Fear Not

newspaper in the other hand. ‘Have you seen this? We’re going home, by the way, on the first available plane. Get your clothes on and start packing.’

‘Good morning to you, too,’ Adam said sourly, letting his colleague in. ‘Do you think you could possibly take one thing at a time? Start with the phone.’

‘I’ve called you five times since yesterday evening. You know perfectly well you’re not supposed to make yourself unavailable.’

‘I haven’t,’ said Adam. ‘Try again now.’

He picked up his mobile from the bedside table as Sigmund keyed in his number on his own phone.

‘It’s ringing,’ said Sigmund with the phone to his ear. ‘Have you got it on silent?’

‘No.’

Adam stared at the display. Nothing was happening. So Johanne might have tried after all.

‘Why didn’t you ring me on that?’ said Adam, pointing to the hotel phone on the small desk by the window.

‘Never occurred to me,’ Sigmund said blithely. ‘But forget that. We’re going home. Now. Just take a look at this and you’ll see why!’

Adam took the copy of VG as if the newspaper might suddenly bite him.

HATE GROUP BEHIND SIX MURDERS, screamed the front page. The subheading read: Police horror theory – Bishop Lysgaard one of victims.

‘What the hell?’ said Adam, raising his voice by several decibels. ‘What the fuck is this? ’

‘Read it,’ said Sigmund. ‘And you will discover that the Oslo police have found a possible link between the murders of Marianne Kleive and some Kurdish kid who was floating around in the harbour just before Christmas, as dead as a doornail and badly disintegrated.’

‘What? But what’s this got to do with Eva Karin?’

Adam sank down on the bed and turned to pages five and six. He was finding it hard to focus. His eyes flew across the article. After a minute and a half he looked up, flung the newspaper at the wall and bellowed:

‘How the hell did VG get hold of this before me? I mean, I’ve learned to live with the fact that they know way too much way too soon, but this is…’

He got up so quickly that the towel slipped off. He ignored the fact that he was stark bollock-naked and hissed at Sigmund, his fists clenched: ‘Are we supposed to start reading the paper every morning just to find out what’s fucking going on? This is… this is… For fuck’s sake, Sigmund, this is fucking scandalous!’

Sigmund grinned.

‘You’re stark naked, Adam. You’re getting fat, boy!’

‘I couldn’t give a fuck!’

He marched into the bathroom. Sigmund sat down on the chair by the desk and switched on the TV. He turned to TV2 as he listened to Adam banging about behind the closed door. Thirty seconds later Adam emerged, grabbed some clean clothes out of his suitcase and got dressed with surprising speed.

‘The news is on in five minutes,’ Sigmund said. ‘We’ll watch it before we go.’

‘A gang from the US,’ Adam growled as he tried to knot his tie. ‘That’s the most ridiculous fucking thing I’ve ever heard.’

‘Not a gang,’ Sigmund corrected him. ‘A group. A hate group.’

‘That’s even more insane. Who the hell came up with something so utterly… idiotic!’

He picked up a bag of dirty laundry and stuffed it in his suitcase, having given up on his tie.

‘Johanne,’ said Sigmund with a laugh. ‘It’s Johanne’s theory!’

‘What? What are you saying?’

Adam stormed over to the newspaper, which was lying in a crumpled heap on the bed. Once again his eyes flew over the article.

‘It doesn’t say anything about her here,’ he said without looking up from the report, which was illustrated with pictures of Marianne Kleive and Bishop Lysgaard. ‘It doesn’t mention Johanne at all.’

He exhaled and dropped the paper on the floor.

‘I spoke to a… Silje Sorensen,’ said Sigmund. ‘She’s with the Oslo police. She rang me at six o’clock. She’d tried to get hold of you, but with no luck.’

‘Has everybody gone mad or what? I’m staying in a hotel for fuck’s sake! This…’

He reached the white, old-fashioned telephone in three strides. He picked up the receiver in one hand and the body of the phone in the other, and held it five centimetres from Sigmund’s face.

‘This is a telephone!’

‘Calm down, Adam. Take it easy.’

‘Take it easy! I don’t want to fucking take it easy! I want to know what all this crap is about, and why-?’

‘Well, listen to me then! Listen to what I have to say instead of rushing around like a lunatic. We’ll get thrown out in a minute if you don’t calm down.’

Adam took a deep breath, nodded and sat down heavily on the bed.

‘Start talking,’ he mumbled.

Sigmund clapped his hands almost silently.

‘That’s better. I don’t know a great deal. Silje Sorensen was just as furious as you about the fact that VG has got hold of this, and they’ve turned the whole of Gronlandsleiret upside down to try and find the leak. She did tell me that this does, in fact, involve six murders. Some artist who died around Christmas, apparently from a heroin overdose, turns out to have minute traces of curacit in his blood. We were lucky. Curacit is broken down incredibly fast, and the guy had already been cremated. However, because it was routinely regarded as a suspicious death, they had some of his frozen blood in the lab, and the curacit-’

‘What?’

‘Curacit. You know, it’s a poison, a muscle relaxant that paralyzes the breathing-’

‘I know perfectly well what curacit is! What I’m wondering is-’

‘Just hang on, Adam. Listen to me. So this artist had been murdered. And he’s also… he was also gay. And then there was a young man who was killed in Sofienberg Park some time in November, and we all know what people get up to in Sofienberg Park at night, don’t we?’

Without giving Adam time to respond, he went on.

‘Then there was a woman everybody thought had died in an RTA, but on closer inspection it turned out that someone had tampered with the brakes of her car. And I’m sure you can guess what her preferences in the bedroom were!’

Adam merely stared at him with a resigned expression.

‘That Silje Sorensen really is paranoid,’ Sigmund continued, unabashed. ‘She called me from home. On her son’s mobile. But whether those journalists have reliable sources or are bugging the police or whatever it is they might be doing, VG has named only three of the victims. The Bishop, Marianne Kleive and the kid in the water. I can never remember those Hottentot names.’

Adam felt so floored by the whole thing that he didn’t even protest at this expression.

‘Anyway, Sorensen told me Johanne had come to see her with some questions and a theory relating to her research. That stuff she’s doing on hate crime. Something that… I don’t know, actually. Anyway, her theory fitted in so well with the material Oslo are sitting on that they’ve now put together a team to work on a major investigation, with the Oslo police and NCIS collaborating. That’s where we’re going. And that’s more or less all I know. Ssh! News!’

‘Ssh?’ Adam repeatedly sourly. ‘I haven’t said a word!’

Sigmund turned up the volume.

TV2 led with the newspaper story.

They had obviously been short of time, because the report was illustrated with archive clips. They hadn’t even managed to find winter pictures; police HQ was bathed in sunshine, with people dressed in summer clothing going in and out of the main entrance. The reporter had nothing more to add to what had been in the newspaper.

‘Ssh!’ Sigmund said again as the camera showed a slim woman in uniform with gold stripes and two stars on her shoulders.

‘We are unable to comment on the case at this stage,’ she said firmly, turning away from the