by Jo Nesbo
Arild Franck looked at Ekebergåsen as it lay bathed in morning sunshine. Once it had been the sunny side of a working-class neighbourhood. Once he had dreamed of buying himself a little house there. Now he owned a bigger house in a more expensive part of Oslo. But he still dreamed about the little house.
Though Nestor appeared to have reacted to the news of the breakout with equanimity, it wasn’t the loss of composure in Nestor and his ilk that worried Franck. On the contrary, he suspected they were at their most unruffled when making decisions which were so horrifying they made his blood run cold. On the other hand, they operated with a simple, clear and practical logic that Arild Franck couldn’t help but admire.
‘Find him,’ Nestor had said. ‘Or make sure that no one does.’
If they found Lofthus, they could persuade him to confess to the murder of Mrs Morsand before anyone else got to him. They had their methods. If they killed Lofthus, they could stop him from explaining away the technical evidence against him at the Morsand crime scene, but then they wouldn’t be able to use him in future cases. That was how it was. Pros and cons. Ultimately, though, it was a matter of hard logic.
‘There’s a Simon Kefas on the phone for you.’ It was Ina’s voice on the intercom.
Arild Franck snorted automatically.
Simon Kefas.
Talk about a man who always looked out for number one. A spineless loser who had walked over more than one dead body in his gambling addiction. They said he had changed since he met the woman he was with now. But no one knew better than an assistant prison governor that people don’t change; Franck had all the insight he needed into Simon Kefas.
‘Tell him I’m not here.’
‘He wants to meet with you later today. It’s about Per Vollan.’
Vollan? Franck thought the police had declared Vollan’s death to be a suicide. He heaved a sigh and looked down at the newspaper on his desk. The breakout was reported further in, but at least it wasn’t on the front page. Presumably because the news desk didn’t have a good photograph of the escaped prisoner. The vultures probably preferred to wait until they got an E-FIT drawing of the killer where, ideally, he would look like a fiend. In which case they would be disappointed.
‘Arild?’
They had an unspoken agreement that she could address him by his first name when no one else was present.
‘Find some space in my diary, Ina. Don’t give him more than thirty minutes.’
Franck peered at the mosque. Soon it would be twenty-five hours.
Lars Gilberg moved a step closer.
The boy was lying on a flattened piece of cardboard and had covered himself with a long coat. He had arrived the day before and had found a spot to hide behind the bushes that grew along the path and the buildings behind. He had sat there, silent and motionless, as if playing hide-and-seek. Two uniformed police officers had stopped by, looked alternately at Gilberg and a photo they held up before moving on. Gilberg had said nothing. Later that evening when it started to rain, the boy had emerged and lain down under the bridge. Without asking for permission. It wasn’t that permission wouldn’t be granted, but he hadn’t even asked to begin with. And then there was the other thing. He was wearing a uniform. Lars Gilberg wasn’t sure what kind of uniform – he had been rejected by the army before he had time to see anything other than the recruiting officer’s green one. ‘Unsuitable’ had been the somewhat vague reason given. From time to time Lars Gilberg wondered if there was anything he was suitable for. And, if so, would he ever find out what that was? Perhaps it was this: getting money for drugs and living under a bridge.
Like now.
The boy was asleep and his breathing was steady. Lars Gilberg took another step. There was something about the way the boy had moved and his skin colour that told Gilberg that he was a junkie. In which case he might still have some drugs on him.
Gilberg was now so close that he could see the boy’s eyelids twitch as if the eyeballs underneath were spinning and moving. He squatted down on his haunches and carefully lifted the coat. Extended his fingers towards the breast pocket of the uniform jacket.
It happened so fast that Lars didn’t even see it. The boy’s hand locked around his wrist and Lars found himself on his knees with his face pressed into the wet soil and his arm twisted behind his back.
A voice whispered into his ear:
‘What do you want?’
The voice didn’t sound angry or aggressive, not even scared. More polite, rather, as if the boy genuinely wanted to know how he could help him. Lars Gilberg did what he always did when he realised he had been defeated. Cut his losses.
‘Steal your stash. Or if you haven’t got any, then your money.’
The boy had got him in the standard hold: his wrist bent into his forearm and with pressure applied to the back of his elbow. Police hold. But Gilberg knew how cops walked, talked, looked and smelled, and this boy wasn’t one of them.
‘What’s your poison?’
‘Morphine,’ Gilberg groaned.
‘How much can you get for fifty kroner?’
‘A little. Not much.’
The hold was eased and Gilberg quickly snatched back his arm.
He looked up at the boy. Blinked at the banknote he was holding up to him. ‘Sorry, it’s all I’ve got.’
‘I haven’t got anything to sell, mate.’
‘The money is for you. I’ve quit.’
Gilberg narrowed one eye. What was it they said? When something sounded too good to be true, it usually was. But then again, the guy might just be a regular nut job.
He snatched the fifty-krone note and stuffed it into his pocket.
‘That’s rent for letting you sleep here.’
‘I saw the police walk by yesterday,’ the boy said. ‘Do they come round here a lot?’
