‘See you!’
He disappeared and she tossed the telephone down on the coffee table. As she walked over to the big window, Johanne was no longer tiptoeing. She stomped angrily across the floor, unsure whether her aggression was directed at herself or Isak.
She still hadn’t bought any curtains.
The snow was so deep that the fence on Hauges Vei was no longer visible. The piles left by the snowploughs were enormous. People had nowhere to put the snow they had cleared from their drives. Not knowing what else to do, they spread it out in the middle of the road, which meant that a considerable amount ended up right back where it came from every time the snowplough rattled past.
There wasn’t a soul in sight. The cold from the window pane made her shudder. The big snowman the children who lived opposite had made stared at her with his coal-black eyes. He had lost his nose. His birch-twig arms stuck out like witch’s talons. He wore an old hat; a bright red scarf covered half his face.
He reminded her of the man by the fence.
She stepped to one side.
Tomorrow she would get some curtains.
It suddenly struck her that she had been completely wrong.
The anxiety that had tormented her since Christmas had not started with the man by the fence. The feeling that someone was watching Kristiane had not started when a strange man came up and asked her what she’d had for Christmas. The reason why Johanne had reacted so strongly on that occasion was because the fear already had her in its grip. The search for those damned spare ribs and all the stress of organizing a Christmas Eve that would satisfy her mother had just temporarily pushed it aside.
It wasn’t the man by the fence who had triggered her anxiety. It had been there since the wedding. Ever since Kristiane had stood on the tram lines and Johanne had been certain she was going to die, she had felt that her own despair was linked to something more, something greater than the fact that her daughter had been in mortal danger. It had all worked out in spite of everything, and even if she was worrying unnecessarily, she couldn’t remember feeling like this since Wencke Bencke had threatened her in her subtle way almost five years ago.
Johanne hurried over to the computer and switched it on.
It seemed to take an eternity for the start page to appear, and when she keyed in the name of the world- famous crime writer, she got it wrong four times before she was finally able to google the name: 26,900 hits. She tried limiting her search. The only thing she wanted to know about the author was whether she was still living in New Zealand.
Wencke Bencke had got away with murder. She had cold-bloodedly taken the lives of a series of celebrities during the winter and spring of 2004; Johanne had never fully understood her motives. Johanne had helped Adam and Sigmund with the wide-ranging investigation, but the only result was that the three of them became convinced that Bencke was guilty. They couldn’t prove a thing. The celebrated author had come to see her one beautiful spring day when it seemed clear that the murderer would never be caught. Johanne had been out pushing the newborn Ragnhild in her buggy when Wencke Bencke confessed, calmly and with a smile. Not that her confession would have stood up in a court of law, but it was clear enough to Johanne. The hidden threat she left hanging between them as she trudged away in the spring sunshine was also subtle, but it was sufficiently unambiguous to leave Johanne scared out of her wits. The fear didn’t really go away until the following year, when Bencke married a Maori man fifteen years her junior and emigrated to New Zealand. She had been back to Norway in connection with book launches, which made Johanne avoid the arts section of the newspapers for most of the autumn.
There.
An article from
Wencke Bencke in the sunshine, surrounded by sheep. She and her husband had bought a farm in Te Anau. She hadn’t even come home last autumn when her latest book was published;
Johanne breathed a little more easily.
This had nothing to do with Wencke Bencke.
The fear that plagued her now had started on 19 December, the evening when Marianne Kleive was murdered. Johanne blinked and saw the number 19 etched on the inside of her eyelids, shimmering and green.
The accursed number 19.
She opened her eyes and stared into space. The telephone rang.
Eva Karin Lysgaard was murdered on 24 December.
Niclas Winter, the artist she had read about last night, died on 27 December.
He died. He wasn’t murdered. He died from an overdose.
The phone kept on ringing. She reached out and picked it up. It was Adam.
19, 24 and 27.
The digital sum was 25.
Giving drug addicts an overdose was a well-known method of covering up a murder.
The phone fell silent. A few seconds later it rang again.
This time she answered it with a brief ‘Hello’.
‘Hi sweetheart. I see you’ve rung me loads of times. Sorry I couldn’t get back to you until now; I’ve been stuck in meetings all afternoon. We’re getting nowhere and-’
‘It’s absolutely fine,’ she mumbled. ‘It wasn’t anything important.’
‘Is everything OK? You sound a bit… odd.’
‘No, no. Yes. I mean, everything’s fine. It’s just… I was asleep. The phone woke me up. I think I might just go to bed, actually.’
‘At this time?’
‘Lack of sleep. Do you mind if we hang up? Only I don’t want to end up wide awake…’
‘Of course…’
His disappointment was so tangible she almost changed her mind.
‘Sleep well,’ he said eventually.
‘Bye darling. Speak to you tomorrow? Good night.’
She sat there for a long time with the silent telephone in her hand. Toni Braxton was emoting her way through
Even if there had been nothing about Niclas Winter’s proclivities in the article in
Eva Karin Lysgaard was certainly a heterosexual woman, married and with children, but she had come out as a passionate defender of the rights of homosexuals.
Marianne Kleive was married to another woman.
Johanne got up from the sofa, suddenly ravenous.
But she was no longer afraid.
Clues
‘I’m afraid Niclas Winter’s envelope has simply disappeared,’ said Kristen Faber’s secretary as she came into his office on the morning of Thursday 15 January. ‘I’ve looked everywhere, but I just can’t find it.’
‘Disappeared? You’ve lost a client’s file?’
Kristen Faber was talking with his mouth full of a chocolate croissant, from which he had acquired a brown
