by Jo Nesbo
I stood beneath a bare tree. The moon had risen and bathed Lake Budal in an eerie light. In a few days’ time the ice would be gone. The current would take hold of the ice floes. Once things start to crack here, it doesn’t take long for everything to go.
A figure appeared beside me.
‘What does the ptarmigan do when the fox takes its eggs?’ It was Carl.
‘Lays new ones,’ I said.
‘Isn’t it funny? When your parents say stuff like that when you’re a kid you think it’s just drivel. And then one day you suddenly understand what they meant.’
I shrugged.
‘It’s lovely, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘When the spring finally reaches us too.’
‘It is.’
‘When are you coming back?’
‘Back?’
‘To Os.’
‘For the funeral, I suppose.’
‘There won’t be any funeral here, I’m sending her in a coffin to Barbados. I mean, when are you moving back?’
‘Never.’
Carl laughed as though I’d just made a joke. ‘You maybe don’t know it yourself yet, but you’ll be back before the year is out, Roy Opgard.’ And then he left.
I stood there for a long time. Finally I looked up at the moon. It should have been something bigger, like a planet, something that could really have set me and everybody else and our tragic and hurried lives in a proper perspective. I needed that now. Something that could tell me that all of us – Shannon, Carl and me, Mum and Dad, Uncle Bernard, Sigmund Olsen, Willumsen and the Danish enforcer – were here, gone and forgotten in the same instant, hardly more than a flash in the universe’s vast ocean of time and space. That was the only comfort we had, that absolutely nothing had meaning. Not looking out across your own land. Not running your own service station. Not waking up beside the one you love. Not seeing your own child grow up.
That’s what it was: unimportant.
But of course, the moon was too small to provide comfort for that.
71
‘THANKS,’ SAID MARTINSEN AS SHE took the cup of coffee I handed to her. She leaned against the kitchen worktop and looked out of the window. The KRIPOS car and Olsen’s Land Rover were still down on Geitesvingen.
‘So you didn’t find anything?’ I asked.
‘Obviously not,’ she said.
‘Does it seem so obvious to you?’
Martinsen sighed and glanced round, as though to assure herself we were still alone in the kitchen. ‘To be quite honest, under normal circumstances we would have rejected the request for assistance in a case which was so obviously an accident. When your sheriff contacted us, the faults on the car – which were obviously what caused it – had already been discovered. The extensive damages sustained by the dead person are what you would expect from such a long fall. The local doctor obviously couldn’t say exactly when she died, given that it took a day and a half before he was able to get down to the car; but his estimate suggests she went off the road sometime between six o’clock and midnight.’
‘So then why have you made the trip out here anyway?’
‘Well, one reason is that your sheriff insisted on it. He was almost aggressive about it. He is convinced that your brother’s wife was murdered, and he’s read in what he calls a technical journal that in eighty per cent of cases the guilty party is the husband. And in KRIPOS we like to keep a good relationship with the sheriffs’ offices round about.’ She smiled. ‘Good coffee, by the way.’
‘Thanks. And what was the other reason?’
‘The other?’
‘You said Sheriff Olsen was one reason, so what was the other?’
Martinsen turned her blue eyes on me, and it was a look that was hard to judge. And I didn’t meet her gaze. Didn’t want to. I was quite simply not there. Moreover I knew that if I let her look me too directly and too long in the eye she might discover the wound.
‘I appreciate your openness with me, Martinsen.’
‘Vera.’
‘But aren’t you at least slightly sceptical when you know that, in all, three cars have driven off the road and fallen down the same precipice, and that you are now talking to the brother of someone who was closely connected to all of those who have lost their lives here?’
Vera Martinsen nodded. ‘I haven’t forgotten that for one moment, Roy. And Olsen has reminded me of those road accidents over and over again. Now he has a theory that the first fatal accident might also have been murder and wants us to check whether the brake hoses on the Cadillac at the bottom were possibly sabotaged.’
‘My father’s,’ I said, hoping my poker face was still in place. ‘Did your people check?’
Martinsen laughed. ‘In the first place the wreck lies squashed under two other cars down there. And if we did find something, the case is now eighteen years old and subject to the statute of limitations. Moreover I’m a great believer in what people call common sense and logic. Do you know how many cars go off the road in Norway each year? Around three thousand. And in how many different places? Less than two thousand. Almost half of all cars that go off the road do so in places where the same thing has happened earlier in the same year. For three cars to go off the road over a period of eighteen years at a place that should obviously have been better protected seems to me not merely reasonable, I think in fact it’s strange there haven’t been more accidents.’
I nodded. ‘Perhaps you’d be kind enough to mention that about better safety measures to the local authorities here?’
Martinsen smiled and put down her cup.
