Fear

Perhaps he should never have had children.

The very thought made the acid in his stomach eat away at his duodenum. He drew up his knees and placed both hands on the spot where in his younger days he had been able to feel the end of his ribs and the beginning of his stomach. Now it was all just one soft mass, in spite of the fact that he was lying on his back: a flabby belly that was far too big, with a stabbing pain deep inside a layer of fat.

Marcus Koll’s entire life revolved around his son.

His work, his company, his extended family – it was all meaningless without little Marcus. When Rolf came into their lives they were already a twosome, but the three of them soon became a family, and Marcus would do anything to protect that family. But the boy remained the very hub of Marcus Koll’s family wheel.

Little Marcus quickly accepted Rolf, and the love was mutual. After a while Rolf had tentatively raised the question of whether he might adopt his stepson.

As time went by, he dropped the subject.

Marcus had never told anyone about the dreams he used to have when he was young.

He wanted children.

He had been a strong boy; breaking with his father had taken real courage. It had cost him surprisingly little to come out as what and who he was. As a teenager his wilfulness could sometimes make him appear stubborn, but as an adult he became cleverer and more skilful. His obstinacy turned into purposefulness. Arrogance turned into pride. He took the sting out of his unconventional inclination with self-irony, and had never felt the need to seek out the gay haunts he knew existed in both Bergen, where he attended business college, and in Oslo when he returned home after completing his studies. On the contrary, he had always regarded seduction as a challenge. Until he met Rolf, he had seduced only heterosexual men. He was quietly proud of the fact that before him they had slept only with women. He wasn’t quite so thrilled when they then returned to their straight lives.

Marcus Koll Junior hadn’t exactly been a typical gay man of his time.

In addition, he wanted a child more than anything. His only sorrow – when, aged sixteen or seventeen, he had decided to stop pretending to be something he was not – was that the future would not bring him any offspring. He had never shared this sorrow with anyone, although his mother had been aware of it in the way that mothers can sometimes read their child better than the child himself. But they had never talked about that little empty space in Marcus’s heart: the lack of a child of his own to love.

However, for many years Marcus Koll had been a contented young man anyway.

Things went well for him, and he never felt that his sexuality was being used against him, neither professionally nor among friends and colleagues. For a long time he served as their politically correct alibi. During the late eighties and early nineties, open homosexuality was not at all common, and his presence in the lives of other people somehow gave them something to show off about.

He was so happy with his life that he didn’t even notice he was starting to burn out. He became so popular that he didn’t realize he was putting too much energy into dealing with his status as an outsider. In the entirely heterosexual life he was leading – with the minor difference that he went to bed with men without lying about it – his soul slowly crumbled until he collapsed with exhaustion; he hadn’t even seen it coming.

Then his friends started to have children.

Marcus Koll wanted children, too.

He had always wanted children.

He made the decision.

When he travelled to California to sign a contract with a surrogate mother and egg donor, he had recently taken over the running of his father’s old company. The future lay before him. He had been blessed with money, and was able to explain away his frequent visits to America over the following year as essential business trips.

One evening in late January 2001 he had simply turned up at his mother’s apartment with the boy in his arms. As soon as she opened the door she understood everything, and burst into tears. Gently, she took her new grandchild, held him close to her breast and carried him into the spacious apartment which her children had bought her when they suddenly became wealthy. She had never quite got used to the apartment, but when Marcus arrived with the child she sat down right in the middle of the sumptuous sofa that no one had ever used. With her nose against the boy’s cheek she whispered almost inaudibly: ‘Grandma’s home, little one. Grandma’s home at last. And you’re at home with Grandma.’

‘His name is Marcus,’ Marcus said, and his mother had wept and wept. ‘Not after me, after Grandfather.’

The idea of losing little Marcus was unthinkable.

Perhaps he should never have had him.

‘Are you awake?’ Rolf murmured, turning over in bed. ‘What time is it?’

‘Go back to sleep,’ Marcus whispered.

‘But why aren’t you sleeping?’ He turned on his side, resting his head on his hand. ‘You lie awake almost every night,’ said Rolf with a big yawn.

‘No I don’t. Go back to sleep.’

Only the glow from the digital alarm clock made it possible to see anything in the room. Marcus stared at his own hands. They looked green in the darkness. He tried to smile.

