Jo Nesbo - The Son

‘How are you, Sonny? Did you enjoy being out on day release? Did you get to see the sea?’

No reply.

Per Vollan cleared his throat. ‘The prison officer said you got to see the sea. You might have read in the papers that a woman was found murdered the next day, not far from where you were. She was found in bed, in her own home. Her head had been. . well. All the details are in here. .’ He tapped his finger on the Bible. ‘The officer has already filed a report saying you ran away while you were at the sea and that he found you by the road one hour later. That you refused to account for your whereabouts. It’s important that you don’t say anything that contradicts his statement, do you understand? As usual you’ll say as little as possible. All right? Sonny?’

Per Vollan finally succeeded in making eye contact with the boy. His expression told Per little about what was going on inside his head, but he felt fairly certain that Sonny Lofthus would follow orders and not say anything unnecessary to the police or the public prosecutor. All he had to do was utter a light, soft ‘Guilty’ when he was asked how he pleaded. Though it sounded paradoxical, Vollan occasionally sensed a direction, a force of will, a survival instinct that distinguished this junkie from the others, from those who had always been in free fall, who had never had any other plans, who had been heading for the gutter all along. This willpower might express itself as a sudden flash of insight, a question that revealed he had paid attention all along and seen and heard everything. Or in the way he might suddenly stand up, with a coordination, balance and flexibility you didn’t see in other habitual drug users. While at other times, like now, he seemed to register nothing at all.

Vollan squirmed in his chair.

‘Of course this means no more trips on the outside for you for quite a while. But you don’t like the outside anyway, do you? And you did get to see the sea.’

‘It was a river. Did the husband do it?’

The chaplain jumped. As when something unexpected breaks through black water right in front of you. ‘I don’t know. Is that important?’

No reply. Vollan sighed. He felt nauseous again. Recently it seemed to come and go. Perhaps he should make a doctor’s appointment and get it checked out.

‘Don’t you worry about that, Sonny. Just remember that on the outside people like you have to scavenge all day to get their next fix. While in here everything is taken care of. And don’t forget that time passes. Once you finish serving out your old sentences, you’ll be no use to them, but with this murder you can extend your detention.’

‘So it was the husband. Is he rich?’

Vollan pointed to the Bible. ‘In here you’ll find a description of the house you entered. It’s big and well furnished. But the alarm that was supposed to guard all this wealth wasn’t turned on; the front door wasn’t even locked. The family’s name is Morsand. The shipowner with the eyepatch. Seen him in the papers, have you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you? I didn’t think that you-’

‘Yes, I killed her. Yes, I’ll read up on how I did it.’

Per Vollan exhaled. ‘Good. There are certain details about how she was killed which you ought to memorise.’

‘Right.’

‘She was. . the top of her head was severed. You used a saw. Do you understand?’

The words were followed by a long silence which Per Vollan considered filling with vomit. Throwing up was preferable to exploiting the boy. He looked at him. What determined the outcome of a life? A series of random events you had no control over or did some cosmic gravity pull everything in the direction it was predestined to go? He loosened his strangely uncomfortable dog collar, suppressed his nausea and steeled himself. Remembered what was at stake.

He got up. ‘If you need to get in touch with me I’m currently staying at the Ila Centre on Alexander Kiellands Plass.’

He saw the boy’s quizzical look.

‘Just for the time being, you understand.’ He laughed quickly. ‘My wife threw me out and as I know the people who run the centre, they-’

He stopped abruptly. Suddenly he realised why so many of the inmates went to the young man to talk. It was the silence. The beckoning vacuum of someone who simply listens without reaction or judgement. Who extracts your words and your secrets from you without doing anything at all. He had striven for that ability as a chaplain all his life, but it was as if the inmates sensed that he had an agenda. They didn’t know what it was, only that there was something he wanted by knowing their secrets. Access to their souls and later a possible recruitment prize in heaven.

The chaplain saw that the boy had opened the Bible. It was such a simple trick, it was comical; the cut-outs in the pages created a compartment. Inside were folded papers with the information Sonny needed in order to confess. And three small bags of heroin.

Arild Franck barked a brief ‘Enter!’ without taking his eyes off the document on his desk.

He heard the door open. Ina, his secretary in the front office, had already announced his visitor and, for a split second, Arild Franck considered asking her to tell the chaplain that he was busy. It wouldn’t even be a lie; he had a meeting with the Commissioner at Politihuset, Oslo Police’s headquarters, in half an hour. But recently Per Vollan hadn’t been as stable as they needed him to be and there was no harm in double-checking that he could still hold it together. There was no room for screw-ups in this case, not for any of them.

‘Don’t bother sitting down,’ Arild Franck said, signing the document and getting up. ‘We’ll have to walk and talk.’

He headed for the door, took his uniform cap from the coat stand and heard the chaplain’s shuffling feet behind him. Arild Franck told Ina that he would be back in an hour and a half and pressed his index finger against the sensor at the door to the stairwell. The prison was on two floors and there was no lift. Lifts equalled shafts which equalled any number of escape routes and had to be closed off in the event of fire. And a fire and its ensuing evacuation chaos was just one of many methods ingenious inmates had used to break out of other prisons. For the same reason, all electric cables, fuse boxes and water pipes had been laid so they were inaccessible to the inmates, either outside the building itself or cemented into the walls. Here nothing had been left to chance. He had left nothing to chance. He had sat with the architects and international prison experts when they drew up the blueprint for Staten. Admittedly the Lenzburg Prison in the Aargau canton in Switzerland had provided the inspiration: hypermodern, but simple and with an emphasis on security and efficiency rather than comfort. But it was him, Arild Franck, who was responsible for its creation. Staten was Arild Franck and vice versa. So why had the board, in their infinite wisdom, damn them all to hell, made him only assistant prison governor and appointed that moron from Haldern Prison as governor? Yes, Franck was something of a rough diamond and, no, he wasn’t the kind of guy who would suck up to politicians by jumping for joy at every bright new idea about how to reform the prison system while the previous reforms had yet to be implemented. But he knew how to do his job — keeping people locked up without them getting ill, dying or becoming noticeably worse human beings as a result. He was loyal to those who deserved his loyalty and he looked after his own. That was more than could be said for his superiors in this rotten-to-the-core, politically motivated hierarchy. Before he was deliberately overlooked for the post of governor, Arild Franck had hoped for a small bust as a memorial in the foyer when he retired — though his wife had expressed the opinion that his bull neck, bulldog face and straggly comb-over wouldn’t suit a bust. But if people failed to reward your achievements, his view on the matter was you just had to help yourself.