The Son

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Thank you,’ Sonny said.

  Per thought how strangely young Sonny seemed. Because he must be close to thirty by now. Yes. Sonny had served twelve years and he was eighteen when he was sent down. Perhaps it was the drugs that had preserved him, preventing him from ageing so that only his hair and beard grew while his innocent baby eyes continued to gaze at the world in wonder. A wicked world. God knows it was evil. Per Vollan had been a prison chaplain for over forty years and seen the world grow more and more sinful. Evil spread like cancer, it made healthy cells sick, poisoned them with its vampire bite and recruited them to do its work of corruption. And once bitten no one ever escaped. No one.

  ‘How are you, Sonny? Did you enjoy being out on day release? Did you get to see the sea?’

  No reply.

  Per Vollan cleared his throat. ‘The prison officer said you got to see the sea. You might have read in the papers that a woman was found murdered the next day, not far from where you were. She was found in bed, in her own home. Her head had been . . . well. All the details are in here . . .’ He tapped his finger on the Bible. ‘The officer has already filed a report saying you ran away while you were at the sea and that he found you by the road one hour later. That you refused to account for your whereabouts. It’s important that you don’t say anything that contradicts his statement, do you understand? As usual you’ll say as little as possible. All right? Sonny?’

  Per Vollan finally succeeded in making eye contact with the boy. His expression told Per little about what was going on inside his head, but he felt fairly certain that Sonny Lofthus would follow orders and not say anything unnecessary to the police or the public prosecutor. All he had to do was utter a light, soft ‘Guilty’ when he was asked how he pleaded. Though it sounded paradoxical, Vollan occasionally sensed a direction, a force of will, a survival instinct that distinguished this junkie from the others, from those who had always been in free fall, who had never had any other plans, who had been heading for the gutter all along. This willpower might express itself as a sudden flash of insight, a question that revealed he had paid attention all along and seen and heard everything. Or in the way he might suddenly stand up, with a coordination, balance and flexibility you didn’t see in other habitual drug users. While at other times, like now, he seemed to register nothing at all.

  Vollan squirmed in his chair.

  ‘Of course this means no more trips on the outside for you for quite a while. But you don’t like the outside anyway, do you? And you did get to see the sea.’

  ‘It was a river. Did the husband do it?’

  The chaplain jumped. As when something unexpected breaks through black water right in front of you. ‘I don’t know. Is that important?’

  No reply. Vollan sighed. He felt nauseous again. Recently it seemed to come and go. Perhaps he should make a doctor’s appointment and get it checked out.

  ‘Don’t you worry about that, Sonny. Just remember that on the outside people like you have to scavenge all day to get their next fix. While in here everything is taken care of. And don’t forget that time passes. Once you finish serving out your old sentences, you’ll be no use to them, but with this murder you can extend your detention.’

  ‘So it was the husband. Is he rich?’

  Vollan pointed to the Bible. ‘In here you’ll find a description of the house you entered. It’s big and well furnished. But the alarm that was supposed to guard all this wealth wasn’t turned on; the front door wasn’t even locked. The family’s name is Morsand. The shipowner with the eyepatch. Seen him in the papers, have you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you? I didn’t think that you—’

  ‘Yes, I killed her. Yes, I’ll read up on how I did it.’

  Per Vollan exhaled. ‘Good. There are certain details about how she was killed which you ought to memorise.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘She was . . . the top of her head was severed. You used a saw. Do you understand?’

  The words were followed by a long silence which Per Vollan considered filling with vomit. Throwing up was preferable to exploiting the boy. He looked at him. What determined the outcome of a life? A series of random events you had no control over or did some cosmic gravity pull everything in the direction it was predestined to go? He loosened his strangely uncomfortable dog collar, suppressed his nausea and steeled himself. Remembered what was at stake.

  He got up. ‘If you need to get in touch with me I’m currently staying at the Ila Centre on Alexander Kiellands Plass.’

  He saw the boy’s quizzical look.

  ‘Just for the time being, you understand.’ He laughed quickly. ‘My wife threw me out and as I know the people who run the centre, they—’

  He stopped abruptly. Suddenly he realised why so many of the inmates went to the young man to talk. It was the silence. The beckoning vacuum of someone who simply listens without reaction or judgement. Who extracts your words and your secrets from you without doing anything at all. He had striven for that ability as a chaplain all his life, but it was as if the inmates sensed that he had an agenda. They didn’t know what it was, only that there was something he wanted by knowing their secrets. Access to their souls and later a possible recruitment prize in heaven.

  The chaplain saw that the boy had opened the Bible. It was such a simple trick, it was comical; the cut-outs in the pages created a compartment. Inside were folded papers with the information Sonny needed in order to confess. And three small bags of heroin.

  2

  ARILD FRANCK BARKED a brief ‘Enter!’ without taking his eyes off the document on his desk.

  He heard the door open. Ina, his secretary in the front office, had already announced his visitor and, for a split second, Arild Franck considered asking her to tell the chaplain that he was busy. It wouldn’t even be a lie; he had a meeting with the Commissioner at Politihuset, Oslo Police’s headquarters, in half an hour. But recently Per Vollan hadn’t been as stable as they needed him to be and there was no harm in double-checking that he could still hold it together. There was no room for screw-ups in this case, not for any of them.

