Headhunters

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘They’re in the Pathology Unit.’ It was the switchboard again. ‘At Rikshospital in Oslo.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said, trying not to overdo my naivety. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘It’s a routine procedure when there’s a suspicion that a crime may have been committed. It looks like the car was rammed by this truck.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘I suppose that’s why they asked me to help them. I live in Oslo, you see.’

  The lady didn’t answer. I could visualise her rolling eyes and long, carefully painted nails drumming on the table with impatience. But I might have been wrong, of course. Being a headhunter doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a good judge of character or particularly empathetic. To get to the top in this business I think the opposite is true, that it can be a disadvantage.

  ‘Could you inform the relevant person that I’m on my way to the Pathology Unit now?’ I asked.

  I could hear her hesitate. This task apparently didn’t come under her job description. Job descriptions in public service are a mess, as a rule, believe me, I still read them.

  ‘I don’t have anything to do with this. I’m just trying to help out,’ I said. ‘So I hope to be in and out quickly.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ she said.

  I put down the receiver and dialled the second number. He answered on the fifth ring.

  ‘Yes?’ His voice sounded impatient, almost irritated.

  I tried to work out from the background noise where he was. In my house or in his own apartment.

  ‘Boo,’ I said and rang off.

  Clas Greve was hereby warned.

  I didn’t know what he would do, but he was bound to switch on the GPS and check where the ghost was.

  I returned to the opened door. In the dark of the bedroom I could just make out the contours of her body under the sheet. I resisted a sudden impulse: to get undressed, slip back into the bed and snuggle up to her. Instead I felt an odd sensation that everything that had happened had not been about Diana, but about me. I closed the bedroom door softly and left. Just as when I had arrived, there was no one on the staircase to greet. Nor when I got out onto the street did I meet anyone who would respond to my friendly nods; no one looked at me or acknowledged my existence in any other way. Now it had dawned on me what the sensation was: I didn’t exist.

  It was time to find myself again.

  Rikshospital is situated on one of Oslo’s many sloping ridges, raised high above the town. Before it was built there had been a small madhouse here. A name that was changed to an institute for the insane. And then to asylum, and finally to psychiatric hospital. And so on as the general population caught on to the fact that the new phrase just meant quite ordinary mental derangement, too. Personally, I have never understood this word game, although those in charge must believe the general public are a bunch of prejudiced idiots who have to be wrapped in cotton wool. They might be right, but it was nevertheless refreshing to hear the woman behind the glass partition say: ‘Corpses are on the lower ground floor, Bratli.’

  Being a corpse is apparently alright. No one highlights the outrage of calling a person who is dead a corpse, or says that, in spite of everything, there is more merit in being a dead person than there is in being dead, or that the word ‘corpse’ reduces people to being a lump of flesh in which the heart happens to beat no longer. And so what? Or perhaps it is all down to the fact that corpses cannot plead minority status; after all, they are in the woeful majority.

  ‘Down the staircase over there,’ she said, pointing. ‘I’ll ring down and tell them you’re on your way.’

  I did as instructed. My footsteps resounded through the bare white walls; otherwise it was very quiet here. At the far end of a long, narrow, white corridor on the floor below, with one foot inside an open door, stood a man dressed in a green hospital uniform. He could have been a surgeon, but something about his exaggeratedly relaxed posture, or perhaps it was his moustache, told me he was lower down the hierarchy.

  ‘Bratli?’ he shouted, so loud that it seemed like a conscious insult to those sleeping on this floor. The echo rolled menacingly backwards and forwards in the corridor.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, hurrying towards him so that we wouldn’t have to take any more of this shouting.

  He held the door open for me, and I stepped in. It was a kind of locker room. The man walked ahead of me to a locker, which he opened.

  ‘Kripos rang to say you would be coming to pick up the Monsen boys’ things,’ he said, still with this exaggeratedly powerful voice.

  I nodded. My pulse was racing faster than I had liked. But not as fast as I had feared. This was, after all, a critical phase, the weak point in the plan.

