What Never Happens

by Anne Holt

  “For a woman who I know has a good heart and who’s just had a baby, you’re painting a pretty grim picture,” he said and got up. “Do you really think that?”

  “Yes. I said it just the other day. When Sigmund was here. The worst thing would be a murder without a motive. If we can’t catch him red-handed or he doesn’t slip up, he gets away with it.”

  “I completely disagree with you,” Adam said, spitting out some hair while trying to scratch his back. “A murder also needs to be planned. Prior knowledge.”

  She looked over at the bottle of wine. About a third full. She got a glass and poured herself some.

  “Of course,” she agreed. “You’re right. It takes some skill. But that’s all. You don’t need much equipment, for example. None of the three victims has been killed with a gun, which you would have to get hold of and also leaves interesting traces. The most important thing is that you can pull out. Right up until the last second. If something goes wrong, something unexpected happens or disturbs you, you can calmly walk away without killing the person. Especially as you don’t need anyone else with you to commit murder. That’s a huge advantage. What one person knows, no one knows; what two people know, everyone knows.”

  “Your mother,” Adam laughed and plopped down on the sofa.

  “Mmm. Not everything she says is stupid.”

  She followed suit and this time she sat next to him.

  “It frightens me to think about the possibility that this person knows what they’re doing. A . . . professional.”

  “Do they actually exist?” Adam asked. “Professional killers? I mean here, in Norway, in this part of the world?”

  She tilted her head and sent him a look as if he had asked whether it was ever winter in Norway.

  “Okay,” he muttered. “They exist. But would they not have a motive? A cause to fight for? Or some distorted reason, be it money or God’s will?”

  For a moment, their eyes met. Then she leaned against him. He held her tight.

  “What do you think about Mats Bohus?” she asked in a quiet voice.

  “We have to find him.”

  “But do you think he has anything to do with the murders?”

  Adam sighed loudly. Johanne made herself more comfortable, pulled her legs up onto the sofa, and took a sip of her wine. He ran his fingers up her under arm.

  “It’s easy to imagine that he might have been involved in Fiona Helle’s murder,” he said. “At least he has a motive. Possibly. We don’t really know enough about what happened when he contacted her. But what the hell would the guy have against Victoria Heinerback and Vegard Krogh?”

  “Nemo,” said the nine year old in the doorway. “Me and Sulamit want to watch Nemo.”

  “Kristiane,” Johanne smiled. “Come here. It’s night time, dear. We don’t watch movies in the middle of the night.”

  “Yes we do,” Kristiane said and climbed up onto the sofa, forcing herself in between them. “Leonard says that Sulamit isn’t a cat.”

  She hugged the fire engine to her body and kissed the ladder, which was broken.

  “It’s up to you whether Sulamit is a cat or not,” Adam told her.

  “Only me,” Kristiane nodded.

  “But I do think that Leonard will think Sulamit is a fire engine. Is that okay with you?”

  “No, cat.”

  “Cat for you, fire engine for Leonard.”

  “And cat for you,” Kristiane said and held the sad, wheelless toy up to Adam’s face. He kissed the hood.

  “Now you have to go back to bed,” Johanne said.

  “With you,” Kristiane replied.

  “In your own bed,” Adam said. “Come along now.”

  He lifted up the child, and the fire engine and disappeared. Johanne stayed on the sofa. Her joints ached with fatigue. She felt weaker than she had for ages. It was as if all the energy had drained out of her; the greedy baby’s mouth sucked out what little she had left after the birth, every four hours, all day and all night; the little bundle made her anxious and weak. Of course she should spend more time with Kristiane. But there wasn’t more time to be had.

  Not even the nights were her own anymore.

  Mats Bohus could feasibly have killed his biological mother.

  But could he have killed the other two?

  She should really get some sleep.

  She drank some more wine. She held it in her mouth, let it run over her tongue, tasted it, then swallowed.

  If Mats Bohus wanted to camouflage his mother’s murder, he had made a big mistake. He killed Fiona Helle first. The actual murder in a series of camouflage killings should never come first.

  Elementary, she thought to herself. A beginner’s mistake. No skill.

  The murderer was professional. Had insight.

  Maybe not.

  She had to sleep.

  There was another case. Something similar. Somewhere in her brain’s hard disk was a story that she couldn’t locate.

  All was quiet. She was missing something without knowing quite what.

  Johanne fell asleep and was not disturbed by dreams.

  Sigmund Berli emptied his fourth cup of bitter coffee in three hours. Not only was it bitter, it was also cold. He wrinkled his nose. A bag of gummy bears lay on the desk beside his screen. He popped three into his mouth and chewed slowly. The missus wasn’t happy that he was putting on weight. She should try sitting here at four in the morning, in front of a damned computer that didn’t want to tell him anything. The woman should try staying awake for twenty-four hours and then try to find some meaning in the columns, names, numbers, and flickering letters on a bright square screen that made his eyes water.

