What Never Happens (34 page)

“Vegard Krogh wasn’t famous,” Sigmund cut in. “I, for one, didn’t have a clue who the guy was before he was killed.”

Johanne let go of Adam’s hand. She put her glasses on again, raised her wineglass, and took a sip.

“You’re right,” she said. “You’re absolutely right. I don’t quite know how—”

“He was pretty well known in certain circles,” Adam said. “He’d been on TV and—”

“Sigmund has a point,” Johanne insisted. “The fact that Vegard Krogh was not more famous weakens my theory. But on the other hand . . .”

She broke off with a thoughtful expression on her face, as if trying to grasp some vague and undefined feeling so she could share it with the others.

“But the motive,” Adam repeated. “If the primary purpose was not to harm Victoria or Vegard per se, what was it? To play with us?”

“Hush! Shhh!” Johanne was completely awake and alert now. “Did you hear that? Is that coming from . . .”

“It’s only Kristiane,” Adam said and got up. “I’ll go.”

“No, let me.”

Johanne tried to be quiet when she went into the hall. Ragnhild might still sleep for another hour before she needed food. Johanne heard sounds from Kristiane’s room that she couldn’t make out.

“What are you up to, sweetie?” she whispered as she opened the door.

Kristiane was sitting up in bed. She had put on some tights and a thick sweater. She had a felt hat on her head, a green Tyrol hat with a feather in it that Isak had once brought back from Munich. Four Barbie dolls lay strewn over the bed. The girl had a knife in her hand and was smiling at her mother.

“What . . . Kristiane! What are you . . . ?”

Johanne sat down on the bed and carefully loosened her daughter’s hand and took the knife.

“You shouldn’t . . . It’s dangerous . . .”

Only then did she notice the dolls’ heads. The Barbies had been decapitated. Their hair had been cut off and lay like old golden Christmas decorations on the duvet.

“What have you . . .” Johanne stammered. “Why have you ruined your dolls?”

Her voice was angrier than she intended. Kristiane burst out crying.

“Don’t know, Mommy. I was bored.”

Johanne put the knife down on the floor. She hugged her daughter to her, pulled her into her lap, pushed off the ridiculous hat, and held her tight. Rocked from side to side. Kissed her tousled hair.

“You shouldn’t do things like that, sweetie. You should never do things like that.”

“But I was so bored, Mommy.”

The window was open, and the room was freezing. Johanne felt she was shivering all over. She threw the remains of the dolls into a corner, pushed the knife far under the bed, and lifted the duvet. She lay down beside her daughter, with her stomach to her daughter’s back. Johanne lay like this, whispering tender words to her, until the crying child finally fell asleep.

Kari Mundal didn’t know the ins and outs of accounting, but she did have a sharp mind and robust common sense and knew roughly what she was looking for. Not because anyone had told her, but because in the weeks since Victoria Heinerback’s death she had used her long morning walks to think, from exactly ten past six until she returned to her husband and a freshly brewed pot of coffee fifty minutes later.

Victoria Heinerback had originally been Kari Mundal’s project. It was the older woman who had discovered the girl’s talent, when Victoria was only seventeen years old. Potential successors to the throne had come and gone over the past fifteen years, but none of them had delivered what they once promised. A couple of them had even stabbed the old king, Kristian Mundal, in the back. Out they went. Others had fallen victim to extreme liberalism, which did not sit comfortably with the party’s persistent efforts to become a new popular party, the people’s party, with stringent state regulation in crucial areas of society. Such as immigration.

Out went the liberals as well, and behind them all stood Victoria Heinerback.

It was Kari Mundal who found her. The seventeen-year-old from the suburbs, from Grorud, who chewed bubble gum and tied her bleached hair up in a ridiculous ponytail. But her eyes were blue and alert, and she had a quick mind. And she was attractive once Kari Mundal persuaded her to get a new haircut and to ditch the pale pink wardrobe.

And she was loyal to Kristian, unstintingly loyal. Always.

