Sister
Page 31
Lise Svinland slumped onto a chair. ‘He wanted to take Alan from me,’ she said.
‘Who did?’
‘Fredrik wanted to take Alan from me. Fredrik refused to listen. Everything would’ve been different if he hadn’t been so stubborn. Besides, he was drunk and angry. He asked where Alan had gone. I said that from now on he was living with us. I said it was madness to send Alan to Kabul, but Fredrik was upset and angry. You couldn’t talk to him. He shouted at me and didn’t listen to sense.’
‘What was sense?’
‘Alan didn’t want to go back to his country. He was afraid. He told me. He asked if he could stay with us instead. I said yes. Fredrik was out that night and then Alan moved to our house. I went back to Fredrik’s and waited for him so that I could tell him calmly that this was best for everyone. But Fredrik’s reaction was all wrong.’
Frølich nodded. ‘And when he didn’t listen to sense, you used the knife?’
Jørgen Svinland intervened. ‘Don’t say any more,’ he told his wife, then turned to Frølich. ‘The main thing is that Fredrik’s dead. He’s not coming back. You might’ve seen Lise lock the door as she came out, but what does it matter? The important thing is that life – after thirty years – finally has some meaning. Can you grasp that someone who has her life back doesn’t want to die again?’
With difficulty, Lise Svinland rose from her chair. She wrapped her arm around her husband’s shoulders. ‘There’s no point, Jørgen.’
They looked into each other’s eyes. ‘Yes, there is,’ her husband said in a thick voice. ‘There is a point.’
She shook her head.
Silence reigned until Frølich cleared his throat and said to her: ‘It’s best if you hand yourself in. That’ll mitigate the sentence.’
She didn’t answer.
Frølich turned and went towards the staircase.
Svinland shouted after him: ‘You have no proof. It’s just what you believe. Can we rely on your discretion?’
Frølich didn’t answer. He went downstairs.
‘What does your silence cost, Frølich?’
Frølich didn’t answer.
‘I’ve got money,’ Svinland shouted. ‘Just say what you want to keep quiet.’
He slipped into his shoes without a backward glance, left, went to his bike, unlocked it and cycled down the hill.
He cycled with the sun in his face. Considered turning into the forest down by the lake. Decided against it – he couldn’t bear the thought of sitting around and moping in his little flat now. Instead he pedalled on to Brynseng and across Ensjø. Then cycled at a leisurely tempo down to Tøyen. A group of bare-chested young men in shorts were throwing a Frisbee to one another on one of the lawns. He stopped for a few seconds, watched them and envied their laughter and energy. He tore himself away and set off again through the small streets in the direction of Enerhaugen. Turned down and past the police station, went onto the pedestrian bridge that led over the railway lines, passed the Barcode buildings and the opera house, then carried on along the harbour promenade by the quays towards the Fish Hall. A number of camper vans had already parked in the queue by the Denmark ferry that was moored there. He kept cycling. It was still a lovely day and he had no idea what to do. On days such as this you should have a partner, he thought, as he passed the hobby fishermen sitting in a line along Akershus quay. An older man in overalls was in the fish-gutting section, hosing down the entrails from the catch. Frank cycled on, past the sailing ships and restaurant boats. He didn’t stop until he was on Honnør wharf and could see one of the small ferries gliding across to Hovedøya. Its wake flashed like silver. The silhouette of the boat made him pensive. The man who had been following him on the boat a few days ago was no more. This thought led him to other incidents he felt a need to shake off. He was filled with an urge to start something completely new. The best thing he could do, he realised, the first thing he should do, was to step out of the mire he had been wading through. He dismounted and pushed the bike to one of the benches along the wall. Here, he took out his phone and sat down to dial Gunnarstranda’s number.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
One of the fathers of the Nordic Noir genre, Kjell Ola Dahl was born in 1958 in Gjøvik. He made his debut in 1993, and has since published seventeen novels, the most prominent of which form a series of police procedurals-cum-psychological thrillers featuring investigators Gunnarstranda and Frølich. In 2000 he won the Riverton Prize for The Last Fix, and he won both the prestigious Brage and Riverton Prizes for The Courier in 2015 (published in English by Orenda books in 2019). His work has been published in fourteen countries. He lives in Oslo.
Follow him on Twitter @ko_dahl.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Don Bartlett completed an MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia in 2000 and has since worked with a wide variety of Danish and Norwegian authors, including Jo Nesbø and Karl Ove Knausgård. For Orenda he has translated several titles in Gunnar Staalesen’s Varg Veum series: We Shall Inherit the Wind, Wolves in the Dark and the Petrona award-winning Where Roses Never Die. He has also translated two books in Kjell Ola Dahl’s Oslo Detectives Series for Orenda – Faithless and The Ice Swimmer.
Other titles in the Oslo Detectives Series available from Orenda Books
Faithless
The Ice Swimmer
Also by Kjell Ola Dahl and available from Orenda Books
The Courier
COPYRIGHT
Orenda Books
16 Carson Road
West Dulwich
London SE21 8HU
www.orendabooks.co.uk
First published in the United Kingdom by Orenda Books, 2020
First published in Norwegian as Søsteren by Gyldendal, 2018
Copyright © Kjell Ola Dahl, 2018
English translation copyright © Don Bartlett, 2020
Kjell Ola Dahl has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This book has been translated with financial support from NORLA
ISBN 978–1–913193–02–7
eISBN 978–1–913193–03–4