The Kingdom

by Jo Nesbo

  Turning, I caught sight of Kurt Olsen standing by the substitutes bench and talking to the manager of Os FC. I could see the manager looked uncomfortable, but he could hardly openly refuse to take advice from Os’s old record goal scorer. Kurt Olsen spotted me, laid a hand on the manager’s shoulders, gave him a last piece of advice and strode bow-legged up towards Carl and me.

  ‘Didn’t know the Opgard boys were interested in football,’ he said.

  Carl smiled. ‘Hey, I remember the time you scored in the Cup against one of the big teams. Odd, was it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Olsen. ‘We lost 9–1.’

  ‘Kurt!’ called a voice behind us. ‘You should be out there now, Kurt!’

  Laughter. Cigarette in mouth Kurt Olsen grinned in the direction of the voice and nodded before turning his attention back to us. ‘Anyway, I’m glad you’re here, because there’s something I want to ask you, Carl. And you’re very welcome to listen in too, Roy. You want to do this here or on the way over to the hot-dog stand?’

  Carl hesitated. ‘A hot dog sounds like a good idea,’ he said.

  We made our way through the blustery wind and rain towards the hot-dog stand behind one of the goalposts. I’m guessing the other spectators were watching us. At that particular moment, with the team 2–nil down and that council resolution passed, Carl Opgard was probably more interesting than Os FC.

  ‘It’s about the timeline on the day my father disappeared,’ said Kurt Olsen. ‘You said he left Opgard at six o’clock. Is that right?’

  ‘It’s a long time ago now,’ said Carl. ‘But yes, if that’s what it says in the report.’

  ‘It is. But signals received by the base stations show that my father’s phone was in the area around your farm until ten o’clock that evening. After that there’s nothing. It could be that the battery ran out, someone removed the SIM card, or the phone was damaged. Or that the phone was buried so deeply the signals no longer carried. What it means is, we have to check the area around the farm with metal detectors. It means that nothing up there should be touched, and that starting date I’ve been hearing about will have to be postponed until further notice.’

  ‘Wh-what?’ stammered Carl. ‘But...’

  ‘But what?’ Olsen stopped by the hot-dog stand, stroked his moustache and looked calmly at him.

  ‘How long are we talking about?’

  ‘Hmm.’ Olsen stuck his lower lip out and looked as if he was calculating. ‘It’s a large area. Three weeks. Maybe four.’

  Carl groaned. ‘Jesus, Kurt, that’s going to cost us a fucking fortune. We’ve got contractors coming in at agreed times to do their work. And the frost—’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Olsen. ‘But investigations into a suspicious death can’t take your desire to turn a profit into consideration.’

  ‘It isn’t just my profit we’re talking about,’ said Carl, his voice shaking slightly. ‘It’s the whole village. And I think you’ll find Jo Aas is of the same opinion.’

  ‘The old chairman, you mean?’ Kurt held up one finger to the lady at the hot-dog stand which obviously meant something since she grabbed the sausage tongs and plunged it down into the pan in front of her. ‘I was talking earlier today to the new one, the one that actually makes the decisions. Voss Gilbert up there.’ Olsen nodded in the direction of the stand. ‘When Gilbert heard what I had to say about the matter he was most worried about news leaking out that the man behind the new hotel project was involved in a possible murder case.’ The woman handed Olsen his hot dog on a piece of waxed sandwich paper. ‘But he said that of course he had no authority to stop me.’

  ‘And what are we going to say to the press?’ I asked. ‘When we announce that the start has been postponed?’

  Kurt Olsen turned and stared at me. Chomped into his sausage which gave off a wet, flaccid sound. ‘I really don’t know,’ he said, his mouth full of pig’s intestines. ‘But yes, it could well be that Dan Krane will think it’s an interesting story. OK then, now I’ve got my answer about the timeline, and you’ve been informed that you can’t start building, Carl. Better luck in the second half.’