  It was sometimes hard to find a wanted person. Even in a small country like Norway, there were plenty of places to hide. The Schengen Agreement meant that they now worked with police forces all over Europe, which helped when they were looking for someone. But then the Agreement also made it easier to cross borders, and thus the number of hiding places had mushroomed. A wanted person could escape. But an ordinary Norwegian, a Mats Bohus, a pure-blooded Norwegian with no criminal record, with a permanent address and personal identity number—they should be able to trace him in a couple of hours.

  They’d been looking for nearly twenty-four hours.

  Gone. The man had simply vanished.

  When they finally managed to confirm that he had been last seen at his apartment in Louisesgate on January 20, the whole NCIS went into action. Adam was probably the only person who was allowed to go home. New baby and all that.

  A stab of envy. A wisp of desire; Sigmund saw Johanne’s face reflected on the screen. He filled his mouth with three red gummy bears. The sugar hurt his teeth. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He grabbed his cup, even though he knew it was empty.

  Foreigners, all these damned foreigners, they just came and went, in and out of Norway, as they pleased, as if they just came here to take a dump. They played with the police. If only people knew. Some people were starting to realize. Luckily. Foreigners.

  But Mats Bohus?

  Fiona Helle had been murdered on January 20. And since then, no one had seen him. Where the hell was he?

  “Hallelujah, Sigmund!”

  Lars Kirkeland was standing in the doorway with his shirt tails out and eyes red. He had a stupid grin on his face and thumped the door frame with his fist.

  “We found the guy!”

  Sigmund burst out laughing and clapped his hands a couple of times before stuffing the rest of the gummy bears in his mouth.

  “Mmmm,” he said and chewed furiously. “We have to call Adam.”

  She should have chosen another hotel. The SAS Hotel, for example, with its Arne Jacobsen design and discreet, cosmopolitan staff. Almost everything you needed was there under one roof, so she wouldn’t have needed to go out. Copenhagen was a Norwegian town, far too Norwegian, haunted by beer- drinking men in stupid hats and women with shopping bags and cheap sunglasses. Like shoals
of fish, they streamed backwards and forwards over Rådhusplassen, driven by instinct, between Tivoli and Strøget, always Tivoli and Strøget, as if Copenhagen consisted entirely of a big park with a bar at one end and a dirty shopping street at the other.

  She stayed in her room. Even now in February, with an ice-cold wind blowing in from Øresund, Copenhagen was full of Norwegians. They shopped and drank and flocked together in the brown cafés, ate frikadeller, and couldn’t wait for their next visit, in spring, when they could enjoy their beer outside, and Tivoli would be open for the season once again.

  She wanted to go home.

  Home. To her astonishment, she realized that Villefranche was home. She had never liked the Riviera. Never. But that was before.

  Everything was new now.

  She had been reborn, she thought to herself, and smiled at the cliché. Her fingers stroked her stomach. It was more toned now, certainly flatter. She was lying naked on the bed, on top of the duvet. The heavy velvet curtains were open and only the thin, semitransparent curtain hung between her and anyone who might be outside. If anyone wanted to look in, if someone on the second or third floor on the other side of the street was looking in, if someone really wanted to see her, she was visible. There was a draft from the window. She stretched. She could feel the goosebumps under her fingertips when she ran her hands up her arms. Braille, the woman thought. Her new life was written in Braille on her skin.

  She knew that she was taking chances now. No one knew that better than she did, and she could have chosen a safer path.

  The first one was perfect. Flawless.

  But safety soon became too safe. She had realized that as soon as she was back in the villa at the Baie des Anges.

  The constraints of boredom, the numbness of a life without risk were something she had never thought about before and therefore had never been able to do anything about. Not until now, when she had finally woken up, broken out of an existence that was protected and padded by routines and passive obligations, where she never did more than she was paid for. Never more, never less. The days slowly accumulated. Became weeks and years. She got older. And better and better at her work. She was forty-five years old and about to die of boredom.

  Danger gave her a new lease on life. Terror kept her awake now. Fear made her pulse leap. The days waltzed by, enticing her to give chase, happy but scared, like a child running after an elephant that has escaped from the circus.

  “And you’re dying so slowly that you think you’re alive,” the woman thought to herself and tried to remember a poem. “It’s about me. It was me he was writing about, the poet.”

  The Chief claimed that Vik was the best. He was wrong.

  “I am the BASE jumper, testing equipment that no one else dares to try. And she is the one standing on the ground, not knowing whether it will hold or break. I dive down where no one has been before, while she sits up in the boat and calculates how long it will take for my lungs to explode. She is a theoretician, as I once was. Now I take action. I am the practitioner, and finally I exist.”

  She slid her fingers down between her legs. She looked over at the windows on the other side of the road. There was a light on, and a shadow was moving around in one of the rooms. Then it disappeared. She was cold. She turned her body toward the window. With open legs. The person who was casting a shadow didn’t come back.

  She could lead Johanne Vik in a merry dance forever.

  But there was no fun in that.

  No tension.

  Ragnhild burped. A pale white liquid ran down her chin into the deep folds on her neck. Johanne wiped it off carefully and laid the baby over her shoulder.

  “Are you asleep?” she whispered.

