What Never Happens (39 page)

They had barely spoken to each other for two days. Both of them carried a fear that was too great to share with the other. The murderer had chosen an athlete this time. Only one case remained from Warren Scifford’s lecture on proportional retribution, and Johanne and Adam conversed with a stiff and false friendliness. Life in the semidetached house in Tåsen was hectic, as everyday activities helped to disguise the fear.

For a while, at least.

Adam was putting up shelves in the bathroom. They had been stored in the cabinet for six months now. Johanne expected to hear Ragnhild crying at any minute; his hammering could wake the dead. But she couldn’t face talking to him. She sat on the sofa and turned the pages of a book. It was impossible to read.

“Tonight’s evening news has been extended by an hour,” said a very faint voice on the TV.

Johanne found the remote control. The voice got louder. The opening music and graphics rolled.

The host was dressed in black, as if he was going to a funeral. He didn’t smile as he usually did at the start of the program. Johanne couldn’t remember ever having seen the long-serving anchorman wear a tie.

The chief of police was also dressed for the occasion. The already slim woman had lost a lot of weight over the past few weeks, and her uniform hung off her. She sat straight and tense in her chair, as if on duty. For once she had problems giving a clear answer to the questions she was asked.

“Adam,” Johanne called. “You should come and see this.”

Angry hammering from the bathroom.

“Adam!”

She went to get him. He was down on all fours, trying to separate two shelves.

“God damn it,” he said tersely. “These damned instructions are all wrong.”

“There’s a special program about your case,” Johanne told him.

“It’s not my case. I don’t own it.”

“Don’t be silly. Come on. Come and watch it. The shelves won’t run away.”

He put the hammer down.

“Look,” he said, ashamed, and pointed at the floor. “I smashed one of the tiles. Sorry. I didn’t think—”

“Come on,” she said curtly and went back into the living room.

“. . . we do of course have a number of leads in this case,” said the chief of police on the screen. “Or cases, I should perhaps say. However, they are not explicit, and it will take some time to figure this out. We’re looking at a complex web of events.”

“Leads,” Adam muttered. He had followed Johanne into the living room and slumped down on the other sofa. “Show me them, then. Show me your leads!”

He wiped his face with a corner of his shirt and grabbed a lukewarm can of beer from the table.

“Can you understand that people are worried?” asked the anchorman as he leaned forward and opened his arms in despair. “Terrified! Following four horrific murders? And the investigation seems to have come to a complete standstill?”

“I must correct you there,” the chief of police said and then coughed into her hand. “We’re talking about three cases. The murder of Fiona Helle has been solved, according to the police and the authorities. Some investigation still needs to be carried out, but a charge will be made shortly—”

“Three cases,” the anchorman interrupted. “Okay. And what leads do you have for those three cases?”

“I’m sure you understand that I can’t give out any more details about an ongoing investigation. The only thing I can say this evening is that we are drawing on considerable resources—”

“Understand!” the host exclaimed. “You ask for our understanding when you seem to have no answers at all. People are barricading themselves in their homes, and . . .”

“He’s frightened,” Adam said and drank the dregs of the flat beer. “He never gets angry. Isn’t it more his style to wheedle and entice? To smile and let people make a fool of themselves?”

Johanne responded by turning up the volume even more.

“He’s terrified,” Adam muttered. “Him and a couple of thousand other Norwegians who live vicariously through that box.” He pointed at the TV with the empty can.

“Shh.”

“Come over here.”

“What?”

“Can’t you come over here and sit next me?”

“I . . .”

“Please.”

The chief of police was finally allowed to go. While they swapped interviewees in the studio, they tried to run a report from the building where Håvard Stefansen had been murdered two days earlier. The film got stuck. The panning shot from the entrance to a window on the fifth floor froze in midswing and became an unfocused still of a woman peering out from behind a curtain on the third floor with a shocked expression. The sound was fuzzy. Something beeped. Suddenly the anchorman was back on the screen.