The fear had arrived with his son. The fact that he was different; the incontrovertible fact that he wasn’t like everybody else and never could be became much clearer. He had always believed it was easy to protect himself. When his son came into his life, he realized how helpless he sometimes felt when he encountered prejudices that he would have ignored in the past and dismissed as the attitudes of a bygone age. He had always thought the world was moving forwards, but when little Marcus arrived he sometimes had the feeling that the development of society was actually describing an unpredictable, asymmetric curve, and that it was difficult to keep up. The joy and love he felt for his son were all-encompassing. The fear of not being able to protect him from the evils and prejudices of the world tore him apart. Then Rolf came along, and many things became much better. Never perfect. Marcus still felt like a marked man in every sense. But Rolf brought strength and happiness, and little Marcus had a fantastic life. That was the most important thing, and as time went by Marcus chose to keep the periods of helplessness and depression to himself. They became more and more infrequent.

Until Georg Koll, his own deceased, accursed father, had played one last trick on him.

‘What is it?’ said Rolf, more fully awake now.

The duvet had partly slipped off his body. He was naked, still lying on his side with one knee drawn up and the other leg stretched out. Even in the faint light the contours of his stomach muscles were clearly visible.

‘Nothing.’

‘Come on, I can tell there’s something wrong!’

The duvet rustled as Rolf impatiently pulled it over his athletic body.

‘Surely you can tell me! You just haven’t been yourself recently. If it’s to do with work, if it’s something you can’t talk about, then at least tell me that’s what it is! We can’t—’

‘There’s really nothing wrong,’ said Marcus, turning over. ‘Let’s get back to sleep.’

He could hear that Rolf wasn’t moving, and he could feel Rolf’s eyes burning into his back.

He should have talked to Rolf as soon as the problem arose. Now, so many months and so many worries later, it struck him that he hadn’t even considered the possibility of sharing his troubles with his husband. That frightened him. Rolf was one of the most sensible people he knew. Rolf would surely have found a way out. Rolf would have calmly analysed the situation and talked things over until he came up with a solution. Rolf was a positive person, an optimist with an indomitable belief that everything – even the darkest tragedy – has a silver lining if you just take the time to find it.

Of course he should have talked to Rolf.

That was the first thing he should have done.

Together they could cope with anything.

Rolf was still lying there in silence. Marcus kept his eyes fixed firmly on the clock. He blinked when the numbers changed from 3.07 to 3.08. Suddenly, he took a quick breath and searched for the words that could support the weight of the painful story they should have shared long ago.

Before he could find the words, Rolf turned over.

They were lying back to back.

Just a few minutes later, Rolf’s breathing was once again heavy and even.

Suddenly, Marcus realized why it was too late to say anything to Rolf: he would never forgive him.

Never.

If he confided in his partner, their life as Marcus knew and loved it would be over. He wouldn’t just lose Rolf; he would lose little Marcus. The fear shot through him, and he lay there wide awake until the numbers switched from 06.59 to 07.00.

*

When Johanne woke with a start, she was soaked in sweat. The bedclothes were sticking to her body. She tried to escape from their damp embrace, but merely succeeded in getting her feet caught in the opening of the duvet cover. She felt trapped, and kicked desperately to free them. The duvet fought back. In the end she was free. She tried to remember what kind of nightmare she might have had.

Her head was completely empty.

Her hands were shaking as she reached for the glass of water on her bedside table and emptied it. As she was putting it back, it fell on the floor. She screwed up her eyes and pulled a face until she remembered that Kristiane was at Isak’s. Ragnhild never woke up this early.

She was still having some difficulty breathing as she flopped back against the pillow and tried to relax.

Despite the fact that she had spent more than twenty minutes talking to Adam on the phone the previous evening, she hadn’t mentioned the conversation with Kristiane. Nor had she said anything to Isak when he turned up after school, feeling rather annoyed. She had forgotten to tell him that she had picked Kristiane up, contravening all their plans and agreements. When he came up the stairs with an uncharacteristically angry expression on his face, she simply said that she had taken some time off work and for once had seized the opportunity to spend some time alone with Kristiane.

She naturally apologized for forgetting to let him know.

As usual Isak accepted everything, and when he set off home with his daughter he was just as good-humoured as always.

Kristiane had witnessed something in connection with the murder of Marianne Kleive. That much was certain. She must at least have seen the dead woman on the evening she was murdered. But still Johanne hadn’t really known what to say to Isak and Adam. Her daughter hadn’t actually told her what had happened. It was her body language and facial expression, her choice of words and the tone of her voice that had been crucial.

Exactly the kind of thing that made Isak laugh at Johanne, and made Adam try to hide how exhausted he was.

And if either of them had believed – against all expectation – that she might be right, then Adam, at least, would have insisted on contacting the police straight away. Isak, too, probably. He was a good father in many ways, but he had never understood how infinitely vulnerable Kristiane was.

If there was one thing she wouldn’t be able to cope with it was strangers trampling about in her own little sphere, asking her questions about something she had obviously managed to lock away, somehow. Clearing up a murder was important, of course, but Kristiane was more important.

This was something Johanne would have to tackle by herself.