‘Now and then, but recently we’ve been overrun with them.’
‘Do you happen to know a place they don’t overrun?’
Gilberg tilted his head and studied the boy.
‘If you wanna avoid the cops altogether, you need to get yourself a room in a hostel. Try the Ila Centre. They don’t let cops in there.’
The boy looked pensively at the river, then he nodded slowly. ‘Thanks for your help, my friend.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ muttered an astonished Gilberg. Definitely a nut job.
And, as if to confirm his suspicions, the boy started to undress. To be on the safe side Gilberg moved back a couple of steps. When the boy was wearing just his underpants, he wrapped the uniform around the shoes. Gilberg handed him a plastic bag which the boy asked if he could have and into which he put the bundled-up clothes and shoes. He placed the bag under a rock between the bushes where he had spent yesterday.
‘I’ll make sure no one finds it,’ Gilberg said.
‘Thank you, I trust you.’ Smiling, the boy buttoned his coat, all the way up so that his bare chest couldn’t be seen.
Then he started walking down the path. Gilberg looked after him; saw the naked soles of his feet splash water from the puddles onto the tarmac.
I trust you?
Stark staring raving mad.
Martha stood in reception looking at the computer screen with CCTV images from the Ila Centre. More specifically at a man who was staring into the camera outside the entrance door. He hadn’t rung the bell yet, hadn’t discovered the little hole in the Plexiglas that covered the bell. They had had to install the Plexiglas as bashing in the bell was a common reaction when someone was denied access. Martha pressed the microphone button.
‘Can I help you?’
The boy didn’t reply. Martha had already established that he wasn’t one of their seventy-six current residents. Though the centre had had a turnover of a hundred residents in the last four months, she remembered every single face. But she had concluded that he belonged to Ila’s ‘target client group’ as it was known: drug addicts. Not that he looked high, because he didn’t; it was his gaunt face. The lines aro
und his mouth. The dreadful haircut. She sighed.
‘Do you need a room?’
The boy nodded and she turned the key in the switch which opened the door lock downstairs. She called out to Stine, who was in the kitchen making sandwiches for one of the residents, to watch reception in her absence. Then she jogged down the stairs and past the iron gate used to bar access to the reception in case intruders forced their way through the entrance door. The boy was standing inside the door, looking around.
His coat was buttoned all the way up to his neck and reached down almost to his ankles. He was barefoot and she could see blood in one wet footprint by the entrance door. But Martha had seen most things by now so what caught her attention was first and foremost his eyes. The way he looked at her. She couldn’t explain it any other way. His eyes were focused on her and in them she could see that he was processing the visual impression which she made. It might not be much, but it was more than she was used to at the Ila Centre. And, for a brief moment, it crossed her mind that he might not be using after all, but she dismissed the thought just as quickly.
‘Hello. Come with me.’
He followed her up to the first floor and into the meeting room via reception. As usual she left the door open so Stine and the others could see them, asked him to take a seat and took out the forms for the obligatory introduction interview.
‘Name?’ she asked.
He hesitated.
‘I need to put a name on this form,’ she said, giving him the opening which many of the people who came here needed.
‘Stig,’ he said tentatively.
‘Stig is fine,’ she said. ‘Anything else?’
‘Berger?’
‘Then that’s what we’ll write here. Date of birth?’
He stated a date and a year and she calculated that he had turned thirty. He looked much younger. That was the strange thing with addicts, it was easy to misjudge their age in either direction.
‘Did anyone refer you here?’
He shook his head.
‘Where did you sleep last night?’
‘Under a bridge.’
‘So I presume you’re of no fixed abode and don’t know which Social Services office you come under; therefore I’ll pick the number eleven which is your birthday and that gives us . . .’ She checked her list. ‘Alna Social Services, which, in its infinite mercy, will hopefully decide to fund you. What kind of drugs are you on?’
Her pen was hovering, but he made no reply.
‘Just mention your favourite poison.’
‘I’ve quit.’
She put down her pen. ‘The Ila Centre is a place for active drug users. I can make a call to the centre in Sporveisgata and see if they have a room for you. It’s much nicer than here.’
‘Are you saying . . .?’
‘Yes, I’m saying you need to get high on a regular basis to qualify.’ She flashed him a tired smile.
‘And if I were to say that I lied because I thought it would be easier to get a room here if I said I was clean?’
‘Then you have also answered that question correctly, but you’ve no more lifelines left, my friend.’
‘Heroin,’ he said.
‘And?’
‘Just heroin.’
She ticked the box on the form, but doubted if it was true. There was hardly a single pure heroin user left in Oslo; everyone was a mixed-substance user these days for the simple reason that if you combined the already mixed heroin with a benzodiazepine such as Rohypnol, for example, you got a bigger bang for your buck in terms of both the intensity and length of the fix.
‘Why have you come here?’
He shrugged. ‘To get a roof over my head.’
‘Any illnesses or essential medication?’
‘No.’
‘Do you have any plans for the future?’
