Fear Not (45 page)

Not with his life, and not with the nights. Not with this night. The darkness grinned scornfully at him out of the corners, and he could feel his pulse rate increasing. Quickly, he began to move towards the stairs. He would go down to his study. Close the door. Watch TV. Switch on all the lights and pretend it was daytime.

He stopped himself just as he was about to slam the door behind him when he finally arrived safely in his study. Breathlessly, he smacked the panel that controlled the lighting. Nothing happened. He pulled himself together and pressed all the sensors firmly with one finger. At last the room was bathed in light, and the television came on. It was pre-programmed to NRK, which was showing
Dansefot Jukeboks.
He picked up the remote from his desk and turned down the
sound, then switched over to CNN. He sank down on the broad, heavy desk chair and leaned his head back. His stomach ulcer was painful and he had a bitter, acrid taste in his mouth. Pain radiated from below his breastbone, and his whole body hurt. His mind was racing, and he was so frightened that his bladder felt full to bursting, even though he’d been less than half an hour ago.

This was no kind of life any more.

Suddenly, he sat up straight and found the key to the heavy corner cupboard that had come with the house. As time went by he had learned to like the Kurbits-style painting, which at first he had thought bizarre and somewhat vulgar. It helped that the cupboard was eighteenth-century, in excellent condition and worth a fortune. Now it was as if the ranks of fat, grotesque flowers were reaching out to grasp him as he put the antique key in the lock and turned it.

Inside were five small drawers. He opened the top one. There lay the tablets he had never mentioned to Rolf. It hadn’t been necessary. Both these and the box in his office had remained untouched for many years. He tipped them into the palm of his hand and went back to his chair, where he let them trickle on to the calf-skin desk mat.

He still didn’t know if drugs lost their effect once the use-by date had passed. Hardly. At least, not completely. If he took the lot, it would probably do the job. He placed one tablet experimentally on his tongue.

The taste was the same. Insipid, slightly salty.

Things would be better for little Marcus if he wasn’t around any more.

Rolf would look after him.

Rolf was a better father than he was. Through his actions Marcus had not only committed a crime; he was no longer worthy of being a father. His whole life was being a father, and his life as a father was over.

The tears poured silently down his cheeks as he placed another tablet in his mouth.

And another.

A slight feeling of sleepiness made him lean back in the chair and close his eyes. He moistened the tip of his index finger with saliva and pressed it down on the desk without looking. Another tablet stuck to his finger, and he placed it on the tip of his tongue.

The last thing he did before he fell asleep was to open the desk drawer and sweep the rest of the tablets inside with the back of his hand.

You can’t even manage to kill yourself, he thought listlessly before blessed sleep finally overcame him.

*

Adam Stubo woke up on Friday 16 January at 7.40 feeling as if he hadn’t slept at all. Every time he had been on the point of dropping off, he had seen the picture of the woman from Eva Karin’s bedroom in his mind’s eye. The idea that their theory about a child who had disappeared or been disowned might have been correct, but with the proviso that all the circumstances had to be moved back a generation, had left him wide awake over and over again. The theory seemed more and more credible as the hours went by. The idea that the Bishop wanted to protect the memory of her parents was considerably more likely than the idea that she had wanted to avoid the shame of having a child as an unmarried sixteen-year-old.

Leaving aside the fact that there was no longer any shame attached, and that the photograph couldn’t possibly be of a woman born in the early sixties.

It must be a sister, Adam thought as he swung his leg over the side of the bed. The last time he looked at the clock it had been just after five, so he must have had two and a half hours’ sleep in spite of everything.

Another thing that had kept him awake was the fact that Johanne hadn’t called. They hadn’t spoken for a day and a half. He had tried to ring her three times yesterday evening, but all he got was the mechanical sound of her voicemail asking him to leave a message after the tone. The first time he called he had left a message, but she still hadn’t called back. He felt a mixture of intense irritation and anxiety as he plodded into the bathroom.

He was tired of living in this hotel.

The bed was too soft.

The soap made his hands dry, and he had lost his appetite.

Adam wanted to go home.

Someone was banging on the door. With a stab of annoyance he
flushed the toilet, wound a towel around his waist and went to see who it was. The acrid smell of morning urine surrounded him. He opened the door a fraction and put his face to the gap.

