The Kingdom

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘But then things do look a bit different once your father’s gone, don’t they?’

  I took a swig of coffee. He’d pulled me in here for a test that he knew as well as me wouldn’t show any blood alcohol content. Now he was offering a truce. OK by me.

  ‘You sort of grow up overnight,’ said Kurt. ‘Because you have to. And you begin to understand something about the responsibility he had, and how you did everything you could to make his job more difficult for him. You ignored all his advice, dismissed what he thought and said, did all you could to be as unlike him as you could. Maybe because there’s something inside telling you that’s how you’re going to end up. As a copy of your father. Because we go round in circles. The only place we’re going is back where we came from. Everyone’s like that. I know you were interested in mountain birds. Carl brought some feathers to school that he’d got off you. We teased him about it.’ Kurt smiled as though at a fond memory. ‘Take these birds, Roy, they move about all over the place. Migrate, I think it’s called. But they never go anywhere their forefathers haven’t been before them. The same habitats and mating sites at the same damned times. Free as a bird? We’re kidding ourselves. It’s just something we like to believe. And we move around inside the same damned circle. We’re caged birds, but the cage is so big and the bars so thin we don’t see it.’

  He glanced over at me as though seeing if his monologue had had any effect. I considered giving the slow nod, but didn’t.

  ‘And it’s the same for you and me too, Roy. Big circles and little circles. The big circle is me taking over the sheriff’s office after my father. The little is that he had this one unsolved case he kept going back to, and I’ve got mine too. Mine is my own father’s disappearance. There are similarities, don’t you think? Two despairing or depressed men taking their own lives.’

  I shrugged and tried to look uninterested. Shit, was that all this was about – the disappearance of Sheriff Sigmund Olsen?

  ‘The difference being that, in my father’s case, there’s no body, and no exact location,’ said Kurt. ‘Only the lake.’

  ‘The great unknown,’ I said, nodding slowly.

  Kurt looked sharply at me. And then he too began to nod, in time to my own nodding, so that for a moment we were like two synchronised oil pumps.

  ‘And since the fact of the matter is that you were the next to last person to see my father alive, and your brother the last, I’ve got a few questions.’

  ‘I guess that’s something we all have,’ I said and took another swig of coffee. ‘But I’ve told you in detail about that fishing trip with your father – I’m sure you have a transcript of it here.’ I nodded towards the papers piled up against the wall. ‘And anyway, I’m here to take a blood alcohol test, aren’t I?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Kurt Olsen. He was done rolling his cigarette and put it away in his tobacco pouch. ‘So this isn’t an official interview. No notes will be taken, and there are no witnesses to anything that might be said here.’

  Just like that fishing trip, I thought.

  ‘What I’m quite specifically interested in is finding out what happened after my father dropped you off at the car repair shop at six o’clock, for you to work on a car.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘Quite specifically? I changed the steering box and the bearings on a Toyota Corolla. I think it was a 1989 model.’

  Kurt’s eyes stiffened, the truce was obviously under threat. I made a strategic withdrawal.

  ‘Your father drove up to the farm and talked to Carl. After he left Carl phoned me because the power was down and he couldn’t work out why. The generator is old and we’ve had a few earth faults. He’s not exactly a handyman so I drove up and fixed it. It took a few hours because it was getting dark, so it was late by the time I got back to the workshop.’

  ‘According to the transcript you got back there at eleven o’clock.’

  ‘Sounds about right. It was a long time ago.’

  ‘And a witness thinks he saw my father driving through the village at nine o’clock. But it was already dark and the person concerned can’t be sure.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘The question is: what was my father doing between six thirty, when he left the farm, according to Carl, and nine o’clock?’

  ‘There’s your riddle.’

  He stared at me. ‘Any theories?’

  I gave him a look of surprise. ‘Me? No.’

  I heard a car pull up outside. Must be the doctor. Kurt glanced at his watch. I was guessing he’d told him to take his time.

  ‘By the way, how did things work out with that car?’ Kurt asked casually.

  ‘Car?’

  ‘The Toyota Corolla.’

  ‘OK, I supppose.’

  ‘I’ve checked the interviews and who owned old Toyotas. You’re right, it was an ’89 model. Turns out Willumsen wanted it repaired before selling it on. Just enough so it would start, I’m guessing.’

  ‘Sounds about right,’ I said.

  ‘Only it didn’t.’

  ‘Eh?’ I exclaimed.

  ‘I talked to Willumsen yesterday. He remembered Bernard promising that you would have the car driveable. He remembers it clearly because the customer came a hundred kilometres to test-drive it and the repairs hadn’t been fixed the way you promised they would be.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I narrowed my eyes, trying to look like a man peering into the mists and darkness of the past. ‘Then I was probably delayed by the time it took me to find and fix that earth fault.’

  ‘Well, you certainly spent long enough on it.’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘I spoke to Grete Smitt day before yesterday. It’s amazing what everyday little trivia people remember when they can relate it to a special event, such as their sheriff being reported missing. She recalls waking up at five in the morning, looking out the window and seeing there was a light on in the workshop, and that your car was parked there.’

