What Never Happens (7 page)

“Can you help me?” Adam asked in an urgent voice, almost insistent. “Can you get anything at all out of the papers?”

“There’s too little. You know that. I need to look through . . . I need to have . . .” She laughed feebly and shrugged her shoulders. “Good God, of course I can’t help you. I’ve got a newborn to look after! I’m on maternity leave! Obviously we can talk about it—”

“There’s no one as good as you in the country. There are no real profilers here, and we—”

“I am not a profiler,” she said, agitated. “How many times do I have to tell you? I’m fed up with—”

“Okay,” he interrupted and held up his hands in a gesture of peace. “But you damn well know enough about profiling to be one. And I don’t know anyone other than you who has been taught by the FBI’s best—”

“Adam!”

The evening before they got married, he had promised, with his hand on his heart, never to ask about Johanne’s time with the FBI. They had argued in a way that was harsh and unfamiliar to both of them; she had used words he never imagined she could use, and he was positively furious that such an important period of her life was closed off to him.

But she would not share it. Never, not with anyone. As a naive young psychology student in Boston, she had been given the opportunity to participate in one of the FBI’s profiler courses. The head of the course was Warren Scifford, already a legend in his fifties, as much for his knowledge as for his relentless bedding of promising young female students. They called him the Chief, and Johanne had trusted the man who was nearly thirty years her senior. In the end she started to believe that she was something special. That she had been chosen, by him and the FBI, and that of course he would divorce his wife as soon as their children were old enough.

It all went wrong and nearly cost her her life. She got on the first possible flight back to Oslo, started to study law three weeks later, and graduated from the university in record time. Warren Scifford was a name she had tried to forget for the past thirteen years. Her time in the FBI, her months with Warren, the catastrophic event that resulted in the Chief having to work behind a desk for six months as punishment until it all blew over and he was one of the big boys again, was a chapter in her life that occasionally came to mind, but she only thought about it reluctantly. It made her feel sick and she never, no matter what, wanted to talk about it again.

The problem was that Adam knew Warren Scifford. In fact, they’d met up again only last summer, when Adam went to an international police conference in New Orleans. When he came home and mentioned Warren’s name in passing over supper, Johanne smashed two plates in a sudden outburst of anger. Then she ran into the guest room, locked the door, and cried herself to sleep. For three days, he only managed to get monosyllabic replies out of her.

And now he was dangerously close to breaking his promise again.

“Adam,” she repeated harshly. “Don’t even go there.”

“Take it easy. If you don’t want to help, you don’t want to help.” He leaned back in the chair with an indifferent smile. “After all, it’s not your problem, all this.”

“Don’t be like that,” she said, dejected.

“Like what? I’m only stating the obvious. It’s not your problem that a couple of famous women have been killed and mutilated just outside Oslo.” He emptied his glass and put it down, a bit too hard.

“I’ve got children,” Johanne said with feeling. “I’ve got a demanding nine year old and a two-week-old baby and more than enough to keep me busy without taking on a major role in a difficult murder investigation!”

“Okay, okay, I said it was all right.” He stood up suddenly and got two dessert bowls out of the cabinet. “Fruit salad,” he said. “Do you want some?”

“Adam, honestly. Sit down. We can . . . I am perfectly willing to discuss the cases. Like now, in the evening, when the girls have gone to bed. But both you and I know that profiling work is extremely demanding, and so far-reaching that—”

“You know what,” he interrupted and banged a bowl of whipped cream down so hard on the table that the cream jumped. “Fiona Helle’s death is one thing. A tragedy. She was a mother and a wife and far too young to die. Victoria Heinerback didn’t have any children, but I still think that twenty-six is too young to die. But all that aside, people die. People get killed.” He stroked his nose, his straight, beautifully shaped nose with nostrils that quivered when he, on rare occasions, got really angry.

“For God’s sake, people are killed every second day in this country. But what upsets me, what really frightens me . . .”