  ‘And so who are you?’

  ‘Third cousin,’ I said airily. ‘The next of kin asked me to pick up their clothes. Just the clothes, no valuables.’

  I had decided on ‘next of kin’ with care. It might indeed sound conspicuously formal, but as I didn’t know whether the Monsen twins had been married or their parents were still alive, I had to choose words which covered all eventualities.

  ‘Why doesn’t fru Monsen come and collect them herself?’ the man said. ‘She’s coming here at twelve anyway.’

  I gulped. ‘I suppose she can’t bear the thought of all that blood.’

  He grinned. ‘But you can?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said simply, hoping with a passion that there would be no more questions.

  The man shrugged and passed over a sheet of paper on a clipboard. ‘Sign here to confirm receipt.’

  I scribbled an R with a wavy line followed by a B with a corresponding squiggle and a final dot over the ‘I’.

  The porter scrutinised the signature thoughtfully. ‘Have you got any ID, Bratli?’

  The plan was creaking at the joints.

  I patted my trouser pockets and put on an apologetic smile. ‘Must have left my wallet in the car down in the car park.’

  ‘Up in the car park, don’t you mean?’

  ‘No, down. I parked in the Research Car Park.’

  ‘All the way down there?’

  I could see his hesitation. Naturally, I had thought this scenario through beforehand. In the event that I was sent off to fetch ID, I would just leave without returning. It wouldn’t be a disaster, but I wouldn’t have achieved what I had come for. I waited. And from the two first words knew that the decision had gone against me.

  ‘Sorry, Bratli, but we have to be on the safe side. Don’t take this the wrong way but murder cases attract a huge number of weird individuals. With extremely weird interests.’

  I acted astonished. ‘Do you mean to say that … people collect murder victims’ clothing?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe what some get up to,’ he said. ‘For all I know you may never have met the Monsen boys, just read about them in the papers. Sorry, but I’m afraid that’s the way it is.’

  ‘Fine, I’ll be back in a bit,’ I said, moving towards the door. Where I paused as though I had remembered something and played my last card. To be precise: the credit card.

  ‘Now I think about it,’ I said, plunging my hand into my back pocket, ‘the last time Endride was at my place, he left his credit card. Perhaps you could give it to his mother when she comes …’

  I passed it to the porter, who held it and studied the name and photo of the bearded young man. I bided my time but was already halfway out of the door when I finally heard his voice behind me.

  ‘That’s good enough for me, Bratli. Here, take the togs.’

  Relieved, I turned back. Took out the plastic bag I had stuffed into my trouser pocket and shoved the clothes in.

  ‘Got everything?’

  I fingered the back pockets of Endride’s uniform trousers. Could feel it was still there, the plastic bag with my shorn hair. I nodded.

  I had to stop myself from running as I left. I was resurrected, I existed once more, and inside me this created a strange exultation. The wheels were spinning again, my heart was beatin
g, my blood was circulating and my fortunes turning. I hurried up the stairs two at a time, passed the woman behind the glass partition at a more sedate pace and was almost at the door when I heard a familiar voice behind me.

  ‘Hello there, mister! Hold on a minute.’

  Of course. It had been too easy.

  I turned slowly. A man, familiar too, came towards me. He was holding up an ID card. Diana’s secret love. And the heretical thought flashed through my mind: I’ve had it.

  ‘Kripos,’ said the man in a deep pilot’s voice. Atmospheric noise, specks of outage. ‘May I have a few words with you, mis-er?’ Like a typewriter with a worn letter.

  It is said that unconsciously we create an image of people we see in films or on TV that is bigger than they are in reality. This was not the case with Brede Sperre. He was even bigger than I had imagined. I forced myself to stand still as he walked towards me. Then he towered over me. From on high, under blond, boyish locks, cut so that his hair would seem wild in a trustworthy way, a pair of steel-grey eyes looked down at me. One of the things I had picked up about Sperre was that he was supposed to be having a relationship with a very well-known and very masculine Norwegian politician. Now rumours of homosexuality are, of course, the final proof that you have become a celebrity, the very hallmark so to speak. It was just that the person who’d told me this – one of the male models used by the designer Baron von Bulldog who had begged his way into Diana’s private view – claimed that he had allowed himself to be sodomised by the ‘police god’, as he reverentially called him.

