The Kingdom

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Oh my God, Raymond,’ was all she said.

  ‘That pile of planks should have been shifted a long time ago,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking I’ll get it done tomorrow. Then we’ll have a word with Carl. We can’t have him hurting himself like that and not telling us. Rusty nails – that can mean blood poisoning and God knows what else.’

  ‘We’d better talk to him. And tell Roy to keep an eye out for his little brother.’

  ‘That won’t be necessary, it’s all Roy ever does. Actually I think it might even be a bit unhealthy, the way he looks out for him all the time.’

  ‘Unhealthy?’

  ‘They’re like a married couple.’

  Pause. Now here it comes, I thought.

  ‘Carl has to learn to stand on his own two feet,’ said Dad. ‘I’ve been thinking, it’s about time the boys each had a room of their own.’

  ‘But we don’t have the space.’

  ‘Come on, Margit. You know we can’t afford the bathroom you want between the bedrooms, but moving a couple of walls around for an extra bedroom won’t cost all that much. I can have it done in two or three weeks.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I’ll start this weekend.’

  Obviously the decision had been taken long before he aired this idea of a separation to Mum. What Carl and I might think was irrelevant. I bunched my fist and bit back my curses. I hated him, hated him. I trusted Carl to keep his mouth shut, but that wouldn’t be enough. The sheriff. The school. Mum. Dad. It was out of control, too many people who knew something, saw something and suddenly understood everything. Soon the tidal wave of shame would wash over us, dragging us all down with it. The shame, the shame, the shame. It was unendurable. None of us would be able to endure it.

  13

  THE FRITZ NIGHT.

  Carl and I never called it that, but that was the name I gave it in my own head.

  It was a blisteringly hot autumn day. I was twenty years old. Two years had passed since the Cadillac with Mum and Dad inside had gone down into Huken.

  ‘Feeling a little better now?’ asked Sigmund Olsen and swung the rod above his head. The line flew out, the reel made a clattering sound, descending in pitch, like some kind of bird I’d never heard before.

  I didn’t answer, just followed the spinner with my eye as it glinted momentarily in the sunlight before disappearing beneath the surface of the water, so far from the boat we were sitting in I couldn’t hear if it made a splash. I wanted to ask why you had to cast the spinner so far away when you could just as well move the boat over to where you wanted it to go. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that it looks more like a living fish if it’s swimming more or less horizontal when you reel it in. I don’t know the first thing about fishing and don’t plan to find out either, so I kept my mouth shut.

  ‘Because even though it doesn’t always seem that way, it’s actually true what people say, that time heals all wounds,’ the sheriff said as he brushed his mop of hair off his sunglasses. ‘A few of them anyway,’ he added.

  I had no answer to that.

  ‘How’s Bernard?’ he asked.

  ‘Doing fine,’ I said, there being no way I could know then he only had months left to live.

  ‘I hear you and your brother are mostly living up at Opgard and not so much at Bernard’s, like the childcare people said?’

  I had no answer to that either.

  ‘Well, anyway, you’re old enough now for that not to matter any more, so I’m not going to make a fuss about it. Carl’s still at school, isn’t he?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said.

  ‘And he’s doing all right?’

  ‘Yes.’ What else could I say? It wasn’t a porky. Carl said he still thought about Mum a lot, and he could spend entire days and evenings alone in the winter garden where he sat to do his homework and read over and over again the two American novels Dad had brought back to Norway with him, An American Tragedy and The Great Gatsby. I never saw him reading any other proper novels, but he loved those two, especially An American Tragedy, and some evenings he would sit and read to me from it and translate the difficult words.

  Once he claimed to have heard Mum and Dad screaming from Huken, but I told him it was only ravens. I felt uneasy when he said he had nightmares about the two of us ending up in prison. But gradually things calmed down. He was still pale and thin, but he ate well, and he was shooting up, pretty soon he was a head taller than me.

