Adam Stubo drew a deep breath and let the air seep out between his clenched teeth. He shrank. Maybe he was just sinking deeper into the sofa.
“Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t. Not until we’re formally working together. And I’m starting to get the impression that you don’t want to do that.”
He gave a smile, as if he wanted to be ironic. But then gave up and continued:
“Strictly speaking, this case is a nightmare. Strictly speaking…”
Again he drew a deep breath.
“My wife and only daughter died just over two years ago,” he said quickly. “I assume you didn’t know.”
“No, I’m very sorry.”
She didn’t want to hear this.
“An absurd accident. My daughter… her name was Trine and she was only twenty-three. Amund was a baby. My grandson. She was going to… is this upsetting you? I’m upsetting you.”
Suddenly he sat up. He straightened his shoulders and once again filled his gray tweed jacket. Then he smiled briefly.
“You have more useful things to be getting on with.”
But he didn’t get up. He gave no sign of moving. A great tit had settled on the bird feeder out on the terrace.
“No,” said Johanne.
When he looked at her, she didn’t know what he wanted. The general impression was that he was grateful. Relieved, perhaps, because he sank back into the sofa.
“My wife had been irritated by a clogged gutter for a while,” he said blankly. “I’d promised to do something about it, for a long time. But I just never got around to it. My daughter dropped by one morning, said she was happy to go up on the roof and hose down the gutters. Presumably my wife held the ladder. Trine must have lost her balance. She fell, taking part of the gutter with her. Which must have fallen under her somehow, because it… impaled her. The ladder fell on top of my wife, with Trine’s full body weight. One of the rungs hit her in the face. Her nose bone was pushed up into her brain. When I came home a couple of hours later, they were both lying there, dead. And Amund was still asleep.”
Johanne could hear herself breathing, short and shallow. She tried to break the rhythm, to slow the pace.
“I was the head of the division at the time,” he continued calmly. “To be honest, I’d seen myself as the next head of the NCIS for a long time. But after that… I asked to be a detective inspector again. Will never be anything else. If I manage to stay on, that is. Cases like this make me wonder. Well, well.”
His eyes were uncertain. His smile was shy, nearly sheepish, as if he had done something wrong and didn’t know how to say sorry. He opened his mouth a couple of times, clearly to say something more. Then he looked down at his hands instead.
“Well, well,” he repeated after a while, twiddling his thumbs. “I’d better beat a retreat.”
But he still didn’t get up. He still made no sign of wanting to go.
I haven’t got room for this, thought Johanne. I haven’t got time for this case in my life. I don’t want it. I haven’t got room…
“… for you,” she mumbled.
“What?”
Adam was sitting with his back to the big living-room window. The contrasting light made it difficult to see his face. Only his eyes were clear. They were looking straight at her.
“Should I make some lunch, instead?” she asked, smiling. “You must be hungry. I certainly am.”
He took up so much space.
Isak, the only man who had ever been in her kitchen for more than thirty seconds, was slight, almost skinny. Adam Stubo filled the entire room. There was barely space for Johanne. He took off his jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. Then he started to make an omelette, without asking. Johanne could hardly move without touching him. He smelled newly showered, with a faint aroma of cigars, the smell of someone who was older than she. When he rolled up his sleeves to cut the onion, she noticed the hairs on his forearms were light, nearly golden. She thought about summer and turned away.
“What do you think the message means?” he said, and jabbed the air with his knife. “Now you’ve got what you deserved. Who got what they deserved? The child? The mother? Society? The police?”
“In both cases the message has been directed at the mother, in a way,” replied Johanne. “Though of course the murderer couldn’t be certain that it would be the mother who found Kim. It could just as easily have been the father who went down into the cellar. And as far as Sarah is concerned, there’s reason to believe that the murderer realized that the package might never be delivered to the address. He’s not stupid. I don’t know. I think it’s more important to focus on the content of the message than whom it’s addressed to.”
“What do you mean by content?”
Adam turned on the stove and took a frying pan out of the lower cabinet without even asking where it was. Johanne had sat down on a stool and was staring with great concentration at a glass of ice water.
“In fact, I think you should start from a completely different angle,” she said slowly.
“Okay. What angle?”
He wiped his eyes.
“You should always start at the bottom,” she said more or less absentmindedly, as if she was searching for something in her memory. “Look at what you’ve got. Facts. Objective evidence. Lay the foundations. Never speculate before you’ve got the foundations. Dangerous.”
“So that’s what you should do.”
“Yes.”
She straightened her back and put down the glass. Good smells were coming from the stove. Adam found some plates and glasses, knives and forks. He seemed to be very focused as he cut a tomato into a beautiful decoration.
“Here you go,” he said with satisfaction, putting the frying pan on the table. “Onion omelette. Now that’s what I call a real lunch.”
“Three children,” she said, chewing slowly. “If we assume that Emilie was taken by the same man as Sarah and Kim. We can’t be certain, but let’s… For the moment, we’ll assume she was. Three children have disappeared. Two of them have been delivered back. Dead. Dead children.”
“Dead children,” Adam repeated, and put down his fork. “We don’t even know what they died from.”
“Wait!”
She lifted a hand and continued:
“Who kills children?”
“Sex offenders and drivers,” he muttered grimly.
“Exactly.”
“Hmm?”
“These children weren’t killed by a driver. And there’s nothing to indicate that they were killed by a pedophile either. Isn’t that right?”
He nodded imperceptibly.
“Unless it was sexual acts that leave no trace,” he said. “And that is a possibility.”
“What are we left with then, if it’s not a question of sex or car accidents?”
“Nothing,” he said, and took another helping.
“You’re eating too quickly,” she said. “And you’re wrong. We’re left with quite a lot. You, I mean. You’re left with quite a few options.”
The omelette tasted good. A bit too much onion for her liking, but the dash of Tabasco made it different.
“The fact is that we don’t kill children easily. Both you and I know that most killings in this country are manslaughter. The percentage of murderers who reoffend is minimal. Most killings are the result of an ongoing family conflict, terrible jealousy or… pure accident. A drunken brawl. One thing leads to another. There’s a weapon in hand, a shotgun or a knife. Bang. Someone becomes a killer and that’s that. We both know that. Children are seldom directly involved, at least not as victims. Other than by association.”
“That’s if we rule out teenagers,” Adam retorted. “They’re killing each other more and more frequently. And they get younger and younger. I think I would call a fourteen-year-old a child. He was that age, the boy who was arrested in January. At Møllergate school, that is.”
Johanne rolled her eyes.