The Son

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Oh? I thought there was a bus?’

  She had started climbing back up the stairs and he shuffled along after her.

  ‘I had some thinking to do,’ he said.

  ‘Someone came by earlier asking for you.’

  Per froze. ‘Who?’

  ‘Didn’t ask. Could have been the police.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘They seemed very keen to get hold of you, so I thought it might be about an inmate you know. Something like that.’

  Already, Per thought, they’ve come for me already.

  ‘Do you believe in anything, Martha?’

  She turned on the stairs. Smiled. Per thought that a young man might fall deeply in love with that smile.

  ‘Like God and Jesus?’ Martha asked, pushing open the door into reception which was a hatch in a wall with an office behind it.

  ‘Like fate. Like chance versus cosmic gravity.’

  ‘I believe in Mad Greta,’ Martha muttered as she leafed through some papers.

  ‘Ghosts aren’t—’

  ‘Inger said she heard a baby cry yesterday.’

  ‘Inger is highly strung, Martha.’

  She stuck her head out of the hatch. ‘We need to have a talk, Per . . .’

  He sighed. ‘I know. You’re full and—’

  ‘The centre in Sporveisgata called today to say the fire means they’ll be closed for another two months at least. More than forty of our own residents are currently in shared rooms. We can’t go on like this. They steal from each other and then they start fighting. It’s only a matter of time before someone gets hurt.’

  ‘It’s all right; I won’t be here very much longer.’

  Martha tilted her head to one side and looked at him quizzically. ‘Why won’t she let you sleep in the house? How many years have you been married? Forty, is it?’

  ‘Thirty-eight. She owns the house and it’s . . . complicated.’ Per smiled wearily.

  He left her and walked down the corridor. Music was pounding behind two of the doors. Amphetamine. It was Monday, the benefits office was open after the weekend and trouble was brewing everywhere. He unlocked his door. The tiny, shabby room with a single bed and a wardrobe cost 6,000 kroner per month. You could rent a whole flat outside Oslo for that kind of money.

  He sat down on the bed and stared out of the dusty window. The traffic hummed sleepily outside. The sun shone through the flimsy curtains. A fly was fighting for its life on the windowsill. It would die soon. That was life. Not death, but life. Death was nothing. How many years was it since he had come to that conclusion? That everything apart from death, everything he preached about, was nothing but a defence people had created against their fear of death. And yet none of what he used to believe meant anything at all. What we humans think we know is nothing compared to what we need to believe to numb the fear and pain. Then he came full circle. He regained his faith in a forgiving God and life after death. He believed it now, more than ever. He took out a pad from under a newspaper and started writing.

  Per Vollan didn’t have much to write. A few sentences on a single sheet of paper, that was all. He crossed out his own name on an envelope which had contained a letter from Alma’s lawyer briefly stating what share of the matrimonial property they thought Per was entitled to. Which wasn’t much.

  The chaplain looked in the mirror, adjusted his dog collar, put on his long coat and left.

  Martha wasn’t at reception. Inger took the envelope and promised to deliver it.

  The sun was lower in the sky now; the day was retreating. He walked through the park while out of the corner of his eye he registered how everything and everyone played their parts without obvious errors. No one rose from a bench a little too quickly as he passed, no cars pulled out discreetly from the kerb when he changed his mind and decided to walk along Sannergata towards the river. But they were there. Behind a window which reflected a peaceful summer evening, in the casual glance of a passer-by, in the chill in the shadows that crept out from the eastside of the houses and banished the sunlight as they gained territory. And Per Vollan thought that his whole life had been like this; a constant, pointless, vacillating struggle between the darkness and the light, which never seemed to result in victory for either side. Or had it? With every day the darkness encroached a little more. They were heading for the long night.

  He increased his speed.

