Anne Holt - Fear Not

Adam was shifting about so much that she sat up and undid his belt.

‘I love you however much you weigh,’ she said. ‘But it does look a little bit ridiculous when you start literally tightening your belt. Couldn’t you perhaps buy yourself some bigger clothes, sweetheart?’

She could have sworn he was blushing. But he left the belt hanging open.

‘I think they’re here for a very definite reason,’ she said.

‘Which is?’

‘If only we knew. But there’s something.’

‘Shit,’ said Adam, lumbering to his feet.

‘What are you going to do?’

He mumbled something she didn’t catch and headed towards the hallway. She could hear Super Trouper coming from below, and realized she was humming along. In order to get the enervating melody out of her head, she picked up a pen from the coffee table and took a newspaper out of the basket on the floor. She jotted down a few notes in the margin of the front page of Aftenposten . When she had finished she sat there brooding so intently that she didn’t even notice Adam until he flopped down beside her. He was wearing generous pyjama bottoms and a big American football shirt.

‘Look at this,’ she said, tapping the paper with her pen.

‘I can’t make head or tail of it,’ he said, wrinkling his nose at her incomprehensible scrawl.

‘The methods,’ she said succinctly.

‘Yes?’

‘Sophie Eklund was killed after someone sabotaged her car. So there was an attempt to cover up a murder.’

‘Yes…’

‘Niclas Winter was written off as the victim of an overdose. Which he was – to be fair – but all the indications are that he was killed with curacit. In other words, another attempt to cover up a murder.’

‘How do you actually inject curacit into an adult, relatively healthy man?’ Adam muttered, still trying to decipher what she had written down. ‘I would have fought like the devil.’

‘The first thing that occurs to me is that he might have been fooled into thinking it was something else. Heroin, for example.’

‘Yes…’

‘Or he was taken by surprise. Curacit works incredibly fast. If you inject into the mouth where there are a lot of blood vessels, it’s only a matter of seconds before the effect kicks in.’

‘Into the mouth? But you can’t force someone to open wide so you can inject a little curacit, surely?’

‘I’m afraid we’ll never know the answer to that. He’s been cremated. But listen to me, Adam. Pay attention. The point is there was an attempt to cover up the next two murders, exactly like the ones I’ve just mentioned.’

She chewed her pen.

‘Runar Hansen, poor soul – nobody really bothered too much about him. Drug addicts who get beaten up and die as a result of their injuries don’t attract much attention these days. And as far as Hawre Ghani is concerned, he was thrown in the water and was virtually unrecognizable by the time they pulled him out. To be perfectly honest, I think his case would have ended up well down the pile at police headquarters if Silje Sørensen hadn’t… felt something for the boy.’

‘Where are you going with this, Johanne?’

‘I want my own wine. Can’t you go and get me a glass?’

He got up without a word.

Johanne stared at her scribbles. Six murders. Two covered up, two almost ignored, simply because the victims were right at the bottom of the scale of humanity in every way. She suddenly drew a thick ring around the last two names.

‘There you go,’ said Adam, handing her a half-full glass. ‘Not exactly the usual Friday night. Apart from the wine, I mean.’

‘What we can almost definitely say,’ said Johanne, taking the glass without looking up, ‘is that something unforeseen happened when Marianne Kleive was murdered. The killer was surprised by Kristiane. In other words, we can’t actually be certain whether this murder would also have been covered up. As an accident. An illness. Something. To make sure the alarm wasn’t sounded straight away, the murderer sent text messages from her mobile. That gave him a whole week.’

‘Does this just mean they don’t want to get caught, that they just want to buy themselves time, or that they want-?’

‘But let’s look at the Bishop,’ said Johanne, suddenly realizing that the page she was writing on had a picture of Eva Karin in the right-hand column.

She turned the old paper ninety degrees and drew a square around the small portrait on the front page.

‘There was no attempt to disguise this murder,’ she said, mostly to herself.

Adam was sensible enough to keep quiet.

‘Quite the reverse,’ she went on. ‘Stabbed out in the street. True, it happened on the only day of the year when you can be fairly sure nobody is out and about, but still… The intention was that she should be found quickly. The intention was that the murder of…’

She held her breath for so long that Adam wondered if something was wrong.

‘Of course!’ she said suddenly in a loud voice, turning to look at Adam. ‘Let’s assume that my theory is correct. The other murders are perceived as something else. The objective was quite simply…’

She stared at him as if she had only just noticed that he was sitting there.

‘… that they should die,’ she said in surprise. ‘The only objective was that they should die! Death itself was the goal!’

Adam thought it was fairly obvious that a person was murdered because someone wanted them dead, but he kept quiet.

‘They’re sinners,’ said Johanne, waxing almost enthusiastic. ‘And they must be punished for their sins! It doesn’t matter to The 25’ers whether the rest of us can see a link, or whether we even realize a crime lies behind their deaths. The most important thing is that they must die, and then that the murderers – God’s instruments, so to speak – are not subject to our worldly legislation.’

‘Yes,’ Adam ventured tentatively.

‘Only one of these victims is known to the public,’ Johanne went on. ‘Eva Karin Lysgaard. And she was the only one who was murdered in a way that positively cries out for attention. Why would that be, Adam?’

She knelt on the sofa and turned towards him. Her face was glowing. Her eyes were shining, her mouth half-open. She took his hand and squeezed it so hard it almost hurt.

‘Why, Adam?’

‘Because,’ he said. ‘Because…’

‘Because they want us to start digging into her life! The investigation into the murder of Eva Karin Lysgaard is an investigation they wanted to happen, Adam! The whole point was for us to turn her life upside down, just as all murder victims have their lives turned inside out in the hope that something will turn up!’

‘In the hope that something will turn up,’ he repeated quietly. ‘Hang on a minute.’

Johanne followed him with her eyes as he padded into the hallway. She was out of breath, and her palms prickled when he came back and handed her a photograph before sitting down again.

‘Who’s this?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know who she is,’ he said. ‘But this is a copy of a photograph that went astray.’

He told her about the room that had been Eva Karin’s sanctuary at night. About the photograph that had been there the day after the murder, but had disappeared when he went back a couple of days later. When he got to the part about Lukas scrambling across the roof in the January rain, he started to laugh. At the end he took back the photograph and laid it on his knee.

‘Lukas thought she might be his sister,’ he said. ‘But you can tell from both the quality of the picture and the clothes she’s wearing that it’s hardly likely it was taken around 1980. And her hairstyle isn’t exactly typical of the eighties either.’