The Kingdom

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ groaned Willumsen. ‘But you’ll never get away with murder, Opgard. A thing like that has to be planned.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And I’ve had the few minutes I needed to realise that your plan to kill me has provided me with the best chance in the world to kill you. We’re here alone, at a place where no one saw us come or go, and do you know what the most common cause of death among men between the ages of thirty and sixty is, Willumsen?’

  He nodded. ‘Cancer.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘It’s not cancer,’ I said.

  ‘Car crash then.’

  ‘No.’ But I made a mental note to google that when I got home. ‘It’s suicide.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘In our village at least we’ll have made our contribution to the statistic if we include my father along with Sheriff Olsen and you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Christmas week. Man takes his shotgun and goes alone to his cabin without telling anyone, found in the living room with the shotgun lying next to him. That’s about as classic as it gets, Willumsen. And oh yeah, black frost. So no trails leading to and from the cabin.’

  I raised the shotgun. Saw him swallow. ‘I’ve got cancer,’ he said, his voice thick.

  ‘You had cancer,’ I said. ‘Sorry, but you recovered.’

  ‘Shit,’ he said, a sob in his throat. I curled my finger around the trigger. The sweat broke out on his forehead. He began shaking uncontrollably.

  ‘Pray your last prayer,’ I whispered. Waited. He sobbed. A puddle swelled out from under his bearskin.

  ‘But of course, there is one alternative,’ I said.

  Willumsen’s mouth opened and closed.

  I lowered the shotgun. ‘And that is if we agree not to kill each other,’ I said. ‘And take a gamble on trusting each other.’

  ‘Wh-what?’

  ‘What I’ve now just proved is that I’m so certain you will realise there’s no reason to kill me that I’m passing up a more or less perfect opportunity to kill you. That is what I call a leap of trust, Willumsen. See, trust is a benign, contagious sickness. So if you don’t kill me, I won’t kill you. What d’you say, Willumsen? Gonna take that leap with me? Have we got a deal?’

  Willumsen wrinkled his brow. Gave a sort of hesitant nod.

  ‘Good. Thanks for the loan.’ I handed the shotgun back to him.

  He blinked, staring at me in disbelief. He wouldn’t take it, almost as though he suspected a trick. So instead I propped the shotgun up against the wall.

  ‘You realise of course that I – I...’ He coughed snot, tears and slime from his throat. ‘...I would have said yes to anything right now. I haven’t made any jump, only you. So how can I get you to trust me?’

  I thought it over for a moment.

  ‘Oh, this’ll be plenty good enough,’ I said, and held out my hand.

  39

  IT SNOWED ON NEW YEAR’S Day and the snow lay until the end of April. At Easter there were more people than ever before heading for their cabins and the service station did record business. We’d also been given an award as the best service station in the county, so the mood in the shop was good.

  Then came the report into the development of the road network that concluded a tunnel should be built, and the main highway be routed around Os.

  ‘It’s a long way off yet,’ said Voss Gilbert, Aas’s successor in the party. Maybe so, but it wasn’t long until the next local elections, and his party would lose. Because it stands to reason, when a village can be wiped off the map of Norway with a stroke of the pen then someone in the village hasn’t been doing his lobbying job.

  I had a meeting with head office and we agreed just to keep on milking the cow as long as we had her. Following that: readjustment, scaling back, for which read – redundancies. Small stations are needed too. And if things didn’t work out, I wasn’t to worry, they told me.

  ‘The door is always open to you, Roy,’ said Pia Syse. ‘If you want to try something new, all you have to do is call, you have my number.’

  I stepped up a gear. Worked harder than ever. That was fine, I like working. And I’d given myself a goal. I was going to get my own station.

  One day Dan Krane came in as I was cleaning the coffee machine. Asked if he could ask me a few questions for a story he was doing about Carl.

  ‘We hear he’s doing well over there,’ said Dan Krane.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I said and carried on cleaning. ‘So this is going to be a positive article, is it?’

  ‘Well, our job is to show both sides.’

  ‘Not all sides?’

  ‘See there, you put it better than the newspaper editor,’ said Dan Krane with a thin smile.

  I didn’t like him. But then again, I don’t like many people. When he first came to the village he’d reminded me of one of those English setters that cabin people have with them in their SUVs; thin and restless, but friendly enough. But it was a cool friendliness, deployed as the means towards a more distant goal, and after a while I began to realise that’s what Dan Krane really was, a marathon runner. A strategist who never loses patience in the field, who never pulls away but just patiently keeps on grinding because he knows that what he possesses is the kind of endurance that will, in the end, get him to the top. And this certainty showed itself in his body language, it could be heard in the way he formulated himself, it even shone from his eyes. That even if today he was no more than the humble editor of a local newspaper, he was going places. Was meant for greater things, as people say. He’d joined the same party as Aas, but even though the Os Daily was an open supporter of the Labour Party, the paper’s own internal regulations stipulated that the editor was prohibited from any political position that might cast doubt on his or her political integrity. Krane was moreover a father with a young family and a lot on his plate, so he wouldn’t be standing at the coming election, although perhaps at the one after that. Or the one after the one after that. Because it was just a matter of time before Dan Krane got those skinny hands of his around the chairman’s gavel.