  Kurt Olsen raised two fingers to his imaginary Stetson and left.

  Carl turned and looked at me.

  Naturally, he looked at me.

  * * *

  —

  We left the game with a quarter of an hour to go and the team losing 4–nil.

  We drove straight to the workshop.

  I’d been thinking.

  There were certain things we had to do.

  * * *

  —

  ‘Like that?’ asked Carl. His voice echoed around the walls of the empty workshop.

  I leaned over the turning lathe and inspected the result. Carl had used a gimlet to scrape the capital letters into the metal of Olsen’s mobile phone. SIGMUND OLSEN, it read in clear script. Maybe a bit too clear.

  ‘We better green it a bit,’ I said and slipped the phone back into its leather case. Clipped it onto a thick piece of string that was lying about, swung it up and down a bit and checked that the clip held the phone in place. ‘Come on.’

  I pulled open the door to the metal wardrobe that stood in the corridor between the workshop and the office. And there it was.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Carl. ‘Have you had it here all the time?’

  ‘Well, apart from that one time we tried it out it was never used,’ I said, and rocked the yellow oxygen tank and squeezed the slightly rotten wetsuit. The mask and snorkel were up on the shelf.

  ‘I better ring Shannon and say I’m going to be late,’ he said.

  24

  WHEN I RETURNED TO THE workshop that night I was so cold I couldn’t stop shivering. Carl had handed me his hip flask in the car, to drive out the cold as people say. I hung on to the hip flask when Carl drove on home to Shannon, who I guessed was lying in the warm double bed waiting for him. Too bloody right I was jealous, I’d given up pretending otherwise. But what was the use? I couldn’t have it. I didn’t want to have it. I was like Moe the roofer, fighting a hopeless battle against my own lust. It was a fucking awful illness I thought I’d got rid of, but now here it was again. I knew that distance and forgetting were my only hope, but I knew no one would be intervening here, no one would be sending anyone to Notodden, it was a move I had to make myself.

  I unlocked the car wash, attached the hose to a standpipe, turned up the hot tap, pulled off my clothes and stood in front of the scalding hot jet. And I don’t know if it was the sudden rise in temperature, if it was the same physiological reaction as you get when men are hanged from the gallows, or whether the heat of the water was transformed in my head to the heat beneath the duvet in the double bed, and that I was the one lying there. But standing there with my eyes closed I felt two things at least. A sobbing in my throat. And a throbbing erection.

  The hissing of the water must have drowned out the sound of the key turning in the door. I only heard it open at the same time as I opened my eyes. I saw the outline of her in the darkness outside the door and turned my back as quickly as I could.

  ‘Oh, sorry!’ I heard Julie call above the hissing of the water. ‘I saw lights and the car wash is supposed to be closed, so—’

  ‘OK!’ I interrupted in a voice thick with whisky, unshed tears and shame.

  I heard the door close behind me and stood there, my head bent. Looked down at myself. The excitement had passed, the erection was fading, there was only a heart beating in panic, as though I had just been exposed. As though now they all knew who he was and what he had done, that damned traitor, the coward, the murderer, the lecher. Naked, so fucking naked. But then my heart slowed down too. ‘The good thing about losing everything is that you have nothing left to lose,’ Uncle Bernard said to me when I went to see him in hospital after he’d been told he was going to die. ‘And in a way that’s a relief,
Roy. Because then there’s nothing else to fear.’

  So then I can’t have lost everything after all. Because I was still afraid.

  I dried myself and pulled on my trousers. Turned to pick up my shoes.

  Julie was sitting on a chair next to the door.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve bust my finger.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I saw you.’

  ‘Well,’ I said as I pulled on my shoes, ‘since you saw me, it’s a little hurtful of you to ask if everything’s all right.’

  ‘Stop being silly, I said. You were crying.’

  ‘No. But it’s not unusual to get water on your face when you’re showering. You’re not supposed to be working this evening.’