  ‘Oh, that’s just talk, that is,’ I had said with a rigid smile, hoping the penetration angst did not show in my eyes.

  ‘Right, mister. I’ve jus-heard that you’re the third cousin of the Monsen boys and know them well. Perhaps you might be so kind as to help us iden-ify the bodies?’

  I swallowed. The polite form of address and the semi-jocular ‘mister’ in the same utterance. But Sperre’s eyes were neutral. Was he playing the status game or did he just do that automatically, almost like a professional reflex action? I heard myself repeating ‘identify’ with a stammer as though the concept were totally unfamiliar to me.

  ‘Their mother will be here in a few hours,’ Sperre said. ‘But any time we could save … We would app-eciate that. It’ll on-y take a couple of se-onds.’

  I didn’t want to. My body bristled and my brain insisted I refuse and get the hell out of there. For I had been reawakened. I – that is the plastic bag of hair I was carrying – was now a person who was active again on Greve’s GPS receiver. It was only a question of time before he would resume the hunt; I could already scent the dog in the air, sense the panic mounting. But another part of my brain, the one with the new voice, said that I should not refuse. That it would arouse suspicion. That it would only take a few seconds.

  ‘Of course,’ I said and was about to smile, until I realised that would be perceived as an inappropriate reaction to having to identify the corpses of your own relatives.

  We went back the same way as I had come.

  The porter nodded to me with a grin as we went through the locker room.

  ‘You should prepare yourself. The deceased are in pretty bad shape,’ Sperre said, opening a heavy metal door. We stepped into the mortuary. I shivered. Everything in the room suggested the inside of a fridge: white walls, roof and floor, a few degrees above zero and meat that was past its sell-by date.

  The four bodies lay in a line, each on its own metal table. Feet stuck out from under white sheets, and I could see that film conventions were rooted in reality; they did in fact each have a metal tag attached to a big toe.

  ‘Ready?’ said Sperre.

  I nodded.

  He whipped back two sheets with a flourish, like a magician. ‘Traffic accidents,’ the policeman said, rocking on his heels. ‘The worst. Hard to identify, as you can see.’ I had the sudden impression Sperre was speaking abnormally slowly. ‘There should have been five people in the car, but we found only these four bodies. The fifth must have landed in the river and floated away.’

  I stared, swallowed and breathed heavily through my nose. I was play-acting, of course. For even naked, the Monsen twins looked better now than they had in the wrecked car. Moreover, it didn’t reek in here. No gaseous faeces, no smells of blood and petrol or the stench of human intestines. It occurred to me that visual impressions are overrated, that sound and smell terrorise the sense mechanisms in a much more effective way. Like the crunching sound a woman’s head makes as it hits the parquet floor, after being shot through the eye.

  ‘It’s the Monsen twins,’ I whispered.

  ‘Yes, we’ve managed to work that out, too. The question is …’

  Sperre paused for a long – a really long – dramatic pause. My God.

  ‘Which is Endride and which is Eskild?’

  Despite the wintry temperature in the room I was soaked with sweat under my clothes. Was he speaking so slowly on purpose? Was it a new interrogation method, of which I knew nothing?

  My gaze hovered over the naked bodies and found the mark I had made. The wound running from the ribs down the stomach was still open and had black scabs along the edges.

  ‘That’s Endride,’ I stated, pointing. ‘The other’s Eskild.’

  ‘Hm,’ Sperre purred with satisfaction, making a note. ‘You must’ve known the twins very well. Not even their colleagues, who have been here, could tell them apart.’

  I answered with a sorrowful nod. ‘The twins and I were very close. Especially of late. Can I go now?’

  ‘Sure,’ Sperre said, but continued to make notes in a way that did not invite a dismissal.

  I looked at the clock behind his head.

