Headhunters

by Jo Nesbo

  I walked along the main road. Of course I ran the risk of being seen by Greve if he drove this way. But I was not concerned. First of all, he wouldn’t have recognised the bald-headed guy in a black nylon jacket with ELVERUM KO-DAW-YING CLUB on the back. Secondly, this person walked differently from the Roger Brown he had met; with a more erect back and at a slower pace. Thirdly, the GPS tracker would show in all its clarity that I was still in the wreck and hadn’t moved a metre. Obviously. After all, I was dead.

  I passed a farm, but continued on my way. A car passed me, braked, wondering perhaps who I was, but accelerated again and disappeared into the sharp autumn light.

  It smelt good out here. Earth and grass, coniferous forest and cow muck. My neck wounds ached a little, but the stiffness in my body was receding. I strode out, taking deep breaths, deep and life-affirming.

  After half an hour’s walking I was still on the same endless road, but I saw a blue sign and a hut in the distance. A bus stop.

  A quarter of an hour later I got onto a grey country bus, paid cash from Eskild Monsen’s wallet and was told that the bus went to Elverum, from where there was a train connection to Oslo. I sat down opposite two platinum blondes in their thirties. Neither of them graced me with a glance.

  I dozed off, but woke up to the sound of a siren and the bus slowing down and pulling in. A police car with a blue light flashing passed us. Patrol car zero two, I mused, noticing one of the blondes look at me. Meeting her gaze, I noted that she instinctively wanted to avert her eyes – I was too direct; she thought I was ugly. But she couldn’t do it. I sent her a wry smile and turned to the window.

  The sun was also shining on the old Roger Brown’s home town when the new one alighted from the train at ten minutes past three. But an icy cold wind was blowing into the snarling mouths of the disfigured tiger sculptures in front of Oslo Central Station as I crossed the square and continued towards Skippergata.

  The dope dealers and whores in Tollbugata looked at me, but didn’t yell after me with their offers as they had done for the old Roger Brown. I stopped in front of the entrance to Hotel Leon and glanced up at the facade where the plaster had crumbled, leaving white sores. Beneath one of the windows hung a poster promising a room for four hundred kroner a night.

  I went inside to the reception desk. Or RESEPTION as the sign hanging above the man behind the counter said.

  ‘Yes?’ he said instead of the usual warm welcome I was used to from the hotels the old Roger Brown frequented. The receptionist’s face was covered in a veneer of sweat as though he had been working hard. Had drunk too much coffee. Or was just nervous by nature. The roaming eyes suggested the latter.

  ‘Have you got a single room?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. How long for?’

  ‘Twenty-four hours.’

  ‘All of them?’

  I had never been to a hotel like the Leon before, but I had driven past a few times, and I had an inkling they offered rooms on an hourly basis for those who made love on a professional basis. In other words, those women who didn’t have the beauty or the wit to use their bodies to acquire a house designed by Ove Bang and their own gallery in Frogner.

  I nodded.

  ‘Four hundred,’ said the man. ‘Payment in advance.’ He had a kind of Swedish accent, the kind preferred by dance band vocalists and preachers for some reason.

  I threw Eskild Monsen’s credit card on the desk. I know from experience that hotels don’t give a damn whether the signature is a match or not, but to be on the safe side I had been working on a passable imitation on the train. The problem was the photograph. It showed a round-jowled man with long, curly hair and a black beard. Not even under-exposure could hide the fact that he bore absolutely no resemblance to the person standing in front of him with a thin face and a recently shaven skull. The receptionist studied the card.

  ‘You don’t look like the guy in the photo,’ he said without looking up from the card.

  I waited. Until he raised his eyes and they met mine.

  ‘Cancer,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Cytotoxin.’

  He blinked three times.

  ‘Three courses of treatment,’ I said.

