The Kingdom

by Jo Nesbo

  Because it was OK. If it ended here, if I was not to live for one more day, then that was OK. With any luck killing me would bring Carl and Shannon together. Carl was a pragmatist. He could live with raising a child that wasn’t completely his and yet was still a member of his family. Yes, maybe my demise was the only chance of a happy ending in all this.

  I rounded Geitesvingen and speeded up slightly, the gravel flying up behind the rear wheels. Below me lay the village, swathed in evening dark, and in what remained of the daylight I saw Carl standing in front of the Cadillac with arms folded, waiting for me.

  And another thought struck me. Not another, but the first.

  That that’s all it was: something wrong with the car.

  Something trivial that had nothing to do with the brake hoses or the throttle cable and could be easily fixed. That somewhere in the kitchen light, behind the curtains, Shannon was waiting for me to sort this out and after that the plan would be back on the rails.

  I climbed out of the car, and Carl walked over and put his arms around me. He held me in such a way that I felt his whole body from head to toe, could feel he was trembling the way he used to after Dad had been to our room and I climbed down into his bed to comfort him.

  He whispered a few words in my ear, and I understood.

  Understood that the plan was not back on the rails.

  69

  WE SAT IN THE CADILLAC. Carl behind the wheel, me in the passenger seat.

  Staring out past Geitesvingen, at the mountain peaks in the south framed in orange and pale blue.

  ‘I said on the phone there was something wrong with the car because I knew Olsen was there,’ Carl said tearfully.

  ‘I understand,’ I said, and tried to move my foot, which had fallen asleep. No, not asleep, but gone lame, as lame as the rest of me. ‘Tell me in more detail what happened.’ My voice felt and sounded as though it was someone else talking.

  ‘Right,’ said Carl. ‘We were about to leave for the building site, were getting changed. Shannon’s ready, she looks like a million dollars. I’m in the kitchen ironing my shirt. And then suddenly she says she’s not feeling well. I tell her we’ve got paracetamol, but she says she has to go upstairs and lie down, I should go to the opening on my own and she’ll take the Subaru to the party if she feels any better. I’m shocked, tell her to pull herself together, this is important. But she refuses, says her health comes first and so on. And yeah, I’m really pissed off, it’s all just bullshit, Shannon never gets so ill she can’t manage to stay on her feet for a couple of hours, right? And this is, you know, it’s her big moment every bit as much as mine. For a moment I lose control, and I just blurt it out...’

  ‘You just blurt it out,’ I said, and could feel the paralysis advancing into my tongue.

  ‘I just blurt out that if she’s feeling so ill it’s probably because of that bastard kid she’s got in the oven.’

  ‘Bastard kid,’ I repeated. It was so cold in the car. So fucking cold.

  ‘Yeah, she asked about that too, like she didn’t understand what I was talking about. Then I tell her that I know about her and that American actor. Dennis Quarry. And she repeats the name, and I can’t even stand hearing the way she says it: Denn-is Qu-arry. And then she starts to laugh. To laugh. And I’m standing there with the iron in my hand, and something inside me just snaps.’

  ‘Snaps.’ Expressionless.

  ‘I hit her,’ he said.

  ‘Hit her.’ I’d turned into a fucking echo chamber.

  ‘The iron hits her on the side of the head, she falls backwards and into the stovepipe so it breaks. There’s a cloud of soot.’

  I say nothing.

  ‘So I’m leaning over her and holding that scalding hot iron right in front of her face and saying if she doesn’t confess then I’ll iron her as flat as my shirt. But she still goes on laughing. And lying there laughing away with the blood running down into her mouth so her teeth are red with blood she looks like a fucking witch and not all that fucking beautiful any more, see what I mean? And she confesses. Not just what I’m asking her about but she sticks the knife right in and confesses everything. She confesses the worst thing of all.’

  I tried to swallow, but there was no saliva left.

  ‘And what was the worst thing of all?’

  ‘What do you think, Roy?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘The hotel,’ he said. ‘It was Shannon who set fire to the hotel.’

  ‘Shannon? How...?’

  ‘As we were leaving Willumsen’s party to go to the square to see the rockets Shannon said she was tired and wanted to go home and she took the car. I was still in the square when we heard the fire truck.’ Carl closed his eyes. ‘Shannon’s sitting there by the stove and she says how she drove up to the building site and started the fire at a place where she knew it would spread, and left behind a dead rocket so it would look like that was the cause of the fire.’

  I know what to ask. That I have to ask, even though I know the answer. Must ask in order not to reveal that I already know, that I know Shannon probably just as well as he does. So I do it. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because...’ Carl swallows. ‘Because she’s God, creating in her own image. She couldn’t live with that hotel, it had to be the way she had drawn it. That or nothing. She didn’t know it wasn’t insured and figured it wouldn’t be a problem to start again from scratch and then, at the second attempt, she’d be able to insist we use her original drawings.’

  ‘Is that what she said?’

  ‘Yes. And when I asked if she didn’t consider the rest of us, you, and me, and the people in the village who had worked and invested in it, she said no.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Fuck no, was what she said. And laughed. And then I hit her again.’

