Jo Nesbø - Headhunters

‘Oh, that’s just talk, that is,’ I had said with a rigid smile, hoping the penetration angst did not show in my eyes.

‘Right, mister. I’ve jus-heard that you’re the third cousin of the Monsen boys and know them well. Perhaps you might be so kind as to help us iden-ify the bodies?’

I swallowed. The polite form of address and the semi-jocular ‘mister’ in the same utterance. But Sperre’s eyes were neutral. Was he playing the status game or did he just do that automatically, almost like a professional reflex action? I heard myself repeating ‘identify’ with a stammer as though the concept were totally unfamiliar to me.

‘Their mother will be here in a few hours,’ Sperre said. ‘But any time we could save… We would app-eciate that. It’ll on-y take a couple of se-onds.’

I didn’t want to. My body bristled and my brain insisted I refuse and get the hell out of there. For I had been reawakened. I – that is the plastic bag of hair I was carrying – was now a person who was active again on Greve’s GPS receiver. It was only a question of time before he would resume the hunt; I could already scent the dog in the air, sense the panic mounting. But another part of my brain, the one with the new voice, said that I should not refuse. That it would arouse suspicion. That it would only take a few seconds.

‘Of course,’ I said and was about to smile, until I realised that would be perceived as an inappropriate reaction to having to identify the corpses of your own relatives.

We went back the same way as I had come.

The porter nodded to me with a grin as we went through the locker room.

‘You should prepare yourself. The deceased are in pretty bad shape,’ Sperre said, opening a heavy metal door. We stepped into the mortuary. I shivered. Everything in the room suggested the inside of a fridge: white walls, roof and floor, a few degrees above zero and meat that was past its sell-by date.

The four bodies lay in a line, each on its own metal table. Feet stuck out from under white sheets, and I could see that film conventions were rooted in reality; they did in fact each have a metal tag attached to a big toe.

‘Ready?’ said Sperre.

I nodded.

He whipped back two sheets with a flourish, like a magician. ‘Traffic accidents,’ the policeman said, rocking on his heels. ‘The worst. Hard to identify, as you can see.’ I had the sudden impression Sperre was speaking abnormally slowly. ‘There should have been five people in the car, but we found only these four bodies. The fifth must have landed in the river and floated away.’

I stared, swallowed and breathed heavily through my nose. I was play-acting, of course. For even naked, the Monsen twins looked better now than they had in the wrecked car. Moreover, it didn’t reek in here. No gaseous faeces, no smells of blood and petrol or the stench of human intestines. It occurred to me that visual impressions are overrated, that sound and smell terrorise the sense mechanisms in a much more effective way. Like the crunching sound a woman’s head makes as it hits the parquet floor, after being shot through the eye.

‘It’s the Monsen twins,’ I whispered.

‘Yes, we’ve managed to work that out, too. The question is…’

Sperre paused for a long – a really long – dramatic pause. My God.

‘Which is Endride and which is Eskild?’

Despite the wintry temperature in the room I was soaked with sweat under my clothes. Was he speaking so slowly on purpose? Was it a new interrogation method, of which I knew nothing?

My gaze hovered over the naked bodies and found the mark I had made. The wound running from the ribs down the stomach was still open and had black scabs along the edges.

‘That’s Endride,’ I stated, pointing. ‘The other’s Eskild.’

‘Hm,’ Sperre purred with satisfaction, making a note. ‘You must’ve known the twins very well. Not even their colleagues, who have been here, could tell them apart.’

I answered with a sorrowful nod. ‘The twins and I were very close. Especially of late. Can I go now?’

‘Sure,’ Sperre said, but continued to make notes in a way that did not invite a dismissal.

I looked at the clock behind his head.

‘Identical twins,’ Sperre said, continuing to write. ‘Ironic, isn’t it?’ What the hell was he writing? One was Endride, the other Eskild, how many words did you really need to say that?

I knew I ought not to ask, but I couldn’t resist. ‘What’s ironic?’

Sperre stopped writing and looked up. ‘Born in the same second from the same egg. Dead in the same second in the same car.’

‘No irony in that, is there?’

‘None?’

‘None that I can see.’

‘Mm. You’re right. “Paradox” is probably the word I was looking for.’ Sperre smiled.

I felt my blood beginning to bubble. ‘It’s not a paradox, either.’

‘Well, it is strange anyway. There is a sort of cosmic logic to it, don’t you think?’

I lost control, saw my knuckles go white as I squeezed the bag and heard my quivering voice say: ‘No irony, no parody, no cosmic logic.’ The volume increased. ‘Just an arbitrary symmetry of life and death, which is not even that arbitrary since they, like many other identical twins, chose to spend a lot of their time in the immediate vicinity of each other. Lightning struck and they were together. End of story.’

I had almost shouted the last part.

Sperre looked at me with a thoughtful gaze. He had a finger and thumb placed at opposite corners of his mouth and now he ran them down to his chin. I knew that look. He was one of the few. He had the interrogator look, the eyes that could expose lies.

‘Well, Bratli,’ he said, ‘something bothering you, is there?’

‘Sorry,’ I said with a wan smile and knew I had to say something truthful now, something that did not register on the lie detector staring at me. ‘I had a bit of a dis agreement with my wife last night, and now this accident. I’m a bit off-kilter. My deepest apologies. I’ll remove myself this minute.’

I turned on my heel and left.

Sperre said something, perhaps goodbye, but it was drowned by the metal door slamming behind me and a bass tone booming through the mortuary.

I CAUGHT THE tram at the stop outside Rikshospital, paid the conductor in cash and said, ‘To the centre.’ He smirked as he gave me change, presumably the price was the same wherever I went. I had caught the tram before, of course, as a boy, but I didn’t recall the routine so well. Get out through the back door, have your ticket ready to be checked, press the stop button in good time, don’t disturb the driver. A lot had changed. The noise from the rails was less deafening, the advertising more deafening and extrovert. People on the seats more introvert.

In the centre I switched mode of transport, to a bus which took me north-east. Was told I could travel on the tram ticket. Fantastic. For peanuts I could navigate my way through the town in a way I had never known was possible. I was in motion. A flashing dot on Greve’s GPS thingy. I seemed to be able to sense his confusion: What the fuck is going on? Are they moving the body?

I got off the bus at Årvoll and began to climb the hills towards Tonsenhagen. I could have got off closer to Ove’s place, but everything I was doing now had a point. In these residential areas it was a quiet morning. A stoop-shouldered old lady was tottering along the pavement pulling a shopping trolley behind her with screaming, unlubricated wheels. Nevertheless she smiled at me as if it was a wonderful day, a beautiful world, a lovely life. What was Greve thinking now? That there was a hearse driving Brown to his childhood home or something like that, but it suddenly seemed to be going so slowly – was there a traffic jam?