The Final Murder by Anne Holt Page B

somewhere. The yowling cut through the evening quiet and Johanne was convinced she could smell cat spray all the way up to the first floor.
    ‘I hate those semi-feral beasts,’ she said and sat down.
    ‘Can you help me?’ Adam asked in an urgent voice, almost
    insistent. ‘Can you get anything at all out of the papers?’
    ‘There’s too little. You know that. I need to look through … I need to have …’ She laughed feebly and shrugged her shoulders.
    ‘Good God, of course I can’t help you. I’ve got a new-born baby to look after! I’m on maternity leave! Obviously we can talk about it…’
    ‘There’s no one as good as you in the country. There are no real profilers here and we…’
    ‘I am not a profiler,’ she said, agitated. ‘How many times do I have to tell you? I’m fed up with…’
    ‘OK,’ he interrupted and held up his hands in a gesture of
    peace. ‘But you bloody well know enough about profiling to be one. And I don’t know anyone other than you who has been
    taught by the FBI’s best…’
    ‘Adam!’
    The evening before they got married, he had promised, with
    his hand on his heart, never to ask about Johanne’s time with the FBI. They had argued, harsh and unfamiliar; she had used words he never imagined she could use and he was positively furious that such an important period of her life was to be a closed book to him.
    But she would not share it. Never, not with anyone. As a naive young psychology student in Boston, she had been given the
    opportunity to participate in one of the FBI’s profiler courses. The head of the course was Warren Scifford, already a legend in his fifties, as much for his knowledge as his relentless bedding of promising young female students. They called him the Chief, and Johanne had trusted the man who was nearly thirty years her
    senior. In the end she started to believe that she was something special. That she had been chosen, by him and the FBI, and that of course he would divorce his wife as soon as the children were old enough.
    It all went wrong and nearly cost her her life. She got on the first possible flight back to Oslo, started to study law three weeks later and graduated from university in record time. Warren
    Scifford was a name she had tried to forget for the past thirteen years. Her time in the FBI, the months together with Warren, the catastrophic event that resulted in the Chief having to work in an office behind a desk for half a year as punishment until it all blew over and he was one of the big boys again, was a chapter in her life that occasionally came to mind, but she only thought about it reluctantly. It made her feel sick and she never, no matter what, wanted to talk about it again.
    The problem was that Adam knew Warren Scifford. In fact,
    they had met up again only last summer, when Adam went to an international police conference in New Orleans. When he came home and mentioned Warren’s name in passing over supper,
    Johanne smashed two plates in a sudden outburst of anger. Then she ran into the guest room, locked the door and cried herself to sleep. For three days, he only managed to get monosyllabic replies out of her.
    And now he was dangerously close to breaking his promise
    again.
    ‘Adam,’ she repeated harshly. ‘Don’t even go there.’
    ‘Take it easy. If you don’t want to help, you don’t want to help.’
    He leant back in the chair with an indifferent smile. ‘After all, it’s not your problem, all this.’
    ‘Don’t be like that,’ she said, dejected.
    ‘Like what? I’m only stating the obvious. It’s not your problem that a couple of famous women have been killed and mutilated just outside Oslo.’
    He emptied his glass and put it down, a bit too hard.
    ‘I’ve got children,’ Johanne said with feeling. ‘I’ve got a
    demanding nine-year-old and a two-week-old baby and more than enough to keep me busy without taking on a major role in a difficult murder investigation!’
    ‘OK, OK, I said it