Jo Nesbo - The Son

The biggest of them all.

If luck was on their side.

‘Try this one,’ Martha said, handing the young man a jacket.

He was relatively new, she had only seen him here once before. Twenty years old, possibly, but he would be lucky if he lived to see twenty-five. Or at least that was the general opinion of the others in reception at the Ila Centre.

‘Great, it suits you!’ she smiled. ‘Try wearing it with these, perhaps?’ She handed him a pair of jeans, barely worn. She became aware that someone was standing behind her and turned round. He must have entered through the cafe, perhaps he had been standing in the doorway to the clothing storeroom, watching her for a while. The suit and the bandage around his head were enough to get him noticed, but Martha didn’t even see them.

All she saw was his intense, hungry gaze.

Everything she didn’t want. Everything she wanted.

Lars Gilberg turned over in his brand-new sleeping bag. The shop assistant in the outdoor store had looked sceptically at the thousand-krone note before accepting it and handing him the miraculous sleeping bag.

Gilberg blinked. ‘You’re back,’ he declared. ‘Jesus, you turned Hindu?’ His voice echoed sharply under the arches of the bridge.

‘Perhaps,’ the boy smiled and squatted down beside him. ‘I need a place to sleep tonight.’

‘Be my guest. Though you look as if you could afford a hotel.’

‘They’ll find me there.’

‘There’s plenty of room here and no surveillance.’

‘Can I borrow some of your newspapers, please? I mean, if you’ve read them, that is.’

Gilberg chuckled. ‘You can borrow my trusty old snoozie — I use it as a mattress now.’ He pulled the old, dilapidated and filthy sleeping bag out from underneath him. ‘Know what? You take the new one and I’ll sleep in the old one tonight. There’s a little too much of me in the old one, know what I mean?’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, old snoozie is missing me.’

‘Thank you so much, Lars.’

Lars Gilberg just smiled in return.

And when he lay down, he felt a pleasant warmth that didn’t come from the sleeping bag. It came from inside him.

It sounded as if the corridors heaved a collective sigh when all the cell doors at Staten were simultaneously locked for the night.

Johannes Halden sat down on his bed. It made no difference what he did. Sitting, lying or standing, the pain was the same. And he knew that it wouldn’t go away, but would only grow worse with each passing day. His disease was visible now. The cancer in his lungs had been joined by a tumour the size of a golf ball in his groin.

Arild Franck had been true to his word. As a punishment for helping the boy escape, Johannes would be eaten up by cancer in his cell without medical attention or pain relief. It was possible that Franck might send him to the sickbay when he felt that Halden had suffered long enough and could die at any moment, simply to avoid having to register a death in a cell in his annual report.

It was very quiet. Camera-monitored and quiet. In the old days prison officers would do rounds after lockdown and hearing their footsteps had been comforting. One of the officers at Ullersmo Prison, Havelsmo, an older, religious man, used to sing on his rounds. Old hymns in a deep baritone. It was the best lullaby a long-term prisoner could get, even the most psychotic ones stopped screaming when they heard Havelsmo walk down the corridors. Johannes wished that Havelsmo was here now. He wished that the boy was here now. But he wasn’t complaining. The boy had given him what he wanted. Forgiveness. And a lullaby on top of that.

He held the syringe up to the light.

The lullaby.

The boy had told him that he’d got it in a Bible from the prison chaplain, the late Per Vollan — may his tormented soul find peace — and that this was the purest heroin available in Oslo. Then he had shown him how to inject it when the time came.

Johannes put the needle on top of a thick blue vein in his arm. He took a trembling breath.

So this was all there was, this was his life. A life which could have been so different if he hadn’t said yes to smuggling the two sacks from Songkhla Port. Strange. Would he have said yes today? No. But the man he once was had said yes. Over and over again. So it could be no other way.

He pressed the needle against the skin, shuddered slightly when he saw the skin yield and the needle slide in. Then he pressed the plunger down. Evenly and calmly. It was important to empty the syringe completely.

The first thing that happened was that the pain went away. As if by magic.

Then the second thing happened.

And he finally understood what the others had been talking about. The high. The free fall. The embrace. Could it really be that simple, that all this time it had only been one needle prick away? Had she only been one needle prick away? Because she was here now, in her silk dress, with her shiny black hair, her almond eyes. And her tender voice that whispered the difficult English words with soft cherry lips. Johannes Halden closed his eyes and collapsed on the bed.

Her kiss.

It was all he had ever wanted.

Markus stared at the TV.

They were talking about all the people who had been killed in the last few weeks, it was on the TV and the radio all the time. His mum had told him not to watch it so much, it would only give him nightmares. But he didn’t have nightmares any more. And now he was on the telly and Markus had recognised him. He was sitting at a table covered with microphones answering questions and Markus remembered him because of his frameless glasses. Markus didn’t know what any of it meant or how it all went together. All he knew was that the man wouldn’t have to come over to turn on the heating in the yellow house now that it had burned down.

At 6.35 A.M., beatrice Jonasen, receptionist at Tomte amp; Ohre Solicitors, strangled a yawn while she tried to remember what film the woman in the trench coat in front of her reminded her of. Something with Audrey Hepburn. Breakfast at Tiffany’s ? The woman also wore a silk scarf and sunglasses that gave her a sixties look. She placed a bag on the counter, said it was for Jan Ohre as arranged, and left.

Half an hour later the sun bounced off the windows of Oslo town hall’s red-brick facade, the first ferries docked at Aker Brygge and commuters from Nesoddtangen, Son and Drobak poured ashore on their way to work. It was going to be another cloudless day, but there was a crispness in the air, a hint that not even this summer would last forever. Two men walked side by side along the promenade between the piers, passing restaurants with chairs still upside down on tables, clothes shops that wouldn’t open for another couple of hours and street vendors unpacking and preparing for the last onslaught on the capital’s tourists. The younger of the two men was wearing an elegant, but crumpled and stained, grey suit. The older wore a checked jacket bought in a sale at Dressmann and trousers that matched it only in terms of price. They wore identical sunglasses bought at a petrol station twenty minutes earlier, and were carrying identical briefcases.

The two men turned into a deserted alleyway. Fifty metres into it they walked down a narrow iron staircase to the modest door of a restaurant which, judging by the discreet sign, appeared to serve fish and seafood. The older man tried the door, but found it was locked. He knocked. A face, distorted as if in a funfair mirror, appeared on the other side of the porthole in the door. The lips moved and the words sounded as if they came from underwater: ‘Hold up your hands where I can see them.’

They did as he said and the door was opened.