  ‘Your brother was a risk-taker and made good money from that shopping mall investment while he was still a student.’ Krane fished notepad and pen up from the pocket of his Jack Wolfskin jacket. ‘Were you a part of that too?’

  ‘No idea what you’re talking about,’ I said.

  ‘No? I gather you provided the last two hundred thousand for the share purchase?’

  I hoped he didn’t see the jolt that passed through me.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  Again that thin smile, as though smiling caused him physical pain. ‘Even in local newspapers we need to protect our sources, I’m afraid.’

  Was it the bank manager? Or Willumsen? Or someone else in the bank? Someone who’d followed the money, as people say.

  ‘No comment,’ I said.

  Krane laughed softly and made a note. ‘You really want it to say that, Roy?’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘No comment. That’s what big-time politicians and celebs in the cities answer. When they’re in trouble. It can create a rather strange impression.’

  ‘I’m thinking it’s more likely you’re the one who creates the impression.’

  Still smiling, Krane shook his head. Narrow, hard, smooth-haired. ‘I only write what people say, Roy.’

  ‘Then do it. Write this conversation, word for word. Including your self-serving advice about the no-comment comment.’

  ‘Interviews have to be edited, you know. So we focus on what’s important.’

  ‘And you’re the one who decides what’s most important. So you’re the one who creates the impression.’

  Krane sighed. ‘I gather from your dismissive attitude that you don’t want it g
enerally known that you and Carl were a part of this high-risk project.’

  ‘Ask Carl,’ I said, closed the front of the coffee machine and pressed the On switch. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Yes thanks. So then you’ve no comment either to the fact that Carl has just moved his business to Canada following an investigation by the American Stock Exchange Supervisory Authority into what they believe to be market manipulation.’

  ‘What I do have a comment on,’ I said as I handed him the paper coffee cup, ‘is that you’re writing a story about your wife’s ex-boyfriend. Do you want my comment?’

  Krane sighed again, pushed the notebook back into his jacket pocket and sipped the coffee. ‘If a local paper in a village like this couldn’t write about someone they have some connection or other with then we wouldn’t be able to write a single story.’

  ‘I understand that, but you will include the information below the article, right? That this was written by the man who was served after Carl Opgard.’

  I saw the marathon runner’s eyes flash now. That his long-term strategy was under pressure, that he was close to saying or doing something that wouldn’t serve his ultimate goal.

  And after his brother, Roy, turned down the offer of service.

  I didn’t say it. Of course I didn’t say it. Just played with the thought of how it might cause Dan Krane to lose his rhythm.

  ‘Thanks for your time,’ said Krane, pulling up the zip on his rain jacket.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I said. ‘Twenty kroner.’

  He looked up at me from his coffee cup. I tried to mimic his wafer-thin smile.

  * * *

  —

  The newspaper ran a story about Carl Abel Opgard, our very own local lad made good on the other side of the pond. The byline was by one of Krane’s financial journalists.

  Back home after the conversation with Krane I went for a run up behind the farm, inspected a couple of nests I had found, went out to the barn and punched that old sandbag for half an hour. Then I went upstairs to the new bathroom and showered. Stood there with soap in my hair and thought about the money that had been enough to cover not just the bathroom and the insulation but new windows. I raised my face to the warm jets and let them wash the day away. A new one awaited. I’d found my rhythm. I had a goal and I had a strategy. I wasn’t aiming to be council chairman, all I wanted was my own bloody service station. But all the same, I was turning into a marathon runner.

  Then Carl called, and said he was moving home.

  PART FIVE

  40

  INCREDIBLE SPEED. THE BEAST CHARGING towards the abyss. The black hunk of metal, chrome, leather, plastic, glass, rubber, smells, tastes, memories you thought would stay with you forever, the ones you loved you thought you could never lose, all of it rolling away from you. I was the one who started it moving, the one who started the train of events in this story. But at a certain point – and it’s bloody difficult to say exactly when and where – the story itself begins to make the decisions, the weight of gravity is in the driving seat, the beast accelerates, becomes autonomous and now it’s of no consequence for the result if I’ve changed my mind. Incredible speed.

  Do I wish everything that happened had never happened? Fucking right I do.

