The Kingdom

by Jo Nesbo

  I pulled on my trousers and went downstairs.

  ‘Did I wake you?’

  Kurt Olsen stood on the steps, cigarette between his lips, his thumbs hooked in his belt.

  ‘It’s early,’ I said. I hadn’t checked the time but saw no sign of the sunrise when I turned and looked east.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he said. ‘We finished searching the workmen’s cabins at the hotel site yesterday, and we found neither Poul Hansen, nor his car, nor any sign that they had been there. And now the base station has stopped getting signals from his phone, so either the battery’s flat or he’s turned off his phone. But then something occurred to me last night, and I wanted to check it as quickly as possible.’

  I tried to collect my thoughts. ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘You thinking of Martinsen?’ said Olsen. He gave me a grin. I had no idea what it was supposed to mean. ‘Didn’t see any reason to wake KRIPOS, this won’t take long.’

  Clattering from the steps behind me. ‘What’s up, Kurt?’ It was Carl, drunk from sleep but irritatingly good-humoured as he always was in the morning. ‘Dawn attack?’

  ‘Good morning, Carl. Roy, last time we were here you said you were woken the morning Willumsen died by what you thought was a Jaguar. But that then the sound disappeared, and you thought it must have been a dream.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I remembered how slippery it was on Geitesvingen when we were here. And that it might – and this is just my brain that can’t stop looking for possible solutions to this riddle – it might be the case that it wasn’t a dream, that it was the Jaguar you heard, but that it just didn’t manage that last bend, started to skid backwards, and then...’

  Olsen paused deliberately as he tapped the ash off his cigarette.

  ‘You think...’ I tried to look astonished. ‘You think that...’

  ‘I’d like to check it anyway. Ninety per cent of all detective work...’

  ‘...involves following leads that go nowhere,’ I said. ‘True Crime. I read that article too. Fascinating stuff, isn’t it? Have you taken a look down into Huken?’

  Kurt Olsen spat to one side of the steps and looked dissatisfied. ‘I tried. But it’s dark and steep, so I need someone to secure me so I can get far enough out to have a look.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ I said. ‘D’you need a torch?’

  ‘Got a torch,’ he said, put the cigarette back in the corner of his mouth and held up something black that looked like a smoked sausage.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Carl, and shuffled back upstairs in his slippers to get dressed.

  We walked down to Geitesvingen where Olsen’s Land Rover stood with its headlights on and shining out across the edge. The change in the weather had brought a rise in temperature and it was only a few degrees below zero. Kurt Olsen got a rope from the back of the car and tied it around his waist.

  ‘If one of you holds this,’ he said, giving the end to Carl and making his way carefully forward to the edge of the road, where there were a couple of metres of steep, stony slope before the edge and where the rock face disappeared from view below. And while he was standing there, bending forward, his back to us, Carl leaned towards my ear.

  ‘He’ll find the body,’ he said in a whispered hiss. ‘And he’ll realise something’s wrong.’ Carl’s face glistened with sweat, and I could hear the panic in his voice. ‘We need to...’ Carl nodded towards Olsen’s back.

  ‘Think straight!’ I hissed as quietly as I could. ‘He will find the body, and there is nothing wrong.’

  Just then Kurt Olsen turned towards us. In the dark his cigarette glowed like a brake light.

  ‘Maybe best to fasten the end to the bumper bar,’ he said. ‘We could all find ourselves slipping here.’

  I took the end from Carl, tied it in a bowline around the bumper, nodded to Kurt that it was secure and gave Carl a discreet warning look.

  Kurt edged down the slope and leaned over as I held the rope taut. He switched on his torch and directed the beam downwards.

  ‘See anything?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ replied Kurt Olsen.

  * * *

  —

  Low-lying steely-blue clouds filtered the flat light as the KRIPOS people lowered Sulesund and two colleagues down into Huken. Sulesund was wearing a quilted suit and had his hairdryer with him. Martinsen stood there with arms folded, observing the whole business.

