Ю Несбё - Macbeth

A car stopped and doors opened.

Footsteps on the tarmac.

Lennox tried to move his head but couldn’t. From the corner of his eye he saw the barrel of a gun parallel with a pair of trouser legs.

They were goners. In some strange way it felt like a relief.

The trouser legs came a step closer. A hand gripped his neck. He was going to be killed silently, strangulation. Lennox held his gaze on the shoes. They went out of fashion a while ago. Winkle-pickers.

‘This one’s dead,’ said a familiar voice from the other side of the car.

‘Tourtell’s unhurt,’ said the man holding him in a stranglehold. ‘Lennox isn’t moving, but he’s got a pulse. Where did they shoot from?’

‘The top of the multi-storey,’ Tourtell sobbed. ‘Lennox saved my life.’

Saved?

‘Get over to this side, Malcolm!’

The hand removed itself, and a face came into Lennox’s field of vision.

Duff stared him in the eye.

‘Is he conscious?’ asked a woman behind him. Caithness.

‘Paralysed or in shock,’ Duff said. ‘His eyes are moving, but he can’t move or talk. We need to get him into the hospital.’

‘Car,’ a voice said. A young boy. ‘Coming out of the multi-storey car park.’

‘Looks like a SWAT car,’ Duff said, getting up and putting the shotgun to his shoulder.

There was silence for a couple of seconds. The sound of the car engine faded away.

‘Let them go,’ Malcolm said.

‘Kasi.’ Tourtell’s voice.

‘What?’

‘You’ve got to find Kasi.’

Kasi ran. His heart was beating in his throat and his feet pummelling the wet tarmac, faster and faster. Until they were running as fast as the song that used to play in his head when he was afraid. ‘Help’. He had been getting in the car when he heard the thud and saw the shot hit the pale-faced policeman in the back. He had fallen over Dad and Dad had told him to run.

He automatically took the road down towards the area where he had grown up, by the river. There was a burned-out house where they used to play, the rat house they called it.

The burned-out house was white with patches of soot around the door and windows, like a decrepit over-made-up whore. Down by the river the small houses lay huddled together as if searching for shelter with each other. Apart from one, which was on its own, as though the others were shunning it. It was timber-framed and painted blue; and around it the grass had grown high. Kasi ran up the steps into the door-less hall to what once had been a kitchen but now was an empty, urine-stinking shell with names and dirty words scribbled on the walls. He continued up the narrow stairs to the bedrooms. A mouldy mattress lay on the floor of one. He’d had his first kiss on it among empty spirit bottles and the stiff carcasses of river rats scattered around the floor. One afternoon when he was ten or eleven he and two friends had sat on it and tasted their first cigarette — in between coughing fits — in the sunset, and watched rats come towards the house, padding across the cracked and litter-strewn mud of the dry riverbed. Perhaps they came here to die.

Should he go back? No, Dad had said he should get away. And the other man, Lennox, was from the police, and there must be more of them there if they knew of plans to assassinate the mayor.

He would hide until it was all over, then go home.

Kasi opened the big wardrobe in the corner. It was empty, stripped of everything. He huddled inside and closed the door. Leaned his head back against the wood. Softly hummed the song in his mind. ‘Help!’ Thought of the film where the Beatles were running around helter-skelter and having fun in comic fast-forward motion, a world where nothing really horrible happened. And no one could find him here. Not unless they knew where he was. And anyway, he wasn’t the mayor, only a boy who hadn’t done anything bad in his life apart from smoke a few cigarettes on the quiet, share half a bottle of diluted whisky and kiss a couple of girls who had boyfriends.

His heart gradually slowed.

He listened. Nothing. But he would have to wait some time. He had got his breath back, enough to inhale through his nose now. He didn’t know how many years it was since clothes had hung here, but he could still smell them. The smell, the ghosts of lives unknown. God knows where they were now. Mum said it had been an unhappy house, with alcohol, beatings and much worse. He should thank his lucky stars he had a father who loved him and had never laid a hand on him. And Kasi had thanked his lucky stars. No one had known his father was the mayor, and he didn’t tell anyone either, neither those who called him a brat, nor the other brats who never saw their fathers or even knew who they were. He felt sorry for them. He had told his father that one day he would help them. Them and all the others in difficulty after Estex closed. And Dad had patted him on the head and laughed, as other fathers would have done. He had listened attentively and said that if Kasi really wanted to do something, when the time came he would help him. He had promised. And who knows, one day Kasi might become mayor, greater wonders had come to pass, Dad had said and called him Tourtell Junior.

‘Help!’

But the world wasn’t like that. The world hadn’t been made for good deeds and funny pop singers in films. You couldn’t help anyone. Not your father, not your mother, not other children. Only yourself.

Olafson braked as the bus in front of them stopped. Young people, mostly women, streamed onto the pavement. Looking their best. Saturday night. That was what he would have done tonight: had a beer and danced with a girl. Drunk and danced away the sight of the driver. Beside him Seyton stretched out a hand and turned off the radio and Linda Thompson’s ‘I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight’.

‘Where the hell did they come from? Duff. Malcolm. Caithness. And the young guy I could have sworn was Banquo’s son.’

‘Back to HQ?’ Olafson asked. It still wasn’t too late for a decent Saturday night.

‘Not yet,’ Seyton said. ‘We’ve got to catch the boy.’

‘Tourtell’s son?’

‘I don’t want to go back to Macbeth empty-handed, and the boy can be used. Turn left here. Drive even more slowly.’

Olafson swung the car down the narrow street and glanced at Seyton, who had opened the window and was inhaling the air, his nostrils opening and closing. Olafson was about to ask if Seyton could sniff out where the boy had run to, but refrained. If this man could heal a shoulder by touching it he was probably capable of smelling his way to where someone had gone. Was he afraid of his new commander? Maybe. He had definitely asked himself whether he preferred his predecessor. But he hadn’t known it could come to this. All he knew was that the surgeon at the hospital had pointed to an X-ray of his shoulder and explained that the bullet had destroyed the joint; he was an invalid and would have to get used to never working as a marksman for SWAT again. In a few moments the surgeon had deprived Olafson of all he had ever dreamed about doing. Then it had been easy to agree when Seyton said he could fix it if Olafson agreed to a deal. He hadn’t even meant it because who could fix something like that in a day? And what did he have to lose? He had already sworn allegiance to the brotherhood that was SWAT, so what Seyton wanted from him was in many ways something he already had.

No, there was no point having regrets now. And just look what had happened to his best pal, Angus. He had betrayed SWAT, the idiot. Betrayed the most precious thing they had, all they had. Baptised in fire and united in blood wasn’t an empty phrase, it was how they had to be, there were no alternatives. He wanted this. To know there was some meaning in what he did, that he meant something to people. To his comrades. Even when he couldn’t see any meaning in what they did. That was a job for other people. Not for Angus, the bloody fool. He must have lost the plot. Angus had tried to persuade him to join him, but he had told him to go to hell, he didn’t want anything to do with someone who betrayed SWAT. And Angus had stared at him and asked him how his shoulder had healed so quickly — a gunshot wound like that didn’t heal in a couple of days. But Olafson hadn’t answered. He just showed him the door.