  And yet there’s something fascinating about seeing the avalanches from Ottertind in March, seeing the snow smash the ice on Lake Budal, seeing a forest fire in July and knowing that the old GMC fire engine won’t be able to make it up the hills. It is thrilling to see the first proper storm of the autumn again test the roofs of the barns down there in the village, and think that this year it’ll succeed in tearing off at least one of them, and you’ll see it bowling along on its sides like a giant fucking sawblade across the fields before it breaks apart. And then that’s exactly what happens. And the next thought you have is, what if someone, some person, had been standing out there when the sawblade came. Of course you don’t wish it, but you can’t quite dismiss the thought; that it would have been quite a sight to see. No, you don’t wish for it. So if I’d known the train of events I was setting in motion, I would probably have done things differently. But I didn’t, so I can’t really claim I would have done things differently if I’d had another chance but no new information.

  And even if it was your will directing the blast of wind that took the barn roof off, what happens after that is out of your hands. The barn roof, now a wheel of razor-sharp corrugated iron, is heading for that solitary person out there in the field, and all you can do is watch with a mixture of horror, curiosity and regret that this was part of something you were hoping for. But the next thought is maybe something you weren’t ready for: that you find yourself wishing you yourself were that person out there in the field.

  41

  ME AND PIA SYSE SIGNED a contract of employment that said that after two years in Sørlandet I was free to return to my job as station boss in Os.

  The service station was outside Kristiansand, on the other side of the Europa highway that passes the zoo and amusement park. Naturally it was much bigger than the one in Os, with more employees, more pumps, a bigger shop stocking a bigger range and with a higher turnover. But the biggest difference was that because the previous boss had treated the staff like a brain-dead financial drain on the firm what I got there was a bunch of demoralised and moaning boss-haters who never did more than exactly what they were employed to do and sometimes not even that.

  ‘All service stations are different,’ said Gus Myre, the sales director at head office, in his lectures to us. ‘The sign is the same, the petrol’s the same, the logistics are the same, but in the final analysis our stations aren’t about petrol, Peugeots and Pepsi, they’re about people. The ones standing behind the counter, the ones in front of it, and the meeting between the two.’

  He sang his message as though it was a tune he was growing a bit more tired of playing with each passing year, and yet was, in spite of everything, his hit. From the exaggeratedly playful alliteration of what must have been that self-composed petrol, Peugeots and Pepsi, to the equally exaggerated and – over time – ever more forced sincerity of people, which always put me in mind of those revivalist meetings at Årtun. Because, just like a preacher, it was Myre’s job to get the gathering to believe in something that, deep down, everyone knew was just bollocks, but which they badly wanted to believe was true. Because belief makes life – and in the preacher’s case: death – that much easier to deal with. If you really believe yourself to be unique, and every encounter therefore unique, you can maybe trick yourself into believing in a kind of purity, an everlasting and virgin innocence which stops you spitting in the customers’ face and puking with boredom.

  But I didn’t feel myself to be unique. And the station was – the previously mentioned differences notwithstanding – not unique either. The chain observes strict franchise principles, meaning that you can move from a small station in one part of the country to a larger one in another part, and it’s like changing sheets on the same bed. It took me two days from the moment I arrived to learn the technical details that distinguished this one from the one at Os, four days to talk to all members of staff, find out what their ambitions were, what changes they thought might turn the station into a better place for them to work, and a better place for the customer to be. Three weeks to have introduced ninety per cent of these changes.

  I gave an envelope to the safety deputy and told her not to open it for eight weeks but to wait until the day of a staff meeting to evaluate the changes. We had hired a local cafe for the meeting. I welcomed everyone and then handed over to a staff member who gave the figures for sales and profits; another gave us the statistics for absence due to sickness; and a third announced the results of a simple customer satisfaction survey, along with a more informal assessment of the atmosphere among the employees. I just listened as the employees, after much arguing, then voted to drop eighty per ce
nt of their own suggested changes. Afterwards I summarised which changes everyone thought had worked and which we would be continuing with, and announced that we would be eating now and the bar was open. One member of the staff, a real old sourpuss, raised his hand and asked if that was all I was in charge of, the bar.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m in charge of the fact that for the last eight weeks you’ve been allowed to be your own bosses. Lotte, will you open the envelope I gave you before we introduced the changes?’

  She did so and read out my list of which changes I thought would work, and which wouldn’t. There was a lot of murmuring as it gradually became apparent that my advance projections – with just two exceptions – agreed with what they had decided themselves after the results were known.

  ‘The point here is not to convince you that I’m Mr Know-it-all,’ I said. ‘Look, I was wrong on two counts, the coffee cards, which I thought would work, and the offer of five day-old buns for the price of one, which I thought wouldn’t. But since I was right about the other twelve it might look as though I know something about running a service station, right?’

  I saw a few heads nodding in agreement. They nod in a different way here in the south. Even slower, in fact. As the nodding spread there were sounds of a low murmuring. Finally even the old sourpuss was nodding.

  ‘We’re second bottom of the list of the best stations in the county,’ I said. ‘I’ve spoken to head office and worked out a deal. If we’re among the ten best at the next grading, they’ll pay for a trip on the Danish ferry for the whole gang. If we’re among the five best, a trip to London. And if we’re best, you’ll be given a budget and allowed to decide for yourselves what the prize should be.’