  His Adam’s apple gave a jump as he swallowed. I could see he had severe doubts. Come on! I had to lie down soon, my throat was hurting like hell. I didn’t relinquish his gaze. But he relinquished mine.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, holding the credit card out to me. ‘I can’t afford to get into trouble. They’re keeping an eye on me. Have you got any cash?’

  I shook my head. A two-hundred-krone note and a ten-krone coin was all I had left after the train ticket.

  ‘Sorry,’ he repeated, stretching out his arm – as if begging – so that the card was touching my chest.

  I took it and marched out.

  There was no point trying other hotels; if they wouldn’t take the card at the Leon, they wouldn’t anywhere else either. And in the worst-case scenario they would sound the alarm.

  I switched to plan B.

  I was a new person, a stranger in town. Without money, without friends, without a past or an identity. The facades, the streets and the people who walked in them, appeared different to me from how they had to Roger Brown. A thin strip of cloud had glided in front of the sun and the temperature had sunk another few degrees.

  At Oslo Central Station I had to ask which bus went to Tonsenhagen, and as I got onto the bus, for some reason the driver spoke English to me.

  From the bus stop to Ove’s house there were a couple of steep hills, yet I was still frozen when I finally passed his place. I circled round the area for a few minutes to make sure there were no policemen in the vicinity. Then I went up to the door and let myself in.

  It was warm inside. Time- and thermostat-controlled radiators.

  I tapped in Natasha to deactivate the alarm and walked into the sitting room-cum-bedroom. It smelt as it had before. Washing-up not done, unwashed bedlinen, gun oil and sulphur. Ove was lying on the bed as I had left him. It felt like it was a week ago.

  I found the remote control, got into bed beside Ove and switched on the TV. Flicked through teletext, but there was nothing about missing patrol cars or dead policemen. The Elverum police must have had their suspicions for some time and must have launched a search, but they would probably wait for as long as possible before announcing that a patrol car had gone missing in case the whole thing was down to a banal misunderstanding. However, sooner or later they would find it. How long from then until they discovered that the body without fingertips in the green tracksuit was not the detainee, Ove Kjikerud? Twenty-four hours? Forty-eight max.

  These were matters, of course, which I was not qualified to judge. I didn’t have the vaguest notion of the process. And the new Roger Brown knew no more about police procedures, but he did at least realise that the situation demanded firm decisions based on uncertain information, risky action instead of hesitation, and toleration of enough fear for the senses to be sharpened, but not so much that you were paralysed.

  For that reason I closed my eyes and slept.

  When I awoke, the clock on teletext showed 20:03. And beneath it a line about at least four people, of whom three were police officers, killed in a traffic accident outside Elverum. The patrol car had been reported missing in the morning and was located in the afternoon next to a copse by the River Trekk. A fifth person, also a policeman, was missing. The police thought he may have been hurled out of the car into the river and a search had been mounted. The police asked the public for information about the driver of a stolen Sigdal Kitchens lorry that had been found parked on a woodland road twenty kilometres from the accident scene.

  When they knew that Kjikerud was the missing person they would sooner or later come here. I had to find myself somewhere else to sleep tonight.

  I took a deep breath. Then I leaned across Ove’s body, picked up the phone on the bedside table and dialled the only number I knew by heart.

&nb
sp; She answered on the third ring.

  Instead of her usual shy but warm ‘Hi’, Lotte answered with an almost inaudible ‘Yes?’

  I put down the phone immediately. All I wanted to know was that she was at home. I hoped she would be later that night as well.

  I switched off the TV and got up.

  After searching for two minutes I had found two guns: one in the bathroom and one squeezed behind the TV. I chose the small black one from behind the TV and went to the kitchen drawer, took out two boxes, one with live ammunition and one labelled ‘blanks’, filled the magazine with live cartridges, loaded the gun and engaged the safety catch. Then I stuffed the gun into my waistband as I had seen Greve do. I went into the bathroom and put the first gun back. After closing the cabinet door, I stood inspecting myself in the mirror. The fine shape of the face and the deep lines, the head’s brutal nakedness, the intense gaze, the almost feverish skin and mouth; relaxed and determined, silent and expressive.

