Jo Nesbo - The Son

Franck smiled. ‘Do you want to bet on the amateur bit, Kefas?’ And his grin spread when Simon failed to respond. ‘So senile of me, you’re no longer a betting man. So let me show you your amateur.’

‘These are the recordings from the surveillance cameras,’ Franck said, gesturing towards the twenty-four-inch computer screen. ‘At this point all the officers in the control room are lying face down on the floor and Johannes has unlocked all the doors in the prison.’

The screen was split into sixteen windows, one for each camera, showing various sections of the prison. At the bottom of the screen was a clock.

‘There he comes,’ Franck said, pointing to a window showing one of the prison corridors.

Simon and Kari saw a young man coming out of a cell and running stiffly towards the camera. He was dressed in a white shirt that reached almost to his knees and Simon concluded that the man’s barber must be even worse than his own; his hair looked as if it had been kicked off his head.

The young man disappeared out of the picture. And reappeared in one of the others.

‘This is Lofthus going through the lock,’ Franck said. ‘And while he’s there, Johannes is busy giving a speech about what he’s going to do to the officers’ families if anyone tries to stop him. The interesting part is what happens in the staff changing room.’

They saw Lofthus run into a room with lockers, but instead of continuing straight to the exit, he turned left and disappeared out of the picture behind the last row of lockers. Franck hit one of the keys angrily with his index finger and the clock at the bottom of the screen stopped running.

Franck moved the cursor over the clock and entered the time 07:20. Then he started playing the recording at four times the normal speed. Uniformed men appeared in a window on the screen. They walked in and out of the changing room and the door was constantly opening and closing. It was impossible to tell them apart until Franck froze the screen with another keystroke.

‘There he is,’ Kari said. ‘He’s wearing a uniform and a coat now.’

‘Sorensen’s uniform and coat,’ Franck said. ‘He must have switched clothes and waited in the changing room. Sat on the bench, kept his head down, pretending to be tying his shoelaces or something while the others came and went. We have such a high staff turnover here that no one would look twice at a new guy who was a bit slow getting changed. He waited until the morning rush peaked and left with the others. No one recognised Sonny without his beard and long hair, which he had cut off in his cell and stuffed into his pillow. Not even me. .’

With another keystroke he restarted playback, this time at normal speed. The screen showed a young man in a coat and uniform leaving through the back entrance while Arild Franck and a man with swept-back hair and a grey suit were on their way in.

‘And the guards outside never stopped him?’

Franck pointed to the image in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.

‘This is taken from the security booth. As you can see, we let cars and people leave without checking their ID. It would create a bottleneck if we had to go through full security procedures at every shift change. But from now on we will also check them out at shift changes.’

‘Yes, I don’t suppose anyone is queuing up to get in,’ Simon joked.

In the silence that followed they could hear Kari suppress a yawn at Simon’s spin on Franck’s welcoming joke.

‘So there’s your amateur,’ Franck said.

Simon Kefas made no reply, he just studied the back of the figure strolling past the security guards. For some reason he started to smile. He realised it was the way Lofthus walked. He recognised that walk.

Martha was standing with her arms folded across her chest, sizing up the two men in front of her. They couldn’t be Drug Squad; she thought she knew most of the officers on the Drug Squad and she had never seen these two before.

‘We’re looking for. .’ one of them began, but the rest of his sentence was drowned out by the howling siren of an ambulance passing behind them in Waldemar Thranes gate.

‘What?’ Martha shouted. She wondered where she had seen black suits like that. In an advert?

‘Sonny Lofthus?’ the smaller of them repeated. He had blond hair and looked as if his nose had been broken several times. Martha saw noses like that every day, but she thought this one was the result of contact sport.

‘We never give out the names of our residents,’ she informed them.

The other, a tall yet compact man with black curls arranged in a strange semicircle around his head, showed her a photograph.

‘He’s escaped from Staten Prison and is considered dangerous.’ Another ambulance approached and he leaned over her, shouting into her face: ‘So if he’s a resident here and you fail to tell us, it’s on your head if anything happens. Do you understand?’

So not the Drug Squad; at least that explained why she hadn’t seen them before. She nodded while she studied the photograph. Looked up at them again. Opened her mouth to say something when a gust of wind blew her dark fringe into her face. She was about to try again when she heard shouting behind her. It was Toy on the stairs.

‘Oi, Martha, Burre has gone and cut himself. I dunno what to do. He’s back in the cafe.’

‘People come and go in the summer,’ she said. ‘It’s a time when many of our residents prefer to sleep rough in the parks, and this in turn makes room for new arrivals. It’s hard to remember every single face-’

‘Like I said, his name is Sonny Lofthus.’

‘-and not everybody wants to register under their real name. We don’t expect our clients to have a passport or other forms of ID so we accept whatever name they give us.’

‘But don’t Social Services need to know who they are?’ the blond one asked.

Martha bit her lower lip.

‘Hey, Martha, Burre is, like, literally bleeding all over the place!’

The man with the curly halo placed a large, hairy hand on Martha’s bare upper arm. ‘Why don’t you just let us have a look around and we’ll see if we can find him?’ He noticed the look in her eyes and withdrew his hand.

‘Talking about ID,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I should ask to see yours?’

She saw something darken in the eyes of the blond man. And there was the hand of the curly-haired man again. Not on her upper arm this time, but around it.

‘Burre is almost out of blood.’ Toy had come over to where they were; he swayed and fixed the two men with his swimming eyes. ‘What’s going on here?’

Martha wriggled to free herself and put her hand on Toy’s shoulder. ‘Then we had better go and save his life. Gentleman, if you would care to wait.’

Martha and Toy walked across to the cafe. Another ambulance rushed past. Three ambulances. She shuddered involuntarily.

When she reached the door to the cafe, she turned round.

The two men were gone.

‘So you and Harnes saw Sonny close up?’ Simon asked as Franck escorted him and Kari back down to the ground floor.

Franck glanced at his watch. ‘What we saw was a young, clean-shaven man with short hair in a uniform. The Sonny we knew wore a filthy shirt, had matted long hair and a beard.’

‘So you’re saying it’ll be difficult to find him given how he now looks?’ Kari asked.

‘The pictures from the surveillance cameras are of poor quality, as you’d expect.’ Arild Franck turned round and fixed her with his eyes. ‘But we’ll find him.’

‘It’s a shame it wasn’t possible for us to talk to this Halden,’ Simon remarked.

‘Yes, as I said his illness has taken a turn for the worse,’ Franck replied as he led them back to reception. ‘I’ll let you know when he’s well enough for visitors.’