The Kingdom

by Jo Nesbo

  I lay on my stomach and reached my arm in under the rocks but it wasn’t long enough, my fingers scraped against granite or thin air. Shit! If I found it, they could find it. I had to move that fucking rock out of the way. I pressed my back against it, bent my knees, wedged my feet against the rock face and heaved. It didn’t move.

  ‘They’re just taking the bend at Japansvingen,’ called Carl.

  I tried again. Felt the sweat break out on my forehead, my muscles and sinews straining to breaking point. Was that a slight movement in the rock? I heaved again and felt it, yes, there was movement. In my back. I yelled in pain. Jeeezus! Slumped down. Was I still able to move? Yes, dammit, it just hurt like fuck.

  ‘Roy, they’re—’

  ‘When I say drive put your foot down and drive forward two metres!’

  I jerked on the rope. I didn’t have enough slack to twine it more than once around the rock, fastening it with what Dad called a bowline knot. I stood behind the rock, ready to push if the Volvo managed to lift the rock slightly.

  ‘Drive!’

  I heard the engine revving, and suddenly a hail of small stones was falling over me. One struck me right on top of the head. But I could feel the rock moving and I pushed up against it like an American linebacker. The rock stood poised and swaying as gravel from the spinning tyres of the Volvo up there rained down. And then it toppled over, and a whiff of something like rotting bad breath rose up from the ground. I had a glimpse of insects scurrying away from the sudden light as I sank to my knees and took hold of the phone. At that same instant there was a loud noise. I looked up, just in time to see the frayed end of the rope shooting up the rock face as the rock began toppling back towards me. I leapt back and landed on my arse, shaking and out of breath, glaring at the rock that had returned to its place, like a jaw I had just escaped from.

  Up there the Volvo had stopped, probably realising that the resistance had stopped. Instead now I heard another engine, the tractor-like rumble of a Land Rover climbing a steep incline. The sound carried well, they could still be a couple of turns away, but the end of the rope was now seven or eight metres away up the rock face.

  ‘Back up!’ I called as I loosened what was left of the rope around the rock, coiled it and squeezed it into my jacket pocket on top of Olsen’s old phone.

  The hanging end of the rope was closer now, but it was still almost three metres up, and I realised Carl had reversed all the way to the edge. With my good left hand I found a hold to climb up, and felt the whole rock move. I was the one who’d lied about all the loose rocks I said we heard falling here – but it was true, they were loose! Still I had no choice. I put my right hand on a ledge, and fortunately the pain in my back was so great I didn’t even notice the throbbing middle finger. I managed to get my feet on top of the rock, my hand found a hold above it, and I moved my legs upward, my arse sticking out like a caterpillar until I straightened up and got hold of the rope with my right hand. And then what? I had to use the other hand to hold on with, and I couldn’t be tying any knot with just one hand.

  ‘Roy!’ It was Shannon’s voice. ‘They’re coming round the final bend.’

  ‘Drive!’ I shouted, grabbing onto the rope half a metre higher up at the same time as I managed to wind it one and a half times around my wrist. ‘Drive! Drive!!’ I heard the message being passed on up there, and as I felt the rope begin to pull me up I moved my left hand onto the rope, at the same time tensing my stomach muscles, raising my legs and planting my feet against the rock face. And then I ran straight to heaven. I’d told Carl to accelerate hard not because Olsen and his crew were approaching but because there is a limit to the number of seconds you can hang on to a rope using just your hands. And I like to tell myself that on that morning I set some kind of world record for the hundred metres vertical. And like the world’s best sprinters, I don’t think I breathed even once the whole way. I thought only of the drop growing below me, death that was ever more certain with every second that passed, every ten metres covered. And when I jerked up over the top of Geitesvingen I didn’t let go but held on tight and let myself be dragged across the gravel for several metres before I felt it was safe to let go. Shannon helped me to my feet, we ran to the car and dived in. ‘Drive to the back of the barn,’ I said.

