Fireraiser

by Torkil Damhaug

  – Show me this secret room of ours, he said.

  – You’ve already seen it.

  – I want to see it again.

  He followed her upstairs. She took the torch out of her desk drawer, crawled in underneath the clothes and removed the plank.

  – Didn’t you say there was something written on the wall in there? Bad thoughts?

  She handed him the torch. He put his arm into the opening, then squeezed his head and upper body through. There was a smell of damp, but when he shone the torch, he didn’t see any signs of it. All he saw were a few dark patches on one of the beams. He wriggled so close that he had to take off his glasses. The patches were scorch marks, framing words that had been cut into the wood. Fire Man come tak them hom with you. He discovered more on another beam. He had to use his fingertips to read them. Elsa, it said. Those four letters repeated over and over again in a descending column.

  He crawled out again, ended up squatting on his haunches and peering between the clothes in the cupboard. Rakel was sitting on the side of the bed and didn’t say a word. He could hear Sara downstairs in the hall. She shouted something, probably very annoyed that the two little ones still weren’t in bed. Directly afterwards, her footsteps on the stairs. He could tell from them how irritated she was and pre-empted her.

  – I have to go to the office, he said. – Yes, it’s important. No, it can’t wait until tomorrow.

  29

  Kai pulled up next to the garage. He saw Elsa’s car in there. Another car parked outside, a dark blue Audi. Rental, he noted when he took a closer look at it. He stayed out in the yard for a minute or two. There was a change of weather in the air, warm spring winds sweeping from the marsh down by the river. In the darkness above him, clouds raced by like a herd of animals without a leader.

  She didn’t answer when he rang. He went into the back garden. The light was on in her workroom. He could see shadows moving within up there.

  He let himself in. In the hallway, he looked in the mirror. There was still blood coming from the cut in his cheek, and above one eye was a bulge the size of a golf ball. The front of his shirt was soaked with the blood of another man.

  – Hallo, he called up the stairs.

  No response, but he had to go up. He stopped outside the room, heard subdued voices inside. He told himself he shouldn’t go in. Not even if she was alone should he go in there. And now there was someone with her. He knew who it was and pushed open the door.

  The room was lit by small candles on the table. She was sitting in one chair, her legs tucked underneath, Adrian in the other. She gave no sign of surprise at all at what Kai looked like as he stood there.

  – Is that you? she said, and her voice sank down towards the ground, down beneath the ground, to the place where he lived.

  He wasn’t invited in, could have backed out again, run down the stairs. He stood there on the threshold.

  Adrian pointed to the third chair. – Sit down, he said.

  The voice was commanding, a prince to an underling. Kai didn’t move.

  – Sit down, Elsa repeated, and then he couldn’t resist, slipped down on to the outer edge of the chair, ready to leap up, overturn the table, grab hold of the candlestick and spread flames around the room, through the whole house.

  – I hear you’ve been talking to Vemund, said Adrian.

  – Yes, that’s exactly what I’ve done, he answered in a voice much too loud. He tried to keep it quieter, couldn’t. – Now I know everything I need to know about you, little brother.

  Adrian gave Elsa a look, one eyebrow raised.

  – You think you know, she corrected him.

  Kai felt a shuddering inside his chest; it spread up into his throat.

  – He killed Karsten, he shouted, pointing at Adrian. – Adrian killed Karsten Clausen. He got him in his car and he beat him to death.

  Elsa stood up and gave him a slap. It happened so quickly he didn’t have time to lift his arm. And so slowly that he saw it coming, had always seen it coming.

  – I will not allow you to talk like that, she hissed, and sat down again.

  The candlestick was standing right next to his hand. He could set her clothes alight. Stay there with her until everything was burned up. Because they belonged together; without her he was nothing.

  – You don’t decide what I can say.

  His voice had become alien, as though the words were being said through him.

