Jo Nesbø - Headhunters

‘At the hospital Greve said I’d persuaded you to have an abortion because the baby had Down’s syndrome.’

‘Down’s?’ It was the first thing Diana had said for several minutes. ‘Where did he get that idea from? I didn’t say-’

‘I know. It was something I made up when I told Lotte about the abortion. She told me her parents had forced her to have an abortion when she was a teenager. So I made up the Down’s syndrome story because I thought she might see me in a better light.’

‘So she… she…’

‘Yes. She’s the only one who could have told Greve that.’

I had waited. Let it sink in.

Then I had told Diana what would happen now.

She had stared at me in horror and shouted: ‘I can’t do it, Roger!’

‘Yes, you can,’ I had said. ‘You can and you will, my love.’ Said the new Roger Brown.

‘But… but…’

‘He was lying to you, Diana. He can’t give you a child. He’s sterile.’

‘Sterile?’

‘I’ll give you the child. I promise. Just do this for me.’

She had refused. Cried. Begged. And then she had promised.

When I went down to Lotte’s to become a murderer later that evening, I had instructed Diana and knew she would accomplish the mission. I could see her before me, receiving Greve when he came, the dazzling perfidious smile, the cognac already in the glass, passing it to him, toasting the victor, the future, the as yet unconceived child. Which she insisted should be conceived as soon as possible, tonight, now!

I recoiled as Diana pinched one of my nipples. ‘What are you thinking about right now?’

I pulled up the duvet. ‘The night Greve came here. Him lying with you where I am now.’

‘So what? You were lying with a dead body that night.’

I had desisted from asking, but now I couldn’t restrain myself any longer. ‘Did you have sex?’

She chuckled. ‘You did well to restrain yourself for so long, darling.’

‘Did you?’

‘Let me put it like this: the drops of Dormicum that were left in the rubber ball and that I squeezed into his welcome drink worked faster than I had imagined. I dolled myself up and when I came in here, he was already sleeping like a baby. The following day, however…’

‘I withdraw the question,’ I said with alacrity.

Diana stroked my stomach with her hand and laughed again. ‘The next morning he was very much awake. Not because of me, but because of a phone call that had woken him up.’

‘My warning.’

‘Yes. At any rate he was dressed and off at once.’

‘Where was his gun?’

‘In his jacket pocket.’

‘Did he check the gun before he left?’

‘I don’t know. He wouldn’t have noticed the difference anyway, the weight was about the same. I just exchanged the top three cartridges in the magazine.’

‘Yes, but the blank cartridges I gave you have a red B on the end.’

‘If he’d checked he would probably have thought it stood for “back”.’

The laughter of two people filled the bedroom. I enjoyed the sound. If all went well and the litmus test was positive, the room would soon be filled by the laughter of three people. And it would suppress the other sound, the echo I could still wake up to in the night. The bangs as Greve fired, the flash of the muzzle, the fraction of a second thinking that Diana had not switched the cartridges after all, that she had changed sides again. And then, the echo, the clink of empty cartridge cases landing on the parquet floor that was already covered with cartridges, live and blank, old and new, so many that the police would not be able to tell them apart regardless of whether they suspected that the video recording was a put-up job.

‘Were you frightened?’ she asked.

‘Frightened?’

‘Yes. You never told me how it felt. And you don’t appear in the pictures…’

‘Pic-’ I moved away to be able to see her face. ‘Do you mean to say you’ve been on the Net looking at the film?’

She didn’t answer. And I thought there was still a lot I didn’t know about this woman. Perhaps there would be enough mysteries for a whole lifetime.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was scared.’

‘What of? You knew his gun didn’t have any-’

‘Only the top three cartridges were blanks. I had to make sure he fired all of them so that the police wouldn’t find unused blanks in the magazine and see through the plan, didn’t I? But he could have fired some of the live bullets too. And he could have changed the magazine before coming. And he could also have brought along a sidekick I knew nothing about.’

Silence fell. Until she asked in a whisper: ‘So there was nothing else you were frightened of?’

I knew she was thinking what I was thinking.

‘Yes, there was,’ I said, turning to her. ‘I was frightened of one more thing.’

Her breathing on my face was fast and hot.

‘He might have killed you during the night,’ I said. ‘Greve didn’t have any plans to start a family with you, and you were a dangerous witness. I knew I was putting your life in danger when I asked you to be the decoy.’

‘I knew I was in danger the whole time, darling,’ she whispered. ‘That was why I gave him the welcome drink as soon as he came through the door. And didn’t wake him until you rang his phone. I knew he would be up and away after hearing the ghost’s voice. And besides, I had swapped the first three bullets in the gun, hadn’t I?’

‘True,’ I said. Diana, as I have said, is a woman with a relaxed relationship to prime numbers and logic.

She caressed my stomach with her hand. ‘And another thing – I appreciate the fact that you knowingly and deliberately put my life in danger…’

‘Oh?’

She ran her hand further down, over my penis. Held my balls in her hand. Weighed them, gently squeezed the two testicles. ‘Balance is of the essence,’ she said. ‘That applies to all good, harmonious relationships. Balance in guilt, balance in shame and pangs of conscience.’

I chewed on that, tried to digest it, let my brain assimilate this somewhat weighty nugget of thought.

‘You mean…’ I began, gave up and started afresh. ‘You mean to say you put yourself in mortal danger for my sake… that that…’

‘… was an appropriate price to pay for what I had done to you, yes. The same as Galleri E was an appropriate price for you to pay for the abortion.’

‘And you’ve thought this for a long time?’

‘Of course. So have you.’

‘Correct,’ I said. ‘Penance…’

‘Penance, yes. It’s a very much underrated method of gaining peace of mind.’ She squeezed my testicles a bit harder and I tried to relax, to enjoy the pain. I inhaled her fragrance. It was wonderful, but would I ever wipe out the stench of human excrement? Would I ever hear anything that would drown the sound of Greve’s punctured lungs? Afterwards he had seemed to be staring at me with glazed, wronged eyes as I pressed Ove’s cold fingers against the stock and the trigger of the Uzi and the small black Rohrbaugh pistol with which I had shot Lotte. Would I ever be able to eat anything that could dull the taste of Ove’s dead flesh? I had bent over him there in bed sinking my canine teeth into his neck. Tightened my jaws until his skin was pierced and the corpse taste filled my mouth. There had been almost no blood, and when I had stifled my retching and wiped away the saliva, I had studied the result. It would probably pass as a dog bite to a detective looking for precisely that. Then I had crawled out of the open window behind the top of Ove’s bed to make sure I wasn’t recorded by the camera. Walked quickly into the forest; found paths, routes. Greeted walkers with a friendly gesture. The air, which became colder the higher I climbed, had kept me cool all the way to Grefsentoppen. There I had sat down and contemplated the autumn colours, which winter had already begun to suck from the forest beneath me, the town, the fjord and the light. The light that always presages the oncoming darkness.