  ‘Don’t bother sitting down,’ Arild Franck said, signing the document and getting up. ‘We’ll have to walk and talk.’

  He headed for the door, took his uniform cap from the coat stand and heard the chaplain’s shuffling feet behind him. Arild Franck told Ina that he would be back in an hour and a half and pressed his index finger against the sensor at the door to the stairwell. The prison was on two floors and there was no lift. Lifts equalled shafts which equalled any number of escape routes and had to be closed off in the event of fire. And a fire and its ensuing evacuation chaos was just one of many methods ingenious inmates had used to break out of other prisons. For the same reason, all electric cables, fuse boxes and water pipes had been laid so they were inaccessible to the inmates, either outside the building itself or cemented into the walls. Here nothing had been left to chance. He had left nothing to chance. He had sat with the architects and international prison experts when they drew up the blueprint for Staten. Admittedly the Lenzburg Prison in the Aargau canton in Switzerland had provided the inspiration: hypermodern, but simple and with an emphasis on security and efficiency rather than comfort. But it was him, Arild Franck, who was responsible for its creation. Staten was Arild Franck and vice versa. So why had the board, in their infinite wisdom, damn them all to hell, made him only assistant prison governor and appointed that moron from Haldern Prison as governor? Yes, Franck was something of a rough diamond and, no, he wasn’t the kind of guy who would suck up to politicians by jumping for joy at every bright new idea about how to reform the prison system while the previous reforms had yet to be implemented. But he knew how to do his job – keeping people locked up without them getting ill, dying or becoming noticeably worse human beings as a result. He was loyal to those who deserved his loyalty and he looked after his own. That was more than could be said for his superiors in this rotten-to-the-core, pol
itically motivated hierarchy. Before he was deliberately overlooked for the post of governor, Arild Franck had hoped for a small bust as a memorial in the foyer when he retired – though his wife had expressed the opinion that his bull neck, bulldog face and straggly comb-over wouldn’t suit a bust. But if people failed to reward your achievements, his view on the matter was you just had to help yourself.

  ‘I can’t keep doing this, Arild,’ Per Vollan said behind him as they walked down the corridor.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘I’m a chaplain. What we’re doing to the boy – making him take the fall for something he didn’t do. Serve time for a husband who—’

  ‘Hush.’

  Outside the door to the control room, or ‘the bridge’ as Franck liked to call it, they passed an old man who paused his swabbing of the floor and gave a friendly nod to Franck. Johannes was the oldest man in the prison and an inmate after Franck’s own heart, a gentle soul who sometime in the previous century had been picked up – almost by chance – for drug smuggling, had never hurt a fly since and over the years had become so institutionalised, conditioned and pacified that the only thing he dreaded was the day he was released. Sadly, inmates like him didn’t represent a challenge for a prison like Staten.

  ‘Is your conscience troubling you, Vollan?’

  ‘Yes, yes, it is, Arild.’

  Franck couldn’t remember exactly when his staff had started addressing their superiors by their first names, or when prison governors started wearing plain clothes rather than uniforms. In some jails the prison officers wore plain clothes as well. During a riot at the Francisco de Mar Prison in São Paulo, officers had shot at their own colleagues in the tear-gas smoke because they couldn’t tell staff from inmates.

  ‘I want out,’ the chaplain implored him.

  ‘Is that right?’ Franck was jogging down the stairs. He was in good shape for a man less than ten years away from retirement, because he worked out. A forgotten virtue in an industry where obesity was the rule rather than the exception. And hadn’t he coached the local swimming team when his daughter used to compete? Done his bit for the community in his spare time, given something back to this country which had given so much to so many? So how dare they overlook him. ‘And how is your conscience when it comes to those young boys we’ve evidence you’ve been abusing, Vollan?’ Franck pressed his index finger against the sensor at the next door; this took them to a corridor which to the west led to the cells, and to the east, the staff changing rooms and the exit to the car park.

  ‘I suggest you think of it as Sonny Lofthus atoning for your sins as well, Vollan.’

  Another door, another sensor. Franck pressed his finger against it. He loved this invention which he had copied from the Obihiro Prison in Kushiro, Japan. Instead of issuing keys that could be lost, copied or misused, the fingerprints of everyone who was authorised to pass through the doors were entered into a database. Not only had they eliminated the risk of careless handling of the keys, they also maintained a record of who had passed through which door and when. They had installed surveillance cameras as well, of course, but faces could be concealed. Not so with fingerprints. The door opened with a sigh and they entered a lock, a small room with a barred metal door at either end where one door had to be closed before the other would open.

  ‘I’m saying that I can’t do it any more, Arild.’

  Franck raised a finger to his lips. In addition to the surveillance cameras which covered practically the entire prison, the locks had been fitted with a two-way communication system so that you could contact the control room if, for some reason, you got stuck. They exited the lock and continued towards the changing rooms where there were showers and a locker for clothing and personal property for each staff member. The fact that the assistant prison governor had a master key that opened every locker was something Franck had decided his staff didn’t need to know. Quite the opposite in fact.

