Punishment aka What Is Mine

“What were you going to say?”

“I asked…”

“No, I interrupted you. You were about to say something about this time again…”

“Oh yes. The girl also had diazepam in her urine. Just a tiny amount.”

“What is the point of giving a child tranquilizers?”

“To calm them down, I would think. Maybe he keeps… maybe he’s keeping them somewhere where they have to be quiet. He has to get them to sleep.”

“But if the reason was to get them to sleep, he could give them sleeping pills.”

“Yes. It’s possible he doesn’t have access to them. He may only have… Valium.”

“Who has access to Valium?”

“Oh, God…”

He stifled a yawn and shook his head sharply.

“Lots of people,” he replied with a sigh. “Everyone who actually gets it prescribed by the doctor. We’re talking about thousands, if not tens of thousands. Then there’s pharmacists, doctors, nurses… Even though there is supposed to be rules and regulations in hospitals and pharmacies, we’re talking about such a small dose that there’s no way… It could be anyone. Did you know that over sixty percent of us open the bathroom cabinet when we’re in someone else’s house? Stealing two or three tablets would be the easiest thing in the world. If we ever manage to catch this guy, it won’t be because he’s in possession of Valium or diazepam.”

“If we ever,” repeated Johanne. “That’s a bit pessimistic.”

Adam Stubo was playing with a toy car. He let it roll down the back of his hand. The front lights glowed weakly when the wheels were set in motion.

“She only likes red cars,” said Johanne. “Kristiane, I mean. Not dolls, nor trains. Nothing but cars. Red cars. Fire engines, London buses. We don’t know why.”

“What is it that’s wrong with her?”

He carefully put the car down on the coffee table. The rubber on one of the wheels had been torn off and the tiny axle scraped against the glass surface.

“We don’t know.”

“She’s sweet. Really sweet.”

He looked like he meant it. But he’d only seen her once, and then only briefly.

“And you’re no further forward with the actual delivery of… I mean, he must have been in the entrance in Urtegate, or got someone else to… What do you know about it?”

“Courier. A courier!”

Adam Stubo thumped his index finger down on the roof of the car and pushed it slowly across the table. A thin scratch in the glass followed in its trail, where the tire was missing. Johanne opened her mouth, but said nothing all the same.

“It’s just so… so impudent,” Adam said savagely. He wasn’t aware of what he was actually doing. “Of course the guy knew that we wouldn’t tolerate another home delivery of a dead child to the mother. We had checks everywhere. Mistake, of course. With Sarah’s murder, Oslo City Police are suddenly involved and the relationship between the NCIS and… forget it. We should have been more discreet. Lured him into a trap. At least tried. He read the signs and used-a courier! A courier! And no one in Urtegate saw anything unusual, no one heard anything, no one guessed. The box with Sarah in it must have been left there in broad daylight. Old trick, by the way…”

“It’s best to hide where there’s lots of people,” Johanne concluded. “Smart. All the same, the package must have been…”

She hesitated before adding quietly:

“Quite big.”

“Yes, it was big enough to hold an eight-year-old child.”

Johanne knew herself well. She was a predictable person. Isak, for example, found her boring after a while. Once Kristiane was well again and life returned to a set routine, he started to complain. Johanne was not impulsive enough. Relax, he said more and more often. It’s not that bad, he sighed in resignation every time she looked skeptically at the frozen pizza he fed their daughter when he couldn’t be bothered to make food. Isak thought she was boring. Lina and her other friends agreed to a certain extent. But they didn’t say so to her face. On the contrary, they praised her. She was so reliable, they enthused. So smart and so responsible. You could always rely on Johanne, always. Boring, in other words.

She had to be predictable. She was responsible for a child who would never really grow up.

Johanne knew herself.

The situation was absurd.

She had invited a man home with her, someone she barely knew. She let him tell her the details of a police investigation that had nothing to do with her. He was in breach of the confidentiality clause. She should warn him. Politely say good-bye. She’d already made up her mind in the hotel room in Harwich Port, when she tore up the message into thirty-two pieces and flushed them down the toilet.

“Strictly speaking, you shouldn’t be telling me this.”

Adam Stubo drew a deep breath and let the air seep out between his clenched teeth. He shrank. Maybe he was just sinking deeper into the sofa.

“Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t. Not until we’re formally working together. And I’m starting to get the impression that you don’t want to do that.”

He gave a smile, as if he wanted to be ironic. But then gave up and continued:

“Strictly speaking, this case is a nightmare. Strictly speaking…”

Again he drew a deep breath.

“My wife and only daughter died just over two years ago,” he said quickly. “I assume you didn’t know.”

“No, I’m very sorry.”

She didn’t want to hear this.

“An absurd accident. My daughter… her name was Trine and she was only twenty-three. Amund was a baby. My grandson. She was going to… is this upsetting you? I’m upsetting you.”

Suddenly he sat up. He straightened his shoulders and once again filled his gray tweed jacket. Then he smiled briefly.

“You have more useful things to be getting on with.”

But he didn’t get up. He gave no sign of moving. A great tit had settled on the bird feeder out on the terrace.

“No,” said Johanne.

When he looked at her, she didn’t know what he wanted. The general impression was that he was grateful. Relieved, perhaps, because he sank back into the sofa.

“My wife had been irritated by a clogged gutter for a while,” he said blankly. “I’d promised to do something about it, for a long time. But I just never got around to it. My daughter dropped by one morning, said she was happy to go up on the roof and hose down the gutters. Presumably my wife held the ladder. Trine must have lost her balance. She fell, taking part of the gutter with her. Which must have fallen under her somehow, because it… impaled her. The ladder fell on top of my wife, with Trine’s full body weight. One of the rungs hit her in the face. Her nose bone was pushed up into her brain. When I came home a couple of hours later, they were both lying there, dead. And Amund was still asleep.”

Johanne could hear herself breathing, short and shallow. She tried to break the rhythm, to slow the pace.

“I was the head of the division at the time,” he continued calmly. “To be honest, I’d seen myself as the next head of the NCIS for a long time. But after that… I asked to be a detective inspector again. Will never be anything else. If I manage to stay on, that is. Cases like this make me wonder. Well, well.”

His eyes were uncertain. His smile was shy, nearly sheepish, as if he had done something wrong and didn’t know how to say sorry. He opened his mouth a couple of times, clearly to say something more. Then he looked down at his hands instead.

“Well, well,” he repeated after a while, twiddling his thumbs. “I’d better beat a retreat.”