  ‘When you make a promise to a customer, you do everything you can to keep that promise,’ I said. ‘Even if you don’t succeed, it’s still a good rule of life.’

  Kurt Olsen glowered at me as though I’d just told a particularly offensive joke.

  ‘Yeah yeah,’ I said breezily. ‘So what’s happening about sending the guys down into Huken?’

  ‘We’ll have to see.’

  ‘Nerell advises against it?’

  ‘We’ll have to see,’ Olsen said again.

  The door opened. It was the doctor, Stanley Spind, the doctor who’d been an intern here and afterwards come back to work full-time, a guy from the Bible Belt. He was in his thirties, a friendly and outgoing man whose clothes and hair were artfully unkempt in an I-just-threw-these-on-and-they-seem-to-match-anyway sort of way and an I-didn’t-comb-my-hair-this-is-just-how-it-is fashion. His body was an odd mixture of firmness and softness, as though he’d bought the muscles somewhere. People said he was gay, and that he had a lover in Kongsberg with a wife and kids.

  ‘Ready for your blood test?’ he asked, ferociously rolling his ‘r’s’.

  ‘Looks like it,’ said Kurt Olsen without taking his eyes off me.

  * * *

  —

  I left with Stanley after he’d taken the blood sample.

  From the moment the doctor had entered the room Kurt Olsen had stopped talking about the case, confirming what he’d said earlier, that at this stage the investigation was still a purely private matter. Kurt gave me only the slightest nod of his head as we left.

  ‘I was at Årtun,’ said Stanley as we inhaled the fine, sharp evening air in the square outside the sheriff’s office. It was in the same featureless 1980s building that also housed the local authority offices. ‘Your brother certainly got everybody all fired up. So now maybe we’ll be getting a spa hotel?’

  ‘It’s
got to go through the council first.’

  ‘If they say yes then I definitely want in.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Can I drive you somewhere?’ asked Stanley.

  ‘No thanks, I’ll call Carl.’

  ‘Are you sure? It’s not too far out of my way.’ He might have held my gaze a fraction of a second too long. Or else, what’s just as likely, I’m a little paranoid.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Another time,’ he said and opened his car door. He’d obviously stopped locking his car after moving here, the way city people often do. They have the romantic idea that people in country villages don’t do that. They’re wrong. We lock our houses, boathouses and we definitely lock our cars. I watched the rear lights of his car disappearing as I took out my phone and set off on foot to meet Carl. When the Cadillac pulled up on the hard shoulder in front of me twenty minutes later, however, Shannon was at the wheel. She explained that Carl had broken out the champagne after they got home. And since he’d drunk most if it and she’d only had a taste, she’d persuaded him to let her drive.

  ‘You two celebrating that I was in jail?’ I asked.

  ‘He said he knew you would say that, and I was to say that he was celebrating that you were definitely going to be released. He’s good at finding reasons to celebrate.’

  ‘True,’ I said. ‘I envy him that too.’ I realised that the too was open to misunderstanding and was about to explain. Tell her that when I stressed envy, the too bit meant both that it was true and that I envied him his ability to compartmentalise, as people say. So, not too in the sense that there was something else that I also envied him for. But then I’ve always had a tendency to complicate things.

  ‘You think,’ said Shannon.

  ‘Not much,’ I said.

  She smiled. The wheel seemed enormous between her small hands.

  ‘Can you see properly?’ I asked, nodding towards the darkness that the cones of light swept away in front of us.

  ‘It’s called ptosis,’ she said. ‘It’s Greek for “to fall”. In my case it’s congenital. You can train your eye so there’s less chance of developing amblyopia, what people call “lazy eye”. I’m not lazy. I see everything.’

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  She changed down approaching the first hairpin bend. ‘For example I can see it’s a problem for you, to you it seems as if I’ve taken Carl away from you.’ She accelerated and a spray of gravel rattled under the wheel arch. For a moment I wondered whether to pretend I hadn’t heard what she’d just said. But I had the definite feeling that if I did, she’d just repeat it.

  I turned towards her.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, before I could get a word out.

  ‘Thanks?’

  ‘Thanks for everything you’re giving up. Thank you for being a wise and good man. I know how much you and Carl mean to each other. Besides being a complete stranger who’s married your brother I’ve pushed my way into your physical domain. I’ve quite literally taken over the place where you used to sleep. You should hate me.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, and took a deep breath. It had already been a very long day. ‘I’m not exactly known for being a good man. The real problem is that unfortunately there’s very little about you to hate.’

  ‘I’ve talked to a couple of the people who work for you.’

  ‘You have?’ I asked, genuinely surprised.

  ‘This is a very small place,’ said Shannon. ‘I probably speak to people a bit more than you do. And you’re wrong. You are thought of as a good man.’

  I snorted. ‘Then you haven’t talked to anyone whose teeth I’ve knocked out.’

  ‘Maybe not. But even that was something you did to protect your brother.’

  ‘I don’t think you should expect too much of me,’ I said. ‘I’ll only let you down.’