  ‘I thought you knew who you were dealing with here,’ Franck said. ‘You can’t just quit. For these people loyalty is a matter of life and death.’

  ‘I know,’ Per Vollan said; his breathing had acquired an ugly rasping. ‘But I’m talking about eternal life and death.’

  Franck stopped in front of the exit door and glanced quickly at the lockers to his left to make sure that they were alone.

  ‘You know the risk?’

  ‘As God is my witness, I won’t breathe a word to anyone. I want you to use those exact words, Arild. Tell them I’ll be as silent as the grave. I just want out. Please, help me?’

  Franck looked down. At the sensor. Out. There were only two ways out. This one, the back way, and the other through reception at the front entrance. No ventilation shafts, no fire exits, no sewer pipes with dimensions just wide enough to allow a human body to squeeze through.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said and placed his finger on the sensor. A small red light at the top of the door handle flashed to indicate the database was being searched. It went off and a small green light appeared in its place. He pushed open the door. They were blinded by the bright sunlight and put on their sunglasses as they crossed the large car park. ‘I’ll tell them you want out,’ Franck said and took out his car keys while he peered at the security booth. It was staffed with two armed guards 24/7 and both the roads in and out had steel barriers which even Franck’s new Porsche Cayenne could not force. Possibly one could do it with a Hummer H1 which he had quite fancied buying, but that car would have been too wide since they had made the entrance narrow precisely to stop larger vehicles. It was also with large vehicles in mind that he had placed steel barricades within the six-metre-high fence which surrounded the entire prison. Franck had asked to have it electrified, but the planning authorities had turned down his application on the grounds that Staten was located in central Oslo and innocent civilians might hurt themselves. Innocent, ha – if anyone wanted to touch the fence from the street, they would first have to scale a five-metre-high wall with barbed wire on top.

  ‘Where are you going, by the way?’

  ‘Alexander Kiellands Plass,’ Per Vollan said hopefully.

  ‘Sorry,’ Arild said. ‘It’s not on my way.’

  ‘Not a problem, the bus stops right outside.’

  ‘Good. I’ll be in touch.’

  The assistant prison governor got into his car and drove up to the security booth. The rules stated that all vehicles, including his own, must be stopped and the occupants checked. Only now, when the guards had seen him exit the prison building and get into the car, did they raise the barrier and let him pass. Franck returned the guards’ salute. He stopped at the traffic lights by the main road. He glanced up at his beloved Staten in the rear-view mirror. It wasn’t perfect, but it came close. He blamed the planning committee, the new, inane regulations from the ministry and the semi-corrupt human resources for any shortcomings. All he had ever wanted was the best for everyone, for all of Oslo’s hard-working, honest citizens who deserved a safe existence and a certain standard of living. So, OK, things could have been different. He didn’t like having to go about things this way. But like he always said to the learners in the pool: you sink or swim, no one is going to do you any favours. Then his thoughts returned to what lay ahead. He had a message to deliver. And he had no doubt as to the outcome.

  The lights changed to green and he pressed the accelerator.

  3

  PER VOLLAN WALKED through the park by Alexander Kiellands Plass. It had been a soaking wet and unseasonably cold July, but now the sun was back and the park was just as intensely green as on a spring day. Summer had returned, people around him sat with upturned faces and closed eyes soaking up the sunshine as if it was about to run out; there was a rumbling of skateboards and a clunking of six-packs of beers on their way to barbecues in the city’s green spaces and balconies. There were, however, some who were even more delighted that the temperature had risen. People who looked as if the traffic around the park had coated them in fumes: shabby figures h
uddled up on benches or around the fountain, who called out to him in hoarse, happy voices that sounded like seagulls screeching. He waited for the green light at the junction of Uelandsgate and Waldemar Thranes gate while trucks and buses swept past him. He looked at the facades on the other side of the street as they flashed in front of him through the gaps in the traffic. Plastic sheeting covered the windows of the notorious pub, Tranen, which had quenched the thirst of the city’s most parched residents since its construction in 1921 – the last thirty years accompanied by Arnie ‘Skiffle Joe’ Norse who dressed in a cowboy costume and rode a unicycle while he played guitar and sang accompanied by his band consisting of an old, blind organist and a Thai woman on tambourine and car horn. Per Vollan’s eyes shifted to the front of a building where cast-iron letters spelling out ‘Ila Pensjonat’ had been cemented into the facade. During the war the building had housed unmarried mothers. Now it was a residential facility for the city’s most vulnerable addicts. Those who didn’t want to get clean. Last stop before the end.

  Per Vollan crossed the street, stopped outside the entrance to the centre, rang the bell and looked into the eye of the camera. He heard the door buzz open and he entered. For old times’ sake the centre had offered him a room for two weeks. That was a month ago.

  ‘Hi, Per,’ said the young, brown-eyed woman who came down to open the barred gate to the stairs. Someone had damaged the lock so that the keys no longer worked from the outside. ‘The cafe is shut now, but you’re in time for dinner if you go in right away.’

  ‘Thanks, Martha, but I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You look tired.’

  ‘I walked all the way from Staten.’