Jo Nesbo - The Son

‘I guess it’s a way of protecting yourself, detaching when it gets too much. Or maybe the well has run dry, perhaps I’m all out of love.’ She thought about it. ‘No, that’s not true. I have plenty. . just not. .’

Martha saw a cloud shaped like Great Britain drift across the sky. Just before it passed the treetop above her head, it turned into a mammoth. In many ways it was like lying on her therapist’s couch. He was one of those who still used a couch.

‘Anders was the bravest and the nicest boy at school,’ she said to the clouds. ‘Captain of the school football team. Please don’t ask me if he was head of the student council.’

She waited.

‘Was he?’

‘Yes.’

They both burst out laughing.

‘Were you in love with him?’

‘Very much. Still am. I’m in love with him. He’s a good guy. There’s more to him than just being nice and fit. I’m lucky to have Anders. What about you?’

‘What about me?’

‘How many girlfriends have you had?’

‘None.’

‘None?’ She raised herself up on her elbows. ‘Good-looking guy like you, I don’t believe it.’

Stig had taken off his T-shirt. His skin was so pale in the sunshine that it almost blinded her. She noticed with some surprise that he had no fresh needle marks. She guessed they must be in his thighs or groin.

‘Really?’ she said.

‘I did kiss some girls. .’ He caressed the old marks with his hand. ‘But this was my only lover. .’

Martha looked at the needle marks. She, too, wanted to run her fingers across them. Make them go away.

‘When I first interviewed you, you said you’d quit,’ she said. ‘I won’t tell Grete. Not for a while. But you know. .’

‘. . that the centre is only for active users.’

She nodded. ‘Do you think you’ll be able to do it?’

‘Pass my driving licence?’

They exchanged smiles.

‘I’m clean today,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow is another day.’

The clouds were still a long way away, but she could hear a distant rumbling, a warning of what was to come. And it was as if the sun knew it too, and burned a little more brightly.

‘Give me your phone,’ she said.

Martha pressed ‘record’. Then she sang the song her father used to play on his guitar to her mother. Usually when one of their countless summer parties was starting to wind down. He had sat right where they were sitting now with his battered guitar, strumming so quietly it was barely audible. The Leonard Cohen song about how he had always been her lover, that he would travel with her, follow her blindly, that he knows she trusts him because he has touched her perfect body with his mind.

She sang the lyrics in a small, fragile voice. It was always like that when she sang; she sounded much weaker and more vulnerable than she was. From time to time she wondered if she really was like that, and whether it was the other voice, the tougher voice she used to protect herself with, which wasn’t her.

‘Thank you,’ he said when she had finished. ‘That was really beautiful.’

She didn’t wonder why it was embarrassing. She wondered why it wasn’t more embarrassing.

‘It’s time we drove back.’ She smiled and handed him the phone.

She should have known that trying to take down the old, rotting hood was asking for trouble but she wanted to feel the fresh air as they drove. It took them more than fifteen minutes of hard work, alternating practical thinking with brute force, but finally they got it down. And she knew that she would never get it up again, not without spare parts and Anders’s help. When she got in the car, Stig showed her his phone. He had entered Berlin on the GPS.

‘Your father was right,’ he said. ‘From little Berlin to big Berlin is 1,030 kilometres. Estimated driving time twelve hours and fifteen minutes.’

She drove. She drove fast as if there was something urgent they had to do. Or were trying to escape. She looked in the mirror. The white, towering clouds over the fjord reminded her of a bride. A bride marching purposefully and unstoppably towards them trailing a veil of rain.

The first heavy drops hit them when they were in dense traffic on Ring Road 3 and she realised immediately that the battle was lost.

‘Exit here,’ Stig said, pointing.

She did as he said, and suddenly they found themselves in a residential area.

‘Take a right here,’ Stig said.

The drops were falling more densely. ‘Where are we?’

‘Berg. Do you see that yellow house?’

‘Yes.’

‘I know the people who own it, it’s empty. Stop outside that garage and I’ll open the garage door.’

Five minutes later they were sitting in the car which was now parked between rusting tools, worn-down tyres and garden furniture draped in cobwebs while they watched the rain tip down outside the open garage door.

‘It doesn’t look like it’s going to stop for a while,’ Martha said. ‘And I think the hood is a write-off.’

‘I agree,’ Stig said. ‘How about a cup of coffee?’

‘Where?’

‘In the kitchen. I know where the key is.’

‘But. .’

‘This is my house.’

She looked at him. She hadn’t driven fast enough. She hadn’t made it in time. Whatever it was, it was too late.

‘OK,’ she said.

Simon adjusted the gauze mask and studied the body. It reminded him of something.

‘The council owns and runs this venue,’ Kari said. ‘They hire out rehearsal rooms to young bands for next to nothing. Better to sing about being a gangster than drive around the streets and actually be one.’

Simon remembered what it was. Jack Nicholson frozen to death in The Shining . He had watched it on his own. It was after her. And before Else. Perhaps it was the snow. The dead man looked as if he was lying in a snowdrift. A fine layer of heroin covered the body and most of the room. Around the dead man’s mouth, nose and eyes the powder had come into contact with moisture and started to clump.

‘A band that rehearses further down the corridor found him when they were going home,’ Kari said.

The body had been discovered last night, but Simon hadn’t been informed until he came to work earlier that morning that a total of three people had been found killed. And that Kripos was handling the case.

In other words, the Commissioner had asked Kripos for assistance — which was the same as giving them the case — without even consulting his own Homicide Squad first. The outcome might ultimately have been the same, but even so.

‘His name is Kalle Farrisen,’ Kari said.

She was reading aloud from the preliminary report. Simon had called the Commissioner and asked that it be sent to them. And requested immediate access to the crime scene. After all, it was still their turf.

‘Simon,’ the Commissioner had said, ‘take a look at it, by all means, but don’t get involved. You and I are too old for a pissing contest.’

‘ You might be too old,’ Simon had replied.

‘You heard me, Simon.’

Simon pondered it from time to time. There was no doubt which of them had had the greatest potential. Where had the road forked? When had it been decided who would occupy which chair? Who would be sitting in the high-backed chair in the Commissioner’s office and who would be occupying the battered one in the Homicide Squad with his wings clipped? And that the best of them would end up in a chair in his study with a bullet from his own gun through his head.

‘The guitar strings around his head are bottom E and G and manufactured by Ernie Ball. The jack-to-jack cable is made by Fender,’ Kari read.

‘And the fan and the radiator?’

‘What?’