  So, incredibly enough, things had fallen into place. Calmed down. I could hardly believe it. The end of the world had come and gone, and we had survived. A fair few of us anyway. Were the ones who perished what Dad used to call collateral damage? Unintentional fatalities, but necessary when there’s a war to be won? I don’t know. I don’t even know if the war was won. There was certainly a ceasefire, and if a ceasefire lasts long enough it’s easy to confuse it with peace. That’s what things felt like the day before the Fritz night.

  ‘I used to bring Kurt along,’ said Olsen. ‘But I don’t think he’s all that interested in fishing.’

  ‘Never,’ I said, as though I found the thought incredible.

  ‘Tell the truth, I don’t think he’s that interested in anything I do. What about you, Roy? You gonna be a car mechanic?’

  I didn’t know why he’d taken me out on Lake Budal in that dinghy of his. Maybe he thought it would get me to relax. Say something I hadn’t said when I was being interrogated. Or maybe it was simply that as sheriff he felt a certain responsibility and wanted to have a talk, find out how things were going.

  ‘Yes, why not?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, because you’ve always liked tinkering about with things,’ he said. ‘Right now all Kurt’s interested in is girls. Always some new one he’s off out to meet. What about you and Carl? Any girls on the radar for you two?’

  He let his question drift while I peered into the darkness beneath the surface of the water, trying to spot the spinner.

  ‘I don’t think you’ve ever had a girlfriend, have you?’

  I shrugged. There’s a difference between asking a twenty-year-old if he has a girlfriend and if he’s ever had a girlfriend. And Sigmund Olsen knew that. Have to wonder how old he was when he styled that moptop of his. Guess it must have worked for him anyway.

  ‘Haven’t seen anything that takes my fancy,’ I said. ‘No point having a girlfriend just to say you have.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Olsen. ‘And some people don’t even want girls at all. To each his own.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. If only he knew how true that was. But no one did. Only Carl.

  ‘So long as no one else gets hurt,’ said Olsen.

  ‘Sure.’ I wondered what we were actually talking about and how long this fishing trip was going to last. I had a car at the repair shop that was supposed to be ready by tomorrow and we were a bit too far from land for my taste. Lake Budal was big and it was deep. For a joke Dad called it the great unknown because it was the nearest thing we had to a sea. At school we’d learned that wind and inflow and outflow of three rivers created horizontal currents in Lake Budal, but the really scary thing was that the differences in temperature in the water – especially in the spring – brewed up strong vertical currents. I don’t know if they were enough to suck you down into the depths if you were so keen you went for a swim in March, but we sat wide-eyed in class and imagined they were. Maybe that’s the reason I’d never really felt comfortable either in the lake or on it. When Carl and I tested out that diving equipment we did it in one of the smaller mountain lakes where there were no currents and where we could swim ashore if the boat went over.

  ‘Do you remember when we had a chat just after your parents died, and me saying that a lot of people hide the fact that they’re suffering from depression?’ Olsen reeled in the dripping line.

  ‘Yes,’ I
said.

  ‘You do? Good memory. Well, I’ve had a taste of what it’s like to be depressed myself.’

  ‘Have you?’ I said, a note of surprise in my voice since I supposed that was what he was expecting to hear.

  ‘Even been on medication for it.’ He looked at me and smiled. ‘It’s gotta be OK to admit that when even prime ministers do it. Anyway, it was a long time ago now.’

  ‘Blimey.’

  ‘But I’ve never thought of taking my own life,’ he said. ‘Know what it would take for me to do that? For me to just end it all and leave a wife and two kids behind?’

  I swallowed. Something told me the ceasefire was in danger.

  ‘Shame,’ he said. ‘What d’you think, Roy?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘No.’ I gave a dry-nosed snuffle. ‘What are you actually fishing for here?’ I held his gaze for a couple of seconds before nodding at the water. ‘Cod and flounder, coalfish and salmon?’

  He did something with the reel, locked it I think, and wedged the rod between the bottom of the boat and one of those things you sit on. Took off his sunglasses. Hoisted up his dungarees by the belt. There was a mobile phone in a leather holder dangling from it. Every once in a while he’d check it. He fixed his eyes on me.

