people; if the politicians chose to have the highest alcohol prices in Europe, it was all they could expect.

  He had seen her as simple, superficial, and politically savvy. Not well read, he thought, and in one interview she seemed to think that Ayn Rand, whom she claimed was her favorite author, was a man.

  It must have been the journalist who got it wrong, Adam thought, as he looked around the living room in more detail. Certainly not Victoria Heinerback.

  He slowly ran his fingers over the book spines in the full shelves that lined two of the walls from floor to ceiling. A worn and well-read copy of The Fountainhead stood beside a paperback copy of Atlas Shrugged. An extensive biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, the eccentric architect and author, was in such a sorry state that several of the pages fell out when Adam tried to check the Ex Libris label.

  Jens Bjørneboe and Hamsun, P. O. Enquist, Günter Grass and Don DeLillo, Lu Xun and Hannah Arendt. New and old side by side, in something that vaguely resembled a system. In order of love, Adam suddenly realized.

  “Look,” he said to Sigmund Berli, who had just come back in from the bedroom. “She’s got all her favorite books between hip and head level! The books down toward the floor or above are almost untouched.”

  He stretched up and pointed to an anthology of Chinese authors he had never even heard of. Then he hunkered down, took out a book from the bottom shelf, and blew the dust off before he read out loud, “Mircea Eliade.” He shook his head and put the book back. “That’s the sort of thing Joha
nne’s sister reads. But I would never have guessed that Miss Heinerback did.”

  “There’s a lot of crime here too.”

  Sigmund Berli ran his fingers over the shelves closest to the kitchen door. Adam squinted at the titles. They were all there. The Grand Old Dames of British literature and the arrogant Americans from the eighties. And here and there a French-sounding name popped up. Judging by the covers, with big cars and lethal weapons in gray stylized strokes, they had to be from the fifties. She had such classics as Chandler and Hammett in American presentation copies, alongside an almost complete catalog of Norwegian crime novels published in the last ten years.

  “Do you think they’re her boyfriend’s books?” Sigmund asked.

  “He just moved in recently. These have been here for a while. I wonder why she . . . why she never mentioned this.”

  “What? That she read?”

  “Yes. I mean, I’ve gone through a pile of interviews today that all gave the impression of a rather uninteresting person. A political animal, true enough, but someone who is more interested in banal individual issues than in putting things into context. Even in the”—Adam drew a square in the air before continuing—“boxes, is that what they’re called? The frames with standard questions, she never said anything about . . . this. When they asked if she read, she said newspapers. Five newspapers a day, and not much time for anything else.”

  “Maybe she read more before. Before she became a politician, I mean. Just didn’t have enough time anymore.”

  Sigmund had moved out into the kitchen. “Wow! Take a look at this.”

  The kitchen was a bizarre mix of old and new. The front- angled wall cabinets looked like they were made just after the war. But when Adam opened a door, it glided silently and easily on modern plastic and metal fittings. The sink was enormous, with faucets straight out of a thirties film. The porcelain buttons that indicated warm and cold in red and blue calligraphy had become unreadable with age. The countertops were dark and matte.