  ‘With the iron?’

  ‘With the back of it. The cold side.’

  ‘Hard?’

  ‘Hard. I saw the light go out in her eyes.’

  I had to concentrate in order to breathe. ‘Was she...’

  ‘I took her pulse, but I couldn’t feel shit.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I carried her out here.’

  ‘She’s lying in the boot?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Show me.’

  We climbed out. As Carl opened the boot I raised my eyes and looked into the west. Above the mountain tops the orange was eating into the pale blue. And I thought that this was maybe the last time I would be able to think that something was beautiful. But for a fraction of a second, before looking down into the boot, I thought it had all been just a joke, that there wouldn’t be anybody there.

  But there she lay. A snow-white Sleeping Beauty. She slept the way she had done the two nights we had spent together in Kristiansand. On her side, with eyes closed. And I couldn’t help thinking: in the same foetal position as the child inside her.

  The wounds to her head left no room for doubt that she was dead. I laid my fingertips against that smashed forehead.

  ‘This isn’t just from one blow with the back of an iron,’ I said.

  ‘I...’ Carl swallowed. ‘She moved when I laid her beside the car to open the boot, and I...I panicked.’

  Automatically I looked down at the ground, and there, in the interior light from the boot, I saw a flash from one of the big stones Dad had made us carry up to the wall of the house, to improve the drainage one autumn when it rained more than usual. There was blood on it.

  Carl’s sobbing whisper beside me sounded like porridge simmering. ‘Can you help me out, Roy?’

  My gaze went back to Shannon. Wanted to look away but couldn’t look away. He had killed her. No, he had murdered her. In cold blood. And now he was asking for help. I hated him. Hated, hated, and now I felt my heart start to pump again, and with the blood came
pain, finally the pain came, and I bit down so hard it felt as though I would crush my own jaws. I drew a breath and freed up my jaw enough to say three words:

  ‘Help you how?’

  ‘We can drive her out to the woods. Leave her somewhere where they’re bound to find her and leave the Cadillac next to her. Then I’ll say she took the Cadillac and went out for a spin earlier in the day and still hadn’t come back by the time I left for the opening ceremony. If we go now and leave her somewhere, then I’ll still have time to make it, and then I can report her missing when she doesn’t show up at the party as arranged. Sound good?’

  I punched him in the stomach.

  He folded in the middle and stood there like a fucking L, gasping for breath. I easily pushed him over onto the gravel, then sat on top of him so that his arms were trapped. He was going to die; he was going to die the same way she did. My right hand found the big stone, but it was sticky and slippery with blood and slipped out of my grasp. I was about to dry my hand on my shirt, but finally managed to think clearly enough to instead run my hand twice through the gravel and then picked up the stone again. Raised it above my head. Carl was still not breathing and lay with his eyes tight shut. I wanted him to see this, so I squeezed his nose with my left hand.

  He opened his eyes.

  He cried.

  His eyes were on me, maybe he still hadn’t seen the stone I was holding up above my head, or maybe he didn’t understand what it meant. Or else he’d reached the same place as me and didn’t give a fuck any more. I felt the pull of gravity on the stone, it wanted to fall, it wanted to crush, I wouldn’t even have to use force, it was when I stopped using force, when I no longer kept it at arm’s length from my brother that it would do the job for which it was intended. He had stopped crying, and already I could feel the burn of the lactic acid in my right arm. I gave up. Let it happen. But then I saw it. Like some fucking echo from childhood. That look in his eyes. That fucking humiliated, helpless little-brother look. And the lump in my throat. I was the one who was going to start crying. Again. I let the stone come, added speed to it, smashed it down so hard I could feel it all the way up my shoulder. Sat there panting like a fucking hound dog.

  And after I’d got my breath back, I rolled off Carl who lay there, motionless. Silent at last. Eyes wide open, as though finally he had seen and understood everything. I sat there next to him and looked at Ottertind Mountain. Our silent witness.

  ‘That was pretty damn close to my head,’ Carl groaned.

  ‘Not close enough,’ I said.

  ‘OK, so I fucked up,’ he said. ‘Have you got that out of your system now?’

  I took the snuffbox from my trouser pocket.

  ‘Speaking of stones to the head,’ I said, and didn’t care a shit if he could hear the shaking in my voice. ‘When they find her in the woods, how do you think they’re going to explain her head wounds? Eh?’

  ‘Someone murdered her, I guess.’

  ‘And who’s the first person they’re going to suspect?’

  ‘The husband?’

  ‘Who is the guilty party in eighty per cent of all cases, according to True Crime magazine? Particularly when he’s got no alibi for the time of the murder.’

  Carl raised himself up onto his elbows. ‘OK then, big brother, so what do we do?’

  We. Naturally.

  ‘Give me a few seconds,’ I said.

  I looked around. What did I see?