  ‘You got here quickly,’ I said.

  ‘They’re forecasting snow,’ she said. ‘Crime scenes with a metre of snow on top are hard work.’

  ‘You do know it’s reckoned to be dangerous down there?’

  ‘Olsen said so, but you don’t often get loose rocks when it’s below freezing,’ she said. ‘The water in the mountain expands when it freezes, forces open the space it needs, but acts like glue. It’s when it melts the stones fall.’

  She sounded like she knew what she was talking about.

  ‘OK, we’re down now,’ said Sulesund’s voice over her walkie-talkie. ‘Over.’

  ‘We await with excitement. Over.’

  We waited.

  ‘Isn’t the walkie-talkie a bit Stone Age?’ I asked. ‘You could have just used your mobile phones.’

  ‘How do you know you can get a signal down there?’ she asked and looked at me.

  Was she suggesting that I had just revealed I had been down there? Was there some last shred of suspicion still hanging there?

  ‘Well,’ I said, and wedged another pellet of snuff into place, ‘if the base station was picking up signals from Poul Hansen after he ended up down there, surely that proves it.’

  ‘First let’s wait and see if him and his phone are there,’ said Martinsen.

  In response the walkie-talkie crackled. ‘There’s a body here,’ said Sulesund. ‘Squashed flat, but it’s Poul Hansen. He’s frozen stiff, we can forget about establishing an exact time of death.’

  Martinsen spoke into the black box. ‘Can you see his mobile phone there?’

  ‘No,’ said Sulesund. ‘Or make that a yes, Ålgard just found it in his jacket pocket. Over.’

  ‘Scan the body, get the mobile phone and come back up. Over.’

  ‘Over. Over and out.’

  ‘Is this your farm?’ asked Martinsen as she fastened the walkie-talkie to her belt.

  ‘My brother and I own it together,’ I said.

  ‘It’s beautiful here.’ Her gaze wandered over the landscape the same way it had wandered over the kitchen the day before. I’m guessing she didn’t miss much.

  ‘You know much about how a farm is run?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Do you?’

  ‘No.’

  We laughed.

  I pulled out my tin of snuff. Took out a pellet. Offered her the tin.

  ‘No thanks,’ she said.

  ‘Packed it in?’ I asked.

  ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘You had the look of a user when I opened the tin, yes.’

  ‘OK, then give me one.’

  ‘I don’t want to be the person who—’

  ‘Just one.’

  I handed her the tin. ‘Why isn’t Kurt Olsen here?’ I asked.

  ‘Your sheriff is already at work solving new cases,’ she said with a wry smile. With her index finger and extended middle finger she pressed the pellet in between the red, wet lips. ‘Going through the workmen’s cabins we found a Latvian, one of the builders working on the hotel.’

  ‘I thought the cabins were closed until work started up again.’

  ‘Yes they are, but the Latvian wanted to save money, so instead of going home for Christmas he was living illegally in the cabin. The first thing he said when the police knocked on the door was: “It wasn’t me who started the fire.” Turns out he was
down in the village to see the New Year’s Eve rockets and when he was going back to the hotel site just after midnight a car had passed him coming the other way. And when he got there, the hotel was ablaze. It was him who phoned in and reported the fire. Anonymously, of course. And he didn’t tell the police about the car, he said, because then it would emerge that he’d been living in the workmen’s cabin all through Christmas and he would have lost his job. Anyway, he’d been so blinded by the car’s headlights that he wouldn’t have been able to tell the police what make it was or what colour. All he had noticed was that one of the brake lights wasn’t working. Anyway, Olsen’s talking to him now.’

  ‘You think this has anything to do with Willumsen’s murder?’

  Martinsen shrugged. ‘We don’t exclude the possibility.’

  ‘And the Latvian?’

  ‘He’s innocent,’ she said. There was something different about her now, a calmness. The nicotine calm.

  I nodded. ‘In general you’re fairly sure about who is guilty and who is innocent, aren’t you?’

