The Redeemer hh-6

by Jo Nesbo

  Martine's eyes widened. 'What do you mean?'

  'I hardly know where to begin.'

  The train drew into Oslo Central. Harry scrutinised the passengers on the platform, but did not see Jon Karlsen.

  'It all started when Ragnhild Gilstrup offered Jon two million kroner to help Gilstrup Invest buy some of the Salvation Army's properties,' Harry said. 'He turned her down because he wasn't convinced she was scrupulous enough to keep a secret. Instead he went behind her back and spoke to Mads and Albert Gilstrup. He demanded five million and they were instructed not to tell Ragnhild about the deal. They agreed.'

  Martine's mouth fell. 'How do you know this?'

  'After Ragnhild's death Mads Gilstrup more or less broke down. He decided to come clean about the whole business. So he rang the police. A telephone number on Halvorsen's business card. Halvorsen didn't answer, but he left the confession as a voicemail. A few hours ago I played the message. Among many other things he said Jon demanded a written agreement.'

  'Jon likes things to be neat and tidy,' Martine muttered. The train pulled out of the station, past the stationmaster's Villa Valle and into east Oslo's grey landscape of backyards with wrecked bikes, bare clothes lines and soot-black windows.

  'But what has this got to do with Stankic?' she asked. 'Who took out the contract? Mads Gilstrup?'

  'No.'

  They were sucked into the tunnel's black void, and in the dark her voice was barely audible above the rattle of the train on the rails. 'Was it Rikard? Say it wasn't Rikard…'

  'Why do you think it's Rikard?'

  'The night Jon raped me Rikard found me in the toilet. I said I had tripped in the dark, but I could see he didn't believe me. He helped me get to bed without waking any of the others. Even though he has never said anything I've always had the feeling that he saw Jon and knows what happened.'

  'Mm,' Harry said. 'So that's why he's so protective. Rikard seems to like you, and it's genuine.'

  She nodded. 'I suppose that's why I…' she began, then paused.

  'Yes?'

  'Why I don't want it to be him.'

  'In that case your wish is granted.' Harry checked his watch. Fifteen minutes until they arrived.

  Martine, with a look of alarm: 'You… you don't think?'

  'What?'

  'You don't think that my father knew about the rape, do you? That he…'

  'No, your father has nothing to do with any of this. The person who took out the contract on Jon Karlsen…'

  They were out of the tunnel; a black, starry sky hung over white, phosphorescent fields.

  '… is Jon Karlsen.'

  Jon entered the vast departures hall. He had been here before, but had never seen as many people as there were now. The noise of voices, feet and announcements rose to the steeple-high vaulted ceiling. An excited cacophony, a hotchpotch of languages and fragments of opinions he didn't understand. Home for Christmas. Going away for Christmas. Stationary queues at the check-in counters coiled round like overfed boa constrictors between the barriers.

  Take a deep breath, he told himself. Plenty of time. They don't know anything. Not yet. Maybe they never will. He stood behind an elderly lady and bent down to help her move her suitcase as the queue shuffled forward twenty centimetres. When she turned to him with a smile of gratitude he could see that her skin was only a thin, deathly pale fabric stretched over a bony skull.

  He returned the smile, and at length she looked away again. But through the noise of living people he could always hear her scream. The unbearable, unending scream struggling to drown out the roar of an electric motor.

  After being taken to hospital and finding out that the police were searching his flat, he had realised they might stumble on the contract with Gilstrup Invest in his bureau. The one that stated that Jon would receive five million kroner if the Salvation Army board of management supported the offer, signed by Albert and Mads Gilstrup. After the police had driven him to Robert's flat he had gone to Goteborggata to collect the contract. But when he arrived someone was already there. Ragnhild. She hadn't heard him because of the vacuum cleaner. She was sitting down reading the contract. She had seen. Seen his sins as his mother had seen the semen stains on the bedding. And, like his mother, Ragnhild would humiliate him, destroy him, tell everyone. Tell his father. She mustn't see. I took her eyes, he thought. But she is still screaming.

