Jo Nesbo - The Son

‘He’s supposed to mentor me.’

‘Lucky you,’ Elias said and pointed to the man walking along the river. ‘That’s him over there.’

‘What’s he looking for?’

‘Evidence.’

‘But surely the evidence will be in the river where the body is and not downstream.’

‘Yes, so he’s assuming we’ve already searched that area. And we have.’

‘The other CSOs say it looks like a suicide.’

‘Yes, I made the mistake of trying to bet a beer with him on it.’

‘Mistake?’

‘He has a problem,’ Elias said. ‘Had a problem.’ He noticed the woman’s raised eyebrows. ‘It’s no secret. And it’s best that you know if you’re going to work together.’

‘No one told me I would be working with an alcoholic.’

‘Not an alcoholic,’ Elias said. ‘A gambling addict.’

She brushed her blonde hair behind one ear and squinted against the sun. ‘What kind of gambling?’

‘The losing kind, as far as I understand. But if you’re his new partner, you can ask him yourself. Where are you from?’

‘Drug Squad.’

‘Well, then you’ll know all about the river.’

‘Yes.’ She narrowed her eyes and looked up at the body. ‘It could have been a drug hit, of course, but the location is all wrong. They don’t deal hard drugs this far up the river, for that you have to go down to Schous Plass and Nybrua. And people don’t usually kill for cannabis.’

‘Oh, good,’ Elias said, nodding towards the boat. ‘They’ve finally managed to get him down. If he has any ID on him, we’ll soon know who-’

‘I know who he is,’ Kari Adel said. ‘It’s Per Vollan, the prison chaplain.’

Elias looked her up and down. He guessed she would soon give up dressing in smart clothes like the female detectives she had seen in American TV series. But apart from that she looked as if she had something about her. Perhaps she was one of those who would go the distance. Perhaps she belonged to that rare breed. But he had thought that about others before.

The interview room was decorated in pale colours; the furniture was pine. Red curtains covered the window which faced the control room. Inspector Henrik Westad from Buskerud Police thought it was a nice room. He had made the trip from Drammen into Oslo before and sat in this very room. They had interviewed children in a sexual assault case and there had been anatomical dolls here. This time it was a murder inquiry. He studied the long-haired man with the beard sitting across the table. Sonny Lofthus. He looked younger than the age stated in the file. He didn’t look as if he was drugged up, either; his pupils were normal-sized. But then people with a high drug tolerance rarely did. Westad cleared his throat.

‘So you tied her up, used an ordinary hacksaw on her and then you left?’

‘Yes,’ the man said. He had declined his right to a lawyer, but answered practically every question with monosyllables. In the end Westad had resorted to asking him yes and no questions. Which seemed to work. Of course it bloody worked; they were getting a confession out of it. But it felt wrong. Westad looked at the photos in front of him. The top of the woman’s head and her skull had nearly been sawn off and flipped aside so that they were attached only by the skin. The surface of the brain was left exposed. He had long since abandoned the idea that one could tell from looking at people what evil they were capable of. But this man, he. . he didn’t exude any of the iciness, the aggression or simply the imbecility Westad thought he had detected in other cold-blooded killers.

Westad leaned back in his chair. ‘Why are you confessing to this?’

The man shrugged. ‘DNA at the crime scene.’

‘How do you know we found some?’

The man touched his long, thick hair which the prison management could have ordered to be cut if they wanted to. ‘My hair falls out. It’s a side effect of long-term drug abuse. Can I go now?’

Westad sighed. A confession. Technical evidence at the crime scene. So why did he still have doubts?

He leaned towards the microphone standing between them. ‘Interview with suspect Sonny Lofthus stopped at 13.04.’

He saw the red light go out and knew that the officer outside had switched off the recording device. He got up and opened the door so that the prison officers could enter, unlock Lofthus’s handcuffs and take him back to Staten.

‘What do you think?’ the officer asked as Westad came into the control room.

‘Think?’ Westad put on his jacket and zipped it up with a hard, irritated movement. ‘He doesn’t give me anything to think about.’

‘And what about the interview earlier today?’

Westad shrugged. A friend of the victim had come forward. She had reported that the victim had told her that her husband, Yngve Morsand, had accused her of having an affair and threatened to kill her. That Kjersti Morsand had been scared. Not least because the husband had good grounds for his suspicion — she had met someone and was thinking of leaving him. It was hard to think of a more classic motive for murder. But what about the boy’s motive? The woman hadn’t been raped, nothing in the house had been stolen. The medicine cupboard in the bathroom had been broken into and the husband claimed that some sleeping tablets were missing. But why would a man who, judging from his needle marks, had easy access to hard drugs bother with a few measly sleeping pills?

The next question presented itself immediately: Why would an investigator with a signed confession care about little things like that?

Johannes Halden was pushing the mop across the floor by the cells in A Wing when he saw two prison officers approach with the boy between them.

The boy smiled; he looked as if he was walking with two friends going somewhere nice, the handcuffs notwithstanding. Johannes stopped and raised his right arm. ‘Look, Sonny! My shoulder is better. Thanks to you.’

The boy had to lift both hands to give the old man a thumbs up. The officers stopped in front of one of the cell doors and unlocked the handcuffs. They didn’t need to unlock the door as well since all cell doors were opened automatically every morning at eight o’clock and were left open until ten o’clock at night. The staff up in the control room had shown Johannes how they could lock and unlock all the doors with a single keystroke. He liked the control room. That was why he always took his time washing the floor in there. It was a bit like steering a supertanker. A little like being where he should have ended up.

Before ‘the incident’ he had worked as an able seaman and studied nautical science. The plan had been to become a deck officer. Followed by mate, first mate and then captain. And eventually join his wife and daughter in the house outside Farsund and get himself a job as a pilot at the port. So why had he done it? Why had he ruined everything? What had made him agree to smuggle two big sacks out of the Port of Songkhla in Thailand? It wasn’t that he didn’t know they contained heroin. And it wasn’t that he didn’t know the penal code and the hysterical Norwegian legal system which at that time equated drug smuggling with murder. It wasn’t even that he needed the huge amount of money he had been offered to deliver the sacks to an address in Oslo. So what was it? The thrill? Or the hope of seeing her again; the beautiful Thai girl in her silk dress with her long, shiny black hair, of looking into her almond eyes, hearing her soft voice whisper the difficult English words with sweet cherry lips, telling him he had to do it for her, for her family in Chiang Rai, that it was the only way he could save them. He had never believed her story, but he had believed in her kiss. And that kiss took him across oceans, through customs, into the remand cell, into the courtroom, into the visitors’ room where his almost grown-up daughter had sat down and told him that the family wanted nothing more to do with him, through the divorce and into the cell in Ila Prison. That kiss was all he had wanted and the promise of that kiss was all he had left.