What Never Happens (31 page)

“It’s been really hard,” he whined and sobbed as he drew breath. “Ulrik has been . . . He said he . . . I meant to tell. I wanted to tell the truth, but when I realized that you thought I’d been at Smuget the whole evening, I’m not sure why . . . I thought . . .”

He suddenly put his head back.

“Can’t you say something?” he appealed. He pulled his head back up and slammed his palms down on the table. “Can’t you at least say something?”

“You’re the one who’s got something to say.”

“But I’ve got nothing more to say! I’m really sorry that I didn’t tell you immediately, but I . . . I loved Victoria! I miss her so much. We were going to get married, and I was so . . . You don’t believe me!”

“Right now, it’s not important whether I believe you or not,” Adam said as he pulled on his earlobe. “But I am very interested in learning exactly how long you were away from the nightclub.”

“One and a half hours, I told you. From half past ten until twelve. Midnight. I swear. Just ask the others, just ask my brother.”

“They obviously made a mistake the last time we questioned them. Or lied, all of them. They swore that you were there all night.”

“They thought I was there! Jesus, it was chaos, and I was only away for a while. I should have told you immediately, but I was . . . embarrassed. I was about to get married.”

“Yes, we know,” Adam said, unrelenting. “So you keep saying.”

“I should have told you,” the young man moaned again. “It was just so . . . I thought—”

“You thought you could get away with it,” Adam Stubo said. His voice had an unfamiliar edge to it. “Didn’t you?”

He got up, put his hands behind his back, and walked slowly around the room. Trond shrunk, he lowered his head and hunched his shoulders, as if he was afraid of being hit.

“What’s interesting . . .” Adam said. His voice now had an exaggerated, fatherly tone to it, both strict and friendly at the same time. “What’s interesting is that you just told me something we didn’t know.”

The boy had stopped crying. He dried the snot and tears with a corner of his shirt and for a moment looked more confused than desperate.

“Don’t know what you mean,” he said, looking the policeman in the eye. “You’ve obviously spoken to Ulrik and that night—”

“You’re wrong,” Adam said. “Ulrik refused to talk to us. He’s sitting in a cell in Grønland station and keeping quiet. And he has every right to. Not talk, that is. So we actually didn’t know that you’d lied about your alibi. Not until now.”

“In a cell? What’s he done? Ulrik?”

Adam stopped about a yard away from the young man. He put his right elbow in his left hand and stroked his nose, thoughtfully.

“You’re not that stupid, Trond.”

“I—”

“You what?”

“I really don’t know what it’s about.”

“Hmm. Fine. You want me to believe that you’ve had a relationship with Ulrik . . . you know him, well, intimately, as they say—”Adam nodded at the file. The letters were sticking out of the top. Trond’s face blushed red—“without knowing that Ulrik was involved with illegal substances,” Adam continued. “With all due respect, I find that very hard to believe.”

Trond looked like he’d seen the devil himself, with horns on his forehead and a burning tail. His eyes were wide, his mouth agape, and he made no move to wipe his running nose. He made nonsensical noises. Adam chewed his knuckles but made no attempt to help.

“Drugs,” Trond finally managed to say. “I knew nothing about that. I swear!”

“I have a little girl at home,” Adam said and started to walk again, taking long, slow strides backward and forward across the small interview room. “She’s nearly ten and has an enviable imagination.”

He stopped and smiled.

“She lies all the time. You say ‘I swear’ more than she does. It doesn’t exactly make you more believable.”

“I give up,” Trond muttered, and it looked like he really meant it. He leaned back in the chair and repeated, “I fucking give up.”

His arms hung loose by his body. He head fell back. He closed his eyes. His legs were apart. He looked like an overgrown teenager.

“Then you didn’t know, either, that Ulrik was a prostitute?” Adam asked calmly. His eyes did not leave the sprawling young man’s face so that he could catch every emotion.

Nothing happened. Trond Arnesen just sat there, his mouth half open, his knees wide apart, his hands moving in rhythm.

“Of the more exclusive type,” Adam added. “But of course you didn’t know that. Because I’m sure you never paid.”

