by Anne Holt
‘I didn’t love him. I don’t even think I was in love. But he was the kindest . . . I think he is the kindest man I have ever met. Thoughtful. Wise. He promised me that he would never tell anyone. I can’t imagine that he would ever break his promise. And if he has, he must have changed radically.’
‘It does happen,’ Johanne whispered.
‘Not with him,’ Helen Bentley said. ‘He was a man of honour, if ever I met one. I’d known him for nearly two years before I got pregnant.’
‘It’s thirty-four years ago,’ Hanne said. ‘A lot can happen to a person in that time.’
‘Not him,’ Helen Bentley repeated and shook her head.
‘What was he called?’ Hanne asked. ‘Can you remember?’
‘Ali Shaeed Muffasa,’ Helen Bentley said. ‘I think he changed his name later. To a more . . . English-sounding one. But to me, he was just Ali, the kindest boy in the world.’
IX
At last, it was half past seven in the morning. Luckily it was a Thursday and both girls had to be at school early. Louise was going to play chess before her classes started and Catherine was going to do circuit training. They asked after their uncle, but believed it when their father hinted that he had had a bit too much to drink the night before and was sleeping it off.
The house in Rural Route # 4 in Farmington, Maine, was never quiet. The woodwork creaked. Most of the doors were warped. Some of them were difficult to open, whereas others hung loose in their frames and bumped and slammed in the continual draught from the windows that were not properly insulated. The great maple trees at the back were planted so close to the house that the branches tapped on the roof with the slightest hint of wind. It was as if the house was alive.
Al Muffet didn’t need to tiptoe around any more. He knew that no one would turn up before the postman came by on his round. And that wasn’t normally until two. After taking the girls to school, Al had dropped by the office. He told his secretary that he wasn’t feeling well. Sore throat and slight temperature, so they would unfortunately have to cancel today’s appointments. She had looked at him with sad eyes and great sympathy, and told him to get better.
He had picked up what he needed, coughed a goodbye and gone home.
‘Are you comfortable?’
Al Muffet looked over at his brother. His arms were fastened to the head of the bed with masking tape around each wrist. His feet were tied together with a rope that was then coiled around one of the posts at the foot of the bed, and tightened into great knots. Al had put a piece of grey sticky tape over his brother’s mouth.
‘Mmffmm,’ his brother said, shaking his head frenetically. The sound was muffled by the face cloth that was held in place by the tape.
Al Muffet opened the curtains and the morning light poured in. The dust in the guest room danced over the worn wooden floor. He smiled and turned towards his brother on the bed.
‘You’re fine. You barely woke up when I injected a sedative into your butt last night. You were so easy to overpower that I almost didn’t recognise you, Fayed. Once upon a time it was you who was the fighter. Not me.’
‘Mmmfff!’
There was a wooden chair by the window. It was old and rickety, and the seat had been worn by a century of use. It had come with the house. When Al Muffet bought the house, it had been full of old, beautiful things that had helped the family to settle in faster than could have been hoped.
He pulled the chair over to the bed and sat down.
‘This,’ he said, calmly, holding a syringe in front of his brother’s eyes, which stared back at him, wide with disbelief, ‘this is a lot more dangerous than what I gave you last night. This, you see . . .’
He pushed the plunger down slowly until a couple of fine drops came out of the thin needle.
‘This is ketobemidone, an effective and strong opioid preparation. Very effective, in fact. And here I’ve got . . .’ he squinted and held the syringe up to the light, ‘one hundred and fifty milligrams. In other words, a lethal dose.’
Fayed rolled his eyes and tried unsuccessfully to pull free his hands.
‘And this,’ Al continued, unperturbed, holding up another syringe from the bag he had put down on the floor beside him, ‘is Naloxone, the antidote.’
He put the second syringe down on the bedside table and pushed it out of reach, just to be on the safe side.
