The Son

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, Simon?’

  It was one of the things Simon had never understood about his old friend; how his voice never changed character or pitch. He could be exhilarated or furious, but his voice stayed exactly the same.

  ‘My job. Catching villains.’ Simon stopped, stuffed a piece of snus under his upper lip and offered the tin to Parr, who rolled his eyes. It was an old joke of which Simon never tired; Parr had never used snus or smoked a cigarette in his life.

  ‘I mean this performance,’ Parr said. ‘You defy a direct order not to enter and then you invite every member of the media to come here. Why?’

  Simon shrugged. ‘I thought we could do with some favourable press coverage for once. Incidentally, it’s not everyone, only those who were working the night shift. And I’m delighted that we agree that the assessment of the officer at the scene should be the decisive factor. If we hadn’t, I don’t think we would have found these girls – they were about to be moved on.’

  ‘What I’m wondering is how you knew about this place.’

  ‘As I told you before, a text message.’

  ‘From?’

  ‘Anonymous. It’s a pay-as-you-go phone.’

  ‘Get the phone companies to trace it. Find whoever it is as soon as possible so we can interview them for more information. Because unless I’m very much mistaken, we won’t get a word out of the people we arrested here.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘They’re just small fry, Simon. They know that the big fish will eat them up unless they keep their mouths shut. And it’s the big ones we want, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Good. Listen, Simon, you know me, and you know that I can be too certain of my own brilliance at times, and . . .’

  ‘And?’

  Parr cleared his throat. Rocked back and forth on his heels as if to take off. ‘And your assessment of the situation here tonight was better than mine. Plain and simple. It won’t be forgotten at your next review.’

  ‘Thank you, Pontius, but I’ll be retired long before my next review.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Parr smiled. ‘But you’re a fine policeman, Simon, you always were.’

  ‘That’s also true,’ Simon said.

  ‘How’s Else?’

  ‘Good, thank you. Or . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  Simon took a breath. ‘Good enough. We’ll talk about it some other time. Bed?’

  Parr nodded. ‘Bed.’ He patted Simon on the shoulder, turned round and walked towards the SUV. Simon looked after him. Hooked his index finger and pulled out the snus. It didn’t taste right.

  31

  IT WAS SEVEN in the morning when Simon got to work. He had managed two and a half hours’ sleep, one and a half cups of coffee, and half a headache pill. Some people could survive on very little sleep. Simon wasn’t one of them.

  Kari, however, might be. She certainly looked surprisingly alert as she strode towards him.

  ‘So?’ Simon said, slumping down in his office chair and tearing open the brown envelope which had been waiting for him in his pigeonhole.

  ‘Not one of the three people we arrested last night is saying anything,’ Kari said. ‘Not a single word, in fact. They even refused to state their names.’

  ‘What nice boys. Do we know them?’

  ‘Oh yes. Plain clothes recognised them. They have previous convictions, all three of them. Their lawyer turned up unannounced in the middle of night and interrupted our attempts to get anything out of them. A man called Einar Harnes. I managed to trace the mobile with the text message from this Son. The mobile belongs to a Fidel Lae. Owns a kennel. He’s not answering his phone, but the signals to the base stations indicate it’s at his farm. We’ve dispatched two patrol cars there.’

  Simon realised why she – unlike him – didn’t look as if she had just got straight out of bed. It was because she had never made it that far, she had worked right through the night.

  ‘Then there’s this Hugo Nestor you asked me to find . . .?’ she continued.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He’s not at his home address, doesn’t answer his phone, nor is he at his office address, but they could all be fake. All I have so far is a plain-clothes cop who says she saw Nestor at Vermont last night.’

  ‘Hm. Do you think I have bad breath, Officer Adel?’

  ‘Not that I’ve noticed, but then again we haven’t—’

  ‘So you wouldn’t regard this as a hint?’

  Simon held up three toothbrushes.

  ‘They look used,’ Kari said. ‘How did you get them?’