Her pulse was steadier now. She was beginning to feel cold because of her night sweat, and decided to change the bed. She got out clean sheets and a duvet cover, and with practised hands she had a dry, cool bed in just four minutes. She hadn’t the energy to change Adam’s duvet. The bed looked odd with covers that didn’t match, but it could wait until tomorrow.

She settled down and closed her eyes.

She was wide awake. Turned over. Tried to think about something else.

Kristiane had seen something terrible. A crime, or the result of a crime.

Someone was watching Kristiane.

She flung herself on to her other side. Her pulse rate increased.

Suddenly she sat bolt upright. Things couldn’t go on like this. Right now there was nothing she could do. She couldn’t ring anyone at this time of the day, besides which Kristiane was perfectly safe with Isak. Somehow she had to get through the night.

Tomorrow she would talk to Adam.

The decision made her feel calmer.

She would ask him to come home. She didn’t have to say why. He would know from the sound of her voice that he had to come. Adam would return from Bergen, and she would tell him everything.

She couldn’t tell him anything.

If he believed she was right, it would destroy Kristiane.

This was impossible. She grabbed Adam’s pillow, placed it on her stomach and hugged it close, as if it were some part of her child.

She could get up and do some work.

No.

There were three books on the bedside table. She selected one of them. Turned to the page with the corner folded down and began to read. The Road by Cormac McCarthy didn’t make her feel one jot calmer. After three pages she closed both the book and her eyes.

Her mind was racing, and she felt physically ill.

For a long time Adam had wanted to have a television in the bedroom. Now she regretted not giving in. She was incapable of watching anything attentively, but she had an intense need to hear voices. For a moment she was tempted to wake Ragnhild. Instead, she switched on the clock radio. It was tuned to NRK P2 and classical music filled the room – music that was every bit as melancholy as McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel. She moved the dial until she found a local station that played chart music all night, then turned the volume up as loud as she dared; the neighbour’s bedroom was directly below theirs.

Dagens Næringsliv had fallen on the floor.

She bent down and picked it up. It was the current edition, and she hadn’t read it. Not that there was a great deal to read; the leading article and every other headline on the front page was about the financial crisis. Up to now the collapse of the world’s financial markets had felt largely irrelevant to her, even if she was reluctant to admit it. Both she and Adam were employed within the public sector, neither of them was in danger of losing their jobs, and interest rates were in free fall. They were already noticing that they had more disposable income than they’d had for a long time.

She started reading from the back as usual.

The main news on the stock market page was to do with the death of the installation artist Niclas Winter. Johanne had seen several of his pieces, and Vanity Fair, reconstruction in particular had made an impression when the whole family went into the city one day and spent an hour among Winter’s three installations on Rådhuskaia. Kristiane had been completely fascinated; Ragnhild had been more interested in the seagulls and the fountain; and Adam had snorted and shaken his head at the idea that this kind of thing was regarded as art.

It seemed Winter had no heirs.

His mother and maternal grandparents were dead. He had no siblings, and his mother had also been an only child. There was quite simply no one to inherit the small fortune Niclas Winter had unknowingly left behind. Apart from the completed piece I was thinking of something blue and maybe grey, darling, it turned out there were four more large installations in the deceased artist’s studio.

Connoisseurs in the art world were expressing themselves in particularly high-flown terms about CockPitt, a homo-erotic homage to Angelina Jolie’s husband. Evidently there had already been an anonymous bid of four million kroner for the work. Dagens Næringsliv’s sources claimed that the actor himself wanted to buy it.

In spite of the financial crisis, it seemed there was no shortage of money when it came to Niclas Winter’s art now that he was dead. Statoil-Hydro had already put in a claim for the installation that they had ordered then cancelled, and only gave up when the administrator of the estate was able to produce the relevant documentation. His approximate and preliminary valuation of the sculptures was around 15 to 20 million kroner. Maybe more. The article mentioned that, ironically, Niclas had lived on a small income and the goodwill of various patrons of the arts, and only became a wealthy man after his death. A not uncommon fate among artists, as the businessman and art collector Christen Sveaas pointed out. He had two smaller installations by Niclas Winter in his extensive collection in Kistefos, and was able to confirm that the value of both pieces had risen dramatically.

A background article made it clear that Niclas certainly had his demons. He was HIV positive, but the condition was kept in check with the help of medication. Since the age of eighteen he had ended up in rehab three times. His last stay, four years ago, had been a success. His best work had been created since then, and two of his collaborators expressed great surprise at the fact that Niclas had started using heroin again. He was on the brink of a major international breakthrough, and particularly in the last few weeks before his death he had seemed contented, almost happy. Previous relapses had occurred as a result of artistic setbacks, so it was difficult to understand why he would have sought refuge in drugs at this point.