‘I’m going to undo your gag soon,’ he explained and tried to catch his brother’s eye. ‘But first I’m going to give you some of the morphine. You’ll feel the effects very quickly. Your blood pressure and pulse will fall. You’ll feel ill. You might have problems breathing. After that, it’s up to you. You can either answer my questions, or I’ll give you more. And so we’ll continue. Very simple, isn’t it? When you’ve given me the information I need, I’ll give you the antidote. But only then. Do you understand?’
His brother twisted and turned desperately on the bed. There were tears in his eyes. Al noticed that his pyjama bottoms were wet around the crotch.
‘And one more thing,’ Al said as he injected the needle into his brother’s thigh, straight through the fabric of his pyjamas. ‘You can scream and shout as much as you like, but it’s a waste of time. It’s a good mile to the next neighbour. And he’s away. It’s a weekday, so no one will be out walking. Forget it. There now . . .’
He withdrew the needle and checked how much he had injected. He nodded, satisfied, and put the syringe down with the other one on the bedside table, then pulled the gag off in one go. Fayed tried to spit the face cloth out, but had to retch and turned his head to one side. Al pulled the cloth out with two fingers.
Fayed gasped for air. He sobbed and was obviously trying to say something, but all he managed to do was hawk and retch.
‘We haven’t got much time now,’ Al said. ‘So you should answer as fast as you can.’
He licked his lips and paused for thought.
‘Is it true that Mother thought you were me before she died?’ he asked.
Fayed just managed to nod.
‘Did she tell you something that you knew was meant for my ears only?’
His brother had pulled himself together now and was calmer. It was as if he had finally understood that there was no point in trying to break free. He lay completely still for a moment. Only his mouth was moving. It looked like he was trying to produce some moisture after having had the cloth in his mouth for several hours.
‘Here,’ Al said and held a glass of water to his lips.
Fayed drank. He took several sips. Then he gave a deep cough and spat water, snot, phlegm and loose threads straight into his brother’s face.
‘Fuck you,’ he said hoarsely, and leant his head back.
‘Hmm, you’re not being very sensible here,’ Al said and dried his face with his sleeve.
Fayed said nothing. He seemed to be thinking, assessing what he needed to do to negotiate a deal.
‘We’ll try again,’ Al said. ‘Did Mother say something to you about my life because she thought you were me?’
Fayed still didn’t answer. But at least he lay still. The morphine had started to work. His pupils suddenly dilated visibly. Al went over to the chest of drawers by the bathroom door, opened the coded suitcase and pulled Fayed’s Filofax from under the clothes. He turned to the year planner for 2002 and pulled it out with a tug.
‘Here,’ he said and went back over to the bed. ‘Here’s the date Mother died. And what have you written there, Fayed? On the day Mother died, when you were sitting with her?’ He held the page up for his brother, who turned his head away.
‘June 1971, New York, is what you’ve written. What does that date mean to you? Did Mother tell you? Was Mother talking about that day when you were sitting with her?’
Still no answer.
‘You know what,’ Al said in a muted voice as he waved the calendar around. ‘Dying from a morphine overdose is not as pleasant as people might think. Can you feel your lungs struggling? Can you feel
that it’s harder to breathe?’
His brother snarled and tried to tense his body like a bridge, but didn’t have the power.
‘Mother was the only one who knew,’ Al said. ‘But she didn’t judge me, Fayed. Ever. It was hard for her to accept my secret, but she never used it against me. Mother was my soulmate. She could have been yours too, if you’d behaved differently. You could at least have tried to be part of the family. Instead you did what you could not to belong.’
‘I never did belong,’ Fayed wheezed. ‘You made sure of that.’
He was pale now. He lay completely still and closed his eyes.
‘Me? Me? It was me who . . .’
He resolutely took the syringe of morphine and injected another ten milligrams into Fayed’s thigh muscle.
‘We haven’t got time for this. What’s going to happen, Fayed? Why are you here? Why have you come to see me after all these years, and what the hell have you used the information about Helen’s abortion for?’
