The Final Murder by Anne Holt Read Free Book Online

and inoffensively well groomed. They had an aura of self confidence and matching
    pastel-coloured psychedelic shirts. Only the wine glasses that were raised in a couple of the photographs broke the illusion.
    They should have been Coca-Cola bottles.
    When Vibeke Heinerback was elected as Norway’s youngest
    party leader, members of the press had been invited to follow her to her room when she retired after the national conference. The papers and magazines were all in raptures about her evening bath.
    Vibeke raised a glass of champagne to the readers from a sea of pink bubbles, with her smooth, beautifully shaped left leg hanging over the edge of the bath. According to the picture captions, she was absolutely exhausted.
    The setting for the photographs was a hotel room.
    Vibeke Heinerback was the ultimate example of young
    Scandinavian success. She only managed to complete a couple of years at the Norwegian School of Management before politics
    completely took over her life. She walked through the winter slush down Karl Johan in high heels, but also let herself be pictured wearing wellies in the woods. She was always suitably
    dressed in the Storting. She adhered to a strict dress code when she participated in debates that were to be televised, but when she took part in programmes that were less important her style had earned her third place in a list of the country’s best-dressed women. She has a real eye for sexy details, the jury said in admiration.
    Naturally, she was going to have children. But not yet, she
    smiled to the impertinent journalists, and carried on climbing up the ladder of a party that, on good days, gloried in being the country’s leading party (just) in the opinion polls.
    As he looked around the sitting room for the third time, Adam felt a twinge of guilt at his own prejudices. His eyes fixed on a beautiful lampshade in milky glass. The glass was held in place by three metal tubes and the whole thing looked a bit like a fifties Bmovie UFO. It was an impressive room. A cream corner sofa
    behind a steel and glass table. The chairs were upholstered in an intense orange fabric that was mirrored in small speckles on a huge abstract painting on the opposite wall. All the surfaces were clean. The only ornament in the room was an Alvar Aalto vase on the austere sideboard, where a colourful bunch of tulips was dying of thirst.
    The woven-steel magazine rack was overflowing with magazines and tabloid papers. Adam picked up a gossip magazine. Two
    divorces, a celebrity anniversary and a singer’s tragic decline into alcoholism graced the front cover.
    To the extent that Adam had ever paid attention to Vibeke
    Heinerback, he had admired, somewhat reluctantly, her instinctive understanding of people’s need for easy solutions. On the
    other hand, he had never detected any real political understanding, or overriding moral conviction. Vibeke Heinerback believed
    that petrol prices should be cut and that the country should be ashamed of its care of the elderly. She called for lower taxes and more police. She thought that shopping in Sweden was a justified protest by the Norwegian people; if the politicians chose to have the highest alcohol prices in Europe, it was all they could expect.
    He had seen her as simple, superficial and politically savvy. Not well read, he thought, and in one interview she seemed to think that Ayn Rand, who she claimed was her favourite author, was a man.
     
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I
    It must have been the journalist who got it wrong, Adam
    thought, as he looked around the sitting room in more detail.
    Certainly not Vibeke Heinerback.
    He slowly ran his fingers over the book spines in the full
    shelves that lined two of the walls, from floor to ceiling. A worn and well-read copy of The Fountainhead stood beside a paperback copy of Atlas Shrugged. An extensive biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, the eccentric architect and author, was in such a sorry state that several of the pages fell