Alarmed by his own choice of words, he hesitated before repeating himself. “Frightened. I’m frightened, Johanne. I don’t understand these cases. There are so many similarities between them that I can’t help wondering . . .”

“When the next victim will be killed,” Johanne helped him, as he still couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Exactly. And that’s why I’m asking for your help. I know that it’s a lot to ask. I know that you’ve got more than enough on your plate with Kristiane and Ragnhild and your mother and the house and—”

“Okay.”

“What?”

“Fine. I’ll see how much I can manage.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Yes. But then I need all the facts. About both cases. And I want it to be clear from the start that I can pull out at any point.”

“Whenever,” he nodded in confirmation. “Should I . . . I can catch a cab down to the office and—”

“It’s nearly half past ten.”

Her laughter was lame. But it was still laughter, Adam thought. He studied her face for signs of irritation, small twitches in her lower lips, a muscle that drew a shadow along her cheekbone. But all he could see was dimples and a long yawn.

“I’m just going to check the children,” she said.

He loved the way she walked. She was slim without being thin. Even now, only a couple of weeks after giving birth, she moved with a boyish lightness that made him smile. She had narrow hips, straight shoulders. When she bent down over Ragnhild, her hair fell across her face, soft and tangled. She pushed it back behind her ear and said something. Ragnhild was snoring gently.

He followed her into Kristiane’s room. She opened the door with great care. The little girl was asleep with her head at the foot of the bed, the duvet underneath her, and her down jacket over her like a duvet. Her breathing was steady and even. A faint smell of sleep and clean bed linens filled the room, and Adam put his arm around Johanne.

“Well, it certainly worked,” she whispered. He could hear she was smiling. “The magic worked.”

“Thank you,” he whispered back.

“For what?” Johanne stood still. Adam didn’t let go of her. A feeling of unease that she had tried to repress all afternoon overwhelmed her. She had first noticed it around one, when Adam called to explain why he would be so late, and she shrugged it off. She was always fretting. About the children, about her mother who had started to get confused after her father’s third heart attack and didn’t always remember what day it was, about whether she would ever get back to her research. About the mortgage and the bad brakes on the car. About Isak’s easygoing attitude when it came to discipline, and about the war in the Middle East. There was always something to worry about. This afternoon she had tried to find out in one of her many medical books whether the white flecks on Kristiane’s front teeth might be symptoms of too much milk or any other imbalance in her diet. Anxiety, bad conscience, and the feeling of never being good enough were all part of her normal frame of mind, and she had grown accustomed to living with it.

But this was different.

There in the dark, quiet room, with the heat from Adam’s body against her back and the barely audible breathing of her sleeping daughter to remind her of everyday joys and security, she couldn’t put her finger on what was making her uneasy, a feeling that she knew something she did not want to remember.

“What’s the matter?” Adam whispered.

“Nothing,” she said quietly and closed the bedroom door again gently.

It was years since she had dared to drink coffee on a plane. But the tempting aroma of coffee had filled the cabin so quickly that she wondered if they had a barista on board.

The flight attendant responsible for her row must have weighed well over two hundred pounds. He was sweating like a pig. Normally she would have been disgusted by the unsightly rings of damp that were visible on the pale shirt fabric. She had nothing against male stewards. But she would prefer the more feminine type, thought the large lady who was now standing and staring southeast from her panorama windows on the hills above Villefranche. Pants-wearing stewards often had a slight gay twist of the wrist and chose aftershaves that were more like light spring perfumes than masculine musks. This red-haired boar was therefore an obvious exception. She would normally have ignored him. But the smell of coffee had undone her. She had asked for a refill three times and smiled.

And even the wine tasted good.

She had recently discovered that the prices the wine monopoly in Norway charged for goods that had been so carefully and expensively imported were in fact the same as in any old wine shop in the Old Town. Unbelievable, she thought, but true. That afternoon she had opened a twenty-five-euro bottle of wine and drunk a glass. She couldn’t remember tasting a better wine. The man in the shop had assured her that the bottle could stand open for a day or two. She hoped he was right.