“We apologize for the technical problems,” he coughed. “But now I think we’re—”

“We’ll always be lovers,” murmured Adam as he smelled her hair; she had curled up beside him and pulled a blanket over them both.

“Maybe,” she said and stroked his arm. “As long as you promise never to do anymore DIY.”

“Welcome to the program, Wencke Berger.”

“What?” Adam sat up.

“Shh!”

“Thank you,” said Wencke Berger without a flicker of a smile.

“You are the author of no less than seventeen crime novels,” the anchorman introduced her. “All of which are about serial killers. You are considered to be something of an expert in the field and have gained widespread recognition for your thorough preparation and extensive research. Even within the police, as we found out today. Now, you were originally a lawyer, right?”

“Yes, that’s right,” she replied, still serious. “But there’s not much of the lawyer left in me now. I’ve been writing novels since 1985.”

“We are particularly pleased to welcome you to the program tonight, as it has actually been twelve years since you gave an interview here in Norway. But it is, of course, the current tragic circumstances that have brought you here. All the same, I would like to start by asking a somewhat lighthearted question: how many people have you killed over the years?”

He leaned forward in anticipation, as if he expected her to share a huge secret.

“I don’t know anymore,” she said and smiled. Her teeth were unusually white and even for a woman who must be in her midforties. “I’ve lost count. After all, quality is more important than quantity, even in my field. I concentrate on the details, not the numbers. I get my . . . pleasure from finding original twists, if you like.”

She pushed her bangs away from her forehead, but they fell back immediately.

Johanne managed to free herself from Adam’s arms. He was about to strangle her. He had just grabbed the
Dagbladet
paper that was lying on the table. He looked at something and then dropped it on the floor. She turned around toward him and asked,

“What is it?”

. . . and you found the most recent victim,
the TV droned,
. . . who was your nearest neighbor. In your view, as an expert, what might lie behind . . .

“What’s wrong, darling?”

. . . the wish to be seen as something other than . . .

“Adam!”

His skin was sweaty. Gray.

“Adam,” she screamed and fell off the sofa. “What’s wrong with you?”

. . . more like cases from other countries. Not just the United States, but also the United Kingdom and in Germany we know . . .

Johanne lifted her hand. Smacked him. The sound of her palm against his cheek made him look up at last.

“It’s her,” he said.

. . . be cautious about jumping to conclusions about . . .

“It’s her,” he repeated. “That woman.”

“What’s wrong, Adam?” Johanne screamed. “I thought you were having a heart attack! I’ve told you a thousand times that you need to lose weight and cut out sugar and—”

. . . bearing in mind that I’ve been abroad for the past few months and only followed the case on the Internet and in the occasional newspaper, I would say that . . .

“Have you gone insane?” Johanne exclaimed. “Have you gone stark raving mad? Why would—”

He was still pointing at the TV screen. The color was returning to his face. His breathing had slowed. Johanne turned slowly back to the TV.

Wencke Berger wore frameless glasses. The reflection of the sharp lights in the studio made it hard to see her eyes. Her suit was a touch too tight, as if she had bought it in the hope of losing some weight. There was a small brooch on the collar. A thin gold chain shone around her neck, and she had good color for the time of year.

“I don’t hold out much hope of that,” she answered to a question that Johanne had not heard. “The police don’t seem to have a clue, so I find it hard to imagine that the likelihood of the murders being solved is anything but slim.”

“Do you really believe that?” the anchorman asked with a gesture that invited a full reply.

“I don’t understand,” Johanne said and turned around again to try to get Adam’s attention.

“Be quiet,” he said. “Let me hear what she has to say!”

“Well, I’m afraid that’s about all we have time for,” the anchorman said. “But in the light of the recent tragic events, I must ask in closing whether you ever get tired of it. Of thinking up murders and crimes for entertainment.”

Wencke Berger straightened her glasses. Her nose seemed too small for her broad face, and her glasses kept threatening to fall off.