  ‘I’m not. I was sitting in one of the cars and I needed to pee. I didn’t want to go into the trees, so can I use yours?’

  I hesitated. I could have suggested she use the station toilet, but we’d told the boy racers it was bad enough them using our parking space as a meeting place without having them running in and out of the station toilet. And now that she’d asked I couldn’t exactly tell her to go behind a tree either.

  I finished dressing and she padded after me through the workshop.

  ‘Cosy,’ she said after she’d finished in the toilet. She glanced round the walls of my room. ‘Why is there a wet wetsuit hanging out there in the corridor?’

  ‘For it to dry,’ I said.

  She pouted. ‘Can I have a cup?’ She crossed uninvited to the coffee maker, took a clean mug from the drying rack and filled it.

  ‘They’ll be waiting for you,’ I warned her. ‘Soon they’ll start searching the woods.’

  ‘No way,’ she said, and sat down on the bed beside me. ‘I quarrelled with Alex, so I think they went home. What do you do here? Watch TV?’

  ‘That kind of thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’ She pointed to the licence plate I’d mounted on the wall above the kitchen alcove. I’d looked it up in my licence-plate book, Vehicle Registration Plates of the World, and found that the J stood for the parish of St John. Four numbers followed the letter. There was no flag or anything else to denote nationality, like the Monaco plates on the Cadillac. Maybe that was because Barbados was an island and the cars registered there would probably never cross an international border. I’d also googled redlegs and found out that St John was the parish in which most of them lived.

  ‘It’s a car registration plate from Johor,’ I said. Finally my body was feeling warm. Warm and relaxed. ‘A former sultanate in Malaysia.’

  ‘Shit,’ she said in an awed tone that referred to the plate or the sultanate or me. Julie was sitting so close her arm touched mine and now she turned her head towards me and waited for me to do the same. I was trying to work out some way of retreat from the situation when Julie tossed my phone to the end of the bed and wrapped her arms around me. Pressed her face into the hollow of my neck. ‘Can’t we lie down for a bit?’

  ‘You know very well we can’t, Julie.’ I neither moved nor responded to the embrace.

  She lifted her face to mine. ‘You smell of booze, Roy. Have you been drinking?’

  ‘A bit. And so have you, I gather.’

  ‘Then in that case we’ve both got an excuse,’ she said and laughed.

  I didn’t reply.

  She pushed me back, sat on top of me and pressed her heels against my thighs as though spurring on a horse. I could easily have bounced her off, but I didn’t. She sat there and looked down at me. ‘I’ve got you now,’ she said in a low voice.

  I still didn’t reply. But I could feel myself getting hard again. And I knew she could feel it too. She started moving, carefully. I didn’t stop her, just watched her as her gaze clouded over and her breathing grew heavier. Then I closed my eyes and imagined the other one. Felt Julie’s hands pressing my wrists against the mattress, her bubblegum breath in my face.

  I rolled her off towards the wall and stood up.

  ‘What?’ Julie called after me as I walked over to the worktop. I filled a glass of water from the tap, drank it, filled it again.

  ‘You better go,’ I said.

  ‘But you want to!’ she protested.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And that’s why you should go.’

  ‘But no one need know. They think I’ve gone home, and at home they think I’m staying over at Alex’s.’

  ‘I can’t, Julie.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’re seventeen years old...’

  ‘Eighteen. I’ll be eighteen in two days.’

  ‘...I’m your boss...’

  ‘I can finish tomorrow!’

  ‘...and...’ I stopped.

  ‘And?’ she yelled. ‘And?’

  ‘And I like someone else.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Love. I’m in love with someone else.’

  In the silence that ensued I heard the dying echo of my own words. Because I had said them to myself. Said them aloud to hear if they sounded true. And they did. Of course they did.

  ‘Who then?’ she hiccupped. ‘The doctor?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dr Spind?’

