Punishment aka What Is Mine

But he still didn’t get up. He still made no sign of wanting to go.

I haven’t got room for this, thought Johanne. I haven’t got time for this case in my life. I don’t want it. I haven’t got room…

“… for you,” she mumbled.

“What?”

Adam was sitting with his back to the big living-room window. The contrasting light made it difficult to see his face. Only his eyes were clear. They were looking straight at her.

“Should I make some lunch, instead?” she asked, smiling. “You must be hungry. I certainly am.”

He took up so much space.

Isak, the only man who had ever been in her kitchen for more than thirty seconds, was slight, almost skinny. Adam Stubo filled the entire room. There was barely space for Johanne. He took off his jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. Then he started to make an omelette, without asking. Johanne could hardly move without touching him. He smelled newly showered, with a faint aroma of cigars, the smell of someone who was older than she. When he rolled up his sleeves to cut the onion, she noticed the hairs on his forearms were light, nearly golden. She thought about summer and turned away.

“What do you think the message means?” he said, and jabbed the air with his knife. “Now you’ve got what you deserved. Who got what they deserved? The child? The mother? Society? The police?”

“In both cases the message has been directed at the mother, in a way,” replied Johanne. “Though of course the murderer couldn’t be certain that it would be the mother who found Kim. It could just as easily have been the father who went down into the cellar. And as far as Sarah is concerned, there’s reason to believe that the murderer realized that the package might never be delivered to the address. He’s not stupid. I don’t know. I think it’s more important to focus on the content of the message than whom it’s addressed to.”

“What do you mean by content?”

Adam turned on the stove and took a frying pan out of the lower cabinet without even asking where it was. Johanne had sat down on a stool and was staring with great concentration at a glass of ice water.

“In fact, I think you should start from a completely different angle,” she said slowly.

“Okay. What angle?”

He wiped his eyes.

“You should always start at the bottom,” she said more or less absentmindedly, as if she was searching for something in her memory. “Look at what you’ve got. Facts. Objective evidence. Lay the foundations. Never speculate before you’ve got the foundations. Dangerous.”

“So that’s what you should do.”

“Yes.”

She straightened her back and put down the glass. Good smells were coming from the stove. Adam found some plates and glasses, knives and forks. He seemed to be very focused as he cut a tomato into a beautiful decoration.

“Here you go,” he said with satisfaction, putting the frying pan on the table. “Onion omelette. Now that’s what I call a real lunch.”

“Three children,” she said, chewing slowly. “If we assume that Emilie was taken by the same man as Sarah and Kim. We can’t be certain, but let’s… For the moment, we’ll assume she was. Three children have disappeared. Two of them have been delivered back. Dead. Dead children.”

“Dead children,” Adam repeated, and put down his fork. “We don’t even know what they died from.”

“Wait!”

She lifted a hand and continued:

“Who kills children?”

“Sex offenders and drivers,” he muttered grimly.

“Exactly.”

“Hmm?”

“These children weren’t killed by a driver. And there’s nothing to indicate that they were killed by a pedophile either. Isn’t that right?”

He nodded imperceptibly.

“Unless it was sexual acts that leave no trace,” he said. “And that is a possibility.”

“What are we left with then, if it’s not a question of sex or car accidents?”

“Nothing,” he said, and took another helping.

“You’re eating too quickly,” she said. “And you’re wrong. We’re left with quite a lot. You, I mean. You’re left with quite a few options.”

The omelette tasted good. A bit too much onion for her liking, but the dash of Tabasco made it different.

“The fact is that we don’t kill children easily. Both you and I know that most killings in this country are manslaughter. The percentage of murderers who reoffend is minimal. Most killings are the result of an ongoing family conflict, terrible jealousy or… pure accident. A drunken brawl. One thing leads to another. There’s a weapon in hand, a shotgun or a knife. Bang. Someone becomes a killer and that’s that. We both know that. Children are seldom directly involved, at least not as victims. Other than by association.”

“That’s if we rule out teenagers,” Adam retorted. “They’re killing each other more and more frequently. And they get younger and younger. I think I would call a fourteen-year-old a child. He was that age, the boy who was arrested in January. At Mollergate school, that is.”

Johanne rolled her eyes.

“Yes, yes. But gang violence is also about rivalry. Misconceived honor. They kill each other, but rarely anyone else. People who aren’t involved. And as far as sex offenders are concerned, they generally kill to hide their crime. The abuse. It’s very rare that the actual killing is part of the sexual act. To put it simply, sex offenders kill because they have to. I’ve talked to many of them and some find it hard to live with the knowledge of what they have done. They are consumed by remorse. Shame. Grief. Not so much for the sexual act-which they have an astonishing ability to rationalize-but for the murder. The fact that a child had to die.”

“What are you getting at?”

He emptied his glass of milk and gently patted his stomach.

“A person who can kill an innocent child… Steal them, kill them and send them back to their parents with a grotesque message… The actions presuppose a psyche that allows him to legitimize what he has done.”

“That his actions are perfectly reasonable, as far as he is concerned. In other words, he’s insane.”

Adam was playing with a tube in his breast pocket.

“No, he’s not insane. Not in the traditional sense of the word, at least. He’s not psychotic. Then he would never be able to pull this off. Don’t forget how… sophisticated his crimes are. How well planned everything has to be… It depends what you mean by insane. A warped… mind? Yes. Mentally ill? No.”

“But it’s fine for him to kill a child? Is that what you’re saying? That he thinks it’s fine to kill a child, but he’s not mentally ill?”

“Yes. Or no, actually. For all we know he might be sorry that a child has to die. But he has a higher goal. A mission, if you like. A kind of… task?”

“But for who?”

The cigar tube slipped backward and forward between his fingers. There was the nearly imperceptible sound of brushed metal rubbing against dry skin.

“Don’t know,” she said abruptly.

You’re playing me, it struck her. Here I am going on about things that are so obvious that you must have worked them out for yourself ages ago. How many murder cases have you worked on? How many killers with distorted judgement have you met? You’ve read volumes about this. You’re fishing. And you think you’ve got me hooked. For some absurd reason it’s important for you to have me on board. I won’t be fooled.

“Coffee?” she asked nonchalantly, and started to fill the machine with cold water.

“You know how a profiler works,” said Adam.

She let the water run over her wrist. The jug was full to overflowing.