Anne Holt - Fear Not

The pause lasted for a long time.

‘Forget it. The point is that I told him the story. He had a solution.’

An even longer pause.

The dog whimpered, and the very tip of his tail swept across the floor.

To the south the flashing light of a plane moved slowly across the sky.

‘What kind of…?’ Rolf had to clear his throat. ‘What kind of solution?’ he said.

‘A contract killer,’ said Marcus.

‘A contract killer.’

‘Yes. A contract killer. As I said, I was drunk.’

‘And the following day you laughed it off, of course.’

The dog looked up at his owner and whimpered again, before getting up and ambling back to his basket.

‘Marcus. Answer me. The next day you both had hangovers and laughed about it, the way you laugh at a joke. Didn’t you? Didn’t you, Marcus? ’

Marcus didn’t answer. He just stood there, shoulders slumped, arms hanging by his side, in his suit and tie and a state of total apathy.

‘I set a monster free,’ he whispered tonelessly. ‘I couldn’t have known I was setting a monster free.’

Rolf finally made his leap and grabbed Marcus by the arm.

‘What are you telling me?’ he roared, squeezing hard.

Marcus ignored both the pain in his arm and Rolf’s violent outburst.

‘ Tell me you didn’t order a fucking murder, Marcus! ’

‘He was going to take everything away from me. Niclas Winter was going to steal everything I deserved. Everything. Anine’s money. And Mathias’s. Ours. Everything that will go to little Marcus one day.’

His voice was nothing more than a monotone now, as if every word were being recorded individually on tape, to be edited into sentences at a later stage. Rolf raised his other hand, clenching his fist until the knuckles turned white. He was taller than Marcus. Stronger. Considerably fitter.

‘If you’re standing here telling me that you paid a contract killer, then I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you Marcus, I swear it! Tell me you’re lying! ’

‘Two. Million. Dollars. For two million dollars, my problem would disappear. I paid. The man from Lehman Brothers organized the rest. The whole thing was so… impersonal. A transfer to the Cayman Islands, and neither the money nor the… order had anything to do with me any longer.’

Suddenly Rolf let go of his arm.

‘That night,’ Marcus went on, not even noticing that the dogs had started circling around them, yelping and whimpering, ‘I got the confirmation I needed. A great deal is being written about The 25’ers at the moment, and doubtless quite a lot of it is unreliable. But the serious web pages gave me the confirmation I needed.’

‘Of what?’ Rolf sobbed, backing away slowly, as if he no longer wanted or dared to stand next to Marcus any longer. ‘Confirmation of what?’

‘The 25’ers commit murder for payment. Just like the Ku Klux Klan and The Order and…’

He gasped for breath.

‘They earn money by killing people they would like to eliminate anyway,’ he whispered. ‘I was the one who brought them here. My contact – or whoever he contacted – must have found out that the person I wanted killed was gay, and passed the job on to The 25’ers. So simple. So… clinical. I’m the one who has financed the murders of six Norwegians. I didn’t even know that Niclas Winter… my brother… was gay too. I set a monster free. I…’

He staggered backwards as the huge window exploded. A freezing cold wind rushed into the room. Shards of glass lay everywhere like fragments of ice. The dogs were howling. Rolf stood there with the heavy floor lamp in his hand, ready to strike again.

‘You killed someone for this?’ he yelled. ‘You decided to buy a murderer? For a fucking Nazi place in Holmenkollen? For expensive cars and a bloody wine cellar? You’ve turned into one of them, Marcus! You’ve turned into a fucking capitalist! ’

With a roar he braced himself, lifted the two-metre tall lamp with six kilos of lead in its base and smashed it into the next window with all his strength.

‘ We would have managed without all this! I’m a vet, for fuck’s sake! You’re well educated! Things could have been just as good without… ’

He was on the way to the next window when the doorbell rang.

He stood there, frozen to the spot.

It rang again.

Marcus heard nothing. He had sunk down into the armchair, among pieces of glass and broken lampshade. The dogs were running around barking. One of them had a badly cut paw, leaving a trail of blood across the floor as the terrified animal disappeared into the hallway.

‘I set a monster free,’ Marcus whispered, closing his eyes.

He registered voices from the hallway, but he didn’t hear what they were saying.

‘A monster,’ he whispered again, then stood up and walked across the room.

‘It’s the police,’ Rolf sobbed from the doorway. ‘Marcus! The police are here.’

But Marcus was no longer there. He had gone into his study and sat down on his calfskin-covered desk chair behind the desk made of polished silver birch. The door was closed but not locked. When he heard Rolf call out again, he opened the top drawer, where he had placed the pistol from the gun cupboard in readiness.

He removed the safety catch and placed the barrel to his temple.

‘Tell them the whole story,’ he said, even though no one could hear him. ‘And take good care of our son.’

The last thing Marcus Koll Junior heard was Rolf’s scream and just a fraction of the short, sharp report.

A short man accompanied by a fat African-American came towards Richard Forrester as he approached passport control at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The queue looked endless, and for a brief moment it occurred to him that they were perhaps going to offer him special privileges as a first-class passenger, allowing him to go ahead of all the other travellers. He smiled encouragingly as the smaller of the two men looked at him and asked: ‘Richard Forrester?’

‘Yes?’

The man took out an ID card, which was very easy to recognize. He began to speak. Richard’s voice disappeared. There was a rushing sound in his ears, and he felt so hot. Too hot. He tugged at his tie, he couldn’t get his breath.

‘… the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in…’

Richard Forrester closed his eyes and listened to the drone of the Miranda warning that seemed to be coming from somewhere far, far away. Something had gone wrong, and for the life of him he couldn’t work out what it was. There wasn’t a trace of him anywhere. No prints. No photos. He had only been in England, on a business trip relating to his small but well-run travel company.

‘Do you understand?’

He opened his eyes. It was the fat man who had asked. His voice was rough and deep, and he glared at Richard as he repeated: ‘Do you understand?’

‘No,’ said Richard Forrester, holding out his hands as the smaller man requested. ‘I don’t understand a thing.’

‘Adam,’ Johanne said quietly, moving close to his sleeping body. ‘Wasn’t there anything we could have done to prevent that suicide?’

‘No,’ he mumbled, turning over. ‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know.’

The time was 2.35 in the morning on Sunday 18 January 2009. Adam licked his lips and half sat up to have a drink of water.

‘I can’t sleep,’ Johanne whispered.

‘I’ve noticed,’ he smiled. ‘But it has been rather an eventful day, after all.’

‘I’m so glad you caught the last flight home.’

‘Me too.’

She kissed him on the cheek and wriggled into the crook of his arm. The worn old leather-bound diary was still lying on Adam’s bedside table. He had shown it to her, but hadn’t let her read any of it. No one else knew of its existence. The highly personal contents had affected him deeply. Religious musings, philosophical observations. Accounts of everyday life. The story of how a homosexual man had created a child with a lesbian woman, about the happiness and the pain of it, the shame. All in small, ornate handwriting that seemed almost feminine. As soon as Adam had landed at Gardermoen he had decided to write a report on the key elements relating to the murder of Eva Karin Lysgaard, and to make it look as if Erik had told him everything. No one else would ever see the diary.