Jo Nesbo - The Son

‘And you’ve no idea what Lofthus might have been talking to Per Vollan about?’

Franck shook his head. ‘The usual unburdening and spiritual guidance, I presume. Though Sonny Lofthus was himself a confidant.’

‘Was he?’

‘Lofthus kept himself apart from the other inmates. He was neutral, didn’t belong to any of the factions you find in every prison. And he never talked. That’s the definition of a good listener, isn’t it? He had become a kind of confessor to the other inmates, someone they could trust with anything. Who would he tell? He had no allies and he was going to stay in prison for the foreseeable future.’

‘What kind of murders was he in for?’ Kari asked.

‘Human murders,’ Franck remarked drily.

‘I mean-’

‘Murders of the most brutal kind. He shot an Asian girl and strangled a Kosovo Albanian.’ Franck held the exit door open for them.

‘And to think that such a dangerous criminal is now at large,’ Simon said, knowing he was twisting the knife now. Not that he was a sadist, but he was prepared to make an exception when it came to Arild Franck. Not because Franck was someone who was hard to like, in fact his personality was a mitigating circumstance. Nor because the man didn’t do his job — everyone at Police HQ knew that Franck was the real boss at Staten, rather than the man who held the title of prison governor. No, it was the other matter, these apparent coincidences which combined to create a suspicion that had been gnawing away at Simon and was approaching the most frustrating kind of knowledge, the one you can’t prove. That Arild Franck was on the take.

‘I give him forty-eight hours, Chief Inspector,’ Franck said. ‘He has no money, no relatives or friends. He’s a loner who has been in prison since he was eighteen years old. That’s twelve years ago. He knows nothing about the world outside, he has nowhere to go, no places to hide.’

While Kari hurried to keep up with Simon on their way to the car, Simon thought about the forty-eight hours and was tempted by the bet. Because he had recognised something about the boy. He didn’t know quite what it was; perhaps it was just the way he moved. Or perhaps he had inherited more than that.

Johnny Puma turned over in his bed and sized up his new room-mate. He didn’t know who had invented the term room-mate, only that at the Ila Centre it was about as much of a misnomer as you could get. Room enemy would have been more appropriate. He had yet to share a room with anyone who didn’t try to rob him blind. Or someone he hadn’t tried to rob blind himself. So he kept all his valuables, which comprised a waterproof wallet containing three thousand kroner and a double plastic bag with three grams of amphetamine, taped to a thigh so hairy that any attempt to remove it would rouse him even from the deepest sleep.

This was what Johnny Puma’s life had been about these last twenty years: amphetamines and sleep. He had been given most of the diagnoses they handed out in the seventies and onwards to explain why a young man would rather party than work, would rather fight and screw around than buy a house and start a family, get high rather than get clean and live a deadly boring life. But the last diagnosis had stuck. ME. Myalgic encephalomyelitis. Chronic exhaustion. Johnny Puma exhausted? Anyone who heard it simply laughed. Johnny Puma, the weightlifter, the life and soul of the party, Lillesand’s most popular removal man who could shift a piano single-handed. It had started with a painful hip, painkillers that didn’t work, followed by painkillers that worked only too well, and he was hooked. Now his life consisted of long days resting in bed, interspersed by intense periods of activity where he had to channel all his energy into getting drugs. Or find money to pay off his already alarmingly large debt to the centre’s drug baron, a Lithuanian transsexual halfway through a sex change who called herself Coco.

Johnny could tell at a glance that the young man standing by the window needed to score. The constant, frantic search. The compulsion. The struggle.

‘Please would you close the curtains, mate?’

The other obeyed and the room became pleasantly dark once more.

‘What are you using, mate?’

‘Heroin.’

Heroin? Here at the centre people said dope when they meant heroin. Shit, scag, horse or dust. Or boy. Or Superboy when it came to the new wonder drug you could buy down at Nybrua from a guy who looked like Sleepy from Snow White . Heroin was what people called it in prison. Or if they were rookies, of course. Though if you were a proper rookie, you could use expressions such as China White, Mexican Mud or any of the other nonsense terms you picked up from the movies.

‘I can get you good, cheap heroin. You don’t need to go out.’

Johnny saw something happen to the figure in the darkness. He had seen how junkies who were really desperate could get high at the mere promise of drugs; he believed tests had registered changes in the brain’s pleasure centre in the several seconds before the fix. With a forty per cent gross margin on the drugs he could buy from Hovdingen in room 36, Johnny could buy three or four bags of speed for himself. It was preferable to robbing the neighbourhood again.

‘No thanks. I can leave if you want to sleep.’

The voice coming from the window was so soft and low that Johnny couldn’t understand how it managed to cut through Ila’s constant noise of partying, screaming, music, arguing and traffic. So the guy wanted to know if Johnny was about to go to sleep, eh? So he could search him. Maybe find the wrap that Johnny had taped to his thigh.

‘I never sleep, I just shut my eyes. You get me, mate?’

The young man nodded. ‘I’m going out now.’

When the door had closed behind his new room enemy, Johnny Puma got out of bed. It took him only two minutes to search the guy’s wardrobe and the top bunk. Nothing. De nada. His room enemy couldn’t be as green as he looked; he carried everything with him.

Markus Engseth was frightened.

‘Are you scared now?’ said the bigger of the two boys blocking his path.

Markus shook his head and gulped.

‘Yes, you’re so scared you’re sweating, you fat pig. Hey, can you smell that?’

‘Look, he’s going to cry,’ the other boy laughed.

They were fifteen years old, possibly sixteen. Or even seventeen. Markus didn’t know, he knew only that they were much bigger and older than him.

‘We just want to borrow it,’ said the bigger boy and grabbed hold of the handlebars of Markus’s bicycle. ‘We’ll give it back to you.’

‘Eventually,’ the other laughed again.

Markus looked up at the windows of the houses in the quiet street. Black, blind, glass surfaces. Normally he didn’t like people watching him. He liked being invisible so that he could sneak past the garden gate and up to the abandoned yellow house. But right now he hoped that a window would open up somewhere, that a grown-up voice would shout at the big boys to clear off. Back to Tasen or Nydalen, or some other neighbourhood where thugs like them belonged. But it remained completely silent. Summer silence. It was the holidays and the other children in the street had gone off to cabins, beaches or foreign cities. It made no difference as far as playing was concerned, Markus always played on his own. But being small was riskier when you weren’t one in a crowd.

The big boy yanked the bicycle out of Markus’s hands and he realised that he didn’t have the strength to blink away the tears any more. The bicycle his mum had bought him with money they could otherwise have spent going away somewhere this summer.

‘My dad is home,’ he said, pointing across the street towards their red house that lay opposite the empty yellow one he had just been inside.