Anne Holt: Fear Not

The last thing Marcus Koll did before leaving was to open the little jar of white, oval tablets in the top drawer. They were probably past their best-before date. It was such a long time ago. He tipped one of them into the palm of his hand. A moment later he put it back, screwed on the lid and locked the drawer.

It was over. For now.

The sirens were already approaching.

‘Are the police on their way? Is that them? Has someone called an ambulance? Those sirens are the police, for God’s sake! Call an ambulance! Give me a hand here!’

The security guard had one arm over the edge of the quayside. One foot was resting on a slippery crossbar no more than half a metre above the surface of the water. The other was dangling back and forth in a desperate attempt to keep the heavy body balanced.

‘Grab hold of me! Get hold of my jacket!

A young lad lay down on his stomach in the slush and seized the guard’s sleeves with both hands. His eyes were shining. He would be eighteen in a couple of months, but was blessed with dark stubble that made it possible for him to go from bar to bar all night without any questions being asked. He was broke, and had mostly stuck to finishing the dregs of other people’s beer. Right now he felt stone-cold sober.

‘That’s not him,’ he panted, getting a firmer grip. ‘The guy who fell in is further out.’

‘What? What the hell are you talking about?’

The guard stared at the body he was desperately trying to haul out of the water. He had a good grip on the collar, but the body inside the clothes was lifeless and as heavy as lead in the water, with the hood pulled up and fastened.

‘Help,’ someone yelled in the dark water further out. ‘Help! I…’

The cry died away.

The boy with the stubble let go of the guard.

‘You’ll have to hang on yourself!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll get the other one!’

He stood up, kicked off his shoes, pulled off his padded jacket and dived into the dark water without hesitation. When he came up he was in the exact spot where he had seen the drunken man splashing around.

‘Were there two of them? Did two people fall in? Did you see? Did anyone see?’

The guard was still hanging on with one arm over the quayside, bellowing. His other hand was clutching something that was definitely a body: a head facing away from him, two arms and a dark jacket. It was just so heavy. So bloody heavy. His arms were aching and he had no feeling in his fingers.

He didn’t let go.

The young man who had just jumped in was gasping for air. The first paralyzing shock of the cold water had given way to an agonising pain so fierce that his lungs were threatening to go on strike. He was treading water so frenetically that half his body was above the surface. Beneath him he could see nothing but a dark, colourless depth of water.

‘There!’ shouted an out-of-breath police officer from the quay.

The boy turned around and made a grab. He couldn’t actually see anything. It was more of a reflex action. His fingers closed around something and he pulled. The half-drowned drunk broke the surface of the water with a roar, as if he had already started screaming underwater. His rescuer had a firm hold on his hair. The drunk tried to wrench himself free and clamber on top of the younger man at the same time. Both of them disappeared. When they came up a few seconds later, the older man was lying on his back, his arms and legs outstretched on the water. He screamed with pain as his rescuer refused to let go of his hair, and, in fact, clutched it more tightly as he wound a rope four times around his other arm, without considering where it had come from.

‘Have you got it?’ shouted the police officer up above. ‘Can you hold on?’

The boy tried to answer, but ended up with a mouthful of water. He managed to give a sign with the arm that was attached to the rope.

‘Pull,’ he groaned almost inaudibly, swallowing even more water.

Never in his life had he imagined that the cold could be so intense. The water seared its way into every pore. Needles of ice pierced him all over. His temples felt as if someone were trying to push them into his brain, and it seemed as if his sinuses were packed with ice. He could no longer feel his hands, and for one moment of pure, sheer terror he thought his testicles had disappeared. His crotch was on fire, a paradoxical warmth spreading from his balls and out into his thighs.

He was finding it more difficult to move. He knew his eyes were dead. Somebody must have unscrewed them. There was nothing but wetness, cold and darkness. It couldn’t have been more than a minute since he dived in, but it occurred to him that this was the last thing he would ever experience, losing his balls in the depths of the December sea, because of some fucking idiot on Aker Brygge.

Suddenly he was out.

He was lying on the ground on a blanket that looked as if it were made of aluminium foil, and somebody was trying to remove his clothes.

He held on tight to his trousers.

‘Take it easy,’ said a police officer, presumably the same one that had thrown the rope. ‘We need to get those wet clothes off. The paramedics will soon be here to look after you.’

‘My balls,’ whimpered the boy. ‘And my fingers, they…’

He turned away. Two police officers – the place was crawling with them now – were just laying a person down on the ground a few metres away. Streams of water poured from the figure as they struggled, but he didn’t move. As soon as they had put him down, an ambulance driver came running over with a trolley. The older police officer pushed him away when he tried to help move the body again.

‘He’s dead. Look after the living.’

‘Fuck,’ groaned the boy.

‘He’s dead? He didn’t make it?’ ‘He’s not the one you saved,’ the police officer said calmly, still struggling to undress the boy. ‘I think it was too late for him. Your man is over there. The one who’s put his hat back on.’

He grinned and shook his head. His movements were rapid, and soon the reckless young man realized his sexual organs were still intact. He gave in and allowed himself to be undressed. Three police officers were busy cordoning off the area with red-and-white tape, and one of them placed a tarpaulin over the body on the trolley.

‘H-h-h-hey you there,’ said the man in the hat, moving closer. ‘W-w-w-w-were you trying to sc-sc-scalp me?’

He was still fully dressed. Someone had placed a woollen blanket around his shoulders. Not only were his teeth chattering, but his entire body was shaking, droplets of water cascading from the clumps of hair sticking out from beneath his sodden hat.

The boy on the ground didn’t remember any hat.

‘I s-s-s-s-saved my hat,’ the other man grinned. ‘I h-h-h-held on to it as hard as I could.’

‘Shift yourself,’ the police officer said wearily. ‘Over there!’

He pointed to an ambulance parked at an angle on the quayside, casting its blue flashing light across the melee of uniformed figures.

‘Who-who-who’s that?’ asked the man, completely unmoved as he gazed with interest at the lifeless form on the stretcher. ‘I d-d-d-didn’t s-s-s-see h-h-h-him in the wa-wa-water.’

‘That’s nothing to do with… Arne! Arne, can you take this guy over to the ambulance? He’s pushing his luck here.’

The shivering man was led away to the ambulance with a certain amount of brute force.

‘He could at least have thanked you,’ said the police officer, waving over one of the paramedics. ‘It was pretty brave, jumping in like that. Not everybody would have had the courage. Over here!’

He stood up and placed his hand on the shoulder of a man in a high-visibility yellow uniform.