All these years, she thought, and stroked her hair. All the projects that had never given her more than money and a headache. All her knowledge that had never been used for anything other than entertaining other people.

This morning she had felt the edge of winter in the air. February was the coldest month on the Riviera. The sea was no longer azure blue. The dirty gray foam lapped tamely at her feet as she walked along the beaches and enjoyed the solitude. Most of the trees had finally lost their leaves. Only the odd pine tree shone green along the roads. Even the path to St. Jean, where noisy, well-dressed children with willowy mothers and wealthy fathers usually shattered the idyll, was empty and desolate. She stopped frequently. Sometimes she lit a cigarette, even though she had stopped smoking years ago now. A slight taste of tar stuck to her tongue. It tasted good.

She had started walking. The restlessness that had plagued her for as long as she could remember felt different now. It was as if she finally understood herself now, understood the feeling of existing in a vacuum of waiting. She had wasted years of her life waiting for something that would never happen, she thought to herself as she stood at the window, holding her hand up against the cool glass.

“For things just to happen,” she whispered and saw a brief gray hint of breath on the windowpane.

She still felt restless, a vague tension in her body. But the unease that had previously gotten her down and pulled her away had now been replaced by an invigorating fear.

“Fear,” she whispered with satisfaction and caressed the glass with slow hand movements.

She chose the word carefully. A good, exhilarating, bright fear was what she felt. She imagined it was like being in love.

Whereas before she felt down but couldn’t cry, tired but couldn’t sleep, she now accepted her existence so fully that she often burst out laughing. She slept well, although she frequently woke up with a feeling that could be mistaken for . . . happiness.

She chose the word happiness, even though it was perhaps a bit too strong at present.

Some people would, no doubt, say she was lonely. She was certain of that, but it didn’t bother her. If only they knew what she actually thought of the people who thought they knew her or what she did. So many of them had allowed themselves to be blinded by her success, despite living in a country where modesty was considered a virtue and superiority the deadliest of all deadly sins.

A nonspecific, unfamiliar anger flared up in her. Her skin crawled, and she ran her cold hand down her left arm and felt how firm she was, how compact her flesh was on her body, hard and dense, as if her skin was slightly too small.

It was a long time since she had bothered to think about the past. It wasn’t worth it. But things had changed so much in recent weeks.

She was born on a rainy Sunday evening in November 1958. Her mother died within twenty minutes of giving birth, and the way the state had treated the tiny, half-dead child made it crystal-clear that Norway was not a country where you should believe you were worth something.

Her father was abroad. She didn’t have any grandparents. One of the nurses had wanted to take her home to her family when she recovered a bit. She thought the baby needed more love and care than could be offered by a three-way shift at the hospital. But the egalitarian country of which the baby was now a citizen did not permit such special arrangements. So she was left in a corner of the children’s ward, where she was fed and had her diaper changed at fixed times, but otherwise was given very little attention until her father came to take her home three months later, to a life where her new mother was already installed.

“Bitterness is not in my nature,” the woman said out loud to her own diffuse reflection in the window. “Bitterness is not in my nature.”

She would never have used the expression “burning rage.” But that was the cliché that came to her all the same as she turned her back to the view and lay down on the far-too-soft sofa so she could breathe more easily. Her diaphragm was burning. She slowly raised her hands to her face. Big square hands with sweaty palms and short nails. She turned them around and noticed a scar on the back of one of them. Her thumb looked as though it had been broken. She tried to recall a story that she knew existed somewhere. She quickly pulled up the sleeves of her sweater, she pinched and touched her own skin. The heat was so extreme now that she could barely swallow. Suddenly she sat up and observed her body as if it belonged to someone else. She ran her fingers through her hair and felt the grease on her scalp against her fingertips. She scratched herself with small, sharp movements until her scalp started to bleed.