‘What the fuck’s wrong with your phone?’ said Sigmund Berli, trying to push the door open and holding up a newspaper in the other hand. ‘Have you seen this? We’re going home, by the way, on the first available plane. Get your clothes on and start packing.’

‘Good morning to you, too,’ Adam said sourly, letting his colleague in. ‘Do you think you could possibly take one thing at a time? Start with the phone.’

‘I’ve called you five times since yesterday evening. You know perfectly well you’re not supposed to make yourself unavailable.’

‘I haven’t,’ said Adam. ‘Try again now.’

He picked up his mobile from the bedside table as Sigmund keyed in his number on his own phone.

‘It’s ringing,’ said Sigmund with the phone to his ear. ‘Have you got it on silent?’

‘No.’

Adam stared at the display. Nothing was happening. So Johanne might have tried after all.

‘Why didn’t you ring me on that?’ said Adam, pointing to the hotel phone on the small desk by the window.

‘Never occurred to me,’ Sigmund said blithely. ‘But forget that. We’re going home. Now. Just take a look at this and you’ll see why!’

Adam took the copy of
VG
as if the newspaper might suddenly bite him.

HATE GROUP BEHIND SIX MURDERS
, screamed the front page. The subheading read:
Police horror theory – Bishop Lysgaard one of victims.

‘What the hell?’ said Adam, raising his voice by several decibels. ‘
What the fuck is this?
’

‘Read it,’ said Sigmund. ‘And you will discover that the Oslo police have found a possible link between the murders of Marianne Kleive and some Kurdish kid who was floating around in the harbour just before Christmas, as dead as a doornail and badly disintegrated.’

‘What? But what’s this got to do with Eva Karin?’

Adam sank down on the bed and turned to pages five and six. He
was finding it hard to focus. His eyes flew across the article. After a minute and a half he looked up, flung the newspaper at the wall and bellowed:

‘
How the hell did
VG
get hold of this before me?
I mean, I’ve learned to live with the fact that they know way too much way too soon, but this is …’

He got up so quickly that the towel slipped off. He ignored the fact that he was stark bollock-naked and hissed at Sigmund, his fists clenched: ‘Are we supposed to start reading the paper every morning just to find out what’s fucking going on? This is … this is … For fuck’s sake, Sigmund, this is fucking scandalous!’

Sigmund grinned.

‘You’re stark naked, Adam. You’re getting fat, boy!’

‘
I couldn’t give a fuck!
’

He marched into the bathroom. Sigmund sat down on the chair by the desk and switched on the TV. He turned to TV2 as he listened to Adam banging about behind the closed door. Thirty seconds later Adam emerged, grabbed some clean clothes out of his suitcase and got dressed with surprising speed.

‘The news is on in five minutes,’ Sigmund said. ‘We’ll watch it before we go.’

‘A gang from the US,’ Adam growled as he tried to knot his tie. ‘That’s the most ridiculous fucking thing I’ve ever heard.’

‘Not a gang,’ Sigmund corrected him. ‘A group. A hate group.’

‘That’s even more insane. Who the hell came up with something so utterly … idiotic!’

He picked up a bag of dirty laundry and stuffed it in his suitcase, having given up on his tie.

‘Johanne,’ said Sigmund with a laugh. ‘It’s Johanne’s theory!’

‘What?
What are you saying?
’

Adam stormed over to the newspaper, which was lying in a crumpled heap on the bed. Once again his eyes flew over the article.

‘It doesn’t say anything about her here,’ he said without looking up from the report, which was illustrated with pictures of Marianne Kleive and Bishop Lysgaard. ‘It doesn’t mention Johanne at all.’

He exhaled and dropped the paper on the floor.

‘I spoke to a … Silje Sørensen,’ said Sigmund. ‘She’s with the Oslo
police. She rang me at six o’clock. She’d tried to get hold of you, but with no luck.’

‘Has everybody gone mad or what? I’m staying in a hotel for fuck’s sake! This …’

He reached the white, old-fashioned telephone in three strides. He picked up the receiver in one hand and the body of the phone in the other, and held it five centimetres from Sigmund’s face.

‘This is a telephone!’

