What Never Happens (2 page)

The cap came off eventually. Her long hair clung to the inside, but Kristiane didn’t seem to feel any pain as he loosened the rubber from her head.

“Abendgebet,” she said.

“That means evening prayers,” he explained. “That’s not her name. The girl in the picture above your bed, I mean. It’s German for what the girl is doing . . .”

“Abendgebet,” Kristiane said.

“Let’s see what Mommy says,” Adam said, as he pulled on his pants and shirt. “Go and find the rest of your clothes. We have to get a move on.”

“Move on,” Kristiane repeated and went out into the hall. “Hoof on. Cows and horses and small pussy cats. Jack! King of America! Do you want to visit the baby too?”

A big mutt with yellowy brown fur and a tongue hanging out of his smiling mouth came tearing out of the girl’s bedroom. He whined eagerly and scampered in circles around the girl.

“Jack will have to stay at home,” Adam told her. “Now, where’s your hat?”

“Jack’s coming with us,” Kristiane said cheerfully and tied a red scarf around the dog’s neck. “The heir to the throne is his sister too. Leonard’s mommy says we’ve got equality in Norway, so girls can do what they want. And you’re not my daddy. Isak’s my daddy. So there.”

“All very true,” Adam laughed. “But I love you lots. And now we have to go. Jack has to stay at home. Dogs aren’t allowed in hospitals.”

“Hospitals are for sick people,” Kristiane said as Adam helped her with her coat. “The baby’s not sick. Mommy’s not sick. But they’re still in the hospital. Spot the pill.”

“You’re a little rationalist, you are.”

He kissed her and pulled her hat down over her ears. Suddenly she looked him straight in the eye. He stiffened, as he always did in these rare moments of openness, unexpected glimpses into a mind that no one could fully grasp.

“An heir to the throne has been born,” she quoted ceremoniously from the morning’s announcements on TV before taking a breath and continuing, “A great event for the nation, but most of all, for the parents. And we are delighted that it is a lovely little princess this time.”

A muffled ringing interrupted from the coat rack.

“Cell phone,” she said mechanically. “Dam-di-rum-ram.”

Adam Stubo stood up and frantically felt all the pockets in the chaos of jackets and coats until he finally found what he was looking for.

“Hello,” he said resignedly. “Stubo here.”

Kristiane calmly started to take off her outdoor clothes again. First the hat, then the coat.

“Hold on a minute,” Adam said into the phone. “Kristiane! Don’t . . . Wait a minute.”

The girl had already taken off most of her clothes and was standing in her pink underpants and undershirt. She pulled her tights over her head.

“No way,” Adam Stubo said. “I’ve got fourteen days’ paternity leave. I’ve been awake for over twenty-four hours, Sigmund. Jesus, my daughter was born less than five hours ago, and now . . .”

Kristiane arranged the legs of her tights like two long braids down her front. “Pippi Longstocking,” she said, pleased with herself. “Diddle, diddle, tra la la la la.”

“No,” Adam said so brusquely that Kristiane was startled and began to cry. “I’ve got time off. We’ve just had a baby. I . . .”

Her crying morphed into a long howl. Adam never got used to this tiny child’s howling.

“Kristiane,” he said in desperation. “I’m not angry with you. I was talking to . . . Hello? I can’t. No matter how spectacular the whole thing is, I can’t leave my family right now. Good-bye. And good luck.” He snapped the phone shut and sat down on the floor. They should have been at the hospital a long time ago.

“Kristiane,” he said again. “My little Pippi. Can you show me Mr. Nelson?”

He knew better than to hug her. Instead, he started whistling. Jack lay down on his lap and fell asleep. A damp patch grew on his pants under the dog’s open, snoring mouth. Adam whistled and hummed and sang all the children’s songs he could think of. The girl stopped crying after forty minutes. Without looking at him, Kristiane pulled the tights off her head and slowly started to get dressed.

“Time to visit the heir to the throne,” she said flatly.

The cell phone had rung seven times.

He hesitated before turning it off without listening to the messages.

A week had passed, and the police were obviously no further along. It didn’t surprise her.

“Internet reports are useless,” the woman with the laptop said to herself.