  Just as we turned onto the muddy field I caught a glimpse of Olsen’s Land Rover rounding the bend at Geitesvingen and hoped that he neither saw us nor the rope that twisted like an anaconda through the grass behind the Volvo.

  I sat in the front passenger seat, fighting to catch my breath as Carl jumped out and started to coil the rope. Shannon ran to the corner of the barn and looked down at Geitesvingen.

  ‘They’ve stopped down there,’ she said. ‘It looks like they’ve got a...what’s a beekeeper in Norwegian?’

  ‘Birøkter,’ said Carl. ‘They’re probably worried there might be wasps down there.’

  I laughed, and the shaking felt as though someone was sticking knives into my back.

  ‘Carl,’ I said quietly, ‘why did you say you were at Willumsen’s last night?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Willumsen lives in town. Erik and his missus who you met last night live out of town’

  Carl didn’t reply. ‘What do you think?’ he finally asked.

  ‘You want me to take a guess,’ I said. ‘So you can work out whether to confirm it instead of the truth?’

  ‘OK,’ said Carl, checking in the mirror that Shannon was still standing by the corner of the barn and watching Olsen and his crew. ‘I could have told you I needed to take a drive just to think. And that would’ve been true enough. Our main contractor suddenly raised his estimate yesterday by fifteen per cent.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘They’ve been up here. They’re postponing the start because they say we didn’t give them a proper description of the site conditions and how exposed to weather it is.’

  ‘And what does the bank say to that?’

  ‘They don’t know. And now that I’ve sold this whole enterprise to the participants for four hundred million, I can’t very well present them with a revised estimate of another sixty million before we’ve even started.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to tell the chief contractor to go fuck himself and I’ll make deals with the subcontractors myself. It means more work, I’ll have to deal with carpenters, masons, electricians, the whole lot of them, and make sure everything’s being done. But it’ll be a lot cheaper than the chief contractor taking his ten or twenty per cent just for hiring a firm of electricians.’

  ‘But that’s not why you went out of town last night?’

  Carl shook his head. ‘I...’

  He stopped as the door opened and Shannon sat in the back seat.

  ‘They’re getting ready to go down,’ she said. ‘It might take a while. What are you talking about?’

  ‘Roy was asking where I was yesterday. And I was about to say I’d driven to Olsen’s cabin. Went down to the boathouse. Tried to imagine everything Roy must have gone through that evening.’ Carl took a deep breath. ‘You faked a suicide and you almost got drowned, Roy. And all of it to save me. Don’t you ever get tired, Roy?’

  ‘Tired?’

  ‘Of clearing up after me?’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault Olsen fell into Huken,’ I said.

  He looked at me. And I don’t know if he could see what I was thinking about. About the plumb line law. About Sigmund Olsen landing on the back of the car, five metres away from the rock face. If that was what made him take a deep breath and start to speak: ‘Roy, there’s something you need to know about all that—’

  ‘I know all I need to know,’ I interrupted. ‘And that is that I am your big brother.’

  Carl nodded. He was smiling but seemed to be close to tears. ‘Is it that simple, Roy?’


  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It really is.’

  22

  WE WERE SITTING IN THE kitchen drinking coffee by the time they had finished down in Geitesvingen. I had fetched the binoculars and focused on the faces down there. It was three o’clock, they had been down there for almost four hours and I opened the window slightly so that we could hear as Kurt Olsen shouted something. Kurt’s mouth – no cigarette for once – formed words that were unmistakable, and his flushed face was no longer entirely due to that overdose of UV radiation. Erik’s body language expressed more indifference and probably the desire to get away from there. Perhaps he guessed that Olsen suspected something. The two men helping the sheriff and Nerell looked slightly confused. They probably knew little of the actual purpose of the operation since Olsen almost certainly knew enough about village gossip to keep things on a need-to-know basis, as people say.

