by Jo Nesbo
I swallowed. ‘Is there nothing else keeping you here?’
She gave me a long look. Then she closed her eyes and nodded slowly.
I took a deep breath. ‘I need to hear you say it, Shannon.’
‘Please. Don’t ask me to do that.’
‘Why not?’
I saw her eyes fill with tears. ‘Because it’s an open sesame, Roy. And that’s why you’re asking me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘If I hear myself say it, my heart opens up, and then I’m weak. And until everything’s finished here, I need to stay strong.’
‘I need to stay strong too,’ I said. ‘And to stay strong enough I need to hear you say it. Say it low so that I’m the only one that hears it.’ And I cupped my hands over her small, white, shell-like ears.
She looked at me. Took a breath. Stopped. Started again. And then she whispered the magic words, more powerful than any password, any declaration of faith, any oath of allegiance: ‘I love you.’
‘And I love you too,’ I whispered in return.
I kissed her.
She kissed me.
‘God damn you,’ she said.
‘When this is over,’ I said, ‘when the hotel is up, will you be free then?’
She nodded.
‘I can wait,’ I said. ‘But then we’ll pack up and leave.’
‘Where?’ she asked.
‘Barcelona. Or Cape Town. Or Sydney.’
‘Barcelona,’ she said. ‘Gaudí.’
‘Deal.’
As though to seal the deal we looked into each other’s eyes. From out of the darkness came a sound. A golden plover? What had caused him to come all the way down here from his mountain? The rockets?
Something showed in her face. Anxiety.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘It isn’t a good sound.’
I listened. It wasn’t a plover. This note rose and fell.
‘It’s the bloody fire engine,’ I said.
As though at a signal we jumped up out of bed and ran into the workshop. I opened the door, just in time to see the old fire engine disappear in the direction of the village. I’d done repair work on it; it was a GMC. The council had bought it from the armed forces, who’d been using it at an airport. The sales argument was that the price was reasonable and came with a water tank with a capacity of 1,500 litres. One year later the sales argument was that the heavy vehicle was so slow in the steep terrain that if a fire broke out in the hills there would be nothing for those fifteen hundred litres of water to put out by the time it got there. But there were no takers for the monster and it was still here.
‘In weather like this they shouldn’t allow fireworks in the middle of the village,’ I said.
‘The fire isn’t in the middle of the village,’ said Shannon.
I followed her gaze. Up the mountain, up in the direction of Opgard. The sky above was a dirty yellow.
‘Ah shit,’ I whispered.
* * *
—
I turned the Volvo into the yard. Shannon was right behind me in the Subaru.
There was Opgard, sloping, shining, leaning a little eastward in the moonlight. Intact. We got out of the cars; I headed towards the barn and Shannon towards the main house.
Inside I saw that Carl had already been there and picked up his skis. I took my own and the ski poles and ran to the house where Shannon stood in the doorway holding out my ski boots. I fastened my skis and set off at double pace through the trees, towards that dirty yellow sky. The wind had dropped so much that Carl’s tracks hadn’t been covered over and I was able to use them to speed along. I would guess that the wind was down to a strong breeze by now, and now I could hear the shouts and the crackle of fire before I came up on the ridge. For that reason I was surprised and relieved when at last I arrived and looked down at the hotel, the framework and the modules. Smoke, but no flames – they must have managed to put it out. But then I noticed the glow in the snow on the far side of the building, on the red bodywork of the fire truck, and on the expressionless faces of those standing there, turned towards me. And when the wind dropped for a moment I saw those yellow, licking tongues everywhere, and realised that it was just that the wind had temporarily blown the flames out on the lee side. And I realised too the problem facing those trying to put them out. The road only went as far as the front of the hotel, and the fire truck had to park some distance away because the snow hadn’t been cleared from the area in front. It meant that even with the hose fully unrolled it wasn’t long enough for them to get round to the rear of the hotel and direct the jet of water with the wind behind them. Now, even though they must have had the hose turned on full, the jet dissipated in the facing wind and blew back across them as rain.
