The Son

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Thank you, Ina.’

  The boy released the trigger, put the gun down, took a roll of duct tape from his jacket pocket, walked round to Franck’s chair and started taping his forearms to the armrests. Then he wound the tape around his chest and the backrest of the chair, and around his feet, the seat post and the castor. Then he picked up the gun again. A strange thought crossed Franck’s mind: that he ought to be more frightened than he was. The boy had killed Agnete Iversen, Kalle, Sylvester, Hugo Nestor. Didn’t he realise that he was going to die? Perhaps the difference was that he was here in his safe office at Staten and it was the middle of the day. That he had seen this boy grow up in his own prison and – except for that one incident with Halden – he’d never shown any propensity or ability to use violence.

  The boy went through Franck’s pockets and took out his wallet and car key.

  ‘Porsche Cayenne,’ the boy read aloud from the car key. ‘That’s an expensive car for a civil servant, isn’t it?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want answers to three simple questions. If you tell me the truth, I’ll let you live. If you don’t, I’m afraid I’m going to have to kill you.’ He said it in an almost regretful tone of voice.

  ‘The first question is, what’s the name and number of the account Nestor sent money to when he paid you?’

  Franck thought about it. No one knew about the account, he could say anything he liked, invent an account because no one could contradict it. Franck opened his mouth, but the boy interrupted him.

  ‘If I were you I would think before speaking.’

  Franck stared at the muzzle of the gun. What did he mean? No one could confirm or deny the account’s existence. No one except Nestor had ever transferred money into it. Franck blinked. Had the boy forced the information out of Nestor before he killed him? Was this a test?

  ‘The account is in the name of a company,’ Franck said. ‘Dennis Limited, registered in the Cayman Islands.’

  ‘And the account number?’ The boy held up something that looked like a yellowing business card. Had he noted down the number that Nestor had given him on it? But if the boy was bluffing, so what? He wouldn’t be able to withdraw the money even if Franck did give him the account number. Franck started reeling off the digits.

  ‘Slow down,’ the boy said, looking at the business card. ‘And speak more clearly.’

  Franck did as he was told.

  ‘Then only two questions remain,’ the boy said when he had finished. ‘Who killed my father? And who was the mole who helped the Twin?’

  Arild Franck blinked. His body knew it. It knew it now and was pouring sweat out of every pore. It understood it was time to be scared. The boy had put the gun down again, but he had produced a knife instead. Hugo Nestor’s revolting, curved, deadly weapon.

  Franck screamed.

  ‘Now I understand,’ Simon said as he slipped his phone into his jacket pocket and steered out of the tunnel and into the light over Bjørvika and the Oslo Fjord.

  ‘Understand what?’ Kari said.

  ‘One of the night receptionists at the Plaza just called the police to say that the man who’s wanted for questioning spent a night in one of their suites. Under the name Fidel Lae. And that another man was found chained to the lavatory in the suite after some guests made a complaint about noise. This other man simply left as soon as they freed him. The hotel has also checked cameras at the entrance and they show Lofthus entering with Hugo Nestor and the man who was later found in the suite.’

  ‘You still haven’t told me what it is you understand.’

  ‘Oh, right. How the three men in Enerhauggata knew we were coming for them. According to the night log at the hotel, the handcuffed man left the Plaza just as we were in place outside the trafficking address. He called and warned everyone that Nestor had been kidnapped and they started evacuating every exposed position in case Nestor gave them up. They knew what had happened to Kalle, didn’t they? But just as they were about to drive off with the girls in the van, they realised we were already there. So they decided to wait for us to leave. Or for us to enter the house, so they could drive away unnoticed.’

  ‘You’ve given this quite a lot of thought, haven’t you?’ Kari said. ‘How they could have known that we were coming.’

  ‘Possibly,’ Simon said, turning off towards Police HQ. ‘But now I’ve worked it out.’

  ‘You know how it could have happened,’ Kari corrected him. ‘Are you going to tell me what you’re thinking about now?’

  Simon shrugged. ‘That we have to get Lofthus before he wreaks more havoc.’