  4

  SIMON KEFAS RAISED the coffee cup to his mouth. From the kitchen table he could look out at the small garden in front of their house in Fagerliveien in Disen. It had rained overnight and the grass was still glistening in the morning sunlight. He thought he could actually see it grow. It meant another outing with the lawnmower. A noisy, manual, sweat- and swear-inducing activity, but that was all good. Else had asked him why he didn’t get an electric lawnmower like all their neighbours. His answer was simple: money. It was an answer which had ended most discussions when he was growing up in this house, as well as in the neighbourhood. But that was back when ordinary people lived here: teachers, hairdressers, taxi drivers, public sector workers. Or police officers, like him. Not that the current residents were anything special, but they worked in advertising or IT, they were journalists, doctors, had agencies for faddy products or had inherited enough money to buy one of the small, idyllic houses, pushing up the prices and moving the neighbourhood up the social ladder.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Else, who was standing behind his chair, stroking his hair. It was thinning noticeably; lit from above you could make out his scalp. But she claimed to like it. Liked that he looked what he was: a police officer close to retirement. Liked that she, too, would grow old one day. Even though he had twenty years’ head start on her. One of their new neighbours, a moderately famous film producer, had mistaken her for Simon’s daughter. That was all right with him.

  ‘I’m thinking about how lucky I am,’ he said. ‘Because I have you. Because I have this.’

  She kissed him on the top of his head. He could feel her lips right against his skin. Last night he had dreamed that he could give up his sight for her. And when he had woken up and not been able to see, he had – for a second before he realised that it was due to the eye mask he wore to block out the early-morning sun in summer – been a happy man.

  The doorbell rang.

  ‘That’ll be Edith,’ Else said. ‘I’ll go and change.’

  She opened the door to her sister and disappeared upstairs.

  ‘Hi, Uncle Simon!’

  ‘Well, look who it is,’ Simon said as he gazed at the boy’s beaming face.

  Edith came into the kitchen. ‘Sorry, Simon, he kept pestering me to get here early so he would have time to try on your cap.’

  ‘Of course,’ Simon said. ‘But why aren’t you at school today, Mats?’

  ‘Teacher-training day,’ Edith sighed. ‘Schools don’t know what a nightmare it is for single mums.’

  ‘Then it’s especially kind of you to offer to drive Else.’

  ‘Not at all. He’s only in Oslo today and tomorrow, as far as I understand.’

  ‘Who is?’ Mats asked as he pulled and tugged at his uncle’s arm to get him to move from his chair.

  ‘An American doctor who is brilliant at eye operations,’ Simon said, pretending to be even stiffer than he really was as he allowed himself be pulled to his feet. ‘Come on, let’s go and see if we can find that police cap. Help yourself to some coffee, Edith.’

  Simon and Mats went out into the hallway and the boy squealed with delight when he saw the black-and-white police cap which his uncle took down from the wardrobe shelf. But he grew silent and reverent when Simon placed the cap on his head. They stood in front of the mirror. The boy pointed to the reflection of his uncle and made shooting noises.

  ‘Who are you shooting at?’ his uncle asked him.

  ‘Villains,’ the boy spluttered. ‘Bang! Bang!’

  ‘Let’s call it target practice,’ Simon said. �
��Even the police can’t shoot villains without permission.’

  ‘Yes, you can! Bang! Bang!’

  ‘If we do that, Mats, we go to jail.’

  ‘We do?’ The boy stopped and gave his uncle a baffled look. ‘Why? We’re the police.’

  ‘Because if we shoot someone we could otherwise have arrested that makes us the bad guys.’

  ‘But . . . when we’ve caught them, then we can shoot them, can’t we?’

  Simon laughed. ‘No. Then it’s up to the judge to decide how long they’ll go to prison.’

  ‘I thought you decided that, Uncle Simon.’

  Simon could see the disappointment in the boy’s eyes. ‘Let me tell you something, Mats. I’m glad I don’t have to decide that. I’m glad that all I have to do is catch criminals. Because that’s the fun part of the job.’

  Mats narrowed one eye and the cap tipped backwards. ‘Uncle Simon . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why don’t you and Auntie Else have any kids?’

  Simon stepped behind Mats, placed his hands on the boy’s shoulders and smiled at him in the mirror.