  ‘Fairly,’ she said. She was about to say something else, but at that moment Sulesund’s face appeared above the edge of the precipice. He’d used a jumar to climb up the rope, and now he freed himself from the climbing harness and got into the passenger seat of the KRIPOS vehicle. He connected the hairdryer to the laptop and entered a command.

  ‘GSR!’ he shouted through the open door. ‘No doubt about it, Poul had fired a weapon not long before he died. And so far it matches the weapon from the crime scene.’

  ‘Can you tell that too?’ I asked Martinsen.

  ‘We can at least see if it’s the same kind of ammunition and, if we’re lucky, if the GSR traces on Poul Hansen could have come from that type of pistol. But the chain of events is pretty clear now.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘Poul Hansen shot Willum Willumsen in his bedroom in the morning, and then drove up here to try to get the money Willumsen owed him from Carl, but then the Jaguar skidded on the ice on Geitesvingen, and—’ Abruptly she stopped. Smiled. ‘Your sheriff probably wouldn’t like it if he knew how closely you were following our investigation, Opgard.’

  ‘I promise not to tell.’

  She laughed. ‘All the same, for the good of our working relationship, I think it’s best if I say you were inside the house for most of the time we were here.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said, zipping up my jacket. ‘It sounds anyway as if the case is cleared.’

  She pressed her lips together as though to say we don’t answer questions like that, but at the same time blinked a ‘yes’ with both eyes.

  ‘How about a coffee?’ I asked.

  I spotted a momentary confusion in her eyes.

  ‘Because it is cold,’ I said. ‘I can bring a pot out for you.’

  ‘Thanks, but we’ve got our own,’ she said.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, turned, and left. I had the distinct feeling she was watching me. Not that she was necessarily interested, but of course you check out the arses you can. I thought of the hole in that zinc bucket and how close that bullet from the Dane had been to hitting me in the head. Professionally done, considering the car was in motion. And a good thing the drop had been so long there was no longer any front windscreen with a bullet hole in it to cause confusion about when and where Poul Hansen had fired that shot.

  ‘Well?’ said Carl, who was sitting at the kitchen table with Shannon.

  ‘I’ll say the same as Kurt Olsen,’ I answered, heading for the stove. ‘Oh yeah.’

  60

  AT THREE O’CLOCK IT STARTED to snow.

  ‘Look,’ said Shannon, staring out through the thin glass windows in the winter garden. ‘Everything is disappearing.’

  Large, shaggy flakes of snow were drifting down to lie like a feathered quilt across the landscape, and she was right, a couple of hours later everything was gone.

  ‘I’m driving to Kristiansand this evening,’ I said. ‘It seems the holiday took a few people down there by surprise, and the work’s been piling up.’

  ‘Keep in touch,’ said Carl.

  ‘Yes, keep in touch,’ said Shannon.

  Her foot touched mine beneath the chair.

  * * *

  —

  It had temporarily stopped snowing as I left Opgard at seven o’clock. I thought I’d better fill up with petrol, turned in at the station and saw Julie disappearing through the new sliding doors. There was only one car parked on the old boy racer hangout, Alex’s souped-up Ford Granada. I pulled up beneath the bright lights of the pumps, stepped out and started to fill up. The Granada was just a few metres away and with the light from a nearby street lamp falling on the golden-brown bonnet and windscreen we could see each other clearly. He was alone in the car, Julie had gone inside to buy something, a pizza maybe. Then they’d go home and watch a film, that was the usual thing to do around here when you started going steady. Removed from circulation, as people say. He pretended he hadn’t seen me. Not until I hooked the pump nozzle inside the fuel cap opening and walked across. Then suddenly he was very busy, sitting up straight behind the wheel, pinched out a freshly lit cigarette so the sparks danced on the snow-free asphalt beneath the roof over the pumps. Started winding up his window. Maybe someone had told him he’d been lucky Roy Opgard hadn’t been in the mood for a fight on New Year’s Eve and mentioned a couple of stories from the old days at Årtun. His hand even crept up and locked the door on his side.