I was standing less than a hundred metres away and could feel no heat from the fire. But when I picked out Carl’s face among the crowd, wet with sweat or maybe water from the hose, I saw that it was hopeless. All was lost.
51
THE GREY LIGHT OF THE first day of the year dawned.
It made the landscape look flat and featureless, and when I drove from the workshop up to the hotel site for a moment I had the feeling that I had lost my way, that this wasn’t a landscape I knew like the back of my hand but somewhere strange, some strange planet.
When I got there I saw Carl standing with three men next to the smouldering blackened ruins of what was to have been the pride of the village. Which still could be that, of course, though hardly this year. Black, charred pieces of wood pointed to the sky like warning fingers, telling us, them, anyone, that you do not build a bloody spa hotel on the bare mountain, it’s against nature, it awakens the spirits.
As I got out of the car and walked towards them I saw that the three other men were the sheriff Kurt Olsen, the council chairman Voss Gilbert, and the fire chief, a man named Adler who worked as an engineer for the council when he wasn’t on duty at the fire station. I don’t know whether they clammed up because I arrived or they’d just finished exchanging theories.
‘Well?’ I said. ‘Any theories?’
‘They found the remains of a New Year’s Eve rocket,’ Carl said so quietly I could only just hear him. His gaze was focused on something far, far away.
‘That’s right,’ said Kurt Olsen, cigarette held into his palm between index finger and thumb, like a soldier on night watch. ‘Obviously, it could have been carried up from the village by the wind and set fire to the timbers.’
Obviously and obviously. From the way he stressed the could it was evident he didn’t have much faith in the theory himself.
‘But?’ I said.
Kurt Olsen shrugged. ‘But the fire chief here says that when they got here, they saw two sets of footprints half covered by snow leading towards the hotel. With a wind like that they can’t have been made much before the fire truck arrived.’
‘It wasn’t possible to tell whether the footprints were two people who went in, or one person who went in and then came out again,’ said the fire chief. ‘We had to operate on a worst-case scenario and send men in to check whether there was anyone in the modules. But they were already alight and it was too hot.’
‘There are no bodies here,’ said Olsen. ‘But it does look as though someone was here during the night. So obviously we can’t rule out arson.’
‘Arson?’ I almost shouted.
Olsen perhaps thought I sounded a little too conspicuously surprised; at any rate he gave me that scrutinising sheriff’s look of his.
‘Who would have anything to gain by that?’ I asked.
‘Yes, who might that be, Roy?’ said Kurt Olsen, and I did not like the fucking way he said my name.
‘Well,’ said the council chairman, with a nod down towards the village that lay half hidden beneath a layer of fog
that had drifted in across the ice on Lake Budal, ‘This is one helluva a hangover for them to wake up to.’
‘Well,’ said I, ‘when you’re up to your neck in shit the only thing to do is start the rebuilding.’
The others looked at me as though I’d said something in Latin.
‘Maybe, but it’ll take some doing to get a hotel up this year,’ said Gilbert. ‘And that means people can’t be selling off land for cabin-building for a while.’
‘Really?’ I glanced over at Carl. He said nothing, didn’t even seem to have heard us, just stared vacantly at the site of the fire with a look on his face that reminded me of newly set cement.
‘Those are the terms of the agreement with the council.’ Gilbert sighed in such a way that I realised he was repeating something he’d just said. ‘First the hotel, then the cabins. Unfortunately quite a few in the village have been counting their chickens before they’re hatched and bought themselves more expensive cars than they should have.’
‘Good job the hotel was fully insured against fire,’ said Kurt Olsen with a glance at Carl.
Gilbert and the fire chief managed little smiles, as much as to say that yes, true enough, but right now that was small comfort.