  ‘We don’t need kids, we’ve got you. Haven’t we?’

  Mats looked pensively at his uncle for a couple of seconds. Then his face lit up. ‘Yeah!’

  Simon stuck his hand in his pocket to answer his mobile which had started to buzz.

  It was a colleague. Simon listened.

  ‘Where by Aker River?’ he asked.

  ‘Past Kuba, by the art college. There’s a pedestrian bridge—’

  ‘I know where it is. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.’

  He put on his shoes, tied the laces and pulled on his jacket.

  ‘Else!’ he called out.

  ‘Yes?’ Her face appeared at the top of the stairs. It struck him once again how beautiful she was. Her long hair flowing like a red river around her petite face. The freckles on and around her small nose. And it occurred to him that those freckles would almost certainly still be there when he was gone. His next thought, which he tried to suppress, followed swiftly: who would take care of her then? He knew that she was unlikely to be able to see him from where she was standing, she was only pretending. He cleared his throat.

  ‘I’ve got to go, sweetheart. Will you give me a call and tell me what the doctor said?’

  ‘Yes. Drive carefully.’

  Two middle-aged men walked through the park popularly known as Kuba. Most people thought the name had something to do with Cuba, possibly because political rallies were often held here and because Grünerløkka was once regarded as a working-class neighbourhood. You had to have lived there for many years to know that there used to be a large gas holder here and that it had had a framework shaped like a cube. The men crossed the pedestrian bridge which led to the old factory that was now an art college. Lovers had attached padlocks with dates and initials to the bars of the railings of the bridge. Simon stopped and looked at one of them. He had loved Else for ten years, every single day of the over three and a half thousand they had been together. There would never be another woman in his life and he didn’t need a symbolic padlock to know that. And neither did she; hopefully she would outlive him for so many years that there would be time for new men in her life. And that was all good.

  From where they were standing he could see Åmodt Bro, a modest little bridge that crossed a modest little river which divided this modest little capital into east and west. Once upon a time, a long time ago, when he was young and foolish, he had dived from this very bridge into the river. A drunken troika of three lads, two of them with an unshakeable faith in themselves and their prospects. Two of them convinced that they alone were the best of the three. The third one, Simon, had realised long ago that he couldn’t compete with his friends when it came to intelligence, strength, social skills or appeal to women. But he was the bravest. Or, to put it another way, the most willing to take risks. And diving into polluted water didn’t require intellect or physical skill, only recklessness. Simon Kefas had often thought that it was pessimism that had prompted him to gamble with a future he didn’t value very much, an innate knowledge that he had less to lose than other people. He had balanced on the railings while his friends had screamed for him not to do it, that he was mad. And then he had jumped. From the bridge, out of life, into the wonderful, spinning roulette wheel which is fate. He had plunged through the water which had no surface, only white foam and, under that, an icy embrace. And in that embrace there was silence, solicitude and peace. When he resurfaced, unharmed, they had cheered. Simon, too. Even though he had felt a vague disappointment at being back. It was amazing what a broken heart could drive a young man to do.

  Simon shook off the memories and focused on the waterfall between the two bridges. More specifically on the figure that had been left there like a photograph, frozen in mid-fall.

  ‘We think he floated downstream,’ said the crime scene officer who was standing next to him. ‘And then his clothes got caught on something sticking out of the water. The river is usually so shallow there that you can wade across it.’

  ‘All right,’ Simon said, sucking the tobacco in his mouth and cocking his head. The figure hung straight down with its arms out to the sides and the cascading water formed a white halo around the head and body. It reminded him of Else’s hair. The other CSOs had finally got their boat into the water and were working on freeing the body.

  ‘A beer says it’s suicide.’

  ‘I think you’re wrong, Elias,’ Simon said and hooked a finger under his upper lip to extract the snus. He was about to drop it into the water below, but he stopped himself. Different times. He looked around for a bin.

  ‘So you won’t bet a beer?’

  ‘No, Elias, I won’t.’

  ‘Oh, sorry, I forgot . . .’ The CSO looked embarrassed.