‘Calm down, Adam. Take it easy.’

‘Take it easy! I don’t want to fucking take it easy! I want to know what all this crap is about, and why—?’

‘Well, listen to me then! Listen to what I have to say instead of rushing around like a lunatic. We’ll get thrown out in a minute if you don’t calm down.’

Adam took a deep breath, nodded and sat down heavily on the bed.

‘Start talking,’ he mumbled.

Sigmund clapped his hands almost silently.

‘That’s better. I don’t know a great deal. Silje Sørensen was just as furious as you about the fact that
VG
has got hold of this, and they’ve turned the whole of Grønlandsleiret upside down to try and find the leak. She did tell me that this does, in fact, involve six murders. Some artist who died around Christmas, apparently from a heroin overdose, turns out to have minute traces of curacit in his blood. We were lucky. Curacit is broken down incredibly fast, and the guy had already been cremated. However, because it was routinely regarded as a suspicious death, they had some of his frozen blood in the lab, and the curacit—’

‘What?’

‘Curacit. You know, it’s a poison, a muscle relaxant that paralyzes the breathing—’

‘I know perfectly well what curacit is! What I’m wondering is—’

‘Just hang on, Adam. Listen to me. So this artist had been murdered. And he’s also … he was also gay. And then there was a young man who was killed in Sofienberg Park some time in November, and we all know what people get up to in Sofienberg Park at night, don’t we?’

Without giving Adam time to respond, he went on.

‘Then there was a woman everybody thought had died in an RTA,
but on closer inspection it turned out that someone had tampered with the brakes of her car. And I’m sure you can guess what her preferences in the bedroom were!’

Adam merely stared at him with a resigned expression.

‘That Silje Sørensen really is paranoid,’ Sigmund continued, unabashed. ‘She called me from home. On her son’s mobile. But whether those journalists have reliable sources or are bugging the police or whatever it is they might be doing,
VG
has named only three of the victims. The Bishop, Marianne Kleive and the kid in the water. I can never remember those Hottentot names.’

Adam felt so floored by the whole thing that he didn’t even protest at this expression.

‘Anyway, Sørensen told me Johanne had come to see her with some questions and a theory relating to her research. That stuff she’s doing on hate crime. Something that … I don’t know, actually. Anyway, her theory fitted in so well with the material Oslo are sitting on that they’ve now put together a team to work on a major investigation, with the Oslo police and NCIS collaborating. That’s where we’re going. And that’s more or less all I know. Ssh! News!’

‘Ssh?’ Adam repeatedly sourly. ‘I haven’t said a word!’

Sigmund turned up the volume.

TV2 led with the newspaper story.

They had obviously been short of time, because the report was illustrated with archive clips. They hadn’t even managed to find winter pictures; police HQ was bathed in sunshine, with people dressed in summer clothing going in and out of the main entrance. The reporter had nothing more to add to what had been in the newspaper.

‘Ssh!’ Sigmund said again as the camera showed a slim woman in uniform with gold stripes and two stars on her shoulders.

‘We are unable to comment on the case at this stage,’ she said firmly, turning away from the microphone.

It followed her.

‘Can you confirm the information in today’s edition of
VG
?’ asked the journalist.

‘As I said, I have no further comment on this matter.’

‘When will you be informing the public about this story, which seems to be particularly serious and far-reaching?’

‘As I said, I am unable to comment on—’

Sigmund switched off.

‘Let’s go,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘I’m starting to get really curious about this whole thing. I’ll fetch my bags and see you downstairs in two minutes. What’s that, by the way?’

He nodded in the direction of the bedside table, where Adam had placed the photograph of the unknown woman.

‘That’s the photo I told you about,’ he said.

‘What photo?’

‘The one that was in Eva Karin’s room. We need to call in at the police station with it. I want to know who she is. They’re probably best placed to find out.’

‘How did you find it?’ Sigmund asked.

‘Long story.’

‘Spare me the details. See you downstairs?’

Adam nodded. He remained sitting on the bed. He was finding it hard to digest everything he had heard in the past half-hour, and felt slightly dizzy. He couldn’t remember ever being caught so off-guard. When he did eventually stand up, exhaustion forced him to take a step to one side to keep his balance.