Johanne was aware that she was breathing more calmly, and was actually starting to feel tired. Reading about the misfortunes of others could sometimes provide a new perspective on things. She allowed the newspaper to drop on to the bed, and her eyes closed.

Kristiane is safe, she thought, feeling that sleep was on its way at last.

She didn’t even dare to lie down and turn out the light. She just wanted to slip into the darkness inside her eyelids. Sleep. Just wanted to sleep.

Kristiane is safe with Isak and tomorrow I will speak to Adam. Everything will be fine, we’ll all be fine.

When she woke up four hours later the newspaper was still lying in front of her on the bed, open at the article about the dead installation artist Niclas Winter.

*

‘Have you seen this article?’

Kristen Faber looked up reluctantly from his documents and took the newspaper his secretary was holding out to him.

‘What’s it about?’ he mumbled, trying to cram the rest of the Danish pastry in his mouth without making too many crumbs.

A fine shower of greasy dough and almond paste landed on his shirt front and he leaned forward in an attempt to brush it off without leaving a stain.

‘Isn’t that yesterday’s paper?’

‘Yes,’ said his secretary. ‘I took it home after work, as usual, and I found this. It’s hardly surprising that your client didn’t turn up! He’s dead.’

‘Who?’

He carried on chewing and held the paper up in front of him with one hand.

‘Oh,’ he said with his mouth full. ‘Him. Jesus. Wasn’t he quite young?’

‘If you read the article,’ said his secretary with an indulgent smile, ‘then—’

‘I never read the stock market page. Let’s see. Niclas Winter. Aha. An overdose, eh? Poor sod. It looks as if …’

He stopped chewing now.

‘Bloody hell. He was famous. I’ve never heard of the bloke. Except as a potential client, I mean.’

As he put the newspaper down on the desk, his secretary went off to find a dustpan and brush. He carried on reading as she swept the floor around him, and he was still reading when she went away and returned with a Thermos of freshly brewed coffee.

‘Your breakfast isn’t particularly nutritious,’ she said gently, filling his cup. ‘You ought to eat before you leave home. Wholemeal bread or cereal. Not Danish pastries, for heaven’s sake! When did you last drink a glass of milk, for example?’

‘If I needed a mother around here I’d employ my own. Where are those bloody documents?’

He had started shuffling through the heaps of current material. He was certain he’d placed the sealed brown envelope in the pile on his desk before he went home for a shower, after an eventful return flight from Barbados. Now it was nowhere to be seen.

‘Shit. I’m due in court in fifteen minutes. Can you try and find his papers? They’re in a sealed envelope with Property of Niclas Winter and his date of birth on it.’

He stood up, pulled on his jacket and grabbed his briefcase on the way to the door.

‘And Vera! Don’t open it! I want to have that pleasure myself!’

The door slammed behind him, and once again silence descended on the office of Kristen Faber, solicitor.

*

Astrid Tomte Lysgaard didn’t really know if she liked the depth of silence in the house when Lukas had gone to work and the children had been dropped off at school and nursery. None of her friends were housewives, apart from the obligatory year after each birth, but she had the impression that most of them envied her the peace they assumed must descend on the house each day between 8.30 and 4.15.

For a long time she had felt the same way.

The daily housework rarely took more than three hours, often less. Although she took the children each morning and picked them up each afternoon, and did all the family shopping, there was still a lot of time left over. She read. She enjoyed going for walks. Twice a week she went to the Nautilus gym on Idrettsveien. Occasionally, she would feel a pang of unhappiness, but it never lasted long.

The fact that everything was done and dinner was on the table when Lukas got home made the afternoons calm. Made their life together more enjoyable. Family life much better. They could spend time with the children instead of worrying about the housework, and Lukas showed her every single day how grateful he was that she had chosen to stay at home.

Since her mother-in-law’s death, everything had changed.

Lukas was grieving in a way that frightened her.

He seemed so distant.

Mechanical.

He said very little, and was prone to losing his temper, even with the children. Under normal circumstances he was the one who sat down and helped their eldest son with his schoolwork, but at the moment he was clearly unable to concentrate on the complexities of Year 2 homework. Instead, he had started clearing out the garage, where he was intending to to build new shelves along one wall. It must be freezing cold out there every evening, and when he finally did come in he would eat his evening meal in silence, then go to bed without even touching her.

It was so quiet in the house, and she didn’t like it.

She set down the iron and went over to the window to switch on the radio. Another miserable day was pressing itself against the wet glass. Surely it had to stop raining soon. January was always a desolate month, but this one was worse than usual. The low pressure was actually having a physical effect on her; for several days she had been troubled by a slight headache, and now it had got worse. Her temples were pounding, and she tried massaging them gently. It didn’t help at all. She would go to the bathroom and take a couple of Alvedon before finishing the ironing.