‘Right, well,’ said the council chairman and stuck his hands into his coat pockets as a sign that he wanted to leave. ‘Happy New Year.’
Olsen and the fire chief trudged along behind him in the snow.
‘Is it?’ I asked quietly once they were out of earshot.
‘A happy new year?’ Carl asked with a voice like a sleepwalker’s.
‘Fully insured?’
Carl turned his whole body to face me, as though he really were cast in cement. ‘Why in the world wouldn’t it be fully insured?’ He spoke so slowly, so quietly. This wasn’t alcohol. Had he been taking pills of some kind?
‘But is it more than fully insured?’
‘What do you mean?’
I felt the anger beginning to bubble up in me, but knew I had to keep my voice down until they were inside their cars. ‘I mean Kurt Olsen is more or less implying that the fire was started deliberately and that the hotel is overinsured. He’s accusing you of an insurance fraud. Or didn’t you realise that?’
‘That I started the fire?’
‘Did you, Carl?’
‘Why would I do that?’
‘The hotel was pretty much shot to hell, the spending way over budget, but so far you’ve managed to keep it hidden. Maybe this was the only way out, for your neighbours in the village to avoid paying the bill and you to avoid the shame. Now you can make a fresh start, from scratch, build the hotel the way it should be built, with proper materials and a fresh injection of insurance money. See, you can still erect that monument to Carl Opgard.’
Carl looked at me with a kind of fascination, as though I had changed shape in front of his very eyes. ‘Do you, my own brother, really believe that I am capable of something like that?’ Then he put his head slightly to one side. ‘Yes, you do believe it. So then answer me this: why am I standing here and feeling like I want to commit hara-kiri? Why aren’t I at home breaking out the champagne?’
I held his gaze. And it began to dawn on me. Carl could lie, but not act grief in a way that could fool me. No way.
‘No,’ I whispered. ‘Not that, Carl.’
‘Not what?’
‘I know you were desperate and cutting costs. But not that.’
‘What?’ he roared, suddenly furious.
‘The insurance. You didn’t stop making the insurance payments on the hotel?’
He looked away, and the fury seemed to have passed. Had to be pills.
‘Yes, that would have been stupid,’ he whispered. ‘To stop making the insurance payments just before the fire. Because then...’ Slowly a smile spread across his face, the kind of smile I imagine the acid tripper on a balcony gives just before he demonstrates he can fly. ‘Yeah, because what actually happens then, Roy?’
52
IN MOUNTAIN LANDSCAPES SUCH AS ours, darkness doesn’t fall, it rises. It rises from the valleys, from the forests and the lake down there, and for a time we can see that evening has come to the village and the fields while up here it’s still day. But that day, the first of the year, was different. Maybe it was because of the cloud that lay so thick above us, colouring everything grey, maybe it was the blackened site of the fire that seemed to suck all the light from the mountainside, or maybe it was the despair that hung over Opgard, or the cold from space. Whatever it was, daylight just disappeared as though it had burned out.
Carl, Shannon and I ate dinner in silence and listened to the sounds as the temperature fell in the walls. When I was finished I grabbed a serviette, wiped the cod and the fat from my mouth and then opened it.
‘On the Os Daily website Dan Krane says the fire just means a delay.’
‘Yes,’ said Carl. ‘He called and I told him we’ll start the rebuilding next week.’
‘So he doesn’t know the place wasn’t insured against fire?’
Carl put his elbows either side of his plate. ‘The only people who know, Roy, are those of us sitting round this table. And let’s keep it that way.’
‘You’d’ve thought that, with him being a journalist, he would have looked more closely at the insurance situation. After all, what’s at stake is the future of the village.’
‘No need to worry. I’ll sort this out, you hear me?’
‘I hear you.’
Carl ate more cod. Glanced over at me. Stopped, drank more water. ‘If Dan had any suspicion the hotel wasn’t covered for fire, he wouldn’t have written that everything was under control. You do see that, right?’