  ‘Your parents were conservative people,’ he said. ‘Strict Christians.’

  ‘Not so sure about that,’ I said.

  ‘They were members of the Methodist Church.’

  ‘That was mostly just something my dad brought with him from the USA.’

  ‘Your parents were not exactly tolerant of homosexuality’

  ‘Mum didn’t really have any problem with it, but my dad was dead against it. Unless they were Americans and standing for election as Republicans.’ I wasn’t kidding, just repeating word for word what Dad had said himself, without mentioning that later he added Japanese soldiers to his shortlist, since they were – as he put it – worthy opponents. He said that as though he’d fought in the war himself. What Dad admired was the ritual of hara-kiri. He obviously believed it was something all Japanese soldiers did whenever the situation called for it. ‘See what a small population can achieve once they’ve realised there’s no option to fail,’ Dad said to me once as I sat and watched him polishing his hunting knife. ‘Once they’ve understood that whoever fails has to sever himself from the body of society, like a cancer.’ I could have told Olsen that. But why should I?

  Olsen coughed. ‘What’s your own attitude towards homosexuality?’

  ‘My attitude? What’s to have an attitude about? What attitude should you have towards people with brown hair?’

  Olsen took hold of the rod again and went on turning the reel. It struck me then that you move your hand in the same way when you want to encourage people to go on talking, to expand on things, as people say. But I kept my mouth shut.

  ‘Let me be direct, Roy. Are you gay?’

  I don’t know why he switched from talking about ‘homosexuality’ to talking about being ‘gay’. Maybe he thought it was less liable to cause offence. I saw the lure glint down in the water, a muted and slightly protracted flash, as though light travels more slowly through water. ‘Are you coming on to me, Olsen?’

  He probably hadn’t seen that coming. He stopped reeling and jerked the rod up, staring at me in horror. ‘Eh? Fucking hell, no. I...’

  Just then the spinner broke the surface of the water, floating over the gunwale like a flying fish. It did a circuit of our heads before heading back towards the rod, landing softly on the back of Olsen’s head. The mop was clearly even thicker than it looked, because he didn’t even seem to have noticed it.

  ‘If I am gay,’ I said, ‘I haven’t come out the closet yet, otherwise you and everybody else in the village would have known within fifteen minutes. So that must mean I prefer the closet. The other possibility is that I’m not gay.’

  At first Olsen looked surprised. Then he seemed to be chewing over the logic of it.

  ‘I am the sheriff, Roy. I knew your father, and I can never get that suicide to add up. At least, not that he would take your mother with him.’

  ‘That’s because it wasn’t a suicide,’ I said in a low voice, at the same time screaming the words inside my head. ‘I keep saying, he didn’t make the corner.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Olsen rubbed his chin.

  He had something or other, the fucking cuckoo.

  ‘I spoke to Anna Olaussen a couple of days ago,’ he said. ‘You know, she used to be the nursing sister at the surgery. She’s in a care home now, got Alzheimer’s. She’s my wife’s cousin, so we called in to see her. While my wife was out getting some water for the flowers Anna said to me that there was one thing she had always regretted. That she had never broken her vow of confidentiality and told me about it when your brother Carl had been to the surgery and she had seen that he had anal ecchymosis. It means he had lacerations. Your brother didn’t want to tell her how it happened, but there aren’t that many options. On the other hand, Anna thought he seemed so calm about it when he said no, he hadn’t had sexual relations with a man, that she thought maybe it didn’t involve rape. That it may have been consensual. Because Carl was so...’ Olsen stared out over the water. The spinner dangling from the back of his head. ‘...well, such a pretty boy.’

  He turned to me again.

  ‘Anna didn’t tell me, but she did alert your mother and father, she said. And two days after she did so, your father drove the car over the edge and into Huken.’

  I averted my eyes from his penetrating gaze. Saw a seagull skimming low over the calm water, looking for prey.