There were no painkillers in the locked medicine cabinet. She searched in despair among Asterix plasters and Flux, bottles of Pyrisept and Vademecum. Not a painkiller in sight, apart from suppositories for children.

It was as if not being able to find any tablets had made the headache worse.

Lukas’s migraine tablets, she thought.

They would help.

The problem was that they weren’t in the medicine cabinet. Lukas thought the lock was too easy to force, and strong medication could be dangerous for a curious eight-year-old. Instead, he kept the box locked in the drawer of the big desk in his study. Astrid knew where the key was: behind a first edition of Around the World in Eighty Days, which his parents had given him on his twenty-first birthday.

She had never opened the drawer, and hesitated before inserting the key in the lock.

They had no secrets from one another, she and Lukas.

Perhaps she ought to ring and ask him first.

He was her husband, she thought wearily, and she only wanted one tablet. Lukas had never told her not to look in the drawer. The very idea of telling each other not to do something was completely alien to them.

The lock opened with an almost inaudible click. She pulled out the drawer and found herself staring down at a photograph. A woman, and the photograph must be quite old. For a while she just stood there looking down at it, then eventually she picked it up, cautiously, and held it under the brighter light of the desk lamp.

There was something familiar about the face, but Astrid couldn’t quite place it. In a way the shape of the face and the straight nose reminded her of Lukas, but that had to be a coincidence. The woman in the photograph also had the same funny teeth, one front tooth lying slightly on top of the other, but after all lots of people had teeth like that. The singer Lill Lindfors, for example, as Astrid had often pointed out when they were young and she was besotted with everything about Lukas.

Despite the fact that she had no idea who the woman was, it struck her in some odd way that she had seen this photograph before. She just couldn’t remember where. As she stared at the woman she realized her headache had disappeared. Quickly, she put the photograph back, closed and locked the drawer and returned the key to its hiding place.

When she left Lukas’s study she closed the door carefully behind her, as if she really had done something forbidden.

*

The depressing piles of unsolved crimes in Silje Sørensen’s office were getting her down. There was barely room for a coffee cup on her crowded desk, even though everything was in neatly sorted files. She sat down on her chair, pushed aside a bundle of newspaper cuttings and put down the cup, before starting to go through the whole lot.

She had to reprioritize.

Her list of things to do was growing.

The Police Officers’ Association’s more or less legal actions and protests against terrible working conditions, low pay, inadequate staffing and the threat to pension entitlement had led to a somewhat acerbic tone in any dealings between the government and the police. Officers were no longer so willing to work overtime. Things didn’t get done as quickly nowadays. The organization’s 11,000-plus members were gradually beginning to take a fresh look at their priorities. Although the statistics hadn’t yet been processed, it looked as if the clear-up rate for 2008 had fallen dramatically in comparison with previous years – and it was only January. Employees were demanding their right to free time, and were off sick more frequently. Sometimes this coincided noticeably with public holidays and weekends, when major challenges awaited those who were charged with maintaining law and order.

The criminals were having an easier time all round.

People felt less and less safe. The police had always scored highly when it came to credibility and trustworthiness, but now they were losing the sympathy of the public. More and more frequently the papers were running stories about victims of violent crime who had been unable to report the offence because their local police station wasn’t manned, rural stations that were closed at weekends, and victims of crime who had to wait several days for the police to turn up and look for any clues. If they turned up at all, that is.

Silje Sørensen was a member of the union, but she had long since abandoned any attempt to keep a record of her overtime. The only yardstick she used was the reaction at home. When her sons became too much of a handful and her husband became more and more taciturn, she tried to spend more time at home. Otherwise, she sneaked off to work outside normal working hours as often as she could.

As the only child of a shipping owner, her decision to train as a police officer hadn’t exactly been expected. Her mother had gone into a state of shock and hysteria when she learned of her daughter’s career choice. This lasted throughout Silje’s first year in college. We’ve wasted a fortune on boarding schools in Switzerland and England, her mother wailed, and now my daughter is going to throw away her future working in the public sector! If she must get her hands dirty dealing with violent criminals and the like, then why on earth couldn’t she become a solicitor instead? Or a legal advisor within the police service, if the worst came to the worst?

That was exactly the reaction Silje had wanted.

Her father had beamed and kissed her on the forehead when she told him she had got into the Police Training Academy. That wasn’t exactly the idea.