“Yes,” she admitted. “I do get tired of it. Sick and tired of it, sometimes. But writing crime is the only thing I can do. I’m getting older and”—she waved a stubby finger and looked into the camera. Suddenly her eyes were visible. They were brown and sparkled with a smile that made her cheeks split into two deep dimples—“obviously the pay is fantastic, which helps.”

“Wencke Berger, thank you very much—”

Click.

Johanne put down the remote control.

“What do you mean?” she whispered. “You scared me so badly, Adam. I thought you were about to die.”

“It’s Wencke Berger. She killed Victoria Heinerback,” he said, squeezing the beer can with both hands. “She killed Vegard Krogh. And she killed her neighbor, Håvard Stefansen. She’s the celebrity killer. She has to be.”

Johanne sank down onto the coffee table. The house was quiet. Not a sound could be heard from outside. The neighbors downstairs were away. Johanne and Adam were alone, and a light was turned off in the house across the road.

Suddenly a sound could be heard from the children’s room: the piercing, vulnerable cry of a six-week-old baby.

Wencke Berger walked slowly through the swinging doors at the NRK TV studio. It was a chilly March evening with a cutting wind. When she looked up, she saw Venus twinkling against a patch of deep blue sky between moving dark clouds. She smiled at the journalists and let the photographers take yet more pictures before getting into the taxi and telling the driver her address.

Everything was different now. The difference was greater than she had ever hoped for. She’d noticed it at Gardemoen Airport the previous Friday, when she, with a broad smile, thanked the flight attendant for a pleasant trip. Whereas before she used to walk with a hunched back and heavy steps, she now stood up straight. She sauntered down the endless corridors with a duty-free bag swinging from her hand. She looked up and out. Noticed all the details of the beautiful building, the enormous lime wood beams and the color play of the artwork by the stairs down to the arrival hall. She waited patiently for her luggage and chatted with a red-haired child who poked her laptop with curiosity. She smiled at the child’s father and straightened the lapel of the new Armani coat she had bought at Galeries Lafayette in Nice, which made her look as new as she actually felt.

She was strong.

And supremely confident.

She had made a decision many years ago when she delivered her first manuscript and discovered that this was something she could do. She would become an expert in crime. A specialist in murder. Literary critics were an unreliable tribe. The reasoning of the media was predictable and petty: they would build you up only to pull you down. Her editor had warned her about it, way back then. Looked at her with indescribably sad eyes, as if by making her debut as a crime writer, Wencke Berger had stepped into purgatory. And so she decided then and there, she would never read a review.

And she would never, ever make a mistake.

She would devise perfect plots. She would never misjudge the effect of a weapon. She would learn all there was to know about human anatomy, about stab wounds and punches, about bullet wounds and poison. Investigations and tactics. Chemistry, biology, psychology. She would build up an understanding of the business of crime, from the big, powerful organizations down to the pathetic junkies who sat at the very bottom of the ladder, holding out a hand:
Can you spare any change?

She hadn’t managed to keep the first promise.

She read the reviews as soon as they came out.

But no one could say that Wencke Berger didn’t know what she was talking about.

And no one did.

She had studied and read constantly since 1985. Done field studies. Traveled. Observed and researched. And eventually she realized that theory could never surpass practice. She had to look to real life. The fictional universe wasn’t concrete enough. Real life was full of details and unexpected turns. Just sitting at a desk, it was hard to imagine the multitude of seemingly insignificant, trivial events that could in fact be decisive in a murder case.

She started to catalog real people.

Her archive dated back to 1995. She had needed a principal of a children’s home and a policeman with a threadbare reputation for a book she was going to write. She was shocked at how easy it was to find them. Surveillance was boring, naturally, with hours of waiting and unimportant observations. Her notes were dry and dispassionate.

But it was easier to write.

The reviews were positive. Book number eight was received with considerable enthusiasm, as her first book had been. A couple of critics remarked that Wencke Berger was fresher than she had been for a long time, almost revitalized.

They were wrong.