Jo Nesbo - The Son

‘I do. Her name was Agnete Iversen. Forty-nine years old. Previously in business, now a housewife. Married with a twenty-year-old son. Chair of the local Women’s Institute. A generous donor to the Norwegian Tourist Association. So she probably qualifies as a pillar of the community.’

Martha coughed. ‘How can you be sure that the shoeprint belongs to the killer?’

‘We can’t. But we found a partial shoeprint with the victim’s blood in the bedroom, and that shoeprint could match this one.’

Martha coughed again. She ought to get it checked out by a doctor.

‘But suppose I could remember the name of anyone given size 8? trainers, how can you know which ones are from the crime scene?’

‘I’m not sure that we could, but it looks as if the killer stepped in the victim’s blood and it got into the sole pattern. And if it’s coagulated, there could still be blood traces left in the grooves.’

‘I understand,’ Martha said.

Chief Inspector Kefas waited.

She got up. ‘But I’m afraid I’m no use to you. Of course I can check with the other staff members, see if they remember a size 8?.’

The police officer stayed where he was as if to give her a chance to change her mind. And tell him something. Then he too got up and handed her his card.

‘Thank you, I appreciate that. Call me, day or night.’

Martha stayed in the meeting room after Chief Inspector Kefas had left. She bit her lower lip.

She had told him the truth. 8?. It was the most common shoe size for men.

‘Closing time,’ Kalle announced. It was nine o’clock and the sun was starting to set behind the buildings on the riverbank. He took the last hundred-krone notes and put them in his money belt. He had heard that in St Petersburg drug dealers carrying cash were robbed so often that the mafia had given them steel money belts that were welded around their waists. The belt had a thin slit into which you inserted the money and a code known only to the guy in the back office, so that dealers couldn’t be tortured into revealing it to any robbers or be tempted to steal the cash themselves. The dealer had to sleep, eat, crap and screw with the money belt in place, but even so Kalle had given the option serious consideration. He was bored out of his wits standing here evening after evening.

‘Please!’ It was one of those emaciated junkie bitches, all skin and bone, skin stretched across her skull Holocaust-style.

‘Tomorrow,’ Kalle said and started to walk away.

‘I have to have some!’

‘We’re all out,’ he lied and signalled to Pelvis, his dealer, to walk on.

She started crying. Kalle felt no compassion, these people just had to learn that the shop shut at nine o’clock and that it was no good turning up at two minutes past. Of course he could have hung around till ten past, quarter past even, to sell to those who managed to scrape together the money at the last minute. But ultimately it was about getting the work/life balance right, knowing when he could go home. Nor would staying open for longer improve his profit margin as they had the monopoly on Superboy; she would be back when they opened tomorrow.

She grabbed his arm, but Kalle shrugged her off. She stumbled onto the grass and fell to her knees.

‘It’s been a good day,’ Pelvis remarked as they walked briskly down the path. ‘How much, do you think?’

‘ What do you think? ’ Kalle snapped at him. Even multiplying the number of bags by the price was beyond this moron. You just couldn’t get the staff these days.

Before they crossed the bridge, he looked over his shoulder to check they weren’t being followed. It was a habit he had acquired long ago, the result of his dearly bought experience of being a drug dealer carrying too much cash, a robbery victim who would never report anything to the police. Dearly bought experience acquired on a summer’s day by the river when he hadn’t been able to keep his eyes open and had nodded off on a bench with 300,000 kroner’s worth of heroin he was going to sell for Nestor. When he woke up, the drugs were gone, obviously. Nestor had sought him out the next day and explained that the boss had been kind enough to give Kalle a choice. Both thumbs — because he had been so clumsy. Or both eyelids because he had fallen asleep on the job. Kalle had chosen the eyelids. Two men dressed in suits, one dark-haired and one blond, had pinned him down while Nestor pulled out his eyelids and sliced them off with his hideous, curved Arabic knife. Afterwards Nestor had — also on the boss’s instructions — given Kalle money for a taxi to the hospital. Surgeons had explained that in order to give him new eyelids, they would need to graft skin from another area of his body and that he was lucky he wasn’t Jewish and hadn’t been circumcised. It turned out that the foreskin was the type of skin whose properties most closely resembled those of eyelids. All things considered, the operation had been a success and Kalle’s standard answer to anyone who asked how he’d lost his eyelids was that he’d had an accident with some acid and that the new skin had been grafted from his thigh. Someone else’s thigh, he explained, if the person asking was a woman in his bed, who demanded to see the scar. And that he was a quarter Jewish, in case she was wondering about that as well.

For a long time he had believed that his secret was safe, right until the guy who had taken over his job with Nestor had come over to him in a bar and asked in a loud voice if he didn’t think it stank of dick curd when he rubbed his eyes in the morning. The guy and his friends had roared with laughter. Kalle had smashed a beer bottle against the bar and glassed him, pulling the bottle out and glassing him again and again until he was quite sure the guy had no eyes left to rub. The next day Nestor visited Kalle and told him that the boss had heard the news and that Kalle could have his old job back, seeing as it was now available and that he approved of his resourcefulness. Since that day Kalle never closed his eyes until he was absolutely certain that everything was under control. But all he could see now was the pleading woman on the grass and a solitary jogger with a hoodie.

‘Two hundred grand?’ Pelvis guessed.

Moron.

After walking through Oslo’s eastern centre and the more dubious but character-building streets of Gamlebyen for fifteen minutes, they entered an abandoned factory area through an open gate. Tallying up shouldn’t take them more than an hour. Apart from them there was only Enok and Syff, who sold speed by Elgen and Tollbugata, respectively. Afterwards they had to cut, mix and wrap new bags for tomorrow. Then he could finally go home to Vera. She had been sulking recently. The Barcelona trip he had promised her hadn’t happened because he had been busy dealing all spring, so he had promised her a trip to Los Angeles this August instead. Unfortunately his criminal record had led to his visa application being turned down. Kalle knew that women like Vera weren’t patient, they had options, so he had to screw her regularly and dangle trinkets in front of her greedy almond eyes to keep her. And that took time and energy. But also money, which meant more work. He was caught between a rock and a hard place.

They crossed an open area with oil-stained gravel, tall grass and two lorries with no tyres permanently parked on Leca blocks, and jumped up onto a loading ramp in front of a red-brick building. Kalle entered the four-digit code on the panel, heard the lock buzz and they opened the door. Drum and bass sounds pounded towards them. The council had converted the ground floor of the two-storey factory into rehearsal rooms for young bands. Kalle had hired a room on the first floor for a peppercorn rent under the pretext of running a band management and booking agency. They had yet to secure any band a single booking, but everyone knew these were difficult times for the arts.