  Wherever I woke up tomorrow morning, it would be with murder on my conscience. Premeditated murder.

  19

  PREMEDITATED MURDER

  YOU WALK ALONG your own street. You stand in the evening gloom under a cluster of trees looking up at your own house, at the lights in the window, at a movement by the curtains which might be your wife. A neighbour out walking his English setter passes by and sees you, sees a stranger in a street where most people know each other. The man is suspicious, and the setter lets out a low growl; they can both smell that you hate dogs. Animals, like humans, stick together against intruders and trespassers up here on the mountainside where they have entrenched themselves, raised high above the confusion of the town and the chaotic jumble of interests and agendas. Up here they just want things to continue as they are, for things are good, everything’s fine, the cards should not be re-dealt. No, let the aces and kings remain in the hands they are in now: uncertainty damages investor confidence, stable economic conditions ensure productivity, which in turn serves the community. You have to create something before you can distribute it.

  It is odd to think that the most conservative person I have ever met was a chauffeur who drove people earning four times as much as he did and addressed him with the condescension that only the most painfully correct politeness can express.

  Dad once said that if I became a socialist I would no longer be welcome in his house, and the same applied to my mother. He was, it is true, not sober when he made that threat, but that was all the more reason to assume that he meant quite literally what he said. He thought that the caste system in India had a lot to recommend it, that we were born into our station in life in accordance with God’s will and it was our damned duty to spend our wretched lives there. Or as the sexton says in Johan Falkberget’s The Fourth Night Watch: ‘Sextons are sextons. And priests are priests.’

  My rebellion, a chauffeur’s son’s rebellion, had therefore been: education, a rich man’s daughter, Ferner Jacobsen-branded suits and a house on Voksenkollen. It had gone wrong. Dad had had the impudence to forgive me; he had even been so crafty as to act proud. And I knew, when I sobbed like a baby at their funeral, that I was not grieving over my mother; I was furious at my father.

  The setter and the neighbour (strange that I could no longer remember what his name was) were swallowed up by the darkness and I crossed the road. There had been no unfamiliar cars in the street, and, pressing my face against the garage window, I could see that it too was empty.

  I sneaked quickly into the raw, almost palpably black night of the garden and took up position under the apple trees where I knew it was impossible to see anyone from the living room.

  But I could see her.

  Diana was pacing the floor. The impatient movements combined with the Prada phone pressed to her ear led me to infer that she was trying to ring someone who was not answering. She was wearing jeans. No one could wear jeans the way Diana did. Despite the white woollen jumper, she walked with her free arm across her chest as though she were freezing. A big house built in the 1930s takes time to warm up after a plunge in temperature, however many radiators you turn on.

  I waited until I was quite sure she was alone. Felt for my gun lodged in my waistband. Took a deep breath. This would be the most difficult thing I had ever done. But I knew I would succeed. The new man would succeed. That was perhaps why the tears flowed, because the outcome was already a given. I did nothing to restrain the tears. They ran like hot caresses down my cheeks while I concentrated on being still, not losing control of my breathing, and not sobbing. After five minutes I was empty and dried my cheeks. Then I walked to the door with rapid strides and let myself in as quietly as I could. Inside, in the corridor, I stood listening. It was as though the house was holding its breath: the silence was broken only by the click of her footsteps on the parquet floor upstairs in the living room. And soon they would stop, too.

  It was ten o’clock in the evening, and behind the barely open door I glimpsed a pale face and a pair of brown eyes.

  ‘Could I sleep here?’ I asked.

  Lotte didn’t answer. She didn’t usually. But she was staring as if I were a ghost. She didn’t usually stare or look frightened, either.

  I smirked and ran a hand across my smooth scalp.

