The Kingdom

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Quite a few loose boulders on the slope,’ Erik Nerell remarked.

  ‘They could have fallen down there a thousand years ago, or a hundred,’ said Kurt Olsen ‘There’s none on top of the car. And I don’t see any marks or dents in the chassis either, so for all we know not a single bloody rock has fallen down there since the one that hit the climber.’

  ‘He’s not climbing any more,’ said Nerell as he peered at the screen. ‘His arm just dangles by his side and it’s only half the size it used to be. He’s been on painkillers for years. Doses big enough to knock a horse out.’

  ‘At least he’s still alive,’ Olsen interrupted impatiently. His face was flushed. When he said ‘alive’, did he mean, unlike those who had been sitting in the Cadillac? No, it was just something he came out with. And yet there was something else there. Was it the old sheriff he was talking about? Sigmund Olsen, his own father?

  ‘Most of what falls down into this chute is bound to hit the car,’ said Olsen and pointed to the screen. ‘And yet it’s overgrown with moss. Not a mark on it. That tells us its history. History is something we can learn from. Lines that can be traced backwards can be traced forwards too.’

  ‘Until you get a rock on your shoulder,’ I said. ‘Or your head.’

  I saw Erik Nerell nodding slowly as he scratched his chin. Olsen flushed even more.

  ‘As I said, we hear loose rocks down in Huken all the time.’ I was looking directly at Olsen, but my words were obviously directed at Erik Nerell. He was the one who was about to become a father. He was the one responsible for an expert assessment of whether or not it was justifiable to send a crew down there to investigate the wreck. Clearly Olsen couldn’t ignore his advice without losing his job should something happen. ‘Maybe the rocks don’t hit the wreck directly,’ I said. ‘But they land beside it. Presumably that’s where your people will be standing?’

  I didn’t need to hear Olsen’s reply. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that particular battle had already been won.

  I stood on Geitesvingen as the sound of their cars faded. Watched a raven glide by, waited until everything was silent once again.

  Shannon, dressed as usual in black, was leaning against the worktop when I came in. Again it struck me that despite an outfit that accentuated the almost boyish skinniness of her body, there was something distinctively feminine about her. Her small hands warmed themselves around a steaming cup with the string of a tea bag dangling over the rim.

  ‘Who was that?’ she asked.

  ‘The sheriff. He wants to examine the wreckage. He thinks he needs to find out why Dad went over the edge into Huken.’

  ‘And doesn’t he?’

  I shrugged. ‘I saw it all. He didn’t brake until it was too late. You have to brake in time.’

  ‘You have to brake in time,’ she repeated with a slow, farmer’s nod of the head. Looked like she was already picking up our body language too. It made me think of those science-fiction films again.

  ‘Carl said it’s not possible to retrieve the wreckage. Does it bother you having it there?’

  ‘Apart from the pollution aspect? No.’

  ‘No?’ She lifted the mug with both hands again, took a sip of tea. ‘Why not?’

  ‘If they’d died in the double bed we wouldn’t have thrown that out either.’

  She smiled. ‘Is that being sentimental or being unsentimental?’

  I smiled too. Hardly noticed that lazy eyelid of hers any more. Or maybe it didn’t hang as low as it did when she arrived and was still tired from all the travelling.

  ‘I think the practical circumstances dictate more of our emotional lives than we realise,’ I said. ‘Even though novels are about unattainable love, nine out of ten fall in love with someone they know they can have.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Eight out of ten,’ I said.

  I stood beside her and noticed that she watched me as I used the yellow measuring spoon to spoon the coffee powder into the pot.

  ‘Practical in death and love,’ I said. ‘That’s the way it is when things are tight the way they are for the people round here. It’s probably not normal for you.’

  ‘Why should it not be normal?’

  ‘Barbados is a wealthy island, you said. You drove a Buick, went to university. Moved to Toronto.’

  She seemed to hesitate for a moment before replying. ‘It’s called social mobility.’

  ‘Are you saying you grew up poor?’

  ‘Yes and no.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’m a redleg.’

  ‘Redleg?’

  ‘You’ve probably heard of the lower-class whites in the Appalachian mountains in the USA. What people call hillbillies?’

  ‘Deliverance. Banjos and incest.’

  ‘That’s the stereotype, yes. Unfortunately some of it’s accurate, just as it is with the redlegs, the lower-class whites in Barbados. The redlegs are the descendants of the Irish and the Scots who came to the island in the seventeenth century, a lot of them transported convicts, same as in Australia. In practice they were slaves, and it was they who made up the workforce until Barbados began to import slaves from Africa. But once slavery was abolished and the descendants of the Africans began to move up in society, most of the white redlegs got left behind. Most of us live in our own shanty town. Rønner, I think that’s what you say in Norwegian. We’re a society on the outside of society, stuck in a poverty trap. Zero education, alcoholism, incest, sickness. The redlegs in St John on Barbados rarely own anything, apart from the few who have farms and small shops serving the wealthier blacks. Other redlegs live off the state, financed by the black and brown Bajanere. Know how you can recognise us? The teeth. If we have any then they’re usually brown from...decay?’ she concluded, using the English word.