‘Well, OK, if you say so.’
Carl put down his fork. ‘What is it you’re actually trying to say, Roy?’
And for an instant I saw him. His imperious body language, his quiet but commanding voice, his penetrating gaze. For an instant it was as though Carl had become him, become Dad.
I shrugged. ‘What I’m probably saying is that it might look like someone has told Dan Krane not to write anything negative about the hotel. And that it was well before the fire.’
‘Like who for example?’
‘A Danish enforcer who was here in town. Someone saw his Jaguar parked outside the offices of the Os Daily just before Christmas. And afterwards people said Dan Krane looked pale and ill.’
Carl grinned. ‘Willumsen’s enforcer? The guy we talked about when we were kids?’
‘I didn’t believe in him back then. I do now.’
‘OK. And why would Willumsen want to shut Dan Krane up?’
‘Not shut him up. Just guide his pen. When Dan Krane was talking about the hotel at Stanley’s party yesterday he wasn’t exactly complimentary about it.’
When I said that something blinked through Carl’s eyes. Something I’d never seen there before. It was hard and dark, like the blade of an axe.
‘Dan Krane doesn’t write what he thinks,’ I said. ‘Willumsen censors him. So I’m asking you why?’
Carl grabbed his serviette, wiped around his mouth. ‘Oh, Willumsen might well have a million good reasons for stopping Dan.’
‘He’s worried about the loan he’s made to you?’
‘Could be. But why do you ask me?’
‘Because on Christmas Eve I saw tyre tracks in the snow outside here. Wide tracks, from summer tyres.’
Carl’s face became curiously long. It was almost as though I was looking at him inside a Hall of Mirrors at a funfair.
‘It snowed two days before Christmas,’ I said. ‘Those tyre tracks must have been from the same day or the day before.’
There was no need for me to say any more. No one else in the village still uses summer tyres in December. Carl cast what was supposed to be a casual look in Shann
on’s direction. She looked back at him, and there was something hard in her eyes too, something I’d also never seen before.
‘Are we done?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said Carl. ‘That’s all we need to say about this.’
‘I meant the food; have we finished eating?’
‘Yes,’ said Carl, and I nodded.
She stood up, gathered the plates and the cutlery and went out to the kitchen. We heard her turn on the tap.
‘It’s not like you think it is,’ said Carl.
‘How do I think it is?’
‘You think it was me who put that enforcer on Dan Krane.’
‘But you didn’t?’
Carl shook his head. ‘That loan from Willumsen is obviously confidential and isn’t part of the accounting where it looks as though we’re drawing on credit we don’t have. But in terms of cash flow, the loan enabled us to carry out the final phase of the building and now things were back on track, we’d cut costs dramatically and still managed to catch up on almost the entire delay from the spring. So it was quite a surprise when that enforcer turned up...’ Carl leaned forward and hissed between clenched teeth. ‘Here, to my own house, Roy! Came here to tell me what’ll happen if I don’t pay what I owe. As though I needed reminding.’ Carl closed his eyes tight, sat back in his chair again and sighed heavily. ‘Anyway, it turned out that the reason for the reminder was that Willumsen was starting to get worried.’
‘Why, if everything was back on track?’
‘Because a while ago Dan called Willumsen to interview him as one of the most prominent participants in the village, and to ask him how he felt about the project, and about me. In the course of the interview Willumsen realised that Dan finally had enough material for a highly critical article, one that would impact on the participants’ belief in the project and in the indulgence of the council. About the accounts, or rather the lack of accounts. And Dan had talked to people in Toronto who’d told him I’d run off from a bankruptcy, and that there were a number of similarities between that case and the Os Spa and Mountain Hotel project. So Willumsen gets worried that I’m going to do a bunk again, and Dan’s going to ruin the whole project with this article about fraud and swindling. So he called up his enforcer to carry out two jobs.’