  “Mmm.”

  Adam turned over heavily and pulled the pillow down over his head.

  “I just thought of something,” she said quietly.

  “In the morning,” he groaned and turned over again.

  “Even though all the victims had strong links with Oslo,” she continued showing no consideration, “they were all murdered outside Oslo. Have you thought about that?”

  “Tomorrow. Please!”

  “Vegard Krogh lived in Oslo. He just happened to be out in Asker that night. Fiona and Victoria both worked in Oslo. And they worked long hours. They spent most of their time in the capital. But they were killed outside of town. Strange, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  He hauled himself up onto one elbow.

  “You’ve got to stop,” he said, earnestly.

  “Has it ever struck you that there might be a reason for that?” she asked, unaffected. “Have you ever asked yourself what happens when a murder takes place outside town?”

  “No, I’ve never asked myself that.”

  “The Criminal Investigation Service,” she stated and put Ragnhild down gently in her crib. She was asleep.

  “The NCIS?” he repeated in a daze.

  “You never help the Oslo police with murders.

  “Yes, we do.”

  “But not with tactical investigations.”

  “Well, I—”

  “Listen to me, then!”

  He lay back down on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Maybe the killer wants to take on more? A stronger opponent?”

  “Jesus, Johanne! Your speculation knows no bounds! And we still don’t know that there’s only one murderer. And another thing, we are so close to a possible suspect. And, and . . . Oslo police are good enough. I would’ve thought that the most infamous villains would find them challenging enough.”

  “After that Wilhelmsen woman stepped down, there’s been rumors that everything’s going to pieces and—”

  “Don’t listen to rumors.”

  “You just don’t want to even consider it.”

  “Not at ten past four in the morning, no,” he said and hid his face in his hands.

  “You’re the best,” she murmured.

  “No.”

  “Yes. They write about you. In the papers. Even though you never give interviews after that fiasco—”

  “Don’t remind me about it,” he said in a strangled voice.

  “You are portrayed as a great tactician. The big, wise, strange outsider who didn’t want to move up the ladder, but who—”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “We need to get an alarm installed.”

  “Please stop being so frightened, honey.”

  His arm was lying heavy on her stomach. She was still half sitting up in bed. She wrapped her fingers around his. The telephone rang.

  “Fuck!”

  Adam fumbled around on the bedside table in the dark.

  “Hello,” he barked.

  “It’s me, Sigmund. We’ve found him. Are you coming?”

  Adam sat up straight. His feet hit the ice-cold floor. He rubbed his eyes and felt Johanne’s warm hand on his lower back.

  “I’m coming,” he said and hung up.

  He turned around and stroked his unfamiliar, naked head.

  “Mats Bohus,” he said quietly. “They’ve found him.”

  Ten

  The medical director of the psychiatric department greeted them in a friendly but rather restrained manner. He too had been pulled out of bed at an ungodly hour. It was still pitch black outside the windows of his office when he asked Adam Stubo and Sigmund Berli to sit down on the gray sofa. A woman with red lips and green hospital scrubs brought them some coffee. When she went out, she left behind a smell of spring that made Sigmund smile at the door, which closed silently behind her. The office was neat and quite cosy. On a shelf behind the doctor’s chair was a sculpture that reminded Adam of Africa, masks and fat, headless goddesses. A framed child’s drawing in vibrant colors brightened the room.

  “I understand,” said the doctor when Adam had explained why they needed to talk to him. “Just fire away. I’ll answer as best I can. Now that all the formalities are in place.”

 
Adam sipped his coffee. It was scalding hot. He looked at Dr. Bonheur over the rim of his mug. The man was probably around forty and in good shape. His hair was even shorter than Adam’s. He had dark skin and brown eyes. His name might have indicated that he was foreign, but he spoke Norwegian without an accent. He was slim and moved gracefully when he went over to a small fridge, poured some milk into a pitcher, and offered it to them. They both declined.

  “Need the kick,” Adam said and chuckled. “At this time in the morning.”

  Sigmund yawned without putting a hand over his mouth. Tears sprang to his eyes, and he shook his head vigorously.

  “Been up all night,” he explained.

  “I see,” the doctor nodded, his close-set eyes sparkling. Adam had the uncomfortable but distinct feeling that he was sizing them up.

  “Mats Bohus,” Adam started. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Right now?”

  “Well . . . I get the impression that he’s in and out of here quite often. I’m not too sure about psychiatric terminology, so I don’t know whether these illnesses . . . does he have a diagnosis?”

  “Yes. He suffers from bipolar disorder. He’s a manic-depressive. And yes, he’s been coming here for quite a while. Mats Bohus has never been scared of asking for help. In that sense, he’s a model patient. It’s just a shame that he often comes here a bit too late.”

  “Born October 13, 1978,” Adam read from his notebook, and then leafed on. “Is that correct?”

  “Yes. He came here for the first time when he was eighteen. He had been referred to us by his GP, who had been struggling to help him for some months. Since then, well . . . he’s been here relatively frequently.”

  “Does he come when he’s manic or depressed?” Sigmund asked.