Jo Nesbo - Phantom

She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Instead she formed the furrow between her broad, black eyebrows he had often stroked with his forefinger whenever he noticed it. ‘Sometimes it’s more important to have a lawyer who is dedicated rather than one who is so experienced he knows the outcome in advance.’

‘Mm. You mean someone who knows it’s a lost cause.’

‘You mean I should have used one of the tired old plodders?’

‘Well, the best are in fact pretty dedicated.’

‘This is a petty drugs murder, Harry. The best are busy with prestige cases.’

‘So, what has Oleg told his dedicated solicitor about what happened?’

Rakel sighed. ‘That he can’t remember anything. Beyond that, he doesn’t want to say anything about anything at all.’

‘And that’s what you’re basing your defence on?’

‘Listen, Hans Christian’s a brilliant solicitor in his field. He knows what’s involved. He’s taking advice from the best. And he’s working day and night, he really is.’

‘You’re exploiting his caring nature in other words?’

This time Rakel did not laugh. ‘I’m a mother. It’s simple. I’m willing to do whatever it takes.’

They stopped where the forest began and sat on separate spruce trunks. The sun sank to the treetops in the west like a weary Independence Day balloon.

‘I know why you’ve come of course,’ Rakel said. ‘But what exactly have you got planned?’

‘To find out if Oleg’s guilty beyond any reasonable doubt.’

‘Because?’

Harry shrugged. ‘Because I’m a detective. Because this is the way we’ve organised this anthill. No one can be convicted until we’re sure.’

‘And you’re not sure?’

‘No, I’m not sure.’

‘And that’s the only reason you’re here?’

The shadows from the spruce trees crept over them. Harry shivered in his linen suit; his thermostat had evidently not adjusted to 59.9 degrees north yet.

‘It’s strange,’ he said. ‘But I have trouble remembering anything except fragmented moments of all the time we were together. When I look at a photograph that’s how I remember it. The way we were in the photo. Even if I know it’s not true.’

He looked at her. She was sitting with her chin in one hand. The sun glittered on her narrowed eyes.

‘But perhaps that’s why we take snaps,’ Harry continued. ‘To provide false evidence to underpin the false claim that we were happy. Because the thought that we weren’t happy at least for some time during our lives is unbearable. Adults order children to smile in the photos, involve them in the lie, so we smile, we feign happiness. But Oleg could never smile unless he meant it, could not lie, he didn’t have the gift.’ Harry turned back to the sun, caught the last rays, extended like yellow fingers between the highest branches on the crest of the ridge. ‘I found a photo of the three of us on his locker door in Valle Hovin. And do you know what, Rakel? He was smiling in that photo.’

Harry focused on the spruce trees. The little colour remaining was quickly sucked out of them, and now they stood like ranks of black uniformed silhouette-guardsmen. Then he heard her come over, felt her hand under his arm, her head against his shoulder, her hot cheek through his linen suit, and breathed in the perfume of her hair. ‘I don’t need any photograph to remember how happy we were, Harry.’

‘Mm.’

‘Perhaps he taught himself to lie. It happens to us all.’

Harry nodded. A gust of wind made him shiver. When was it he had taught himself to lie? Was it when Sis asked if their mother could see them from heaven? Had he learned so early? Was that why he found it so easy to lie when he pretended he didn’t know what Oleg had been doing? Oleg’s lost innocence was not that he had learned to lie, not that he had learned to inject heroin or steal his mother’s jewels. It was that he had learned, in a risk-free and effective way, how to sell drugs that consume the soul, cause the body to disintegrate and send the buyer into dependency’s cold, dripping hell. If Oleg was innocent of Gusto’s murder he would still be guilty. He had sent them by plane. To Dubai.

Fly Emirates.

Dubai is in the United Arab Emirates.

There are no Arabs, only pushers in Arsenal shirts selling violin. Shirts they had been given along with instructions on how to sell dope in the right way: one money man, one dope man. A conspicuous and yet run-of-the-mill shirt showing what they sold and to which organisation they belonged. Not one of the standard ephemeral gangs who were always brought down by their own greed, stupidity, torpor and foolhardiness, but an organisation that took no unnecessary risks, did not expose its backers and still seemed to have a monopoly on the junkies’ favourite new drug. And Oleg was one of them. Harry didn’t know a great deal about football, but he was pretty sure that Van Persie and Fabregas were Arsenal players. And absolutely sure that no Spurs supporter would have considered owning an Arsenal shirt if it hadn’t been for a special reason. Oleg had managed to teach him that much.

There was a good reason for Oleg talking to neither him nor the police. He was working for someone or something no one knew anything about. Someone or something that made everyone stay shtum. That was where Harry had to begin.

Rakel had started crying and buried her face in his neck. The tears warmed his skin as they ran down inside his shirt, over his chest, over his heart.

Darkness fell quickly.

Sergey was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling.

The seconds passed, one by one.

This was the slowest part: the waiting. And he did not even know for sure if it was going to happen. If it was going to be necessary. He had slept badly. Dreamed badly. He had to know. So he had rung Andrey, asked if he could talk to Uncle. But Andrey had answered that ataman was not available. No more than that.

That was how it had always been with Uncle. And, for the majority of his life, Sergey had not even known that he existed. It was only after he — or his Armenian straw man — had appeared and created order that Sergey had begun to make enquiries. It was an eye-opener how little the others in the family knew about this relation. Sergey had established that Uncle had come from the west and married into the family in the 1950s. Some said he came from Lithuania, from a kulak family, the peasant landowning class that Stalin had actively deported, and that Uncle’s family had been sent to Siberia. Others said he was part of a small group of Jehovah’s Witnesses that had been transported to Siberia from Moldavia in 1951. An ageing aunt said that although Uncle had been a well-read, linguistically talented and courteous man he had adapted immediately to their simple lifestyle and had espoused ancient Siberian urka traditions as if they were his own. And that perhaps it was precisely his ability to adapt, along with his obvious business acumen, which soon enabled other urkas to accept him as a leader. Within a short time he was running one of the most profitable smuggling operations in the whole of southern Siberia. His enterprise in the eighties was so wide-ranging that in the end the authorities could no longer be bribed to turn a blind eye. When the police struck, while the Soviet Union was collapsing around them, it was with a raid so violent and so bloody, according to a neighbour who remembered Uncle, that it was more reminiscent of a blitzkrieg than the hand of the law. At first Uncle was reported killed. It was said he had been shot in the back and the police, fearing reprisals, had secretly disposed of the body in the River Lena. One of the officers had stolen his flick knife and had not been able to stop boasting about it. Nevertheless, a year later, Uncle gave a sign of life, and by then he was in France. He said he had gone into hiding, and the only thing he wanted to know was if his wife was pregnant or not. She was not, and with that no one in Tagil heard a word from him for several years. Not until Uncle’s wife died. Then he appeared for the funeral, Father said. He paid for everything, and a Russian Orthodox funeral does not come cheap. He also gave money to those of her relatives who needed a handout. Father was not among them, but it was him Uncle had gone to when he wanted a rundown on what family his wife had left in Tagil. And that was when his nephew, little Sergey, had been brought to his attention. The next morning Uncle was gone, as mysteriously and inexplicably as he had arrived. The years passed, Sergey became a teenager, an adult, and most people probably thought Uncle — whom they remembered as seeming old even when he went to Siberia — was long dead and buried. But then, when Sergey was arrested for smuggling hash, a man had made a sudden appearance, an Armenian who had presented himself as Uncle’s straw man, sorted out matters for Sergey and arranged Uncle’s invitation to Norway.