  ‘Good question,’ Simon said, peering into the envelope. He pulled out a sheet of paper with the logo of the Plaza Hotel at the top. But there was no sender. Just a short handwritten message:

  Check for DNA. S.

  He handed the sheet to Kari and looked at the toothbrushes.

  ‘Probably some weirdo,’ Kari said. ‘Forensics have more than enough to do with the killings to—’

  ‘Take them straight up there,’ Simon said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘“S”. It’s Sonny.’

  ‘How do you know—’

  ‘Tell them it’s urgent.’

  Kari looked at him. Simon’s phone started to ring.

  ‘OK,’ she said, and turned to leave.

  She was standing outside the lift when Simon came over and stood next to her. He had put on his coat.

  ‘You’re coming with me first,’ he said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘That was Åsmund Bjørnstad. They’ve found another body.’

  A woodland bird hooted hollowly from somewhere in the spruce forest.

  Åsmund Bjørnstad had been stripped of all traces of arrogance. He was pale. He had come straight out with it on the phone: ‘We need help, Kefas.’

  Simon was standing beside the Kripos inspector and Kari, staring through the mesh of a cage, at the remains of a body which they had temporarily identified on the basis of various credit cards as Hugo Nestor’s. Confirmation would have to wait until they had checked his dental records. Simon could deduce from where he was standing and looking at the fillings in the exposed teeth that the deceased had actually seen a dentist. The two police officers from the dog patrol who had taken away the Argentine mastiffs had provided a simple explanation for the state of the body: ‘The dogs were hungry. Somebody forgot to feed them.’

  ‘Nestor was Kalle Farrisen’s boss,’ Simon said.

  ‘I know,’ Bjørnstad groaned. ‘All hell will break loose once the press finds out.’

  ‘How did you find Lae?’

  ‘Two patrol cars down at the farm were following a phone signal,’ Bjørnstad said.

  ‘I sent them,’ Kari said. ‘We got an anonymous text message.’

  ‘First they discovered Lae’s phone,’ Bjørnstad said. ‘It was on top of the gate as if someone had left it there to be traced and found. But they didn’t find Lae when they searched the house. They were about to leave when one of the police dogs reacted and wanted to go inside the forest. And that’s when they found . . . this.’ He flung out his hands.

  ‘And Lae?’ Simon asked, nodding towards the shivering man huddling under a woollen blanket, sitting on a tree stump behind them.

  ‘The killer threatened him with a gun, he says. Locked him in the adjacent cage, took his mobile and his wallet. Lae was locked up for thirty-six hours. He saw everything.’

  ‘And what’s he saying?’

  ‘He’s broken, poor man, he can’t stop talking. Lae sold dogs illegally and Nestor was his client. But he’s unable to give a proper description of the killer. Still, it’s common for witnesses not to remember the faces of people who threatened their lives.’

  ‘Oh, they remember them,’ Simon said. ‘They remember those faces for the rest of their lives. They just don’t recall them the way we see them, that’s why their descrip
tions are wrong. Wait here.’

  Simon went over to the man. Sat down on another tree stump next to him.

  ‘How did he look?’ Simon asked.

  ‘I’ve already given a description—’

  ‘Like this?’ Simon said, producing a photograph from his inside pocket and showing it to him. ‘Try to imagine him without the beard and the long hair.’

  The man stared at the picture for a long time. Then he nodded slowly. ‘That look. He had that look in his eyes. As if he was innocent.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘He kept saying that the whole time. Thank you. And he cried when the dogs killed Nestor.’

  Simon put the picture back in his pocket. ‘One last thing. You told the police that he threatened you with a gun. In which hand did he hold the gun?’

  The man blinked a couple of times as if he hadn’t thought about it until now. ‘Left. He was left-handed.’

  Simon got up and walked back to Bjørnstad and Kari. ‘It’s Sonny Lofthus.’

  ‘Who?’ Åsmund Bjørnstad asked.