  Once Erik was out of that comical bomb-disposal suit, he and the other two got into Kurt’s Land Rover, while Kurt himself remained standing with his head turned towards the house. Of course I realised that with the sunlight directly on the window he couldn’t see us, but perhaps there had been a flash of light reflected from the binoculars. And maybe he’d noticed the fresh marks of spinning tyres and a rope in the gravel. And maybe I’m just paranoid. Anyway, he spat on the ground, got into the car and they drove off.

  * * *

  —

  I went from room to room, packing my things. At least the things I figured I’d have a use for. And even though I wasn’t going far and didn’t exactly need to think hard about it I did so. Packed as though I’d never be coming back.

  I was in the boys’ room stuffing the duvet and my pillow into a big blue IKEA bag when I heard Shannon’s voice behind me.

  ‘Is it that simple?’

  ‘Moving?’ I asked without turning round.

  ‘That you’re his big brother. Is that why you always help him?’

  ‘Why else?’

  She came in and closed the door behind her. Leaned against the wall, her arms crossed. ‘When I was in second grade at primary school I pushed a friend of mine once. She banged her head on the asphalt. Shortly afterwards she started wearing glasses. She’d never complained about her sight before and I became convinced that it was my fault. I didn’t say so, but I hoped she would push me so I would hit my head on the asphalt too. By the time we were in fifth grade she’d still not got a boyfriend and said it was because of the glasses, and I blamed myself for that too, and spent more time with her than I actually really wanted to. She wasn’t very good at school and had to take the sixth grade again. I was certain it was because of that blow to the head. So I took sixth grade again with her.’

  I stopped. ‘You did what?’

  ‘I skipped classes, never did my homework, and at the orals I deliberately gave wrong answers to the easiest questions.’

  I opened the wardrobe and started packing folded T-shirts, socks and underwear in a bag. ‘Did she end up OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Shannon. ‘She stopped wearing glasses. And one day I surprised her with my boyfriend. She said how sorry she was and that she hoped one day I’d have the chance to break her heart the way she’d broken mine.’

  I smiled as I packed the licence plate from Barbados into the bag. ‘What’s the moral of the story?’

  ‘Sometimes feelings of guilt are wasted and no good to anyone involved.’

  ‘You think I feel guilty about something?’

  She put her head on one side. ‘Do you?’

  ‘And what might that be?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Me neither,’ I said, zipping up the bag.

  As I was about to open the door she put a hand on my chest. The touch made hot and cold run through me.

  ‘I don’t think Carl has told me everything, has he?’

  ‘Everything about what?’

  ‘About you two.’

  ‘It’s never possible to tell everything,’ I said. ‘About anyone.’

  And then I was out the door.

  Carl saw me off in Mum’s haaall with a big, warm silent hug.

  And then I was out the door.

  I chucked the bag and the IKEA holdall into the back seat of the car, climbed in, beat my forehead against the steering wheel before turning on the ignition and accelerating off down towards Geitesvingen. And for an instant the possibility flashed through my mind. A permanent solution. And a pile of wrecked cars and corpses that just grew and grew.

  * * *

  —

  Three days later I was standing on Os FC’s home ground and almost regretting I had turned the steering wheel at all by Geitesvingen. It was pouring down, five degrees and 3–nil. Not that the score bothered me, I don’t give a damn about football. But I had just realised that the other match, the one against Olsen and the past, the one I’d thought we’d won, wasn’t even halfway played.

  23

  CARL PICKED ME UP IN the Cadillac.

  ‘Thanks for coming along,’ he said as he wandered around the workshop.

  ‘Who are we playing?’ I asked as I pulled on my wellingtons.

  ‘Can’t remember,’ said Carl, who had stopped in front of the lathe. ‘But it’s apparently a game we must win if we’re not to get relegated.’

  ‘To which division?’

  ‘What makes you think I know any more about football than you do?’ He brushed his hand over the tools hanging on the wall, the ones Willumsen hadn’t taken. ‘Jesus Christ I’ve had some nightmares about this place.’ Maybe he recalled some of them I had used for the dismemberment. ‘That night, I puked up, didn’t I?’