It wasn’t easy to get close to Victoria. Even though they had seen each other every day for years, Kari and Victoria had never really been close. Not on a personal level. Maybe it was the age difference that made it difficult. On the other hand, Victoria Heinerback was not open with anyone, as far as Kari Mundal knew. Not even with that show-off she was engaged to. Mrs. Mundal thought the boy had no integrity, but was wise enough not to say it. They certainly looked good together. And that was something.

Politically, however, it was a different matter. Victoria Heinerback was not forthcoming with her views about her own and the party’s future, but when she did speak out, she always allied herself with Kristian and Kari Mundal. The three of them had long since laid down a long-term strategy for the party, aside from the manifesto and the other party members. The first milestone had been achieved when Victoria had been elected by acclamation to succeed Kristian Mundal as party leader. The next would come after the parliamentary elections in 2005, when the party would, for the first time in history, be in a position where the old king could make a comeback as a minister. Then by 2009, the country should be ready for another young female prime minister.

Rudolf Fjord might be a problem.

They had realized that already last summer during the leadership campaign, when the man was blessed with a wave of goodwill from the party apparatus. He was popular in the regions. He traveled a lot, and local government was his forte. It was easy to promise millions to local governments as long as the party was in opposition, and Rudolf was a master of the art. For a while it looked as though the race between the two leadership candidates might be closer than the Mundals cared for. But Kari knew what to do. She whispered a few well-chosen words in selected ears about Rudolf’s relationships with women, and the desired results were achieved. The man seemed to be incapable of commitment. There was something suspicious about the way he always turned up at premieres and A-list parties with a new woman on his arm. It just wasn’t appropriate for a man of his age.

Victoria felt that Rudolf was necessary for the party and seemed to be quite happy to have him as deputy leader. But Kari Mundal, with her sharp nose, well trained and finely tuned from working as Kristian’s closest adviser for over a generation, knew that Victoria was hiding something. She became very alert whenever Rudolf was near. There was something in her eyes, a watchfulness that Kari never managed to grasp and that Victoria avoided explaining the few times Kari had mentioned it.

“Rudolf should be grateful that everyone is so happy about the new building that no one takes a closer look,” Victoria had said the last time they spoke together. “He has done a good job as chairman of the works committee, but he should tread carefully!”

Victoria had been furious when she said it. Rudolf Fjord had taken part in a TV debate where he had openly broken a pact they had made. They had agreed to keep on good footing with the government for a while, as it wasn’t long until the revised national budget was to be announced. They had a plan. An agreement. He broke it, and her eyes were dark when she repeated, “That man should be careful. I could crush him. Like a louse, if I wanted to. He’s walking on thin ice. But he should watch out what’s coming from above, literally.”

And then she had to rush off to a meeting, and Kari never found out what she meant. They never saw each other again, as she was killed two weeks later. When she had confronted Rudolf about Victoria’s outburst during the memorial service at the house on Snarøya, he had claimed that he didn’t know what she was talking about. But the color in his cheeks intensified, and he had been very uncomfortable when they ran into that policeman in the hall.

It was only three days ago, when she had gone to Rudolf’s apartment in Frogner to drop off some papers for Kristian, that she had finally discovered one possible explanation for Victoria’s outburst. Rudolf was irritated by her being there, impatient for her to leave. She asked if she could use the bathroom. He looked angrily at the clock but couldn’t say no. And it was there, as she let the warm water run over her thin, sinewy, and soapy hands, that she realized where she should look.

The accounting department was situated right above Rudolf Fjord’s office. The name was a misnomer, as it wasn’t really a department, just a nice small room with cream wallpaper and cherrywood filing cabinets. The light flooded in through a large window facing the back and over the desk where Hege Hansen sat alone and kept the accounts for the party and the operations company, Kvadraturen Building Ltd.

Victoria had said, “He’s walking on thin ice, but he should watch out for what’s coming from above.”