  Simon looked at the inspector for a long time. ‘I thought it was you who turned up with Delta, trying to catch him at the Ila Centre?’

  Bjørnstad shook his head.

  ‘Anyway,’ Simon said, taking out the picture again. ‘We need to issue a description and a wanted person notice so that the public can help us. We need to get this photo to the news desks at NRK and TV2.’

  ‘I doubt if anyone will recognise him on the strength of that picture.’

  ‘How soon can we get them to broadcast it?’

  ‘They’ll make room for this story immediately, trust me,’ Bjørnstad said.

  ‘For the morning news bulletins in fifteen minutes, then,’ Kari said, taking out her mobile and turning on the camera function. ‘Hold the picture up and keep it still. Who do you know in NRK that we can send it to?’

  Morgan Askøy was carefully picking at a small scab on the back of his hand when the bus driver suddenly slammed on the brakes and Morgan inadvertently ripped off the scab. A drop of blood appeared. Morgan quickly averted his eyes, he couldn’t stand the sight of blood.

  Morgan got off the bus at Staten Maximum Security Prison where he had been working for two months. He was walking at the back of a group of other prison officers when a guy in a prison officer uniform came up alongside him.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Good morning,’ Morgan replied automatically and looked over, but couldn’t place him. Even so, the guy continued walking alongside him as if they knew each other. Or as if he wanted to get to know him.

  ‘You don’t work in A Wing,’ the guy remarked. ‘Or are you new?’

  ‘B Wing,’ Morgan said. ‘Two months.’

  ‘Ah, right.’

  The guy was younger than the other uniform fetishists. Mostly it was the older officers who travelled to and from work in their uniform, as if they were somehow proud of it. As did Franck, the assistant governor, himself. Morgan would have felt like an idiot if he had to sit on the bus and have people staring at him and perhaps asking questions about where he worked. At Staten. In a prison. No way.

  He looked at the ID card on the young man’s uniform. Sørensen.

  They passed the security booth side by side and Morgan nodded to the security guard inside.

  When they approached the entrance, the guy took out his mobile and lagged slightly behind; perhaps he was sending a text.

  The door had slammed shut behind the staff in front of them, so Morgan had to pull out his own key. He unlocked the door. ‘Thank you so much,’ said the Sørensen guy as he slipped in in front of him. Morgan followed, but turned off towards the lockers. He saw the guy join the rest of the staff as they poured into the lock towards the wings.

  Betty kicked off her shoes and flopped down on her bed. What a night shift. She was exhausted and knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep for a while, but she had to give it a try at least. And in order to do that, she first had to rid herself of the feeling that she should have reported the incident in Suite 4 to the police. After she and the security guard had searched the room to see if anything was damaged or missing, Betty had tidied up and was about to throw away the half lemon when she discovered a used, disposable syringe in the bin. Without any prompting her brain had put two and two together: the discoloured citrus flesh and the syringe. She had traced her fingers over the lemon peel and found several tiny holes. Squeezed a drop of lemon juice into her hand and saw that the juice was cloudy, as if it contained chalk. She touched the drop carefully with her tongue to taste it; besides the almost overpowering acidity, there was another bitter, medicinal note. She had to make a decision. Was there a law against guests having strangely tasting lemons in their possession? Or a disposable syringe? What if they happened to be diabetic or suffer from some other condition? Or play bizarre games with visitors in their room? So she had carried the contents of the bin down to reception and disposed of it. Written a brief entry in the log about the noise coming from Suite 4 and the man they found tied to the lavatory. A man who had himself dismissed the whole incident. What else could she do?