  I couldn’t answer, just stood there, glass in hand, as she climbed off the bed and pulled on her jacket.

  ‘I knew it!’ she hissed as she pushed past me on her way out.

  I followed, stood in the doorway and watched as she stamped across the forecourt as though she was trying to crack the asphalt. Then I locked the door, went back and lay on my bed. Plugged the headphones into my phone and pressed play. J. J. Cale. ‘Crying Eyes’.

  25

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING A PORSCHE Cayenne turned into the station forecourt. Two men and a woman climbed out. One of the men filled up with petrol while the other two stretched their legs. The woman had blonde hair and was sensibly dressed in the Norwegian way, but still she didn’t strike me as one of the cabin people. The man was wearing an immaculate woollen overcoat and scarf and had on a pair of comically large sunglasses, the kind women wear when they want you to know that they might not be good-looking but they’ve still got something. Active body language with much waving of the arms. Pointed and explained things to the woman though I was prepared to bet he’d never been here before. I would also have bet he wasn’t Norwegian.

  It was quiet, and I was bored, and travellers sometimes have interesting tales to tell. So I went out to them, gave the windscreen of the Porsche a wash and asked where they were headed.

  ‘West country,’ said the woman.

  ‘Well, you can’t miss that,’ I said.

  The woman laughed and translated into English for the guy in the sunglasses, who laughed too.

  ‘We’re scouting locations for my new film,’ he said in English. ‘This place looks interesting too.’

  ‘Are you a director?’ I asked.

  ‘Director and actor,’ he said and removed his sunglasses. He had a pair of extremely blue eyes in his well-looked-after face. I could see he was waiting for a reaction.

  ‘This is Dennis Quarry,’ the woman discreetly prompted me.

  ‘Roy Calvin Opgard.’ I smiled, dried off the windscreen and left them to give the other pumps a clean while I was at it. Well, OK, but sometimes they really do have interesting stories.

  The Cadillac glided into the forecourt and Carl jumped out, unhooked one of the pump nozzles, caught sight of me and raised his eyebrows quizzically. He’d asked me the same question ten times in the two days that had passed since the football match and the dive. Have they taken the bait? I shook my head, and at the same time my heart skipped a beat when I saw Shannon in the passenger seat. And maybe her heart skipped a beat when she saw the American with the blue eyes, because she put a hand in front of her mouth, fumbled for pen
and paper in her bag, got out and went over to him and I saw him smiling as he signed his autograph. His assistant walked over and sat in the SUV while Dennis Quarry stood there talking to Shannon. She was about to leave when he stopped her, took the pen and paper back and scribbled something else down.

  I went over to Carl. His face was grey.

  ‘Worried?’ I asked.

  ‘Some,’ he said.

  ‘He’s a film star.’

  Carl smiled wryly. ‘Not about that.’ He knew I was kidding. Carl never understood jealousy, which was one reason he had never managed to read the situations right at the dances at Årtun until it was too late. ‘It’s the official start.’ He sighed. ‘Gilbert called and said he can’t dig the first shovelful after all, something came up. He wouldn’t say what but it’s obviously Kurt Olsen. Fuck him!’

  ‘Easy now.’

  ‘Easy? We’ve invited journalists from all over the place. This is a crisis.’ Carl wiped his free hand over his face but managed to say ‘hi’ and smile at a guy I think works in the bank. ‘Can’t you just see the headlines?’ Carl went on once the guy was out of earshot. ‘Hotel construction delayed owing to murder investigation. Entrepreneur himself chief suspect.’

  ‘In the first place they’ve no grounds for writing about either murder or suspects, and in the second the official start is still two days away. Things could well have changed before that.’

  ‘It needs to happen now, Roy. If we’re going to cancel the opening it’ll have to be this afternoon.’

  ‘A fishing net that’s set out in the evening usually gets taken up the next morning,’ I said.

  ‘You’re saying something’s gone wrong?’