  'Beggars don't say no to charity,' Harry said. 'It's in the very nature of things. That was what struck me in Zagreb. Quite literally. A Norwegian twenty-kroner coin that was hurled at me. And as I watched it spinning on the floor I remembered the Crime Scene Unit had found a Croatian coin trodden into the snow outside the shop on the corner of Goteborggata. They automatically connected it with Stankic who had been escaping that way while Halvorsen lay bleeding further up the street. I am by inclination a doubter, but when I saw this coin in Zagreb it was as though a higher authority wanted to make me aware of something. The first time I met Jon a beggar threw a coin at him. I remember because I was surprised that a beggar would reject charity. Yesterday I tracked down the beggar to the Deichmanske library and showed him the coin the Crime Scene Unit had found. He confirmed he had hurled a foreign coin at Jon and that it could well have been the one I showed him. Yes, it could indeed have been that one, he said.'

  'So Jon must have been to Croatia at some point. That's not illegal, I suppose?'

  'Not at all. Yet he told me he had never been abroad in his life, except to Denmark and Sweden. I checked with the passport office and no passport has ever been issued in Jon Karlsen's name. However, a passport had been issued to Robert Karlsen almost ten years ago.'

  'Perhaps Jon got the coin from Robert?'

  'You're right,' Harry said. 'The coin proves nothing. But it makes sluggish brains like mine think a little. What if Robert never went to Zagreb? What if it had been Jon who went? Jon had keys to all the Salvation Army's rental flats, including Robert's. What if he had borrowed Robert's passport, travelled to Zagreb in his name and pretended to be Robert Karlsen when he organised the hit on Jon Karlsen? And the plan had always been to kill Robert?'

  Martine chewed a nail, deep in thought. 'But if Jon wanted to kill Robert, why take out a contract on yourself?'

  'To give yourself the perfect alibi. Even if Stankic was arrested and confessed, Jon would never be suspected. He was the intended victim, wasn't he. Jon and Robert swapping shifts on that day of all days would be seen as the hand of fate. Stankic was merely following instructions. And when Stankic, and Zagreb, discovered later that they had killed their own customer there would be no reason for them to fulfil the contract by killing Jon. After all, there was no one to pay the bill. In fact that was part of the genius of the plan. Jon could promise Zagreb as much money as they wanted after the event as there would be no billing address. And the one person who could have refuted that Robert was in Zagreb that day or who might have had an alibi for the date the contract was agreed – Robert Karlsen – was dead. The plan was like a circle of logic that worked, the illusion of a snake eating itself, a self-destructing creation that would guarantee nothing would be left afterwards, no loose threads.'

  'A man of ordered habits,' Martine said.

  Two of the male students had started singing a drinking song: a twovoice experiment, accompanied by the loud snoring of one of the recruits.

  'But why?' Martine asked. 'Why would he kill Robert?'

  'Because Robert represented a threat. According to Sergeant Major Rue, Robert supposedly threatened Jon that he would 'destroy' him if he ever approached a certain woman again. The first thing that came to my mind was that they were talking about Thea. But you were right when you said that Robert did not entertain any special feelings for her. Jon claimed Robert had a sick obsession with Thea so that it would seem as though Robert had a motive for wishing to kill Jon. The threat that Robert made, however, concerned Sofia Miholjec. A Croatian girl of fifteen who has just told me everything. How Jon forced her to have sex w
ith him on regular occasions, saying he would evict her family from the Salvation Army flat and have them thrown out of the country if she put up any resistance or told anyone. When she became pregnant, however, she went to Robert, who helped her and promised to stop Jon. Unfortunately Robert did not go straight to the police or those in command in the Salvation Army. He must have considered it a family affair and wanted to solve the problem within the organisation. I gather there's a bit of a tradition of that in the Salvation Army.'

  Martine was staring out at the snow-covered, night-faded fields rolling by like the swell of the sea.

  'So that was the plan,' she said. 'What went wrong?'

  'What always goes wrong,' Harry said. 'The weather.'

  'The weather?'