  ‘I think I know already what to expect of you,’ she said. ‘The advantage of having a lazy eye is that people reveal themselves to you, they think you’re not listening properly.’

  ‘So you think you know all there is to know about Carl, is that what you’re saying?’

  She smiled. ‘Love is blind, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘In Norwegian we say love makes you blind.’

  ‘Aha.’ She gave a low laugh. ‘But that’s even more precise than my English love is blind. Which people use in the completely wrong way anyway.’

  ‘They do?’

  ‘They use it to mean that we see only the good side of people we love. But actually it refers to the fact that Cupid wears a blindfold when he shoots his arrows. Meaning that the arrows strike at random, and it isn’t us who chooses who to fall in love with.’

  ‘But is that right? At random?’

  ‘Are we still talking about Carl and me?’

  ‘For example.’

  ‘Well, maybe not at random, but falling in love isn’t always a voluntary thing.

  ‘I’m really not so sure that we mountain people are as practical in matters of love and death as you seem to think we are.’

  The headlights strafed the wall of the house as the car climbed the final incline. A face, ghostly white in the light, its eyes black holes, stared out at us from behind the living-room window.

  She stopped, shoved the gearstick into P, turned off the lights and the engine.

  Silence descends so quickly up here when you turn off the only source of sound. Like a sudden roar. I remained in my seat. So did Shannon.

  ‘How much do you know?’ I asked. ‘About us. About this family?’

  ‘Pretty much everything, I think,’ she said. ‘As a condition of marrying and coming here I told him he would have to tell me absolutely everything. Including the bad stuff. Especially the bad stuff. And anything he didn’t tell me I’ve seen for myself since I came here.’ Shannon pointed to her half-drawn eyelid.

  ‘And you...’ I swallowed. ‘You feel you can live with the you know what?’

  ‘I grew up on a street where brothers fucked sisters. Fathers raped daughters. Sons repeated the sins of the fathers and became parricides. But life goes on.’

  I nodded slowly, and not ironically, as I pulled out my tin of snuff. ‘Guess it does. But it seems a lot to put up with.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Shannon. ‘It is. But everyone has something. And it was a long time ago. People change, I truly believe that.’

  I sat there and wondered why it was I had imagined that this was the worst thing that could happen – that some outsider found out – when it just didn’t feel that way. And the answer was obvious. Shannon Alleyne Opgard wasn’t an outsider.

  ‘Family,’ I said as I wedged tobacco in below my upper lip. ‘That means a lot to you, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Everything,’ she replied without hesitation.

  ‘Does love of family make you blind too?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘In the kitchen, when you talked about Barbados, I thought you said you believed that people’s loyalty is attached more to family and feelings than principles. More than political views and people’s ideas in general of right and wrong. Did I get that right?’

  ‘Yes. Family is the only principle. And right and wrong proceed from that. Everything else is secondary.’

  ‘Is it?’

  She peered out through the windscreen at our little house. ‘We had a professor of ethics in Bridgetown. He told us that Justitia, who symbolises the rule of law, holds a pair of scales and a sword in her hands that stand for justice and punishment, and that she wears a blindfold, like Cupid. The usual interpretation is that this means all people are equal in the eyes of the law. That the law doesn’t take sides, doesn’t concern itself with family and love, only the law.’

  She turned and looked at me, her snow-white face glowing in the dark interior of the car.

 
; ‘But with a blindfold you can see neither the scales nor where your sword strikes. He told us that in Greek mythology, blindfolded eyes meant only the inner eye was used, the eye that found the answer within. Where the wise and blind see only what they love, and what’s on the outside has no meaning.’

  I nodded slowly. ‘We – you, me and Carl – are family?’

  ‘We’re not blood, but we are family.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Then as a family member you can join Carl and me when we have our councils of war, instead of just listening to the stovepipe.’

  ‘The stovepipe?’

  ‘A turn of phrase.’

  Carl had walked round from the front door and was now heading towards us across the gravel.

  ‘And why council of war?’ asked Shannon.

  ‘Because this is war,’ I said.

  I looked at her. Both eyes flashed like a battle-ready Athena. God, how beautiful she was.

  And then I told her about the Fritz night.

  15

  I SPOKE INTO THE PHONE hoping Uncle Bernard couldn’t hear me over the sound of the hosepipe.

  ‘Carl, what d’you mean, you’re certain he’s dead?’

  ‘He must have fallen a long way. And I can’t hear anything from down there. But I can’t be sure, he’s disappeared.’

  ‘Disappeared where?’

  ‘Down Huken, of course. He’s gone, even when I lean over the edge I can’t see him.’

  ‘Carl, stay right where you are. Don’t say a word to anyone, don’t touch anything, don’t do anything, OK?’

  ‘How quickly can you—’

  ‘Fifteen minutes. OK?’

  I hung up, left the car wash and looked up towards Geitesvingen. You can’t see the track itself where it’s hewn into the mountain, but if someone’s driving there you can see the top half of the car. If a person is standing on the edge of the drop and wearing brightly coloured clothing you can see them on a clear day, but now the sun was too low.