  ‘I’ve shaved off …’ I searched for the word. ‘… the lot.’

  She blinked twice. Then she pulled back the door and I slipped in.

  20

  RESURRECTION

  I AWOKE AND glanced at my watch. Eight. It was time to begin. I had what they call a big day in front of me. Lotte lay on her side with her back to me, swathed in the sheets that she preferred to a duvet. I slid out on my side of the bed and dressed at top speed. It was bitterly cold, and I was frozen to the marrow. I crept into the hall, put on my jacket, hat and gloves and went into the kitchen. In one of the drawers I found a plastic bag which I shoved into my trouser pocket. Then I opened the fridge, thinking it was the first day I had woken up as a murderer. A man who had shot a woman. It sounded like something from the newspaper, the kind of case I ignored because criminal cases were always so painful and banal. I grabbed a carton of grapefruit juice and was about to put it to my mouth. But changed my mind and fetched a glass from the overhead cabinet. You don’t need to let all your standards decline just because you have become a murderer. After finishing the juice, rinsing the glass and putting the carton back, I went into the living room and sat down on the sofa. The small black gun in my jacket pocket poked me in the stomach, and I took it out. It still smelt, and I knew the smell would come to remind me of the murder for ever. The execution. One shot had been sufficient. At point-blank range, as she was about to embrace me. I had shot during the embrace and hit her in the left eye. Was it intentional? Maybe. Maybe I had wanted to take something from her in the same way that she had tried to take everything from me. And the lying traitor had embraced the lead, the phallic bullet had penetrated her as I had once done. Never again. Now she was dead. Thoughts came like that, in short sentences confirming facts. Good. I would have to continue thinking like that, maintaining the chill, not letting my emotions have a chance. I still had something to lose.

  I raised the remote control and switched on the TV. There was nothing new on teletext; the editors weren’t in the office that early, I supposed. It still said the four bodies would be identified in the course of the following day, today in other words, and that one person was still missing.

  One person. They had changed that from ‘one policeman’, hadn’t they? Did that mean then that they now knew that the missing person was the detainee? Maybe, maybe not; there was no mention of them searching for anyone.

  I leaned over the armrest and picked up the receiver from her yellow landline phone, the one I always visualised by Lotte’s red lips when I rang. The tip of her tongue was next to my ear as she was wetting them. I dialled 1881, asked for two numbers and interrupted her when she said an automated voice would give them to me.

  ‘I would li
ke to hear them from you personally in case the speech is unclear and I have any problems understanding,’ I said.

  I was given the two numbers, memorised them and asked her to put me through to the first. The central switchboard at Kripos answered on the second ring.

  I introduced myself as Runar Bratli and said I was a relative of Endride and Eskild Monsen and that I had been asked by the family to collect their clothes. But no one had told me where to go or who to see.

  ‘Just a moment,’ said the switchboard lady, putting me on hold.

  I listened to a surprisingly good pan-pipe version of ‘Wonderwall’ and thought about Runar Bratli. He was a candidate I had once decided not to recommend for a top management job even though he had been the best qualified by far. And tall. So tall that during the final interview he had complained that he had to sit doubled up in his Ferrari, an investment he had conceded with a boyish smile that had been a childish caprice; more like a midlife crisis I thought. And I had jotted down: Open, enough self-assurance to expose own foolishness. Everything had been, in other words, textbook stuff. Just not the comment he had followed up with: ‘When I think about how I hit my head on the roof of the car, I almost env—’

  He had cut off the sentence there, shifted his gaze away from me and on to one of the customer’s representatives and chatted about exchanging the Ferrari for a SUV, the kind you allow your wife drive. Everyone round the table had laughed. I had, too. And not so much as a twitch revealed that I had completed the sentence for him: ‘… envy you for being so small.’ And that I had just put a line through his name as a contender. Unfortunately, he didn’t possess any interesting art.