  'If the flight to Zagreb had not been cancelled because of snow that night, Stankic would have travelled home, found out that they had killed their go-between by mistake and the story would have finished there. Instead Stankic had to spend a night in Oslo and he discovers he has killed the wrong person. But he doesn't know that Robert Karlsen is also the name of the go-between, so he continues his hunt.'

  The tannoy announced: 'Gardemoen Airport, Gardemoen. Passengers please alight on the right-hand side.'

  'And now you're going to catch Stankic.'

  'That's my job.'

  'Will you kill him?'

  Harry looked at her.

  'He killed your colleague,' Martine said.

  'Did he say that to you?'

  'I said I didn't want to know anything, so he didn't say a word.'

  'I'm a policeman, Martine. We arrest people and the court sentences them.'

  'Is that so? Then why haven't you sounded a full alarm? Why haven't you called the airport police? Why isn't the Special Forces Unit on its way with all its sirens blaring? Why are you on your own?'

  Harry didn't answer.

  'No one else even knows what you've just told me, do they?'

  Harry saw the designer-smooth, grey cement platform of Gardemoen Airport approach through the train window.

  'Our stop,' he said.

  34

  Monday, 22 December. The Crucifixion.

  There was one person between him and the check-in counter when he smelt it. A sweet soap smell that vaguely reminded him of something. Something that had happened not too long ago. He closed his eyes and tried to pinpoint what.

  'Next please!'

  Jon shuffled forwards, put the suitcase and rucksack on the conveyor belt and placed his ticket and passport on the counter in front of a suntanned man wearing the airline's white short-sleeved shirt.

  'Robert Karlsen,' the man said, eyeing Jon, who confirmed with a nod. 'Two bags. And that's hand luggage, is it?' He gestured towards the black bag.

  'Yes.'

  The man flipped through the pages, typed and a hissing printer spat out tags marked Bangkok for the luggage. That was when Jon remembered the smell. For one second in the doorway of his flat, the last second he had felt safe. The man standing outside who said in English he had a message, then raised a black pistol. He forced himself not to look.

  'Have a good trip, herr Karlsen,' the man said with an ultra-swift smile, handing over his boarding pass and the passport.

  Jon walked without delay to the queues by the X-ray machines. Putting the ticket in his inside pocket, he snatched a glimpse over his shoulder.

  He looked straight at him. For one desperate instant he wondered whether Jon Karlsen had recognised him, but then Jon's gaze moved on. What worried him, however, was that Karlsen appeared frightened.

  He had been a little too slow to catch Karlsen at the check-in desk. And now he was in a hurry because Karlsen was already queueing for security where everything and everyone was screened and a revolver was impossible to conceal. It had to happen on this side.

  He breathed in and tightened and slackened his grip on the gunstock inside his coat.

  His instinct was to shoot the target on the spot, his usual practice. But even though he could soon disappear into the crowd, they would close the airport, check everyone's identities and he would not only miss his flight to Copenhagen in forty-five minutes but his freedom for the next twenty years.

  He moved towards Jon Karlsen's back. It had to happen with speed and decisiveness. He would go up to him, thrust the gun in his ribs and give him the ultimatum in plain, concise terms. Thereafter lead him calmly through the jam-packed departures hall into the multistorey car park, behind a car, a shot to the head, body under the car, lose the gun before the security controls, gate 32, plane to Copenhagen.

  He already had the gun out halfway and was two steps away when Karlsen stepped out of the queue and with long strides made for the other end of the departure hall. Do vraga! He turned to follow, forcing himself not to run. He hasn't seen you, he kept repeating to himself.

  Jon told himself not to run, that it would make it obvious he knew he had been seen. He had not recognised the face, but he didn't need to. The man was wearing the red neckerchief. On the stairs down to the arrivals hall Jon felt the sweat coming. At the bottom he turned back on himself and when he was out of sight from those on the staircase, he placed the bag under his arm and began to run. The faces in front of him flashed past, with Ragnhild's empty eye sockets and unstoppable screams. He ran down another staircase and now there was no one around him any more, just cold, damp air and the echo of his own footsteps and breathing in a broad corridor sloping downwards. He realised he was in the corridor leading to the car park and hesitated for a moment to stare into the black eye of a surveillance camera, as if that could give him the answer. Further ahead he saw a neon sign over a door like a living image of himself: a man standing erect and helpless. The men's toilet. A hiding place. Out of sight. He could lock himself in. Wait until the plane was about to leave before coming out.