  Opgard. A small house, a barn, a few outlying fields. And what, actually, was that? A name in six letters, a family with two surviving members. Because, when you take away all the rest, what was a family? A story we told each other because family was a necessity. Because, over thousands of years, it had worked as a unit of cooperation? Yeah, why not? Or was there something beyond the merely practical, something in the blood that bound parents, brothers and sisters together? They say you can’t live on just fresh air and love. But you can’t fucking well live without them either. And if there’s something we want, then it’s to live. I felt that now, perhaps even more strongly because death lay in the boot directly in front of us. That I wanted to live. And, for that reason, that we had to do what had to be done. That everything depended on me. That it had to be done now.

  ‘First,’ I said, ‘when I checked the Cadillac last autumn I told Shannon you should replace the brake hoses and the throttle cable. Have you done that?’

  ‘What?’ Carl coughed and held a hand to his stomach. ‘Shannon never said a word about that.’

  ‘Good, then we’re in luck,’ I said. ‘We move her into the driver’s seat. Before you wash the kitchen and the boot, take what blood there is and smear it on the steering wheel, the seat and the dashboard. Got that?’

  ‘Er, yes. But...’

  ‘Shannon is going to be found in the Cadillac down in Huken and that will explain her head wounds.’

  ‘But...that’s the third car down in Huken. The police are bound to wonder what the fuck is going on.’

  ‘Definitely. But once they find those worn parts I’m talking about, then they’ll understand that this really was an accident.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Certain of it,’ I said.

  * * *

  —

  A thin glow of orange light still lay around Ottertind as Carl and I started the heavy black beast moving. Shannon looked so tiny behind that big wheel. We let go of the car and it trundled slowly, almost reluctantly forward as the gravel crunched beneath its tyres. Uppermost on the fins sticking out at the back the two vertically mounted lights glowed red. It was a Cadillac DeVille. From the days when the Americans made cars like spaceships that could take you to the sky.

  I followed the car with my eyes, the throttle cable must have got stuck because it just kept on accelerating and I thought this time it will happen, it’ll take off for the sky.

  She’d said she thought it was a boy. I had said nothing, but of course I couldn’t help thinking about names. Not that I think she would have accepted Bernard, but that was the only one I could think of.

  Carl put his arm around my shoulder. ‘You’re all I have, Roy,’ he said.

  And you’re all I have, I thought. Two brothers in a desert.

  70

  ‘FOR A LOT OF US, we’re back now where we started out,’ said Carl.

  He was on the stage at Årtun, in front of one of the microphone stands which would shortly be taken over by Rod and his band.

  ‘And I’m not thinking about the first investors’ meeting we had here, but when I, my brother and many of you who are here tonight used to meet at the local dances. And it was usually after a few drinks we would get up enough front to start boasting about all the great things we swore we were going to achieve. Or else we asked the one who had had the loudest mouth how things were coming along with that great plan of his, had he made a start yet? And then there would be mocking grins one way and curses the other and – if he happened to be the touchy type – a butt.’

  Laughter from the audience standing in the hall.

  ‘But when anyone asks us next year how things are going with that hotel us people from Os boast about so much, then we can tell them oh yes, we built that all right. Twice.’

  Wild enthusiasm. I shifted from one foot to the other. Nausea gripped around my throat, a headache pounded rhythmically behind my eyes, the pain in my chest was excruciating, almost like I would imagine a heart attack feels. But I tried not to think, tried not to feel. For the moment it looked as though Carl was dealing with it better than me. As I should have known. He was the cold one of us. He was like Mum. A passive accessory. Cold.

  He held his arms out wide, like a circus ringmaster, or an actor.

  ‘Those of you who were present at the launch earlier this evening were able to see the drawings exhibited there, and you know how fantastic this is goi
ng to be. And actually our master builder, my wife Shannon Alleyne Opgard, should have been up here on the stage with me. She may be along later, but at the moment she’s at home in bed because sometimes that’s the way it is when a hotel isn’t the only thing you’re pregnant with...’

  There was silence for a moment. Then the cheering started all over again, presently turning into foot-stamping applause.

  I couldn’t take any more, I hurried for the exit.

  ‘And now, everyone, please give a warm welcome to...’

  I elbowed my way out of the door and just managed to get round the corner of the building before my throat filled and the puke splashed down onto the ground in front of me. It came in contractions, something that had to come out, like a bloody birth. When at last it was over I sank to my knees, empty, done. From inside I heard the cowbell tap out the rhythm to the fast number Rod and his gang always opened with, ‘Honky Tonk Women’. I pressed my forehead against the wall and started to cry. Snot, tears and puke-stinking slime poured out of me.

  ‘Jesus,’ I heard a voice say behind me. ‘Did someone finally beat up Roy Opgard?’

  ‘Don’t, Simon!’ said a woman’s voice, and I felt a hand on my shoulder. ‘Is everything all right, Roy?’

  I half turned. Grete Smitt had a red headscarf wrapped around her head. And she actually looked quite good in it.

  ‘Just some bad moonshine,’ I said. ‘But thanks anyway.’

  The two of them walked on towards the car park, arms around each other.

  I got to my feet and headed off in the direction of the birch wood, feet squelching on soft ground that swayed, heavy with meltwater. I cleared my nostrils one after the other, spat and breathed in. The evening air was still cold, but it tasted different, like a promise that things would change, into something new, and better. I couldn’t comprehend what that might be.