  I stood next to his door and tapped on the glass with the knuckle of my index finger.

  He wound the window down a couple of centimetres. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve got a suggestion.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Alex and looked as if he reckoned what was coming was a suggestion for a rematch. And that would be a suggestion in which he had no interest at all.

  ‘Julie’s bound to have told you what happened before you came along on New Year’s Eve, and that you should apologise to me. But that isn’t so easy for a guy like you. I know, because I used to be that guy myself, and I’m not asking you to do this for my sake or for yours. But it’s important for Julie. You’re her fellah, and I’m the only boss she’s had who’s treated her decently.’

  Alex gaped, and I realised that what I said was making sense to him.

  ‘For this to look right I’m going to go over and finish fuelling, slowly. And when Julie comes back, you get out of the car and walk over to me, and you and I set things straight so she sees it.’

  He stared at me, his mouth half open. I don’t really know how smart Alex is, but when he did finally close his mouth I figured he’d realised that this would actually solve a couple of problems. In the first place, Julie would stop going on about how he wasn’t man enough to dare to apologise to Roy Opgard. In the second place, it would mean he could stop looking over his shoulder and waiting for me to have my revenge.

  He nodded.

  ‘See you,’ I said, and returned to the Volvo. I positioned myself behind the pump so Julie didn’t see me when she re-emerged a minute later. I heard her get into the car, heard the door close. A few seconds later a car door opening. And then Alex was standing in front of me.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, and held out his hand.

  ‘These things happen,’ I said. Over his shoulder I saw Julie staring at us, wide-eyed, from inside the car. ‘But, Alex?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Two things. Number one. Be kind to her. Number two. Don’t throw away lighted cigarettes when you’re parked this close to the pumps.’

  He swallowed and nodded again. ‘I’ll pick it up,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll pick it up after you’ve gone. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ Alex said with his mouth. And then added a ‘thanks’ with his eyes.

  Julie waved gaily to me as they drove by.
>
  I got into my car and drove off. Slowly, the milder weather had made the roads more treacherous. Passed the county sign. I didn’t look in the mirror.

  PART SEVEN

  61

  IN THE SECOND WEEK OF January I received a summons to attend a company meeting of the Os Spa and Mountain Hotel SL. It was scheduled for the first week in February. The order of business was simple and consisted of one point: Where do we go from here?

  The formulation opened up all sorts of possibilities. Should the hotel be scrapped? Or should it be sold to other interested parties and only the SL company be scrapped? Or should the project continue, only with a new timetable?

  The meeting wasn’t due to start until seven, and it was still only one as I pulled into the yard outside Opgard. A metallic white sun shone from a cloudless sky, and it was higher above the mountain peaks than it had been the last time I was home. As I stepped out of the car Shannon was standing there, so beautiful that it was painful.

  ‘I’ve learned to walk on these,’ she said, holding up a pair of skis in delight. I had to stop myself from taking her in my arms. Only four days earlier we had shared a bed in Notodden. I could still taste her on my tongue and feel the warmth of her skin.

  ‘She’s good!’ said Carl as he emerged from the house with my ski boots in his hands. ‘Let’s take a trip over to the hotel.’

  We fetched our skis from the barn, fastened them on and set off. I realised that Carl had of course exaggerated; Shannon managed to stay on her feet most of the way, but she wasn’t good.

  ‘I think it’s the surfing I did as a child,’ she said, obviously pleased with herself. ‘It helps your balance, and—’ She squealed as one ski reared up in front of her and down she went on her arse in the fresh snow. Carl and I doubled over with laughter, and after a failed attempt to look offended Shannon had to start laughing too. As we helped her up I felt Carl’s hand on my back, felt it give my neck a little squeeze. And his blue gaze shone on me. He looked better than he had done at Christmas. A bit thinner, movements a little quicker, the whites of his eyes a little clearer, his diction clearer too.