  He heard an echo of rapid footsteps coming closer. He ran to the toilet, opened the door and stepped inside. The white light that was reflected towards him was how he imagined heaven would reveal itself to a dying man. Bearing in mind the isolated location of the toilet he thought it absurdly spacious. Rows of unoccupied white bowls stood in line, waiting along one wall, while cubicles of the same white hue lined the other. He heard the door glide to behind him and close with a metallic click.

  The air in the cramped monitoring room at Gardemoen Airport was unpleasantly warm and dry.

  'There,' Martine said, pointing.

  Harry and the two security guards in the chairs faced her first, then the wall of screens she was pointing at.

  'Which one?' Harry asked.

  'There,' she said, walking over to the monitor showing an empty corridor. 'I saw him pass by. I'm positive it was him.'

  'That's the surveillance camera in the corridor to the car park,' one of the guards said.

  'Thanks,' Harry said. 'I'll handle this from here.'

  'Hang on,' the guard said. 'This is an international airport and you may have police ID but you need authorisation to-'

  He stopped in his tracks. Harry had drawn a revolver from his waistband and was weighing it in his hand. 'Can we say this authority is valid until further notice?'

  Harry didn't wait for an answer.

  Jon had heard someone enter the toilet. But all he could hear now was the flush of water in the white tear-shaped bowls outside the cubicle in which he had locked himself.

  Jon was sitting on the toilet lid. The cubicles were open at the top, but the doors went right down to the floor so he didn't have to pull up his legs.

  Then the flush stopped and he heard a splash.

  Someone was peeing.

  Jon's first thought was that it couldn't have been Stankic. No one could be so cold-blooded that they would think about urinating before committing murder. His second was that Sofia's father may have been right about the little redeemer you could hire for peanuts at Hotel International in Zagreb: he was fearless.

  Jon clearly heard the swish of trouser flies being zipped up, and then
the white porcelain orchestra's water music started up again.

  It stopped as if at the command of a baton, and he heard running water from a tap. A man was washing his hands. With scrupulous care. The tap was turned off. Then more steps. The door creaked. The metallic click.

  Jon slumped in a heap on the toilet lid with the bag in his lap.

  There was a knock at the cubicle door.

  Three light taps, but with the sound of something hard. Like steel.

  The blood seemed to refuse to enter his brain. He didn't stir, just closed his eyes and held his breath. But his heart was pounding. He had read somewhere that some predators have ears that can pick up the sound of a victim's frightened heart, in fact that was how they found them. Apart from his heartbeat, the silence was total. He shut his eyes tight and thought that if he concentrated he would be able to see through the roof and catch sight of the cold, clear starry sky, see the planet's invisible but comforting plan and logic, see the meaning of everything.

  Then came the inevitable crash.

  Jon felt the air pressure against his face and for a moment believed it was from a gunshot. He opened his eyes with caution. Where the lock had been were now splinters of wood, and the door was hanging at an angle.

  The man before him had opened his coat. Underneath he was wearing a dinner suit and a shirt that was the same dazzling white as the walls behind him. Around his neck was a red neckerchief.

  Dressed for a party, thought Jon.

  He inhaled the smell of urine and freedom as he looked down at the skulking figure before him. An ungainly young man scared out of his wits, sitting and shaking as he waited for death. Under any other circumstances he would have wondered what this man with the turbid blue eyes might have done. But for once he knew. And for the first time since the Christmas dinner in Dalj this would give him personal satisfaction. And he was no longer frightened.

  Without lowering the revolver he glanced at his watch. Thirty-five minutes before the departure of the plane. He had seen the camera outside. Which meant there were probably surveillance cameras in the car park, too. It would have to be done here. Pull him out and into the next cubicle, shoot him, lock the cubicle from the inside and climb out. They wouldn't find Jon Karlsen before the airport was closed for the night.