  ‘Råte,’ I supplied in Norwegian. ‘But your teeth are...’

  ‘I had a mother who made sure I got proper food and brushed my teeth every day. She was determined that I should have a better life. When she died, my grandmother took over the job.’

  ‘Jesus.’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  She blew on her tea. ‘If nothing else, we redlegs are proof that it’s not just the blacks and Latinos who never manage to escape the poverty trap.’

  ‘At least you got out.’

  ‘Yes, and I’m racist enough to believe that it was my African genes that got me out.’

  ‘You? African?’

  ‘My mother and grandmother were both Afro-Bajanere.’ She laughed when she saw my incredulous expression. ‘My hair and skin are from an Irish redleg who drank himself to death before I was three years old.’ She shrugged her narrow shoulders. ‘Even though both my grandmother and my mother lived in St John and were married respectively to an Irishman and a Scot, I was never reckoned to be a proper redleg. Partly because we owned a little land, but especially after I matriculated at the University of the West Indies in Bridgetown. I wasn’t just the first from my family to go to university, I was the first in the whole neighbourhood.’

  I looked at Shannon. It was the longest speech I’d heard her make about herself since she came here. Maybe the reason was simple: I hadn’t asked for her story. Or at least not since that time she and Carl were in the bunk beneath me, and she said she’d rather hear me talk. Maybe she wanted to check me out first. And now she had.

  I coughed. ‘Must have been quite something to make a choice like that.’

  Shannon shook her head. ‘It was my grandmother’s decision. She got the whole family, uncles and aunts and all, to spill my school fees.’

  ‘Split your school fees.’

  ‘Split my school fees, and later on for my studies in Toronto. The reason my grandmother drove me back and forth to the university was that we couldn’t afford for me to live in the city. One lecturer told me I was an example of the
new social mobility in Barbados. I told him that even after four hundred years redlegs were still sloshing about in social cement, and I have my family to thank, not social reformers. I’m a redleg girl who owes everything to her family, and I always will be. So even though I’ve lived better in Toronto, Opgard is still luxury to me. You understand?’

  I nodded. ‘What happened to the Buick?’

  She looked at me as if to check I wasn’t trying to be funny. ‘Not “what happened to your grandmother”?’

  ‘She’s alive and doing well,’ I said.

  ‘How d’you know that?’

  ‘Your voice when you talk about her. It’s steady.’

  ‘So, car mechanic and psychologist?’

  ‘Car mechanic,’ I said. ‘The Buick’s gone, am I right?’

  ‘By mistake my grandmother left the gear lever in drive when she parked outside our house. It rolled off an incline and was smashed to pieces in the rubbish dump below. I cried for days. Did you hear that in my voice when I was talking about it?’

  ‘I did. A Buick Roadmaster 1954. I can understand that.’

  She dipped her head from one side to the other as though she was studying me from several angles, as though I were a bloody Rubik’s cube.

  ‘Cars and beauty,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘You know, last night I dreamed about a book I read a long time ago. I’m sure it was because of that wreck down in Huken. Crash, it was called. J. G. Ballard. About people getting turned on by car crashes. By the crashes, and the injuries. Their own and others’. Did you ever see the film?’

  I tried to think.

  ‘David Cronenberg,’ she said, trying to help me out.

  I shook my head.

  She hesitated. As though regretting she had started a conversation about something that couldn’t possibly interest a guy who worked at a service station.

  ‘I prefer books to films,’ I said to help her out. ‘But that’s one I haven’t read.’

  ‘In the book there’s a description of a blind corner on Mulholland Drive where cars drive over the edge at night and fall down the cliff into a wilderness. It’s too expensive to salvage the cars so a sort of car cemetery has built up down there which gets higher every year. In time there won’t be any drop there at all, anyone driving over the edge will be saved by the mountain of wrecks.’

  I nodded slowly. ‘Saved by a car wreck. Maybe I should read it. Or see the film.’

  ‘Actually I prefer the film,’ she said. ‘The book is a first-person narrative and that makes it perverse in a way that’s subjective and...’ She stopped. ‘How do you say intrusive in Norwegian?’

  ‘Sorry, we’ll need to ask Carl for that,’ I said.

  ‘He’s gone to have a word with Jo Aas.’

  I looked at the kitchen table. The plans were still lying there, and Carl hadn’t taken his laptop with him either. Perhaps he thought he had a better chance of convincing Aas that the village needed a spa hotel if he didn’t swamp him with material.

  ‘Påtrengende?’ I suggested.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘The film isn’t as påtrengende. As a rule the camera is more objective than the pen. And Cronenberg managed to get hold of the essence of it.’

  ‘Which is?’

  A sort of spark flared in her good eye, and her voice became animated now she realised I was genuinely interested.

  ‘The beauty of a thing spoiled,’ she said. ‘The partially destroyed Greek statue is extra beautiful because from what isn’t damaged we can see how beautiful it could have been, should have been, must have been.’ She pressed the palms of her hands against the worktop as though about to hoist herself up onto it, sit there with her back arched the way she had at the party. Tiny dancer. Christ.

  ‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘I should try to get back to sleep.’

  The spark in her eye went off like an indicator.

  ‘What about your coffee?’ she said, and I could hear the disappointment in her voice. Now that she’d finally got someone to talk to. They probably talk to each other all the time over there in Barbados.

  ‘I need another couple of hours, I can feel it,’ I said, turned off the hot plate and pulled the pan off the heat.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, and took her hands off the worktop.

  I lay in bed for half an hour. Tried to sleep, to think of nothing. Heard the tapping of the laptop keyboard up through the hole, the rustle of paper. Not a chance.

  I repeated the ritual. Got up, dressed, hurried out. Called out ‘See you!’ before the door slammed shut behind me. It must have sounded as though I was running from something.

  10

  ‘OH, HI,’ SAID EGIL AS he opened the door. He looked ashamed. Must have been because he knew I could hear the sounds of a war game and the excited voices of his pals from the living room. ‘Yeah, actually I’m better now,’ he said quickly. ‘I can work tonight.’

  ‘Take as long as you need to get well,’ I said. ‘That’s not why I came.’

  He seemed to be searching his conscience to find out what that might possibly be. Clearly there were a couple of things to choose between.

  ‘What does Moe come in to buy?’ I asked.

  ‘Moe?’ Egil said it as though he’d never heard the name.

  ‘The roofer,’ I said. ‘He asked after you.’

  Egil smiled, but there was fear in his eyes.

  ‘What does he come in for?’ I repeated, as though I thought Egil might have forgotten the question.

  ‘Nothing special,’ said Egil.

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  ‘Hard to remember.’

  ‘But he pays cash?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If you can remember that then you can remember what it is he buys. Come on.’

  Egil stared at me. And in that sheep-like gaze I saw a prayer for permission to confess.

  I sighed. ‘This is something that’s been eating away at you, Egil.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘He’s got something on you, is that it? Is he threatening you in some way?’

  ‘Moe? No.’

  ‘Then why are you covering up for him?’

  Egil stood there blinking. Behind him, in the living room, a war was raging. I saw chaos behind that desperate look.

  ‘He...he...’

  I really didn’t have the patience for this, but for added effect I lowered my voice. ‘Now don’t make anything up, Egil.’

  The boy’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a lift and he’d taken a half-step back into the hallway, looked almost ready to slam the door shut in panic, but then stopped. Maybe he saw something in my eyes, something his brain connected to what he’d heard about guys getting their lights punched out in Årtun. And he gave in.

  ‘He let me keep the change for whatever it was he bought.’

  I nodded. Naturally I had told Egil when he started working for me that we don’t accept tips, that if the customer insisted then we punch the amount into the till and leave the money out for the times when one of us made a mistake and handed over too much change. Usually that would be Egil, but he might have forgotten, and right now I wasn’t about to tell him; what I wanted was to have my suspicions confirmed.

  ‘And what did he buy?’

  ‘We didn’t do anything illegal,’ said Egil.

  I didn’t bother to tell him that him using the imperfect like that told me he understood that whatever arrangement he might have had with Moe was as of now over, and was therefore unlikely to have been legit. I waited.

  ‘EllaOne,’ said Egil.

  So that was it. The morning-after pill.

  ‘How often?’ I asked.

  ‘Once a week,’ said Egil.

  ‘Did he ask you not to tell anyone?’

  Egil nodded. He was pale. Pale and stupid
, but not mentally defective, as people call it. I mean, they change the words like they change dirty underwear, so probably they call it something else now, but anyway: Egil had probably managed to put two and two together, even if Moe had gambled he wouldn’t. I saw it now, that he wasn’t just ashamed of himself, he was totally mortified. There’s no heavier punishment than that. And I say that as someone who’s drunk cup after cup of that bitter stuff. Someone who knows that there’s nothing a judge could do that would add to that shame.

  ‘Then let’s say you’re sick today and good tomorrow,’ I said. ‘OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, at the second time of trying to get sound into his voice.

  I didn’t hear the door close behind me. He was probably still standing there watching me. Wondering what was going to happen now.

  * * *

  —

  I entered Grete Smitt’s hair salon. It was like emerging from a time machine that had landed in the USA straight after the war. There was an enormous and much patched red leather barber’s chair in one corner. According to Grete, Louis Armstrong had once sat in it. The other corner housed a salon hairdryer from the 1950s, one of those helmets on a stand that the old biddies sit under while reading magazines and gossiping in old American movies, though it always makes me think of Jonathan Pryce and the lobotomy scene in Brazil. Grete uses that helmet for something she calls a shampoo and set, which is when you first wash the hair with a special shampoo, put in the curlers and then dry the hair slowly by sticking your head up inside this helmet, preferably with a headscarf so you don’t touch any of the elements which in her fifties version look like the glowing insides of a toaster. According to Grete, a shampoo and set was now retro-hip and on its way back in again. The thing is, here in Os it had probably never really been away in the first place. Anyway, if you ask me, Grete herself was probably the most frequent user of that helmet, to maintain those rat-brown permed curls that hung from her head.