Complete silence.
The final verse of the lullaby, which she had not reached, played in her head.
Blueman, Blueman, answer me, bleat with your familiar sound. Not yet, my Blueman, can you die on your boy.
2
Friday
Value
The press conference took place as usual in the Parole Hall at Police HQ. The clock on the wall showed three minutes to ten, and while Mona Daa, VG’s crime reporter, and the others waited for the police representatives to take to the podium, Mona could conclude that the attendance was good. Over twenty journalists, and on a Friday evening. She’d had a brief discussion with her photographer on why double murders sold twice as well as single ones, or if it was a case of diminishing returns. The photographer believed that quality was more important than quantity, that as the victim was a young, ethnic Norwegian, of above-average attractiveness, she would generate more clicks than — for example — a drug-addicted couple in their forties with previous convictions. Or two — yes, even three — immigrant boys from a gang.
Mona Daa didn’t disagree. So far only one of the missing girls was confirmed killed, but realistically it was only a matter of time before it turned out the other had suffered the same fate, and both were young, ethnic Norwegians and pretty. It didn’t get any better. She wasn’t sure what to make of that. If it was an expression of extra concern for the young, innocent and defenceless individual. Or if other factors played a part, factors pertaining to the usual things that got clicks: sex, money and a life the readers wished they themselves had.
Speaking of wanting what others had. She looked at the guy in his thirties in the row in front. He was wearing the flannel shirt all the hipsters were supposed to be wearing this year and a porkpie hat à la Gene Hackman in The French Connection. It was Terry Våge from Dagbladet, and she wished she had his sources. Ever since the story broke, he’d had his nose in front of the others. It was Våge, for instance, who had first written about Susanne Andersen and Bertine Bertilsen having been at the same party. And Våge who had quoted a source as saying both girls had had Røed as a sugar daddy. It was annoying, and for more reasons than simply that he was competition. His very presence here was annoying. As though he had heard her thoughts, he turned and looked right at her. Smiling broadly, he touched a finger to the brim of his idiotic hat.
‘He likes you,’ the photographer said.
‘I know,’ she said.
Våge’s interest in Mona had begun when he made his improbable comeback to newspaper journalism as a crime reporter, and she had made the mistake of being relatively friendly towards him at a seminar on — of all things — press ethics. Since the other journalists avoided him like the plague, her attitude must have come across as inviting. He subsequently got in touch with Mona for ‘tips and advice’, as he termed it. As if she had any interest in acting as a mentor for a competitor — indeed, had any desire to have anything to do with someone like Terry Våge; after all, everybody knew there had to be something in the rumours doing the rounds on him. But the more stand-offish she was, the more intense he became. On the phone, social media channels, even popping up in bars and cafes, as though from nowhere. It had, as usual, taken a little time before she understood it was her he was interested in. Mona had never been the boys’ first pick, stocky and broad-faced as she was, with what her mother had called ‘sad hair’ and a congenital hip defect which gave her a crablike gait. God knows if it was an attempt to compensate, but she had begun training with weights, grown even more stocky, but had taken one hundred and twenty kilos in the deadlift and a third place in the national bodybuilding championships. And because she’d had to learn that a person — or at least she — didn’t get anything for free, she had developed a pushy charm, a sense of humour, and a toughness which the Barbie dolls of this world could just forget about, and which had won her the unofficial throne of crime queen — and Anders. Out of the two, she valued Anders higher. Well, just about. No matter: even though the type of attention from other men which Våge displayed was unfamiliar and flattering, it was out of the question for Mona to explore it any further. And she was of the opinion that she — if not in so many words, then in tone and body language — must have made this clear to Våge. But it was as though he saw and heard what he wanted. Sometimes when she looked into those wide-open, staring eyes of his, she wondered whether he was on something or if he was all there. One night he had shown up at a bar, and when Anders went to use the men’s room, he had said something to her, in a voice so low it couldn’t be heard above the music, but still not quite low enough. ‘You’re mine.’ She had pretended not to hear, but he just stood there, calm and confident, wearing a sly smile, as if it were now a secret they shared. Fuck him. She couldn’t stand drama, so she hadn’t mentioned it to Anders. Not that Anders wouldn’t have handled it just fine, she knew he would, but still she hadn’t said anything. What was it Våge imagined? That her interest in him, the new alpha male in their little pond, would grow in proportion with his position as a crime reporter who was always one step ahead of the others? Because he was, that wasn’t open to discussion any longer. So yes, if she wanted something someone else had, it was to be leading the race again, not downgraded to one of the pack chasing behind Terry Våge.
‘Where does he get it from, do you think?’ she whispered to the photographer.
He shrugged. ‘Maybe he’s making it up again.’
Mona shook her head. ‘No, there’re good grounds to believe what he’s writing now.’
Markus Røed and Johan Krohn, his lawyer, had not even attempted to refute any of what Våge had written, and that was confirmation enough.
But Våge had not always been the king of crime. The story lingered about him, always would. The girl’s stage name was Genie, a retro glam act à la Suzi Quatro, for those who remembered her. The matter had occurred about five or six years prior, and the worst part of it was not that Våge had manufactured pure lies about Genie and had them put in print, but the rumour he had dropped Rohypnol into her drink at an after-party in order to have sex with the teenager. At the time, he had been a music journalist for a free newspaper and had obviously become infatuated with her, but had — in spite of his eulogising her in review after review — been turned down repeatedly. Nevertheless he had continued showing up at gigs and after-parties. Right up to the night when — if the rumours were to be believed — he had spiked her drink and carried her off to his room, which he had booked at the same hotel as the band were staying at. When the boys in the band realised what was happening, they barged into the hotel room where Genie lay unconscious and in a state of half-undress on Terry Våge’s bed. They had given Terry such a beating that he suffered a skull fracture and was hospitalised for a couple of months. Genie and the band must have figured Våge had had punishment enough, or may not have wanted to risk prosecution themselves; in any case, the matter was not reported to the police by any of the parties involved. But it was the end of the glowing reviews. In addition to panning her every new release, Terry Våge wrote about Genie’s infidelity, drug abuse, plagiarism, underpayment of band members, and false information on applications for grants for tour support. When a dozen or so stories were referred to the Press Complaints Commission, and it turned out that Våge had simply made half of them up, he was sacked and became persona non grata in the Norwegian media for the next five years. How he had managed to make it back in was a mystery. Or maybe not. He had realised he was finished as a music journalist, but had been behind a crime blog that gathered more and more readers, and eventually Dagbladet said that one could not exclude a young journalist from their field just because he had made some mistakes early in his career, and had taken him on as a freelancer — a freelancer who currently got more column inches than any of the newspaper’s permanent reporters.