As she hadn’t bothered to subscribe to a local server, she was charged extortionate fees to surf the net. She got stressed when she thought of all that money being eaten up while she waited for a connection on the slow, analog line to Norway. She could, of course, go to Chez Net. They charged five euros for fifteen minutes and had broadband. But unfortunately the place was full of drunk Australians and braying Brits, even now in winter. So she didn’t bother, not now anyway.

There had been remarkably little fuss in the first days after the murder. The little princess had the full attention of the media circus. The world truly wanted to be deceived.

But then it started to get more coverage.

The woman with the laptop simply could not stand Fiona Helle. It was an unbearably politically correct response, but there wasn’t much to be done about that. She read phrases like “loved by the people” in the papers. Which was fair enough, given that the program had been watched by well over a million viewers every Saturday, for five seasons in a row. She had only seen a couple of shows, just before she went away. But that was more than enough to realize that for once she agreed with the cultural snobs’ usual, unbearably arrogant condemnation of popular entertainment. In fact, it was just one such vitriolic criticism in
Aftenposten
, written by a professor of sociology, that made her sit down in front of the television one Saturday evening and waste one and a half hours watching
On the Move with Fiona.

But it hadn’t been a total waste of time. It was ages since she had felt so provoked. The participants were either idiots or deeply unhappy. But they could hardly be blamed for being either. Fiona Helle, on the other hand, was successful, calculating, and far from true to her love of the common people. She waltzed into the studio dressed in creations that had been bought worlds away from H&M. She smiled shamelessly at the camera while the poor creatures revealed their pathetic dreams, false hopes, and not least extremely limited intelligence. Prime time.

The woman, who now got up from the desk by the window and walked around the unfamiliar living room without knowing quite what she wanted, did not normally join in public debate. But after watching one episode of
On the Move with Fiona,
she’d been tempted. Halfway through writing a letter from an “outraged reader,” she’d stopped and laughed at herself before deleting it. She had been in a good mood for the rest of the evening. As she couldn’t sleep, she allowed herself to indulge in a couple of TV3’s terrible late-night films and had even learned something from them, if she remembered correctly.

At least feeling angry was a form of emotion.

Readers’ letters in newspapers were not her chosen form of expression.

Tomorrow she would go into Nice and see if she could find some Norwegian papers.

Two

I
t was night in the two-family house in Tåsen. Three sad streetlights stood on the small stretch of road behind the picket fence at the bottom of the garden, the bulbs long since broken by excited children with snowballs in their mittens. It seemed that the neighborhood was taking the request to save electricity seriously. The sky was clear and dark. To the northeast, over Grefsenåsen, Johanne could make out a constellation she thought she recognized. It made her feel that she was totally alone in the world.

“You standing here again?” asked Adam with resignation.

He stood in the doorway, sleepily scratching his groin. His boxer shorts were stretched tight over his thighs. His naked shoulders were so broad that he almost touched both sides of the doorway.

“How much longer is this going to keep up, honey?”

“Don’t know. Go back to bed.”

Johanne turned back to the window. The transition from living in an apartment house to a house in this neighborhood had been harder than she’d expected. She was used to complaining water pipes, babies’ cries that traveled through the walls, quarreling teenagers, and the drone of late-night programs from downstairs, where the woman on the first floor who was nearly stone-deaf often fell asleep in front of the TV. In an apartment, you could make coffee at midnight. Listen to the radio. Have a conversation, for that matter. Here, she barely dared open the fridge. The smell of Adam’s nocturnal leaks lingered in the bathroom in the morning, as she had forbidden him to disturb the neighbors below by flushing before seven.

“Why do you creep around like this?” he said. “Can’t you at least sit down?”

“Don’t talk so loud,” Johanne whispered.

“Give me a break. It’s not that loud. And you’re used to having neighbors, Johanne!”

“Yes, lots. But they’re more anonymous. You’re so close here. It’s just them and us, so it’s more . . . I don’t know.”

“But we get along so well with Gitta and Samuel! Not to mention little Leonard! If it wasn’t for him, Kristiane would hardly have any—”

“I mean, look at these!” Johanne stuck out a foot and laughed quietly. “I’ve never had slippers before in my life. Hardly dare to get out of bed without putting them on now!”