  ‘Funny sort of guy,’ Morgan Askøy said to his older colleague as they walked down the broad corridor. The cell doors were wide open, ready for morning inspection. ‘Sørensen, his name was. He just came up to me.’

  ‘Can’t have been him,’ his colleague said. ‘There’s only one Sørensen in A Wing and he’s on sick leave.’

  ‘Oh, it was him. I saw his ID card on his uniform.’

  ‘But I spoke to Sørensen a couple of days ago – he’d just been readmitted to hospital.’

  ‘So he made a quick recovery.’

  ‘How odd. He was in uniform, you say? Can’t have been Sørensen, he hates the uniform; he always gets changed here and keeps it in his locker. That’s how Lofthus managed to steal it.’

  ‘The inmate who escaped?’

  ‘Yes. Are you enjoying your job, Askøy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Make sure you take time off in lieu, don’t be tempted to do too much overtime.’

  They walked another six steps before they both stopped in their tracks and stared at each other. Saw each other’s wide-open eyes.

  ‘What did that guy look like?’ his colleague exclaimed.

  ‘What did Lofthus look like?’ Morgan exclaimed.

  Franck exhaled through his nose. His scream was muffled by the boy’s hand pressing against his mouth. The boy kicked off his shoe, pulled off his sock and stuffed it into Franck’s mouth and covered it with duct tape.

  The boy cut away enough of the tape on the right armrest so that Franck’s fingers could hold the pen he handed him and raise it to the sheet lying at the very edge of the desk.

  ‘Answer me.’

  Franck wrote.

  Don’t know.

  Then he let go of the pen.

  He heard the rasping sound of duct tape being torn in half, smelled the glue on the adhesive side before it was placed over his nostrils and cut off the air. Franck’s body was out of his control, jerking and arching in the chair. Twisting and squirming. Dancing for that bloody boy! The pressure inside his head rose, soon it would explode. He had prepared to die when he saw the boy press the tip of the pen against the taut tape across his nostril.

  He pierced it and Arild Franck’s left nostril inhaled air while the first warm tears rolled down his cheek.

  The boy gave him back the pen. Franck concentrated.

  Have mercy. I would give you the mole’s name if I knew it.

  The boy read it. Closed his eyes and pulled a face as if in agony. He tore off another piece of tape.

  The telephone on the desk started ringing. Franck stared at it hopefully. The office extension lit up on the display. It was Goldsrud, the shift supervisor. But the boy ignored it and focused entirely on reattaching the tape over Franck’s nostrils. And Franck felt the shaking that accompanied his own panic. It almost made him wonder whether he was crying or laughing.

  ‘There’s no reply from the governor,’ Geir Goldsrud said and hung up. ‘And Ina isn’t there, either – she picks up if he doesn’t. But before we disturb the governor, let’s run through this one more time. You’re saying that the man you saw called himself Sørensen and that he looked like him . . .’ Goldsrud pointed to the TV monitor where he had brought up a picture of Sonny Lofthus.

  ‘It doesn’t look like him!’ Morgan insisted. ‘It is him, I keep telling you.’

  ‘Relax,’
his older colleague said.

  ‘Easy for you to say,’ Morgan snorted. ‘The guy is only wanted for six murders.’

  ‘I’ll call Ina on her mobile and if she doesn’t know where her boss is, we’ll start our own search. But I don’t want any panic, understood?’

  Morgan looked at his colleague and back at the shift supervisor. It looked as if there was a shorter route to panic there than in Morgan himself. Personally, he just felt excited. Really excited. A prisoner, breaking into Staten, how was that even possible?

  ‘Ina?’ Goldsrud practically screamed into the phone and Morgan could see the relief in his face. It was tempting to accuse the shift supervisor of trying to avoid responsibility, but it must surely be hell to be middle management, reporting to the assistant prison governor. ‘We need to get hold of Franck at once! Where is he?’

  Morgan saw relief give way to bewilderment and then horror. Goldsrud ended the call.

  ‘What . . .?’ the older colleague began.