  ‘That’s all right,’ Simon said and left. He nodded in passing to a tall, blonde woman in a black skirt and a short jacket. If it hadn’t been for the police warrant card dangling around her neck he would have taken her to be a bank clerk. He chucked the snus into the green rubbish bin at the end of the bridge and walked down to the riverbank, scanning the ground with his eyes as he did.

  ‘Chief Inspector Kefas?’

  Elias looked up. The woman who had addressed him was the archetypal Scandinavian female as imagined by foreigners. He suspected she thought she was too tall, which was why she stooped slightly and wore flat shoes.

  ‘No, that’s not me. Who are you?’

  ‘Kari Adel.’ She held up a warrant card around her neck. ‘I’ve just joined the Homicide Squad. They told me I would find him here.’

  ‘Welcome. What do you want with Simon?’

  ‘He’s supposed to mentor me.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ Elias said and pointed to the man walking along the river. ‘That’s him over there.’

  ‘What’s he looking for?’

  ‘Evidence.’

  ‘But surely the evidence will be in the river where the body is and not downstream.’

  ‘Yes, so he’s assuming we’ve already searched that area. And we have.’

  ‘The other CSOs say it looks like a suicide.’

  ‘Yes, I made the mistake of trying to bet a beer with him on it.’

  ‘Mistake?’

  ‘He has a problem,’ Elias said. ‘Had a problem.’ He noticed the woman’s raised eyebrows. ‘It’s no secret. And it’s best that you know if you’re going to work together.’

  ‘No one told me I would be working with an alcoholic.’

  ‘Not an alcoholic,’ Elias said. ‘A gambling addict.’

  She brushed her blonde hair behind one ear and squinted against the sun. ‘What kind of gambling?’

  ‘The losing kind, as far as I understand. But if you’re his new partner, you can ask him yourself. Where are you from?’

  ‘Drug Squad.’

  ‘Well, then you’ll know all about the river.’

  ‘Yes.’ She narrowed her eyes an
d looked up at the body. ‘It could have been a drug hit, of course, but the location is all wrong. They don’t deal hard drugs this far up the river, for that you have to go down to Schous Plass and Nybrua. And people don’t usually kill for cannabis.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ Elias said, nodding towards the boat. ‘They’ve finally managed to get him down. If he has any ID on him, we’ll soon know who—’

  ‘I know who he is,’ Kari Adel said. ‘It’s Per Vollan, the prison chaplain.’

  Elias looked her up and down. He guessed she would soon give up dressing in smart clothes like the female detectives she had seen in American TV series. But apart from that she looked as if she had something about her. Perhaps she was one of those who would go the distance. Perhaps she belonged to that rare breed. But he had thought that about others before.

  5

  THE INTERVIEW ROOM was decorated in pale colours; the furniture was pine. Red curtains covered the window which faced the control room. Inspector Henrik Westad from Buskerud Police thought it was a nice room. He had made the trip from Drammen into Oslo before and sat in this very room. They had interviewed children in a sexual assault case and there had been anatomical dolls here. This time it was a murder inquiry. He studied the long-haired man with the beard sitting across the table. Sonny Lofthus. He looked younger than the age stated in the file. He didn’t look as if he was drugged up, either; his pupils were normal-sized. But then people with a high drug tolerance rarely did. Westad cleared his throat.

  ‘So you tied her up, used an ordinary hacksaw on her and then you left?’

  ‘Yes,’ the man said. He had declined his right to a lawyer, but answered practically every question with monosyllables. In the end Westad had resorted to asking him yes and no questions. Which seemed to work. Of course it bloody worked; they were getting a confession out of it. But it felt wrong. Westad looked at the photos in front of him. The top of the woman’s head and her skull had nearly been sawn off and flipped aside so that they were attached only by the skin. The surface of the brain was left exposed. He had long since abandoned the idea that one could tell from looking at people what evil they were capable of. But this man, he . . . he didn’t exude any of the iciness, the aggression or simply the imbecility Westad thought he had detected in other cold-blooded killers.