  ‘As I say, Anna has dementia, and everything she says you have to take with a pinch of salt. But I related it to a warning note from the school a few years earlier, from a teacher who had twice noticed that Carl had blood on the seat of his trousers.’

  ‘Nails,’ I said in a low voice.

  ‘Missed that?’

  ‘Nails!’

  My voice floated over the strangely still surface of the water towards land. It struck the rock face and came bouncing back twice...ails...ails. Everything comes back at you, I thought.

  ‘I had hoped you might be able to help me shed light on why your father and mother didn’t want to live any more, Roy.’

  ‘It was an accident,’ I said. ‘Can we go back now?’

  ‘Roy, you must understand; I can’t just let this go. It’ll all come out sooner or later, so the best thing for you now is to tell me exactly what was going on between you and Carl. There’s no need to worry it’ll be used against you, because this isn’t an official interrogation in any judicial sense. It’s just you and me on a fishing trip. I’ll make it as easy as I can for everybody involved, and if you cooperate I’ll make sure any potential punishment is as lenient as possible. Because the way things are looking at the moment, this was going on while Carl was still underage. That means that you, being a year older, risk—’

  ‘Listen,’ I interrupted, my throat so tight my voice sounded as though it was coming up through a stovepipe, ‘I’ve a car that needs repairing, and it looks like you’re not going to get a bite today, sheriff.’

  Olsen looked at me for a long time, as though he wanted me to believe he could read me like an open book, as people say. Then he nodded, moved to lay the rod down in the boat and cursed as the hook bit and stretched his sunburnt neck below his mop of hair. He detached the hook with two fingers, and I saw a single drop of blood that quivered on the skin, but didn’t run anywhere. Olsen started the outboard motor, and five minutes later we pulled the dinghy up into the boathouse below their cabin. From there we drove to the village in Olsen’s Peugeot and he dropped me off at the repair shop. It was a bloody quiet fifteen-minute drive.

  * * *

  —

  I had only been work
ing on the Corolla for half an hour and was about to change the steering box when I heard the phone ringing in the car wash. A few moments later Uncle Bernard’s voice:

  ‘Roy, it’s for you. It’s Carl.’

  I dropped what I had in my hand. Carl didn’t call me at the repair shop. In our house we never rang anywhere unless there was a crisis.

  ‘What is it?’ I shouted above the sound of Bernard’s hosepipe, the note rising and falling all according to where the jet was hitting the car.

  ‘It’s Sheriff Olsen,’ said Carl. His voice was shaking.

  I understood it really was a crisis and steeled myself. Had that bastard already gone public with his suspicions that it was me, the big brother, who was Carl’s shirtlifter?

  ‘He’s disappeared,’ said Carl.

  ‘Disappeared?’ I laughed. ‘Rubbish. I saw him three-quarters of an hour ago.’

  ‘I mean it. And I think he’s dead.’

  I squeezed the phone hard. ‘What d’you mean, you think he’s dead?’

  ‘I mean I don’t know. Like I said, he’s disappeared. But I can just feel it, Roy. I’m pretty sure he’s dead.’

  Three thoughts struck me in quick succession. The first was that Carl had lost it completely. He didn’t sound even remotely pissed, and although he was a bit soft he wasn’t the oversensitive type who actually saw things. The second was that it would be almost absurdly convenient if Sheriff Sigmund Olsen had disappeared from the surface of the earth just when that was what I needed most. The third was that this was a repeat, this was Dog all over again. I had no choice. By betraying my little brother I had incurred a debt I was going to have to go on paying until I died. This was just another instalment falling due.

  14

  ‘THINGS CHANGED AFTER DAD DISAPPEARED,’ said Kurt Olsen as he placed a cup of coffee on the table in front of me. ‘It’s not like I was fated to be a policeman.’

  He sat down, brushed the blond quiff aside and started rolling a cigarette. We were sitting in a room that functioned as a cell but was obviously used for storing stuff too. Folders and documents were piled on the floor along the walls. Maybe the idea was that people held in custody could while away the time checking their own records and anybody else’s too while they sat here.