The young man still didn’t react. For a long time he didn’t move at all. Even his hands were still. Just a twitch in his eyelids showed that he had heard at all. The only noise in the stuffy interview room was of Adam’s even breathing and the barely audible buzz of the air-conditioning.

“You shouldn’t have written those letters,” Adam said quietly and maliciously, though he didn’t know why. “If you hadn’t written those letters, everything would be fine now. You’d be sitting at home. In your house. You’d have everyone’s sympathy. Life would have normalized again eventually. You’re young. In six months or so the worst would be over, and you could move on. But you had to write those letters. Not very smart, Trond.”

“Now I’m being mean,” Adam thought to himself and pulled a big aluminum cigar case out of his breast pocket. “I’m punishing him for my own disappointment. What am I disappointed about? That he lied? That he had secrets? Everyone lies. Everyone has secrets. No one has a streamlined life without shame, without faults and stains. I’m not punishing him for being immoral, I’ve seen and understood too much for that. I’m disappointed that I’ve been duped. For once I chose to believe. My whole working life depends on other people’s lies and deceit, cowardice and betrayal. There was something about this boy, this immature man. Something innocent. Genuine. But I was wrong, and I’m punishing him for it.”

He could smell the cigar. Opened the case a little and inhaled.

Slowly, Trond straightened up in his chair. His eyes were full of tears. A fine dribble of spit hung from the left-hand corner of his mouth. He caught his breath in gasps.

“I never paid,” he said and put his face in his hands. “I didn’t know he took money from others. I didn’t know that there were others . . . apart from me.”

Then he was overcome by tears. He was inconsolable. He didn’t stop crying when Adam gently put a hand on his shoulder, when his mother hugged him after she had been called in, agitated and terrified, half an hour later, nor when his brother gave him an awkward brotherly embrace in the parking lot before helping him into the back of the car.

“He’s well over the age of consent,” Adam replied to his mother’s many questions. “You’ll have to ask him what it’s about.”

“But . . . you must tell . . . is he . . . was it him who—”

“Trond didn’t kill Victoria. You can be sure of that. But he’s a troubled young man. Take good care of him.”

Adam stayed in the parking lot long after the red taillights of Bård Arnesen’s car had disappeared. The temperature fell a degree or two while he stood there, without a coat. It started to snow. He stood very still, without acknowledging the people who left the building and called out good-byes before getting into their cars, shivering, and driving home to their families and their own skewed lives.

It was times like these that he was reminded why the passion he once felt for his work was now no more than an occasional and subdued feeling of satisfaction. He still believed that what he was doing was important. His job still challenged him every day. He could draw on a wealth of experience and knew that it was valuable. His intuition had also become stronger and more precise over the years. Adam Stubo was a great old-fashioned champion of what is good and just, and he knew he could never be anything other than a policeman. But he no longer felt a sense of triumph or overwhelming joy when he solved a case, as he had when he was younger.

Over the years it had grown harder and harder to live with the destruction that every investigation involved. He turned other people’s lives upside down, changed destinies. Revealed secrets. Hidden parts of people’s lives were pulled out of drawers and forgotten cupboards.

Next summer, Adam Stubo would turn fifty. He had been a policeman for twenty-eight years, and he knew that Trond Arnesen was not guilty of murdering his fiancée. Adam had met many Trond Arnesens before, with all their weaknesses and foibles; ordinary people who unfortunately suddenly had floodlights trained on every dark corner of their lives.

Trond Arnesen had lied when he felt threatened and was deceptive when he thought it would help. He was just like everyone else.

The snow was getting thicker, and the temperature was falling steadily.

Adam stood there and enjoyed the feeling of being bare-headed and thinly clad in an open space in bad weather.

Enjoyed the sensation of being cold.

Kari Mundal, the party’s former first lady, stood for a moment, as she usually did, and looked up at the façade before climbing the stone steps. She was proud of the party headquarters. Unlike her husband, who thought that he would be the stranger at the wedding if he didn’t stay away, Mrs. Mundal popped in several times a week. Generally she didn’t have any particular errand, and sometimes she just came in to drop off some bags on one of her frequent and extensive shopping trips in the center of town. And she always paused for a few seconds to relish the sight of the newly renovated façade. She got great pleasure from all the details, the corniced stringcourses at each level, the statues of saints in the niches above the windows. She was particularly fond of John the Baptist, who was closest to the door and looked down at her with a very realistic lamb in his arms. The steps were wide and dark, and she was out of breath when she put her hand on the door handle, opened the door, and went in.