Silje Sørensen had never rebelled as a child or a teenager. Never protested. Not when she was forced to move abroad at the age of ten, only seeing her parents during the holidays. Not when she had to spend two months at a French language school in Switzerland at the age of fifteen, where the working day began at 6.30 in the morning and the Catholic nuns had no qualms about using punishments that were probably forbidden under the Geneva Convention. Silje didn’t even argue with her father when he decided that she should squeeze five school years into two and a half; she gained a degree in English by the time she was nineteen. By then she had come of age, and as a reward for her silent patience and remarkable hard work, her father had transferred more than half of his fortune to his only daughter.

Training as a police officer was Silje Sørensen’s first deliberate act of rebellion.

When she was allocated to work with the legendary Hanne Wilhelmsen during her first year, she quickly realized that this stubborn, rebellious choice of career was going to make her happy. She loved it. The majority of what she knew about police work she had learned from her reluctant, uncommunicative mentor. Although Hanne Wilhelmsen had made herself more and more unpopular through her own headstrong approach, Silje had never ceased to admire her. When Inspector Wilhelmsen was shot during a dramatic incident in Nordmarka and paralysed from the waist down, Silje had grieved as if it had happened to a sister. She never really got over the fact that Hanne had then turned her back on the few remaining friends she had in the big shabby police headquarters on Grønlandsleiret.

Silje Sørensen was proud of her profession, but accepted with resignation the parameters within which she was forced to operate.

She decided to sort the cases in order of seriousness. Minor knife crimes and pub brawls with no life-threatening injuries she placed in a separate pile.

You’ll probably get away with it, she thought wearily, and tried to forget that several of the cases involved known perpetrators. Their victims would regard any attempt to abandon these investigations as highly provocative. However, that was the way it was, and according to every directive from both the public prosecutor and the National Police Board, she was perfectly justified in prioritizing more serious cases. The public might have some difficulty in understanding the police definition of serious, but that couldn’t be helped.

After about an hour the files had been sorted into five piles.

Silje finished off the dregs of her tepid coffee, then picked up three of the piles and placed them in the cupboard behind her.

Two left.

The smallest contained murders. Three files. The first very thin, the second almost as slim. The third was so fat that she had put two rubber bands around it to keep everything together.

Suddenly, she got up and went over to the noticeboard on the wall opposite her desk. She quickly scanned every piece of paper before placing one on the desk and dropping the rest into the large waste-paper basket beside it. She took three sheets of A4 out of the cupboard. They fitted next to each other perfectly at the top of the noticeboard.

Runar Hansen, she wrote with a red felt-tip on the first sheet.

19/11/08.

On the next sheet she wrote Hawre Ghani.

24/11/08.

She chewed the cap of the pen and thought for a moment before adding a question mark.

24/11/08?

It wasn’t possible at this stage to say exactly when Hawre Ghani had been murdered, but at least they had confirmation that he had, in fact, been murdered. The pathologist had found clear signs of garrotting. It was hardly likely that the boy had hanged himself with a steel wire until his head almost came away from his body, then thrown himself in the sea. They were only able to hint at the time of death, but so far the investigation had found no evidence to suggest that the boy had been alive after he went off with a client outside Oslo’s central station on Monday 24 November. All the CCTV cameras had, of course, been checked. No joy. This matched Martin Setre’s story: the man had approached them just outside the entrance.

Clever bastard, thought Silje with a sigh.

Marianne Kleive, she wrote on the last sheet of paper.

19/12/08.

She put the cap back on the pen and took two steps back. She felt the edge of the desk behind her legs and sat down.

Three murders. All unsolved.

Runar Hansen was her guilty conscience. She couldn’t even bring herself to look through the thin file. Instead, she stared at the name, the anonymous name of a drug addict who had been beaten and abused in Sofienberg Park, apparently without anyone taking much notice. All Runar Hansen had merited was a quick examination of the crime scene some hours after his body had been found, a post-mortem report, and a brief mention in the evening paper. Plus two interviews with witnesses, whose only contribution was that Runar Hansen had no fixed abode and was unemployed, and that he had a sister called Trude.

At least something was happening in the investigation into the murder of Hawre Ghani. The sketch by the police artist had been distributed internally. It had been decided not to make it public yet, because experience indicated this would lead to a flood of calls. The man’s appearance was so ordinary that there would be a deluge of callers insisting that they recognized him. Instead, Knut Bork was still working on the prostitution angle. Silje had ordered a new and extensive investigation into the boy’s life since he came to Norway. If possible, she was hoping to obtain a clearer picture of Hawre Ghani’s tragic fate.

Work on the Marianne Kleive case was proceeding at full throttle.