It had started to look as if Fayed was really frightened. He tried to gasp for breath, but his muscles wouldn’t obey. A white froth appeared on his lips, as if he didn’t even have the capacity to swallow his own spit.
‘Help me,’ he said. ‘You have to help me. I can’t . . .’
‘Answer my questions.’
‘Help me. I can’t . . . Everything . . . according to plan.’
‘Plan? What plan? Fayed, what plan are you talking about?’
He was about to die. It was obvious. Al felt hot. He noticed that his hands were shaking as he grabbed the syringe with Naloxone and got it ready.
‘Fayed,’ he said and put his free hand under his brother’s chin so he could force him to look at him. ‘You really are in trouble now. I have the antidote here. Just tell me one thing. One thing! Why did you come here? Why did you come to me?’
‘The letters,’ Fayed mumbled.
His eyes looked completely dead now.
‘The letters are coming here. If anything goes wrong . . .’
He stopped breathing. Al gave him a good thump on the chest. Fayed’s lungs made another attempt to defy death.
‘I’ll pull you down with me,’ he said. ‘You were the one they loved.’
Al grabbed a knife from his bag and cut the tape that bound Fayed’s right arm to the headboard. He had injected the morphine straight into Fayed’s muscle, but now he needed a vein. He slowly emptied the antidote into a blue vein in his brother’s lower arm. Then quickly, so he wouldn’t lose heart again, he taped his arm back to the headboard. He got up and took a few steps. Now he couldn’t hold back the tears.
‘Fucking hell! Fucking hell! All I ever wanted in my life was peace and quiet. No quarrelling! No fuss! I found this little backwater where everything was going well for me and the girls, and then you have to come and . . .’
He was sobbing now. He wasn’t used to crying. He didn’t know what to do with his arms. They were just hanging at his sides. His shoulders were shaking.
‘What letters are you talking about, Fayed? What have you done? Fayed, what have you done?’
Suddenly he stormed across the floor and bent down over his brother. He put his hands to his cheeks. Fayed’s moustache, the great big ridiculous moustache that he had recently grown, tickled his skin as he stroked his brother’s face, again and again.
‘What have you done this time?’ he whispered.
But his brother didn’t answer, because he was dead.
X
It was just gone two o’clock when Helen Bentley came back into the kitchen. She looked awful. Six hours’ sleep and a long shower had worked wonders for her in the morning, but now she was deathly pale. Her eyes were glazed and she had moon-shaped bags under her eyes. She sank heavily down on to a chair, and greedily took the coffee that Johanne offered her.
‘The New York Stock Exchange opens in an hour and a half.’ She sighed and drank some coffee. ‘It’s going to be a black Thursday, perhaps the worst since the thirties.’
‘Have you found anything out?’ Johanne asked tentatively.
‘I’ve got some kind of overview. It’s clear that our friends in Saudi Arabia were not so friendly after all. There are persistent rumours that they’re behind it, together with Iran. Without anyone in my administration admitting anything, of course.’
She forced a smile. Her lips were nearly as pale as the rest of her face.
‘Which means that Warren must’ve sold out to the Arabs,’ Johanne said, still speaking quietly.
The President nodded and put a hand over her eyes. She sat like this for a few moments, before suddenly looking up and saying: ‘I just can’t work out how all this fits together without logging on to my secured pages in the White House. I’ll have to use my own code. And even then there will still be a lot that I can’t access as I need other equipment. But I have to find out if Warren has been burnt. I have to find out how much my people know about all this before making any sound. If they don’t know anything about his—’
‘He’s in full swing here in Norway,’ Johanne said. ‘I would have known if anything had happened to him. If he’d been arrested or anything like that, I mean.’
She paused for a moment, and looked over at her mobile. ‘Or at least, I think I would.’
‘But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything,’ the President said. ‘If they know that he’s involved, they may just as easily feel that it’s expedient to keep him on his toes. But if they don’t know . . .’ she took a deep breath, ‘then it might be dangerous to have him running around freely when I raise the alarm. I have to get into my pages. I just have to do it.’