He looked at her. Martha’s father used to say that a person’s past was written in their eyes and it was worth learning how to read it. But that their future couldn’t be found there. The future was unknown. Even so, Martha would later look back at this moment and ask herself if she could, if she should have been able to read anything about the future plans of the man who called himself Stig Berger.
He shook his head and gave the same reaction to her questions about work, education, previous overdoses, somatic illnesses, blood infections and mental health issues. At the end she explained that the centre had a policy of total confidentiality and they wouldn’t tell anyone that he was a resident, but should he wish to, he could complete a consent form naming anyone who could be given information, should they contact the centre.
‘So that your parents, friends or girlfriend can get in touch with you, for example.’
He smiled wistfully. ‘I’ve none of those.’
Martha Lian had heard this reply many times before. So many times it no longer made an impression on her. Her therapist called it compassion fatigue and had explained that it affected most people in her profession at some point. What worried Martha was that it didn’t seem to get any better. Of course she understood that there is a limit to how cynical a person who worries about their own cynicism can be, but she had always been fuelled by empathy. Compassion. Love. And she was close to running on empty. So she was startled when she heard the words I’ve none of those touch something, like a needle causing an atrophied muscle to twitch.
She gathered up the papers and put them in a folder which she left at reception and took the new resident down to a small storeroom on the ground floor.
‘I hope you’re not the paranoid type who can’t handle wearing second-hand clothing,’ she said and turned her back while he took off his coat and put on the clothes and trainers she had selected for him.
She waited till he coughed. She turned round. Somehow he looked taller and straighter in the pale blue jumper and the jeans. Nor was he as skinny as he had looked in the coat. He glanced down at his plain blue trainers.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The shoe of choice for the homeless.’
Large quantities of blue trainers had been donated to various deserving organisations in the 1980s by the Norwegian Army’s surplus depot and they had become synonymous with drug addicts and the homeless.
‘Thank you,’ he said quietly.
Martha had initially started seeing her therapist because of a resident who failed to thank her. It had only been one more ‘non-thank-you’ in a long line of other ‘non-thank-yous’ from the self-destructive individuals who still enjoyed some sort of existence thanks to the welfare state and the various social organisations the same junkies spent the majority of their waking hours ranting at. She had lost her temper. Told him to go to hell if he didn’t like the size of the disposable syringe he got for free so he could go to his room – for which Social Services paid six thousand kroner a month – to get high on drugs he had financed by stealing bicycles in the neighbourhood. Along with his complaint, the resident had filed a four-page-long hard-luck story. She had been forced to apologise.
‘Let me take you to your room,’ she said.
On the way up to the second floor she showed him where the bathrooms and lavatories were. Men walked past them with brisk footsteps and stoned eyes.
‘Welcome to Oslo’s best drugs shopping centre,’ Martha said.
‘In here?’ the boy asked. ‘You allow dealing?’
‘Not according to the rules, but if you’re using, you’ll obviously have drugs in your possession. And I’m telling you this because it’s useful for you to know, we don’t check if that’s one gram or one kilo. We’ve no control over what’s being bought and sold in the rooms. We’ll only enter if we suspect you of keeping weapons.’
‘People do that?’
She gave him a sideways glance. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘I just want to know how dangerous staying here is going to be.’
‘All the dealers here have runners who act as enforcers and they use everything from baseball bats to regular firearms to collect debts fr
om the other residents. Last week I raided a room and found a harpoon gun under the bed.’
‘A harpoon gun?’
‘Yep. A loaded Sting 65.’
She surprised herself by laughing and he smiled back. He had a nice smile. So many of them did.
She knocked before unlocking the door to room 323.
‘We’ve had to close off several rooms due to fire damage, so people are having to share until the damage has been made good. Your room-mate is called Johnny, the others call him Johnny Puma. He has ME and spends most of the day in bed. But he’s a nice, quiet guy so I don’t expect you’ll have any trouble with him.’
She opened the door. The curtains were closed and it was dark inside. She turned on the light. The fluorescent tubes in the ceiling flashed a couple of times before they came on.
‘How nice,’ the boy said.
Martha looked around the room. She had never heard anyone describe the rooms at the Ila Centre as nice unless they were being sarcastic. But somehow he was right. Yes, the lino was worn and the sky-blue walls full of dents and graffiti which not even lye could wash off, but it was clean and light. The furniture consisted of a bunk bed, a chest of drawers and a scratched low table with peeling paint, but it was all intact and in working order. The air smelled of the man asleep in the bottom bunk. The boy had stated he had never overdosed, so she had allocated him the top bunk. They prioritised bottom bunks to residents most likely to overdose since it was much easier to move them from a bottom bunk and onto a stretcher.
‘Here you are,’ Martha said, handing him the key ring with the key. ‘I’ll be your primary contact which means you come to me if there’s anything you need. OK?’
‘Thank you,’ he said, taking the blue plastic tag and looking at it. ‘Thank you so much.’
13
‘HE’S ON HIS way down,’ the receptionist called out to Simon and Kari, who were sitting on a leather sofa beneath a gigantic painting of something which might be a sunrise.
