Jo Nesbo - The Son

Markus stared into the drawer. He gasped. It had gone! It must have been him. The son. He had come back. No one else could possibly know where the key to the desk drawer was kept. And he had had needle marks on his arms.

Markus went into the boy’s bedroom. His room. He glanced around and immediately realised what was missing. The photo of the father in his police uniform. The Discman. And one of the four CDs. He looked at the other three. The one which wasn’t there was Depeche Mode, Violator . Markus had listened to it, but hadn’t thought much of it.

He sat down in the middle of the room to be sure he couldn’t be seen from the street. He listened to the summer silence outside. The son had returned. Markus had invented a whole life for the boy in the photo. But he had forgotten that people age. And now he had come back. To fetch the thing in the desk drawer.

Then Markus heard a car engine break the silence.

‘Are you sure the numbering doesn’t go the other way?’ Kari asked as she peered out at the modest wooden houses, hoping to spot a house number for guidance. ‘Perhaps we should ask that guy over there.’

She nodded towards the kerb where a guy in a hoodie with the hood up, his head down and a red bag over his shoulder was walking towards them.

‘The house is just over the hill,’ Simon said and accelerated. ‘Trust me.’

‘So you knew his father?’

‘Yes. What did you find out about the boy?’

‘Anyone at Staten who was prepared to talk to me said that he was quiet and didn’t say much, but that he was well liked. He had no real friends and kept mainly to himself. I haven’t been able to track down any relatives. This is his last known address.’

‘Do you have keys to the house?’

‘They were with his belongings that were being stored in the prison. I didn’t need a new warrant — a search warrant had already been issued in connection with his escape.’

‘So an officer has already visited?’

‘Only to check if Sonny had gone home. Though no one really thought he would be that stupid.’

‘No friends, no relatives, no money. That doesn’t leave him with a lot of options. You’ll soon learn that prisoners, as a rule, are remarkably stupid.’

‘I know, but that breakout wasn’t the work of an idiot.’

‘Perhaps not,’ Simon admitted.

‘No,’ Kari said firmly. ‘Sonny Lofthus was an A-grade student. He was one of Norway’s best wrestlers in his age group. Not because he was the strongest, but because he was a clever tactician.’

‘You’ve done your homework.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I just googled his name, looked at PDFs of old newspapers, made a few phone calls. It’s not rocket science.’

‘There’s the house,’ he said.

Simon parked the car, they got out and Kari opened the garden gate.

‘How dilapidated it looks now,’ he remarked.

Simon took out his police issue revolver and checked the safety catch was off before Kari unlocked the front door.

Simon entered first with his weapon raised. He stopped in the hallway and listened. He flicked on the light switch. A wall lamp lit up.

‘Oops,’ he whispered. ‘Unusual for an uninhabited house to have power. Looks like someone has recently-’

‘No, Kari said. ‘I’ve checked it. Ever since Lofthus went to prison the utility bills have been paid from a Cayman Islands account that’s impossible to trace back to an individual. The amounts aren’t huge, but it’s-’

‘-mysterious,’ Simon said. ‘That’s all good, we detectives just love a good mystery, don’t we?’

He led the way down the hallway and into the kitchen. He opened the fridge. He discovered that it wasn’t plugged in even though there was a solitary carton of milk inside it. He nodded to Kari who gave him a puzzled look before she understood. She sniffed the open milk carton. No smell. Then she shook the carton and they heard the rattling of lumps that had once been milk. She followed Simon through the living room. Up the stairs to the first floor. They checked all the rooms and ended up in what was clearly the boy’s bedroom. Simon sniffed the air.

‘His family,’ Kari said, pointing to one of the photographs on the wall.

‘Yes,’ Simon said.

‘His mother — she looks like a singer or an actress, doesn’t she?’

Simon made no reply; he was looking at the other photograph. The one that was missing. More precisely, he looked at the faded rectangle on the wallpaper where the photograph used to be. He sniffed the air again.

‘I managed to speak to one of Sonny’s old teachers,’ Kari said. ‘He said that Sonny wanted to be a police officer like his father, but that he went off the rails when his father died. Got into trouble at school, pushed people away, deliberately isolated himself and became self-destructive. His mother, too, fell apart after the suicide, she-’

‘Helene,’ Simon said.

‘Pardon?’

‘Her name was Helene. An overdose of sleeping pills.’ Simon scanned the room. His gaze stopped at the dusty bedside table while Kari’s voice intoned in the background:

‘When Sonny was eighteen years old, he confessed to two murders and was sent to prison.’

There was a line in the dust.

‘Up until then the police investigations had pointed in completely different directions.’

Simon took two brisk steps towards the window. The afternoon sunshine fell on the bicycle that was lying on the ground in front of the red house. He looked down the road they had come up. There was no one there now.

‘Things aren’t always how they appear,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

Simon closed his eyes. Did he have the energy? All over again? He took a deep breath.

‘Everyone in the police thought that Ab Lofthus must have been the mole. When Ab died, the mole’s activities ceased, no more strangely failed raids, or evidence, witnesses or suspects suddenly disappearing. They took that as proof.’

‘But?’

Simon shrugged. ‘Ab was a man who was proud of his work and the police force. He didn’t care about getting rich, all he cared about was his family. But there is no doubt that there was a mole.’

‘So?’

‘So someone still has to find out who that mole was.’

Simon sniffed again. Sweat. He could smell sweat. Someone had been here recently.

‘And who might that be?’ she asked.

‘Someone young and resourceful.’ Simon looked at Kari. Over her shoulder. At the wardrobe door. Sweat. Fear.

‘There’s no one here,’ Simon said loudly. ‘All good. Let’s go downstairs.’

Simon stopped halfway down the stairs and signalled to Kari to carry on walking. He remained where he was and waited. He listened out as he gripped the handle of his pistol tightly.

Silence.

Then he followed Kari.

He returned to the kitchen, found a pen and wrote something on a pad of yellow Post-it notes.

Kari cleared her throat. ‘What exactly did Franck mean when he said you were kicked out of the Serious Fraud Office?’

‘I’d rather not talk about it,’ Simon said, tore off the Post-it note and stuck it on the fridge door.

‘Did it have anything to do with gambling?’

Simon looked at her sharply. Then he left.

She read the note.

I knew your father. He was a good man and I think he would have said the same about me. Contact me and I promise you that I’ll bring you in in a safe and proper manner.

Simon Kefas, tel. 550106573, simon.kefas@oslopol.no

Then she rushed after him.

Markus Engseth heard the car start and breathed a sigh of relief. He was squatting under the clothes on the hangers with his back pressed against the back of the wardrobe. He had never been so scared in his whole life; he could smell his T-shirt which was so wet with sweat that it was sticking to his body. And yet it had also been exhilarating. Like when he was in free fall from the ten-metre board at Frognerbadet’s diving pool, thinking that the worst that could happen was that he might die. And that it wouldn’t be that terrible, really.