Jo Nesbo - The Son

‘Yes?’

Simon took a breath. ‘Good enough. We’ll talk about it some other time. Bed?’

Parr nodded. ‘Bed.’ He patted Simon on the shoulder, turned round and walked towards the SUV. Simon looked after him. Hooked his index finger and pulled out the snus . It didn’t taste right.

It was seven in the morning when Simon got to work. He had managed two and a half hours’ sleep, one and a half cups of coffee, and half a headache pill. Some people could survive on very little sleep. Simon wasn’t one of them.

Kari, however, might be. She certainly looked surprisingly alert as she strode towards him.

‘So?’ Simon said, slumping down in his office chair and tearing open the brown envelope which had been waiting for him in his pigeonhole.

‘Not one of the three people we arrested last night is saying anything,’ Kari said. ‘Not a single word, in fact. They even refused to state their names.’

‘What nice boys. Do we know them?’

‘Oh yes. Plain clothes recognised them. They have previous convictions, all three of them. Their lawyer turned up unannounced in the middle of night and interrupted our attempts to get anything out of them. A man called Einar Harnes. I managed to trace the mobile with the text message from this Son. The mobile belongs to a Fidel Lae. Owns a kennel. He’s not answering his phone, but the signals to the base stations indicate it’s at his farm. We’ve dispatched two patrol cars there.’

Simon realised why she — unlike him — didn’t look as if she had just got straight out of bed. It was because she had never made it that far, she had worked right through the night.

‘Then there’s this Hugo Nestor you asked me to find. .?’ she continued.

‘Yes?’

‘He’s not at his home address, doesn’t answer his phone, nor is he at his office address, but they could all be fake. All I have so far is a plain-clothes cop who says she saw Nestor at Vermont last night.’

‘Hm. Do you think I have bad breath, Officer Adel?’

‘Not that I’ve noticed, but then again we haven’t-’

‘So you wouldn’t regard this as a hint?’

Simon held up three toothbrushes.

‘They look used,’ Kari said. ‘How did you get them?’

‘Good question,’ Simon said, peering into the envelope. He pulled out a sheet of paper with the logo of the Plaza Hotel at the top. But there was no sender. Just a short handwritten message:

Check for DNA. S.

He handed the sheet to Kari and looked at the toothbrushes.

‘Probably some weirdo,’ Kari said. ‘Forensics have more than enough to do with the killings to-’

‘Take them straight up there,’ Simon said.

‘What?’

‘It’s him.’

‘Who?’

‘“S”. It’s Sonny.’

‘How do you know-’

‘Tell them it’s urgent.’

Kari looked at him. Simon’s phone started to ring.

‘OK,’ she said, and turned to leave.

She was standing outside the lift when Simon came over and stood next to her. He had put on his coat.

‘You’re coming with me first,’ he said.

‘Oh?’

‘That was Asmund Bjornstad. They’ve found another body.’

A woodland bird hooted hollowly from somewhere in the spruce forest.

Asmund Bjornstad had been stripped of all traces of arrogance. He was pale. He had come straight out with it on the phone: ‘We need help, Kefas.’

Simon was standing beside the Kripos inspector and Kari, staring through the mesh of a cage, at the remains of a body which they had temporarily identified on the basis of various credit cards as Hugo Nestor’s. Confirmation would have to wait until they had checked his dental records. Simon could deduce from where he was standing and looking at the fillings in the exposed teeth that the deceased had actually seen a dentist. The two police officers from the dog patrol who had taken away the Argentine mastiffs had provided a simple explanation for the state of the body: ‘The dogs were hungry. Somebody forgot to feed them.’

‘Nestor was Kalle Farrisen’s boss,’ Simon said.

‘I know,’ Bjornstad groaned. ‘All hell will break loose once the press finds out.’

‘How did you find Lae?’

‘Two patrol cars down at the farm were following a phone signal,’ Bjornstad said.

‘I sent them,’ Kari said. ‘We got an anonymous text message.’

‘First they discovered Lae’s phone,’ Bjornstad said. ‘It was on top of the gate as if someone had left it there to be traced and found. But they didn’t find Lae when they searched the house. They were about to leave when one of the police dogs reacted and wanted to go inside the forest. And that’s when they found. . this.’ He flung out his hands.

‘And Lae?’ Simon asked, nodding towards the shivering man huddling under a woollen blanket, sitting on a tree stump behind them.

‘The killer threatened him with a gun, he says. Locked him in the adjacent cage, took his mobile and his wallet. Lae was locked up for thirty-six hours. He saw everything.’

‘And what’s he saying?’

‘He’s broken, poor man, he can’t stop talking. Lae sold dogs illegally and Nestor was his client. But he’s unable to give a proper description of the killer. Still, it’s common for witnesses not to remember the faces of people who threatened their lives.’

‘Oh, they remember them,’ Simon said. ‘They remember those faces for the rest of their lives. They just don’t recall them the way we see them, that’s why their descriptions are wrong. Wait here.’

Simon went over to the man. Sat down on another tree stump next to him.

‘How did he look?’ Simon asked.

‘I’ve already given a description-’

‘Like this?’ Simon said, producing a photograph from his inside pocket and showing it to him. ‘Try to imagine him without the beard and the long hair.’

The man stared at the picture for a long time. Then he nodded slowly. ‘That look. He had that look in his eyes. As if he was innocent.’

‘Sure?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Thank you.’

‘He kept saying that the whole time. Thank you. And he cried when the dogs killed Nestor.’

Simon put the picture back in his pocket. ‘One last thing. You told the police that he threatened you with a gun. In which hand did he hold the gun?’

The man blinked a couple of times as if he hadn’t thought about it until now. ‘Left. He was left-handed.’

Simon got up and walked back to Bjornstad and Kari. ‘It’s Sonny Lofthus.’

‘Who?’ Asmund Bjornstad asked.

Simon looked at the inspector for a long time. ‘I thought it was you who turned up with Delta, trying to catch him at the Ila Centre?’

Bjornstad shook his head.

‘Anyway,’ Simon said, taking out the picture again. ‘We need to issue a description and a wanted person notice so that the public can help us. We need to get this photo to the news desks at NRK and TV2.’

‘I doubt if anyone will recognise him on the strength of that picture.’

‘How soon can we get them to broadcast it?’

‘They’ll make room for this story immediately, trust me,’ Bjornstad said.

‘For the morning news bulletins in fifteen minutes, then,’ Kari said, taking out her mobile and turning on the camera function. ‘Hold the picture up and keep it still. Who do you know in NRK that we can send it to?’

Morgan Askoy was carefully picking at a small scab on the back of his hand when the bus driver suddenly slammed on the brakes and Morgan inadvertently ripped off the scab. A drop of blood appeared. Morgan quickly averted his eyes, he couldn’t stand the sight of blood.

Morgan got off the bus at Staten Maximum Security Prison where he had been working for two months. He was walking at the back of a group of other prison officers when a guy in a prison officer uniform came up alongside him.