  – Listen to me, he howled. He stood in front of her, but he didn’t touch her, and Adrian sat there quite calmly. – Listen to me, he howled again, but he saw no fear in her face. – Now I’m going to tell you what happened that night.

  She didn’t respond.

  – Synne Clausen was here. Adrian had called her. The girl was thirteen years old. Do you understand? Your son, Adrian, the one who’s going to save the world, had a thirteen-year-old girl visiting here.

  Still no response.

  – Karsten arrived. Somehow or other he knew his sister was in the house.

  – Her bike, Elsa interrupted. – He saw her bike outside.

  Kai slumped back down into his chair. – You knew?

  – Adrian has told me everything.

  He stared at her. – Has he told you she was lying half naked in the back of the car? Vemund had to help her on with her jacket and pullover.

  Elsa waved her hand dismissively. – She came here of her own free will, took her clothes off without Adrian knowing anything about it. She was in love and she misunderstood what was just meant as friendliness.

  – You weren’t there, Kai raged. – You don’t know anything. He killed Karsten to hide the fact that he was having it away with his little sister. If Karsten had gone to the police, there would have been precious little left of your prince. He gave Vemund a job in his firm and paid the guy a bloody king’s ransom to keep his mouth shut.

  Elsa shook her head. – You’ve never understood anything. You’ve never managed to make anything at all of your life.

  Kai pulled a memory stick out of his pocket. – Here are photographs of everything that happened that night. Vemund took them so that Adrian wouldn’t trick him.

  He offered it to her; she didn’t take it.

  – Adrian says he has no blame in what happened to Karsten. I believe him.

  She laid her hand over Adrian’s, but Kai had kept his ace to the last. Now he flung it into her face.

  – Has he told you that he told Vemund to get rid of me? That he paid someone to have his own brother killed?

  She lifted her arms in exasperation. – You’re exaggerating. As usual.

  – Look at these pictures, he shouted, holding the memory stick in front of her. – It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Do you know what Adrian did to Karsten?

  – You were the one who was after Karsten, she interrupted. – He found out what you were up to. It’s the most primitive and disgusting thing I’ve ever heard. We’ve kept it to ourselves all these years. The only thing you can do for me now is to leave Adrian in peace.

  She leaned across the table towards him.

  – If you don’t, we’ll tell the police what we know about you.

  He reached for the candlestick, but his hand had withered.

  – He has a life, she said calmly. – If you destroy that, I never want to have anything to do with you again.

  She stared at him until he had to look away. The sweet scent of the incense seeped from the walls and into him. This was the room in which she told people what they should do with their lives. He’d sat here many times himself and seen his own fate laid out across the table. His task was to follow Adrian, help Adrian, protect Adrian when he needed it, make himself invisible when there was no longer any use for him.

  – You knew, he mumbled. – You know they were going to kill me.

  – Now go, she said.

  He glanced up. Adrian sat half turned away and looking out of the window.

  – Go, she said again. – You will n
ever, ever say a word about this to anyone.

  Finally he managed to get to his feet, out on to the landing.

  – And those pictures you’ve got there, you’re to destroy them, every single one.

  As he reached the foot of the stairs, he heard the door being shut.

  He sat in his room. Couldn’t even face closing the curtains. In the dark sky above, the clouds had been piled into a mass and pushed down over the river. He sat for an hour, maybe longer. He heard a car engine starting down in the yard. Without looking, he knew that it was Adrian leaving. Maybe off to London, or Birmingham, or Basra. Or maybe it was just a quick trip out. Maybe he had returned to stay. Live in the house with Elsa, be her son, be the prince she’d waited for, the one she lived for. He opened a drawer, removed a packet of cigarettes, some elastic bands and lengths of string. His thoughts journeyed on into the darkness as he began putting the pieces together.

  After he had made five of them, he turned to his computer, woke it, clicked on the path to Synne Clausen’s machine. There he opened a new document. How Karsten died, he called it.

  He began to type with two fingers.