“It’s only me,” she chirped. “I’m back.”

The receptionist smiled. She stood up so she could look over the high reception desk and nodded approvingly.

“Beautiful,” she said. “But should you be wearing them in this weather?”

Kari Mundal looked at her new boots, held her foot out provocatively in front of her, turned her ankle, and clicked her tongue.

“I’m sure I shouldn’t,” she said. “But they’re so elegant. You’re here late tonight, my dear. You should head home.”

“There’s lots of meetings this evening,” the woman replied. She was big and heavy with unflattering glasses. “I thought it would be best to stay a while longer, with people coming and going all the time. And not everyone is good at making sure the door is locked behind them. But if I’m here, it’s not so much of a problem.”

“You truly are a loyal trooper,” Kari Mundal praised her. “But please don’t wait for me. I may well be very late. I’ll be in the Yellow Room, if you want anything.”

She leaned conspiratorially over the desk and whispered, “I’d rather not be disturbed.”

With her hands full of shopping bags, she tripped over the spiral pattern on the floor. As always, she cast a glance at the gold shield bearing the party’s motto and smiled before heading for the elevator.

“Did you find everything I wanted?” she asked suddenly, turning back to the entrance.

“Yes,” replied the stout lady behind the desk. “Everything should be there. Forms, vouchers, everything. Hege in accounting is working overtime today, so you just go to her if you need anything. I didn’t mention it to anyone else.”

“Thank you,” said Kari Mundal. “You’re an angel.”

Rudolf Fjord paused for a few minutes on the broad landing on the second floor that looked down into the foyer, where the chandelier had been lit, casting a soft yellow glow on the room below. Then he drew back into the shadows by the wall, by the impressive palm next to the door to his office. The fear that he had managed to repress, the anxiety he had buried on the day he received the party’s unconditional acceptance, flared up again, as he had known it would, even though he had prayed to God that it would never haunt him again.

“I really appreciate your discretion,” he heard Kari Mundal call before a click and nearly inaudible rush of air told him that the elevator was on its way up.

Vegard Krogh’s widow opened the door and smiled halfheartedly. Adam Stubo had called in advance and found her voice unusually pleasant. He had pictured a dark woman. Tall, with a straight back, a large mouth, and languid movements. But she was in fact small and blonde. Her thick hair was tied up in two tired pigtails. Her sweater looked like it had been pulled from a seventies time capsule; it was brown with orange stripes and a drawstring at the neck.

“Thank you for letting me come,” Adam said, giving her his coat.

She led him into the living room and gestured that he should sit down on a stained, light-colored sofa. Adam moved a cushion, lifted up a book, and sat down. He looked around the room. The shelves were crammed and chaotic. The newspaper rack was overflowing, and he noted two copies of the phone book and a torn copy of
Le Monde diplomatique
. The glass table, between the sofa and the two armchairs that didn’t match, was dirty, and a wineglass with the remains of some red wine was standing unsteadily on a pile of magazines he didn’t recognize.

“Sorry about the mess,” said Elsbeth Davidsen. “I haven’t exactly had the energy to clean recently.”

Her voice didn’t match her body. It was deep and melodious and made her pigtails look like a joke. She had no makeup on, and her eyes were the palest that Adam had ever seen. He smiled in understanding.

“I think it’s homey,” he said and meant it. “Who’s that by?”

He nodded at a lithograph above the sofa.

“Inger Sitter,” she mumbled. “Can I offer you anything? Haven’t got much in the house, but . . . coffee? Tea?”

“Coffee would be nice,” he said. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Not at all. I made some half an hour ago.”

She pointed at an Alessi coffee pot and went to get a cup.

“Would you like milk or sugar?” he heard from the kitchen.

“Both, please,” he laughed. “But my wife doesn’t let me, so I’ll just take it black.”