  ‘Identical twins,’ Sperre said, continuing to write. ‘Ironic, isn’t it?’ What the hell was he writing? One was Endride, the other Eskild, how many words did you really need to say that?

  I knew I ought not to ask, but I couldn’t resist. ‘What’s ironic?’

  Sperre stopped writing and looked up. ‘Born in the same second from the same egg. Dead in the same second in the same car.’

  ‘No irony in that, is there?’

  ‘None?’

  ‘None that I can see.’

  ‘Mm. You’re right. “Paradox” is probably the word I was looking for.’ Sperre smiled.

  I felt my blood beginning to bubble. ‘It’s not a paradox, either.’

  ‘Well, it is strange anyway. There is a sort of cosmic logic to it, don’t you think?’

  I lost control, saw my knuckles go white as I squeezed the bag and heard my quivering voice say: ‘No irony, no parody, no cosmic logic.’ The volume increased. ‘Just an arbitrary symmetry of life and death, which is not even that arbitrary since they, like many other identical twins, chose to spend a lot of their time in the immediate vicinity of each other. Lightning struck and they were together. End of story.’

  I had almost shouted the last part.

  Sperre looked at me with a thoughtful gaze. He had a finger and thumb placed at opposite corners of his mouth and now he ran them down to his chin. I knew that look. He was one of the few. He had the interrogator look, the eyes that could expose lies.

  ‘Well, Bratli,’ he said, ‘something bothering you, is there?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said with a wan smile and knew I had to say something truthful now, something that did not register on the lie detector staring at me. ‘I had a bit of a dis agreement with my wife last night, and now this accident. I’m a bit off-kilter. My deepest apologies. I’ll remove myself this minute.’

  I turned on my heel and left.

  Sperre said something, perhaps goodbye, but it was drowned by the metal door slamming behind me and a bass tone booming through the mortuary.

  21

  INVITATION

  I CAUGHT THE tram at the stop outside Rikshospital, paid the conductor in cash and said, ‘To the centre.’ He smirked as he gave me change, presumably the price was the same wherever I
went. I had caught the tram before, of course, as a boy, but I didn’t recall the routine so well. Get out through the back door, have your ticket ready to be checked, press the stop button in good time, don’t disturb the driver. A lot had changed. The noise from the rails was less deafening, the advertising more deafening and extrovert. People on the seats more introvert.

  In the centre I switched mode of transport, to a bus which took me north-east. Was told I could travel on the tram ticket. Fantastic. For peanuts I could navigate my way through the town in a way I had never known was possible. I was in motion. A flashing dot on Greve’s GPS thingy. I seemed to be able to sense his confusion: What the fuck is going on? Are they moving the body?

  I got off the bus at Årvoll and began to climb the hills towards Tonsenhagen. I could have got off closer to Ove’s place, but everything I was doing now had a point. In these residential areas it was a quiet morning. A stoop-shouldered old lady was tottering along the pavement pulling a shopping trolley behind her with screaming, unlubricated wheels. Nevertheless she smiled at me as if it was a wonderful day, a beautiful world, a lovely life. What was Greve thinking now? That there was a hearse driving Brown to his childhood home or something like that, but it suddenly seemed to be going so slowly – was there a traffic jam?

  Two gum-chewing, heavily made-up teenage girls with school bags, tight trousers and muffin tops came towards me. They glared briefly, but didn’t stop talking in loud voices about something that obviously annoyed them. As they passed, I caught a ‘I mean … so unfair!’ I guessed that they were skipping school, were on their way down to a cake shop in Årvoll, and that the unfairness was not directed at the fact that eighty per cent of the earth’s population could not afford the cream buns they were about to tuck away. And it struck me that if Diana and I had had the child, she would – I was convinced it would be a girl even though Diana had already called it Damien – have looked at me one day with the same mascara-heavy eyes, shouted that it was unfair, for Chrisssake, she and her girlfriend wanted to go to Ibiza and after all they were old enough and would soon be leaving school! And that I … I could have managed, I think.