  It took Dan-Levi nearly three quarters of an hour to get hold of a key to the archives. By the time he unlocked the bomb shelter in the basement of the newspaper’s office, it was quarter past ten.

  It would be inaccurate to say that the paper had invested a lot of money in making things efficient down there. To get to the card indexes, he had to move aside a computer from a previous century, a punctured tyre and a sack of topsoil. After searching for a while, he found four cards on Furutunet and started looking in the cuttings folders, created in an era when online newspapers were the stuff of science fiction. He started when he saw one of the headlines: Two near-fires in one week. The article was from the autumn of 1991. The fire brigade had been called out, but in neither case did a serious incident develop. Nothing was said about the causes of the fires. At the foot of the page was a brief interview with the head of the remand home.

  Up in the editorial office, he grabbed a cup of coffee. The news editor and a couple of online journalists were bent over a desk at the far end of the room. None of them looked up. Once he was online, he navigated to the phone book, glanced at the clock, decided to risk making a call.

  The person who answered sounded like an old woman. Dan-Levi introduced himself, said he was writing a piece about unsolved cases of arson in Romerike. Which was not too far from the truth.

  – I can’t tell you anything about former residents of Furutunet, the woman answered in response to his question. – I am sure you’ll understand that.

  It was what Dan-Levi had expected. He stressed that he fully respected her duty of confidentiality.

  – I’d just like you to think about whether there might have been a connection between the fire eight years ago and those two incidents back in nineteen ninety-one when fires nearly broke out.

  Silence at the other end. Then she said:

  – We had our suspicions. These things do happen in my line of work.

  – Were these attempted arson attacks reported?

  – We wrote a formal note of concern.

  – To whom?

  – The county children’s services.

  – Were the police brought in?

  – I’m sure we considered it, but I don’t know what happened in the end.

  After hanging up, Dan-Levi spread out the sheet of paper with his solar association diagram on it, pencilled in a new ray and added the thought that had been circling around in his head the whole evening: Gunnhild Hammer’s son Kai, adopted. Sent to an institution when his adoptive mother became ill.

  He sat there studying the diagram. Suddenly he picked up his mobile phone and called Elsa Wilkins’ number. She didn’t answer. He Googled her website, called the number given there.

  – Elsa’s tarot service.

  He apologised for using that number to contact her and for calling so late, apologised for calling at all.

  – Then you don’t want me to read the cards for you again?

  – I’ll get back to you on that. Right now, I have another question I’d like to ask you.

  – I’d prefer it if you called me on my private number. When I’m not working. You know what it costs to use this?

  He apologised again, even though he was the one who would be paying for the call.

  – You sound uneasy, she observed.

  – A bit stressed out, that’s all, I’m still at the office. And I came across something I have to ask you about. I asked you last time we spoke as well. But you were interrupted.

  Silence at the other end. He still hadn’t said anything that was not actually true.

  – I found out that your sister and her husband once lived in the house we now live in, so that means her adopted son Kai must also have lived there.

  – What does this have to do with me? Elsa interrupted.

  Dan-Levi felt a drop of sweat trickling down his back. – I’m not quite sure, but it would help me if you could answer one question in particular.

  – All right.

  – Kai Hammer spent some time in a remand home. I was wondering if he was there at the same time as someone else I know.

  Now he was lying. His ear was burning. He switched the receiver to the other side. Maybe this was how the Jesuits felt, at least in the beginning.

  – Dan-Levi, I really don’t know where you’re going with this.

  He realised he was heading full speed into a dead-end street and asked straight out: – Was he at Furutunet up in Nannestad?

  She sighed. – I really can’t remember. I wasn’t even living in this country at the time.

  Kai turned off straight after the roundabout and headed up the side road towards the low buildings grouped at the top of the hill. He left the car in the almost empty parking lot. For almost ten minutes he waited around the corner from the entrance to the nursing home. At last someone came out. The automatic door remained open and buzzing after them, and just before it closed, he slipped out of the shadows and glided through.