  ‘She says he has a visitor in his office,’ Goldsrud said, getting up and going over to the gun cabinets at the far end of the room. ‘A man called Sørensen.’

  ‘So what do we do now?’ Morgan asked.

  Goldsrud stuck the key in the lock, turned it and opened the gun cabinet. ‘This,’ he said.

  Morgan counted twelve rifles.

  ‘Dan and Harald, you’re coming with me!’ Goldsrud shouted and Morgan could no longer detect any trace of bewilderment, horror or fear of responsibility in his voice. ‘Now!’

  Simon and Kari were standing by the lift in the atrium at Police HQ when his mobile rang.

  It was the Institute of Forensic Medicine.

  ‘We have the preliminary DNA results from your toothbrushes.’

  ‘Great,’ Simon said. ‘And the score at half-time is?’

  ‘I’d rather call it thirty seconds before the whistle goes. Probability is over ninety-five per cent.’

  ‘For what?’ Simon said and saw the lift doors open.

  ‘That we’ve found a partial match in our DNA database to the saliva from two of the toothbrushes. What’s interesting about the match is that it isn’t to a known criminal or a police officer, it’s to a murder victim. More specifically, it proves that whoever used the toothbrushes is closely related to the victim.’

  ‘I was expecting that,’ Simon said, getting into the lift. ‘The toothbrushes come from the Iversen family. I noticed they were missing in the Iversen bathroom after the murder. It’s a partial DNA match to Agnete Iversen, isn’t it?’

  Kari looked quickly at Simon, who held up a hand in triumph.

  ‘No,’ replied the voice from the Institute of Forensic Medicine. ‘We haven’t actually got Agnete Iversen’s DNA uploaded to our system yet.’

  ‘Oh? Then how—’

  ‘This is an unidentified murder victim.’

  ‘You can prove a relationship between two of the toothbrushes and an unidentified murder victim? Unidentified as in?’

  ‘As in unidentified. A very young and very dead female.’

  ‘How young?’ Simon asked and stared at the lift doors which were starting to close.

  ‘Younger than we usually get them.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘A four-month-old foetus.’

  Simon’s brain tried to process the information to the best of its ability. ‘Agnete Iversen had a late abortion, is that it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It isn’t? Then who is— Damn!’ Simon closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the lift wall.

  ‘You got cut off?’ Kari asked.

  Simon nodded.

  ‘We’ll be out of this lift in a second,’ she said.

  The boy punctured the tape twice. Once under each nostril. And Arild Franck sucked new seconds of life into his lungs. All he wanted to do was to live. And it was the only instinct his body obeyed.

  ‘So, do you want to give me a name?’ the boy asked in a low voice.

  Franck breathed hard; he wished he had broader nostrils, wider nasal passages for this sweet, delicious air. He listened out for sounds that would tell him help was on its way, his rescue, while he shook his head, trying to indicate with his dry tongue behind the sock, the lips behind the tape, that he didn’t have a name, didn’t know who the mole was, that he was pleading for mercy. To go free. To be forgiven.

  And he froze when he saw the boy stop in front of him and raise the knife. Franck couldn’t move, every limb was taped down. Everything . . . The knife came down. Nestor’s hideous, curved knife. Franck’s head strained against the headrest, every muscle tensed up and he screamed silently when he saw the blood spurt from his body.

  32

  ‘TWO,’ GOLDSRUD WHISPERED.

  The men stood with their weapons at the ready, listening to the silence behind the door to the assistant prison governor’s office.

  Morgan exhaled. Now, it was about to happen now. This was the moment where he might finally get to take part in something he had dreamt about ever since he was a little boy. He would catch someone. Perhaps even . . .

  ‘Three,’ Goldsrud whispered.

  Then he swung the sledgehammer. It hit the lock on the door and splinters flew from the frame as Harald, the tallest of them, forced his way through the door. Morgan entered with a rifle held at chest height and took two steps to the left like Goldsrud had instructed him to. There was only one person in the room. Morgan stared at the man in the chair with blood on his chest, his throat and his chin. Christ, there was so much blood! Morgan felt his knees weakening as if some kind of drug had been injected into them. He mustn’t! But there was so much blood! And the man in the chair was shaking, convulsing as if he were being electrocuted. And his eyes stared at them, frantic, bulging as if he were a deep-sea fish.

