The Final Murder Read Free

Fiona
    Helle. It was an unbearably politically correct response, but there wasn’t much to be done about that. She read phrases like ‘loved by the people’ in the papers. Which was fair enough, given that the programme had been watched by well over a million viewers every Saturday, for five series in a row. She had only seen a couple of shows, just before she came away. But that was more than
    enough to realize that for once she agreed with the cultural snobs’
    usual, unbearably arrogant, condemnation of popular entertainment.
    In fact, it was just one such vitriolic criticism in Aftenposten, written by a professor of sociology, that made her sit down in front of the television one Saturday evening and waste one and a half hours watching On the Move with Fiona.
    But it hadn’t been a total waste of time. It was ages since she had felt so provoked. The participants were either idiots or deeply unhappy. But they could hardly be blamed for being either. Fiona Helle, on the other hand, was successful, calculating, and far from true to her love of the common people. She waltzed into the
    studio dressed in creations that had been bought worlds away from H&M. She smiled shamelessly at the camera, while the poor creatures revealed their pathetic dreams, false hopes and, not least, extremely limited intelligence. Prime time.
    The woman, who now got up from the desk by the window and
    walked around the unfamiliar sitting room without knowing quite what she wanted, did not normally join in public debate. But after watching one episode of On the Move with Fiona she had been
    tempted. Halfway through writing a letter from an ‘outraged
    reader’, she’d stopped and laughed at herself before deleting it.
    She had been in a good mood for the rest of the evening. As she couldn’t sleep, she allowed herself to indulge in a couple of TV3’s terrible late-night films and had even learnt something from them, if she remembered rightly.
    At least feeling angry was a form of emotion.
    Readers’ letters in newspapers were not her chosen form of
    expression.
     
    Tomorrow she would go into Nice and see if she could find
    some Norwegian papers.
     

Two
     
    It was night in the duplex villa in Tasen. Three sad street lights stood on the small stretch of road behind the picket fence at the bottom of the garden, the bulbs long since broken by excited children with snowballs in their mitts. It seemed that the
    neighbourhood was taking the request to save electricity seriously.
    The sky was clear and dark. To the northeast, over Grefsenasen, Johanne could make out a constellation she thought she recognized.
    It made her feel that she was totally alone in the world.
    ‘You standing here again?’ asked Adam with resignation.
    He stood in the doorway, sleepily scratching his groin. His boxer shorts were stretched tight over his thighs. His naked shoulders were so broad that he almost touched both sides of the doorway.
    ‘How much longer is this going to carry on, love?’
    ‘Don’t know. Go back to bed.’
    Johanne turned back to the window. The transition from living in a block of flats to a house in this neighbourhood had been harder than she’d expected. She was used to complaining water pipes, babies’ cries that travelled through the walls, quarrelling teenagers and the drone of late-night programmes from downstairs, where the woman on the ground floor who was nearly
    stone-deaf often fell asleep in front of the telly. In a flat you could make coffee at midnight. Listen to the radio. Have a conversation, for that matter. Here, she barely dared open the fridge. The smell of Adam’s nocturnal leaks lingered in the bathroom in the morning, as she had forbidden him to disturb the neighbours below by
    flushing before seven.
    ‘Why do you creep around so?’ he said. ‘Can’t you at least sit down?’
    ‘Don’t talk so loud,’ Johanne whispered.
    ‘Give me a break. It’s not that loud. And you’re used to having neighbours,