“They’re sweet. Remind me of little toadstools.”

“They’re supposed to look like toadstools, that’s why! Couldn’t you have gotten her to pick something else? Rabbits, bears? Or even better, completely normal brown slippers?”

The parquet creaked with every step he took toward her. She made a face before turning back to the window again.

“It’s not exactly easy to get Kristiane to change her mind,” he said. “Please stop being so anxious. Nothing is going to happen.”

“That’s what Isak said when Kristiane was a baby too.”

“That was different. Kristiane—”

“No one knows what’s wrong with her. So no one can know if there’s anything wrong with Ragnhild.”

“Oh, so we’re agreed on Ragnhild, then?”

“Yes,” Johanne said.

Adam put his arms around her. “Ragnhild is a perfectly healthy eight-day-old baby,” he whispered. “She wakes up three times a night for milk and then goes straight back to sleep. Just like she should. Do you want some coffee?”

“Okay, but be quiet.”

He was about to say something. He opened his mouth, but then imperceptibly shook his head instead, picked up a sweater from the floor, and pulled it on as he went into the kitchen.

“Come and sit down in here,” he called. “If you absolutely must stay awake all night, let’s at least do something useful.”

Johanne pulled up a bar stool to the island in the middle of the kitchen and tightened her robe. She absentmindedly picked through a thick file that shouldn’t have been lying around the kitchen.

“Sigmund doesn’t give up, does he?” she said as she rubbed her eyes behind her glasses.

“No, but he’s right. It’s a fascinating case.” He turned around so quickly that the water in the coffee pot spilled over the rim. “I was only at work for an hour,” he said defensively. “From the time I left here until I got back was only—”

“Okay, okay, don’t worry. That’s fine. I understand that you have to go in every now and then. I have to admit . . .”

On the top of the pile was a photograph, a flattering portrait of a soon-to-be murder victim. The shoulder-length hair parted in the middle made her narrow face look even thinner. Not much else about Fiona Helle was old-fashioned. Her eyes were defiant, her full lips smiled confidently at the lens. She was wearing heavy eye makeup but somehow managed to avoid looking vulgar. In fact, there was actually something quite captivating about the picture, an obvious glamour that contrasted sharply with the down-to-earth, family-friendly program image she had so successfully constructed.

“What do you have to admit?” asked Adam.

“That—”

“That you think this case is damned interesting too,” smirked Adam, banging around with the cups. “I’m just going to get a pair of pants.”

Fiona Helle’s background was no less fascinating than the portrait. She graduated with a degree in art history, Johanne noted as she read. Married Bernt Helle, a plumber, when she was only twenty-two; they took over her grandparents’ house in Lørenskog and lived there without children for thirteen years. The arrival of little Fiorella in 1998 had obviously not put any brakes on either her ambition or her career. Quite the opposite, in fact. Having gained cult status as a presenter for the arty
Cool Culture
on NRK2, she was then snapped up by the entertainment department. After a couple of seasons on a late-night talk show on Thursdays, she finally made it. At least, that was the expression she used herself in the numerous interviews she had given over the past three years.
On the Move with Fiona
was one of national TV’s greatest successes since the sixties, when there was little else for people to do other than gather around their TV screens to watch the one channel, doing the exact same thing as every other person in Norway.

“You liked those programs! A grown man sitting there crying!”

Johanne smiled at Adam, who had come back wearing a bright red fleece, gray sweatpants, and orange woolen socks.

“I did not cry,” Adam protested, pouring the coffee into the cups. “I was touched, though, I admit that. But cry? Never!”

He moved a stool in closer to her. “It was that episode about the war baby whose father was a German soldier,” he remembered quietly. “You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by her story. Having been persecuted and bullied throughout her childhood, she goes to the United States and gets a job cleaning floors in the World Trade Center when it was first built. Then she took her first and only sick day on September eleventh. And she had always remembered the little Norwegian boy next door who—”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Johanne, wetting her lips with the steaming hot coffee. “Shhh!”