  ‘A bit,’ I said.

  He chuckled. And I remembered something Uncle Bernard said. That in time all memories turn into good memories.

  He took a plastic bottle down from the shelf. ‘You still use that cleaning fluid?’

  ‘Fritz heavy-duty workshop cleaner? Sure. But by law they’re no longer allowed to make it so concentrated. EU rules. I’m ready.’

  ‘Well then, let’s go.’ Carl smiled and twirled his flat cap. ‘Heia Os, knus og mos, tygg og spytt en aprikos! Remember that?’

  I remembered, but the rest of the home supporters, about 150 shivering souls, seemed to have forgotten the chant from back then. Or else saw no reason to sing it since we were already 2–nil down after ten minutes.

  ‘Remind me why we’re here,’ I said to Carl. We were standing at the bottom of the round seven-metre-wide and two-and-a-half-metre high stand that was built halfway along the western side of the AstroTurf pitch. As several posters made clear, the wooden stand had been sponsored by Os Sparebank. Everyone knew that it was Willumsen who had paid for the artificial grass that now lay atop the old cinder pitch. Willumsen claimed he’d bought it only slightly used from a top club in the east of the country, but in truth it was an old surface from the early days of artificial grass, from a time when teams rarely left the pitch without burn marks, twisted ankles and at least one torn ligament. And Willumsen had been offered it free on condition that he removed it himself so that it could be replaced by a newer pitch that was less of a health hazard.

  The stand provided a degree of overview, but its most important function was to provide shelter from the westerly winds, and act as an unofficial VIP area for the village’s more affluent citizens, who occupied the topmost of the seven rows. That was where the arbiter, the new chairman Voss Gilbert, stood. The manager of Os Sparebank, whose logo adorned the front of Os FC’s blue shirts. Along with Willum Willumsen, who had managed to get Willumsen’s Used Cars and Breaker’s Yard squeezed in above the numbers on the back of the shirts.

  ‘We’re here to show our support for our local club,’ said Carl.

  ‘Then maybe we should start making a noise,’ I said. ‘We’re being slaughtered here.’

  ‘T
oday is just about showing we care,’ said Carl. ‘So next year when we support the club financially people will know the money comes from two real fans who’ve followed the club through thick and thin.’

  I snorted. ‘This is the first match I’ve been to in two years, and the first time you’ve been here in fifteen.’

  ‘But we’ll be at all three of the remaining home games this season.’

  ‘Even if they’re already relegated?’

  ‘Because they’re already relegated. We didn’t abandon them in the hour of their defeat, people notice things like that. And when they get the money, all the matches we never went to will be forgotten. By the way, from now on it’s not “they” and “them”, it’s “we” and “us”. The club and Opgard are a team.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the hotel needs all the goodwill it can get. We need to be regarded as supporters. This time next year the club’s going to be buying a great new striker from Nigeria, and where it says “Os Sparebank” on the shirts it’s going to say “Os Spa and Mountain Hotel”.’

  ‘You mean a professional player?’

  ‘No, are you crazy? But I know someone who knows a Nigerian who works at the Radisson Hotel in Oslo who’s played football. No idea how good he is but we’ll offer him the same job at our hotel only at a better wage. Maybe that’ll tempt him.’

  ‘Yeah, why not?’ I said. ‘He can’t be any worse than this lot.’ Out on the pitch our left back had just chanced a sliding tackle in the rain. Alas, there was still plenty of friction in those bright green plastic tufts and he’d ended up tripping and landing on his belly five metres away from his man.

  ‘And I’m going to want you to stand up there,’ said Carl with a nod back towards the top row. I half turned. Voss Gilbert, the new chairman, was standing there, along with the bank manager and Willumsen. Carl had told me that Gilbert had agreed to dig the first shovelful of earth to mark the official start of the building process. Carl had already made deals with the most important contractors, and now it was about making a start before the first frost came, so the building process had been brought forward.