It was late, and the building was almost empty. Kari Mundal had drunk a whole thermos of tea. She wasn’t used to figures and columns. She didn’t even do her own taxes. Kristian took care of things like that. But curiosity drove her on as she plowed through the accounts for the extensive renovation project, from cover to cover, from the ledger down to the smallest receipt. Every now and then she stopped, straightened the glasses that were perched on the end of her sharp nose, and squinted a bit longer at an invoice before shaking her head and carrying on.

Then she stopped.

Div plumbing

PStarck porcelain

Ft ++

Wk se ok 03

Tot NOK 342,293

VAT NOK 82,150.32

To pay NOK 424,443.32

She had been studying unclear and meaningless vouchers for five hours now, but this was by far the worst. The words “porcelain” and “plumbing” were easy enough, but it took a while before she realized that Ft had to mean “fittings” and that there were in fact spaces between se and ok and 03. Had someone inspected the work and said it was okay in 2003? What did PStarck mean? Postscript tarck? And why was there a PS at the top of the invoice?

The VAT had been invoiced and paid.

Se ok 03.

Se ok, pondered Kari Mundal.

September–October 2003, perhaps? Strange abbreviation.

She thought back to autumn last year, when it looked like everything was going wrong with the building. It was primarily the cellar, roof, and façade that were causing the problems. They had chosen the wrong kind of paint. The stone couldn’t breathe, and they had to repaint the whole thing. And there was something wrong with the drainage. Following a torrential rain, the cellar flooded. The flooring on the first floor had to be pulled up and replaced due to water damage, which was an expensive and time-consuming operation that had nearly ruined all plans for a big opening Christmas party.

The bathrooms were already finished in June.

PStarck.

Philippe Starck.

When they were doing up the big house on Snarøya, their youngest daughter had deluged her with interior design magazines. “Think new, Mom,” she nagged and pointed at jacuzzis that Kari couldn’t bear and toilets that looked like eggs. She most certainly did not want to feel like a hen every time she went to the bathroom was how she dismissed her daughter’s suggestion.

The big building in the Kvadraturen area of Oslo was renovated meticulously and with great care. The toilets were old-fashioned, with high-level tanks and porcelain hand pulls on gold chains.

But in Rudolf’s apartment, in his newly refurbished bathroom, everything was of the moment. Philippe Starck. She had been there, she had seen it, and the realization of what she had just unearthed made her hands sweat. She resolutely drank what was left of the lukewarm tea.

Then she took the voucher out of the file and went to get the key to the photocopying room. When she opened the door, the silence in the corridor was like a dense wall. She hesitated for a moment, listening. She seemed to be alone.

Had Rudolf killed Victoria?

For making a fuss about a bill for 424,443.32 kroner? He couldn’t have. Or could he?

Did he know that she knew? Had she threatened him? Was that why everything had suddenly gone so smoothly just before the election, when Rudolf unexpectedly withdrew his candidacy and asked his supporters to vote for Victoria?

Rudolf Fjord couldn’t have killed Victoria. Could he?

Kari Mundal put the copy in a small brown handbag before tidying away all the papers and quietly letting herself out of the building.

The woman who had wintered on the Riviera was on her way back to Norway. She was looking forward to it, in a way. At first she didn’t recognize the feeling. It reminded her of something rare from her childhood, something unspecific and vague, and she wasn’t even sure that it was pleasant. She felt restless, she had an uncomfortable feeling that time was passing too slowly. Only when the plane climbed steeply into the sky and she watched the wide Baie des Anges disappear under steel gray clouds, did she smile. Then she understood that it was anticipation she was feeling.

It was Friday, February 27, and the plane was only half full. She had a whole row to herself, and when the flight attendant asked if she would like some wine, she replied “Yes, please.” It was too cold. She put the bottle between her thighs and leaned back in her seat. Closed her eyes.

There was no way back.

Everything would be closer now. More intense.

More dangerous—and better.

Ulrik Gustavsen was petrified. The madman who had arrested him just under a week ago had come to get him from the prison cell. Ulrik had tried to protest. He would rather sit in his cell until he rotted than spend time with the oversized bald man who obviously didn’t give a shit about anything or anyone. Particularly not Ulrik Gustavsen and his democratic legal rights.