  Goldsrud took two steps forward and ripped the tape off the man’s mouth.

  ‘Where are you hurt, boss?’

  The man opened his mouth wide, but no sound came out. Goldsrud stuck in two fingers and pulled out a black sock. Saliva poured from the man’s mouth and Morgan recognised the voice of assistant prison governor Arild Franck as he screamed: ‘Go after him! Don’t let him get away!’

  ‘We need to find out where he’s injured and stop the—’ Goldsrud was about to rip open his boss’s shirt, but Franck yelled: ‘Lock the bloody doors, he’s going to get away! He has my car key! And my uniform cap!’

  ‘Calm down, boss,’ Goldsrud said as he cut the tape off one armrest. ‘He’s trapped; he won’t get past the fingerprint sensors.’

  Franck glared at him furiously and held up his now free hand. ‘Oh yes, he will!’

  Morgan stumbled backwards and had to lean against the wall for support. He tried, but failed to avert his eyes from the blood pouring from the place where the assistant prison governor Arild Franck should have had a forefinger.

  Kari followed Simon out of the lift and down the corridor to the open-plan office.

  ‘So,’ she said, trying to digest the information. ‘Three toothbrushes were sent to you by post with a note from someone called “S” who said they ought to be checked for DNA?’

  ‘Yes,’ Simon said as he pressed the buttons on his phone.

  ‘And two of the toothbrushes had DNA material that proves a family relationship to an unborn child? An unborn child who is registered as a murder victim?’

  Simon nodded while holding a finger to his lips to indicate that he had re-established the connection. When he spoke, it was in a loud and clear voice and he had set the phone to loudspeaker mode.

  ‘It’s Kefas again. Who was the child, how did it die, and what was the family relationship?’

  He held up his mobile between them so Kari could listen in.

  ‘We don’t know who the mother or the baby was, all we know is that the mother died – or was killed – by an overdose in the centre of Oslo. In the register she’s just down as “unidentified”.’

  ‘We know about the case,’ Simon said, sweari
ng silently to himself. ‘Asian, probably Vietnamese. And probably a victim of trafficking.’

  ‘That’s your department, Kefas. The baby, or the foetus, died because its mother died.’

  ‘I understand. And who is the father?’

  ‘The red toothbrush.’

  ‘The . . . red one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Simon said and ended the call.

  Kari went over to the coffee machine to fetch coffee for them both. When she came back, Simon was on another call which she guessed from his soft voice to be with Else. When he hung up, he had on this expression which some people over a certain age suddenly display for a few seconds, as if something has passed them by, as if they have the potential to crumble into dust on the spot. Kari had been about to ask how things were, but decided to let it lie.

  ‘So . . .’ Simon said, trying to sound cheerful. ‘Who do we think is the daddy? Iver Senior or Junior?’

  ‘We don’t think,’ Kari said. ‘We know.’

  Simon looked at her for a moment in surprise. Saw her slowly shake her head. Then he narrowed his eyes, bowed his head and ran his hand across it as if to smooth what little hair he had left.

  ‘Of course,’ he said quietly. ‘Two toothbrushes. I must be getting old.’

  ‘I’ll go check to see what we have on Iver,’ Kari said.

  When she had gone, Simon turned on his computer and opened his mailbox.

  Someone had sent him a sound file. Sent it from a mobile, it would appear.

  No one ever sent him sound files.

  He opened the file and pressed play.

  Morgan looked at the incandescent assistant prison governor who was standing in the middle of the control room. He had wrapped gauze around the stump on his hand, but had dismissed the medical orderly’s urgent requests to lie down.

  ‘So you raised the barrier and just let the killer drive straight out?!’ Franck thundered.

  ‘He was driving your car,’ the guard said, wiping sweat off his forehead. ‘He was wearing your uniform cap.’

  ‘But it wasn’t me!’ Franck roared.