The murder of the 42-year-old nursery school teacher had all the ingredients of a juicy media story. The private pictures obtained by Verdens Gang just two hours after the murder was made public showed an unusually attractive woman. Thick, wavy blonde hair, a slim figure with long legs and an athletic appearance. Exactly the kind of lesbian the media loved. There was something of Gro Hammerseng about her, Silje thought, as she pinned up the front page she had torn out of VG a few days earlier. And even if her wife, Synnøve Hessel, wasn’t exactly a celebrity, she occupied such a central position in the Norwegian film world that the papers were able to use their favourite phrase ‘the noted and award-winning’ when writing about the victim’s grieving widow – who also looked pretty good, incidentally, even wearing a padded jacket with her hair blowing all over the place at a height of 5,208 metres at North Base Camp in Nepal.

The fact that the murder had taken place in the respectable Hotel Continental also helped. Two days after the body had been found, VG dedicated an entire page to an ‘at home with’ report on a man named Fritiof Hansen, an insignificant individual who was some kind of caretaker at the hotel. He had found the body, and thanks to his passion for the TV series CSI he had managed to keep everyone away from the scene until the police arrived to secure any evidence. In the picture he was sitting in his best armchair with a glass of beer and a small packet of crisps, looking as if all the cares of the world were resting on his shoulders.

Sometimes Silje Sørensen wished the mass media didn’t exist. Sometimes she would have liked to abolish the freedom of the press.

She reached for her coffee cup.

It was empty.

She frowned and looked from one name to the other. She groped for the felt-tip without taking her eyes off the noticeboard. Quickly, she pulled the cap off with her teeth, went over and wrote SOFIENBERG PARK beneath Runar Hansen’s name and the date of his death. Under Hawre’s name she wrote UNDERAGE MALE PROSTITUTION, and finally – across the top of the photo of Marianne Kleive on Gaustatoppen Mountain in the sunshine, wearing a bikini top, cut-off jeans and sturdy walking boots – she wrote CIVIL PARTNERSHIP.

As she was settling back on her desk, there was a knock on the door. She took the cap of the pen out of her mouth and shouted: ‘Come in!’

Knut Bork did as he was told.

‘Hi,’ he said breathlessly. ‘I thought I’d just—’

‘Stand here,’ said Silje Sørensen. ‘Come and stand next to me.’

DC Bork shrugged his shoulders and obliged.

‘What are you up to? What’s that?’ He nodded in the direction of the noticeboard.

‘Those are the three murders I’m dealing with at the moment,’ said Silje.

‘Three is too many.’

‘I had four. I turned one down. Does anything strike you about those three?’

‘Does anything strike me? Well, I’d need to look through the files and—’

‘No. You’re familiar with the cases, Knut. Just look at what’s up on the board.’

He frowned without saying anything.

‘Look at what I’ve written underneath the names!’

‘Sofienberg Park,’ he read. ‘Underage male prostitution. Civil partnership.’

He still couldn’t see any connection.

‘What’s Sofienberg Park famous for?’ she asked.

‘Well … I know! Those ambulance drivers who—’

‘No. Well, that too, but what else? I’m not thinking about the area to the west of Sofienberg Church, but the part behind it. On the eastern side.’

‘Gay sex,’ he said immediately. ‘Buying and selling and mutual exchanges. Not a place I’d want to go in the dark.’

‘Exactly,’ said Silje with a wan smile. ‘That’s where Runar Hansen was found. He was murdered on a raw, wet November night at some point between midnight and half past. That’s about all we’ve managed to accomplish in his case. Establishing when he was killed, I mean.’

‘Was he gay?’

‘No idea. But for the time being, just focus on the reputation of the place. Do you see where I’m going with this?’

She looked at him. A shadow of surprise passed over his eyes as he suddenly got the point.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said, running a hand over his fair stubble. ‘It’s strange that LHH haven’t started shouting the odds!’

For a long time, LHH – the gay and lesbian movement – had been trying to get the justice department to take violence against homosexuals seriously. The problem, Silje Sørensen had always thought, was that attacks on homosexuals rarely differed significantly from all the other attacks that happened when people had been drinking. Attacks on women. On men. On heterosexuals and homosexuals. People drank. Became aggressive. Fought, stabbed, raped and murdered. For every homosexual victim, Silje could come up with a hundred heterosexuals. She couldn’t understand why they made such a fuss about it.

But this was striking.

‘Runar Hansen is in a park where it’s well known that homosexual services are bought, sold and exchanged,’ she said slowly. ‘Hawre Ghani disappears with a male punter. Marianne Kleive is married to a woman. They were all murdered in different ways, in different places, and none of them had any connection with each other while they were alive. As far as we know, that is. But …’

Her eyes narrowed.

‘I’m responsible for three completely independent murder investigations, and each one has a possible link to homosexuality. What are the odds on that?’

‘Bloody long,’ said Knut Bork, starting to chew on a thumbnail. ‘What the fuck is going on? And seriously, Silje, why hasn’t anybody noticed a possible link before?’