‘It’ll only take them a few seconds to discover you,’ Johanne said, with some scepticism. ‘They’ll see the IP address and find out that the computer is here. And then Armageddon will break loose.’
‘Yes. Could it . . . No. I don’t need a long time, really. Just a couple of hours, I hope.’
The door to the sitting room opened and Hanne Wilhelmsen rolled in.
‘An hour’s nap here and there,’ she said and yawned. ‘It actually makes you feel quite rested. Have you managed to make any headway?’
She looked at Helen Bentley.
‘A fair bit. But now I’ve got a problem. I have to access my secured pages, but if I use your computer, that will immediately tell them that I’m alive, and not only that, where I am.’
Hanne sniffed and wiped her nose with her finger.
‘A problem, hmm. What should we do?’
‘My computer,’ Johanne said, surprised at herself, and raised her finger. ‘What about using that?’
‘Your computer?’
‘Do you have a computer? Here?’
The other two looked warily at her.
‘It’s in the car,’ Johanne said eagerly. ‘And it’s registered with the University of Oslo. They would, of course, also be able to trace the IP address there, but it would take longer to . . . They would have to contact the university first, then they would have to find out who the laptop had been lent to, and then they would have to establish where I was. And in fact . . .’ she looked guiltily at her mobile phone again, ‘Adam is the only one who knows,’ she finished, subdued. ‘And he doesn’t really know either.’
‘Do you know,’ the President said. ‘I think that’s a good idea. I don’t need more than a couple of hours. And that is presumably the amount of time we can buy by using another computer.’
Hanne was the only one who was still sceptical.
‘I don’t know a lot about IP addresses and things like that,’ she said. ‘But is either of you absolutely certain that this will work? That it’s not the line itself that’s traced?’
Johanne and Helen Bentley exchanged looks.
‘I’m not certain,’ the President said. ‘I simply have to take that chance. Could you get it?’
‘Of course,’ Johanne said and got up. ‘I’ll only be five minutes.’
As the front door closed, Helen Bentle
y sat down on the chair beside Hanne’s wheelchair. She seemed to be struggling to find the right words. Hanne looked at her with an expressionless face, as if she had all the time in the world.
‘Hannah. Do you . . . You said you were a retired policewoman. Do you have a gun in the house?’
Hanne rolled away from the table.
‘A gun? What do you want—’
‘Shhh,’ the President said. There was a hint of authority in her voice that made Hanne stiffen. ‘Please. I’d rather Johanne didn’t know about this. I wouldn’t like my one-year-old to be in the same flat as a loaded gun. Of course, I don’t think it will be necessary to use it. But you must remember that—’
‘Do you know why I’m sitting here? Has the thought never occurred to you? I’m sitting in this bloody wheelchair because I was shot. My spine was destroyed by a bullet. I don’t exactly have a good relationship with guns.’
‘Hannah! Hannah! Listen to me!’
Hanne tightened her lips and looked straight at Helen Bentley.
‘I am normally one of the world’s best-guarded people,’ the President almost whispered, as if she was frightened that Johanne might already be back. ‘I have heavily armed bodyguards with me everywhere, all the time. That’s not for no reason, Hannah. It is absolutely necessary. The moment that it’s known that I’m here in this flat, I will be completely defenceless. Until the right people get here, and then I’ll be protected by them again. But until then, I have to be able to defend myself. I know you’ll understand, if you just think about it.’
Hanne was the first one to look away.
‘I do have a gun,’ she said eventually. ‘And ammunition. I never had those heavy steel cupboards removed, and they . . . Are you any good?’
The President gave a shy smile.
‘My teachers might say otherwise. But I can handle a gun. I’m the commander-in-chief, remember?’
Hanne was still staring at the table without expression.
‘One more thing,’ Helen Bentley said, and laid her hand on Hanne’s arm. ‘I think it’s best if you all leave. Leave the flat, in case something happens.’