  The smell in the corridor was even more overpowering than the previous time he had been here, urine and faeces and disinfectant. Two decrepit old men sat in front of a TV in the day room, maybe the same two as last time, and the screen was still black. No one else in sight. Kai slipped down the corridor, away from the ward office.

  The window in Khalid Chadar’s room was slightly open, and somewhere in among the stench coming from the bed was a waft of fresh evening air. For an instant Kai felt relief that he would never end up like this, floating around in his own bodily fluids.

  He heard Khalid Chadar breathing and turned on the bedside lamp. The thin body jerked, the eyes opened immediately. In the dull light, the membranes were amber yellow. Khalid lay there looking up at him. Waiting perhaps to be turned, or for something to drink. On the bedside table, next to the photograph of the two boys and the man in the turban, was a glass. Kai picked it up and held it against the old man’s lips, tipped it, tipped too much. A gurgling sound came from Khalid Chadar’s throat, and beneath the yellow membrane his eyes widened.

  Kai put the glass down. – You don’t know who I am?

  Khalid blinked, but his face didn’t change at all.

  – You’re my father, did you know that?

  No reaction.

  – My father, Kai repeated.

  Khalid Chadar’s cracked lips moved slightly. Water trickled from the corners of his mouth.

  – You probably know what Mr Wilkins in Birmingham did when he found out who the bastard’s father was. He kicked Elsa out.

  He looked over towards the balcony. A bird carved from wood was fastened to the railing; he felt he wanted to pull it off and toss it away into the darkness.

  – All of that happened because you hung around her, followed her everywhere, forced yourself on her. In the stable, among the horses …

  He stood there a while longer, looking down at the old man
. Then he opened Khalid Chadar’s mouth and poured more water into it. Emptied the whole jug down his throat, pulled the duvet over the gurgling, staring face and slipped away.

  A thin sliver of moon was visible above the river as he walked down Erleveien. Only one thing left now, he thought, and when had he last felt this calm, this relaxed? The garage door was wide open and the journalist’s car wasn’t there. He knew how he was going to do it. It had thought itself out inside him.

  – Now you’d best tell me what it is you’re up to, Dan-Levi, exclaimed Solveig at the other end of the phone, her voice sounding beyond exasperation.

  While he told her what he had discovered about the fires, he played with the associative diagram that lay spread on the desk in front of him.

  When he had finished she said: – Well that sounds completely crazy.

  He knew that. – You don’t have to believe me, Solveig, he said in his own defence. – I’m only asking you to do me a favour. You must know someone who worked in Vollen nursery school before you. I want to know if Kai Hammer went there. This must have been in the early eighties.

  – Have you talked to the police? she asked.

  He mentioned his conversation with Roar Horvath. – I need to find out about Vollen before I call him again. Can you help me?

  – I’ll make a couple of phone calls. This is important, Dan-Levi.

  He knew it, but it wasn’t until she said it that he realised the extent of what he was involved in. He turned the piece of paper over and made a new diagram. In the centre he wrote Kai Hammer.

  Kai used one of the bottles of lighter fluid on the garden shed. He took his time, allowed it to soak into the dry woodwork, put down three ignition devices. He glanced at his watch. Twenty to eleven. He crouched in the corner, unscrewed the top again, inhaled the smell. Purity through fire, he thought. Elsa’s words. She didn’t know what they would lead to. He was the one to show her.

  Almost fifteen minutes passed. He heard the sound of the front door opening, and then the voice of the woman of the house. He knew her name, but stopped himself from thinking it. She said something to the dog, clearly trying to get it to calm down. It must have picked up the scent of the lighter fluid, and for a moment he feared its nose would lead it out to the shed where he was waiting. He thought he could hear it by the corner of the house, snuffling and straining, but the woman jerked it back, and shortly afterwards he saw her silhouette out on the road.