She didn’t reply. They stood in silence gazing at the noticeboard. For a long time.

‘Nobody cares about the first case,’ she said suddenly. ‘Nobody knows anything about the second case. People might have read in the paper about a body being found in the harbour, and there might have been a few lines saying that the dead man turned out to be a young asylum seeker. But that’s all. As far as Marianne Kleive is concerned, that case is …’

She hesitated for such a long time that he carried on for her: ‘That case is so unusual and absurd that nobody has actually made a connection with the fact that the victim is a lesbian.’

Silje went over to the board, took down the sheets of paper and the newspaper article, screwed them up and threw them in the waste-paper basket. Knut Bork remained standing there with his arms folded as she walked around the desk and sat down.

‘You and I,’ she said firmly, ‘are going to keep this to ourselves. For the time being. It could all be a coincidence, just as every connection can be pure chance; on the other hand it could be …’

‘Something very nasty indeed,’ Knut Bork supplied; his thumb had started to bleed.

*

For the second time in three weeks Johanne was at home alone, and it felt almost frightening. The apartment always seemed so different without the familiar sounds of the children. She noticed that she was moving cautiously across the floor, so as not to make any noise.

‘Pull yourself together,’ she muttered to herself, putting on a CD that Lina Skytter had compiled, burned and given to her for Christmas. Kristiane was at Isak’s until Friday, and every other Wednesday Ragnhild went to visit her maternal grandparents and stayed over.

She had been trying to get hold of Adam for several hours, but her calls went straight to voicemail. Presumably, he was in a meeting. When the day had finally dawned after the restless, fearful night, she had realized she had to talk to him. There was no more room for doubt – unlike last night when she kept changing her mind. She had made her decision now, and that very fact made her a little more optimistic about the whole thing.

If only she knew what Kristiane had actually seen.

Even though she realized there must be something, she was still unsure what it was. It didn’t feel right to press her daughter any further. Later, perhaps, she thought, as she tiptoed around in her stocking feet, not really knowing what to do.

The music Lina had put together wasn’t entirely to Johanne’s taste. She went over to the CD player and turned down Kurt Nilsen’s voice right in the middle of the chorus of one of his ballads.

She ought to eat something, but she wasn’t hungry.

Adam’s meeting must be taking a long time; it was three hours since she left the first message asking him to call her.

She could sit down and do some work, of course.

Or read.

Watch a film, perhaps.

She reached for the phone and keyed in Isak’s number without even thinking about it. He answered right away.

‘Hi, it’s Johanne.’

‘Hi.’ She could hear him smiling on the other end of the line.

‘I just rang to …’

‘To ask how Kristiane is,’ he supplied. ‘She’s absolutely fine. We’ve been to the pool at Bislett, even though children aren’t really allowed in except at weekends. She’s so quiet that the lady in the ticket office lets her in.’

‘Do you let her go into the women’s changing room on her own?’

‘Of course. She’s too big to come into the men’s with me! She’s starting to develop breasts, in case you haven’t noticed! And she’s got a little bit of hair down below too! Our little girl is growing up, Johanne, and, of course, I let her go into the women’s changing room on her own.’

She didn’t reply.

‘Johanne,’ he said wearily. ‘She’s fine! We’re making tacos, and she’s fried the mince all on her own. She’s chopping vegetables and doing a great job. When she’s with me we always cook dinner together. She’ll be fourteen this year, Johanne. You can’t treat her like a child all her life.’

She is a child.

She’s the most vulnerable child in the world.

‘Hello?’

‘Yes, yes,’ Johanne mumbled. ‘I’m here. I’m glad you’re having a good time. I just wanted to check if—’

‘Would you like to speak to her? She’s standing right here.’

There was a terrible clatter in the background.

‘Oops,’ said Isak. ‘Something just fell on the floor. Can I ask her to call you later on?’

‘No, no. There’s no need. Have a good time. See you Friday.’

‘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 VG in September.

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; VG had visited her instead.

‘This is my home now,’ says the world-famous writer, proudly showing off her enormous flock of sheep. ‘I write better here. I live better here. This is where I’m going to stay.’

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 Un-Break My Heart on the stereo. A car was revving its engine over on Hauges Vei. The wind must have changed direction, because the constant, distant roar from Maridalsveien and the heavy traffic on Ringveien was so clearly audible that it sounded as if a pipe had sprung a leak in the bathroom.

Even if there had been nothing about Niclas Winter’s proclivities in the article in Dagens Næringsliv, it was possible to read a great deal between the lines. The man was HIV positive. That could be a result of heroin abuse, but it could also be a consequence of unprotected sex with other men. The CockPitt installation certainly pointed in that direction.

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.