  She turned on the wall-mounted TV while she undressed, went to the bathroom, took off her make-up and cleaned her teeth. She could hear the steady hum of voices from TV2’s news channel. She tended to leave it on at low volume because it helped her fall asleep. Possibly because the news anchor’s reassuring voice reminded her of her father’s, a voice which could report on the downfall of continents, and yet she would still feel safe. But the TV alone was not enough any more. She had started taking sleeping pills. Not very strong ones, admittedly, but even so. Her doctor said she should consider asking to be let off night shifts to see if that might help. But no one got to the top by shirking, you had to pull your weight. Over the noise of the tap and her own foaming toothbrush she heard the voice say that police were looking for a person in connection with the killing of a man in a dog kennel last night, and that they linked this person to the murder of Agnete Iversen and the triple homicide in Gamlebyen.

  Betty rinsed her mouth, turned off the tap and went back to the bedroom. Stopped in her tracks on the threshold. Stared at the photo of the wanted man on the TV.

  It was him.

  He had a beard and long hair, but Betty was trained to strip a face of disguises and masks, comparing faces with the photographs the Plaza and other international hotels kept on file of notorious hotel con men who were bound to show up at their reception sooner or later. And it was him. The man she had checked in, only without glasses, but with eyebrows.

  She stared at her mobile which she had left on her bedside table.

  Attentive, but discreet. Puts the hotel’s interests first. Could go far.

  She pressed her eyes shut again.

  Her mother had been right. That damn curiosity of hers.

  From his office window, Arild Franck watched the officers from the night shift leave through the gate. He made a mental note of anyone who turned up late for the morning shift. It irritated him. People who couldn’t do their job irritated him. Like Kripos and the Homicide Squad. The police had been given a tip-off to raid the Ila Centre and even so Lofthus had eluded them. It just wasn’t good enough. And now they were having to pay the price for the police’s ineptitude. Hugo Nestor had been killed last night. In a kennel. It was unbelievable that one man, a junkie, could cause so much mayhem. The law-abiding citizen in Franck was equally outraged by this repeated example of police incompetence; at times he even felt frustrated that the police had never managed to catch him, a corrupt assistant prison governor. He had seen the suspicion in Simon Kefas’s eyes, but Kefas didn’t have the guts to go after him, the big coward, he had too much to lose. Simon Kefas was only brave when there was money at stake. That bloody money. What had Franck expected? That it would buy him a bust, a reputation as a pillar of the community? And once he had become hooked on money, it was like he
roin and the numbers in the bank account became the end rather than the means because there was no longer any meaningful goal. And just like the junkie, he knew and understood it, and yet he was incapable of doing anything about it.

  ‘An officer called Sørensen is on his way to see you,’ said his secretary in the front room.

  ‘Don’t let him—’

  ‘He walked right past me, said it would only take a minute.’

  ‘Really?’ Franck frowned. Was Sørensen reporting fit for duty before his sick leave had ended? Out of character for a Norwegian worker. He heard the door behind him open.

  ‘So, Sørensen,’ Arild Franck said without turning round. ‘Did you forget to knock?’

  ‘Sit down.’

  Franck heard the door being locked and he turned towards the voice in surprise. He stopped moving when he saw the gun.

  ‘If you make a single sound, I’ll shoot you right through your forehead.’

  When you point a gun at someone, that person will usually focus all their attention on the gun and it will take time before they look at the person behind the gun. But when the boy lifted his foot and nudged the chair so that it rolled across the floor to the assistant prison governor, Franck saw who it was. The Son had returned.

  ‘You’ve changed,’ Franck said. He meant to say it with greater authority, but his throat was dry and no particular sound came out of it.

  The gun rose slightly higher and Franck immediately dropped down on the chair.

  ‘Put your arms on the armrests,’ the boy said. ‘I’m going to press the button on your intercom and you’re going to tell Ina to go to the baker’s to get some pastries. Now.’

  The boy pressed the button.

  ‘Yes?’ They heard Ina’s obliging voice.

  ‘Ina . . .’ Franck’s brain searched desperately for alternatives.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Go . . .’ Franck’s search ended abruptly when he saw the boy’s finger tighten on the trigger. ‘. . . down to the baker’s and get me some fresh pastries, would you? Now.’

  ‘OK.’