I followed her out into the hall.
‘How is your brother doing?’ she said as she buttoned up her jacket.
‘Well, he’s taking it hard. He’s accompanied the coffin to Barbados. He’s going to meet her relatives there. After that he says he’s going to drown himself completely in work on the hotel.’
‘And what about you?’
‘It gets better,’ I lied. ‘Of course, it was a shock, but life goes on. For the eighteen months Shannon lived here I was mostly other places, so we never really knew each other well enough to...well, you know what I mean. It’s not like losing someone from your own family.’
‘I understand.’
‘Hm, well,’ I said, and opened the front door for her, since she hadn’t done so herself. But she didn’t move.
‘Hear that?’ she whispered. ‘Wasn’t that a plover?’
I nodded. Slowly. ‘Are you interested in birds?’
‘Very. I get it from my father. And you?’
‘Yeah, pretty much.’
‘You’ve got a lot of interesting specimens up in these parts, I expect?’
‘Yes we do.’
‘Maybe I can come up one day and you can show me?’
‘That would’ve been nice,’ I said. ‘But I don’t live here.’
And then I met her gaze anyway and let her see it. How damaged I was.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Let me know if you move back then. You’ll find my number on the card I left under the coffee cup.’
I nodded.
Once she’d gone I went up to the bedroom, lay down on the double bed, pulled the pillow over my face and breathed in the last remnants of Shannon. A faint, spicy smell that in a few days’ time would be gone. I opened the wardrobe on her side of the bed. It was empty. Carl had taken most of her things to Barbados with him and thrown away the rest. But in the dark recesses of the cupboard I saw something. Shannon must have found them somewhere in the house and stored them there. It was a pair of crocheted baby shoes, so comically small you had to smile. Grandma had crocheted them, and according to Mum they were mine first, and then later Carl’s.
I went down into the kitchen.
From the window I could see the barn door was wide open. The glow of a cigarette. Kurt Ol
sen squatting on his haunches inside and examining something on the floor.
I took out the binoculars.
He ran his fingers over something. And I knew what it was. The marks from the jack on the soft planking. Kurt walked over to the punchbag, stared at the face painted on it. Gave it a tentative punch. Vera Martinsen had probably told him by now that KRIPOS were getting ready to pack up and leave. But Olsen wouldn’t be giving up. I read somewhere that it takes the body seven years to change all its cells, including brain cells, and that after seven years we are in principle a new person. But our DNA, the programme the cells are based on, does not change. That if we cut our hair, our nails or a fingertip, what grows out again will be the same, a repetition. And that new brain cells are no different from old ones and take over many of the same memories and experiences. We don’t change, we make the same choices, repeat the same mistakes. Like father like son. A hunter like Kurt Olsen will go on hunting, a killer will – if the circumstances are an exact repetition – again choose to kill. There’s an eternal circle, like the predictable orbits of planets, and the regular progression of the seasons.
Kurt Olsen was on his way out of the barn when he stopped to look at something else. And now he lifted it up, held it up to the light. It was one of the zinc buckets. I focused the binoculars. He was studying the bullet holes. First on one side of the bucket, then on the other. After a while he put the bucket down, walked down to his car and drove off.
The house was empty. I was alone. More alone than I’d ever been before. Was this what it was like for Dad, even with all of us around him?
From the west came a low, threatening rumbling sound and I turned the binoculars to look.
It was an avalanche on the north face of Ottertind. Heavy, wet ‘sugary’ snow that couldn’t stay up there any more, it had to get down and now thundered through the ice, making the water cascade high into the air on the far shore of Lake Budal.
Yes, merciless spring was on its way again.
Jo Nesbo is one of the world’s bestselling crime writers, with multiple books including The Son, Macbeth and Knife topping the Sunday Times bestseller charts. He’s an international number one bestseller and his books are published in 50 languages, selling over 45 million copies around the world.
Before becoming a crime writer, Nesbo played football for Norway’s premier league team Molde, but his dream was dashed when he tore ligaments in his knee at the age of eighteen. After three years of military service he attended business school and formed the band Di Derre (‘Them There’). They topped the charts in Norway, but Nesbo continued working as a financial analyst, crunching numbers during the day and gigging at night. When commissioned by a publisher to write a memoir about life on the road with his band, he instead came up with the plot for his first Harry Hole crime novel, The Bat.
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Robert Ferguson has lived in Norway since 1983. His translations include Norwegian Wood by Lars Mytting, the four novels in Torkil Damhaug’s Oslo Crime Fiction series, and Tales of Love and Loss by Knut Hamsun. He is the author of several biographies, a Viking history and, most recently, The Cabin in the Mountains: A Norwegian Odyssey.
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