Jo Nesbo - Phantom

As I came into the yard I saw her car, one of those 4x4s people drive to barge their way through city-centre streets. I knocked at the farmhouse door. But no one opened it. I called, the echo resounding around the walls, but no one answered. She could of course have gone for a ride on a horse. Fine, I knew where she kept her cash, and out in the country people still didn’t always lock their doors. So I pressed the handle, and, yes, it was quite open.

I was on my way up to the bedroom when suddenly there she was. Big, standing legs apart on the stairs, wearing a bathrobe.

‘What are you doing here, Gusto?’

‘I wanted to see you,’ I said, turning on the smile. Turned it right up.

‘You need a dentist,’ she said coldly.

I knew what she meant, I had some brown stuff on my teeth. They looked a bit rotten, but it was nothing a wire brush couldn’t fix.

‘What are you doing here?’ she repeated. ‘Money?’

That was the thing with Isabelle and me, we were the same, we didn’t need to pretend.

‘Five big ones?’ I said.

‘That won’t work, Gusto, we’ve finished with that. Should I drive you back to the station?’

‘Eh? Come on, Isabelle. What about a shag?’

‘Shhh!’

It took me a second to suss the situation. Bit slow on the uptake, I was. Have to blame the fricking craving. There she stood, middle of the day, in a bathrobe but fully made up.

‘You expecting someone?’ I asked.

She didn’t answer.

‘New fuck buddy?’

‘That’s what happens when you go missing, Gusto.’

‘I’m hot on comebacks,’ I said and was so quick she lost balance as I grabbed her wrist and pulled her to me.

‘You’re wet,’ she said and struggled, but no more than she did when she wanted it hard.

‘It’s raining,’ I said, biting her earlobe. ‘What’s your excuse?’ I already had a hand up under her bathrobe.

‘And you stink. Let me go!’

My hand stroked her shaven pussy, found the crack. She was wet. Dripping wet. I could get two fingers up at once. Too wet. I felt something sticky. Pulled my hand away. Held it up. My fingers were covered with something white and slimy. I looked up at her in surprise. Saw the triumphant grin as she leaned over to me and whispered: ‘As I said. If you go missing…’

I lost it, raised my hand to slap, but she grabbed it and stopped me. Strong bitch, that Skoyen.

‘Go now, Gusto.’

I felt something in my eyes. If I hadn’t known better I would have said it was tears.

‘Five thousand,’ I whispered in a thick voice.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Then you’ll come back. And we can’t have that.’

‘You cunt!’ I shouted. ‘You’re forgetting a few seriously important points. Cough up or I’ll go to the papers with your whole set-up. And by that I’m not referring to our shagging, but the fact that the whole clean-up-Oslo stuff is your and the old boy’s doing. Fricking pseudo socialists. Dope money and politics in the same bed. How much do you think Verdens Gang will pay?’

I heard the bedroom door open.

‘If I were you I’d make a run for it now,’ Isabelle said.

I heard the creak of the floorboards in the blackness behind her.

I wanted to run, I really did. Yet I didn’t move.

It came closer.

I imagined I could see the stripes on his face light in the dark. Fuck buddy. Tiger boy.

He coughed.

Then he stepped into the light.

He was so drop-dead gorgeous that, sick as I was, I could feel it again. The desire to place my hand on his chest. Feel the sun-warmed, sweaty skin under my fingertips. Feel the muscles that would automatically tense in shock at whatever bloody liberties I took.

‘Who did you say?’ Harry said.

Beate coughed and repeated: ‘Mikael Bellman.’

‘Bellman?’

‘Yes.’

‘Gusto had Mikael Bellman’s blood under his nails when he died?’

‘Looks like it.’

Harry leaned back. This changed everything. Or did it? It didn’t need to have anything to do with the killing. But it had something to do with something. Something which Bellman had not wanted to talk about.

‘Get out,’ Bellman said with the kind of voice that isn’t loud because it doesn’t need to be.

‘So it’s you two, is it?’ I said. ‘I thought it was Truls Berntsen she had hired. Smart to go higher, Isabelle. What’s the set-up? Is Berntsen just along as your slave, Mikael?’

I caressed rather than pronounced his first name. That was after all how we had introduced ourselves on his land that day, Gusto and Mikael. Like two boys, two potential play pals. I saw how it seemed to light something in his eyes, made them flare up. Bellman was quite naked; perhaps that was why I imagined he would not attack. He was too quick for me. He was on me and had my head in a vice.

‘Let go!’

He pulled me to the top of the stairs. My nose was squeezed between his chest and armpit and I could smell both of them. And this was a thought that lodged itself in my brain: if he wanted me to get out why haul me up the stairs? I couldn’t punch my way free, so I dug my nails in his chest and dragged my hands like claws towards me, felt one nail catch on his nipple. He swore and slackened his grip. I slipped out of the vice and jumped. Landed halfway down the stairs, but managed to stay on my feet. Charged down the hall, grabbed her car keys and ran into the yard. Course, the car wasn’t locked either. The wheels churned up the gravel as I released the clutch. In the mirror I saw Mikael Bellman come running out of the door. Saw something glint in his hand. Then the wheels bit, I was thrust back against the seat and the car shot across the yard and onto the road.

‘It was Bellman who took Truls Berntsen along to Orgkrim,’ Harry said. ‘Is it conceivable that Berntsen is doing the burner jobs under Bellman’s instructions?’

‘You’re aware of what we’re moving into here, Harry?’

‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘And from now on you don’t have anything to do with it, Beate.’

‘Try bloody stopping me!’ The phone diaphragm crackled. Harry couldn’t remember Beate Lonn ever swearing before. ‘This is my police force, Harry. I don’t want people like Berntsen dragging it down into the dirt.’

‘OK,’ Harry said. ‘But let’s not draw any hasty conclusions. The only evidence we have is that Bellman met Gusto. We don’t even have anything concrete on Truls Berntsen yet.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to start somewhere else. And if it’s what I hope it is, the pieces will topple against each other like dominoes. The problem is staying free long enough to launch the plan.’

‘Do you mean to say you have a plan?’

‘Of course I have a plan.’

‘A good plan?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘But a plan?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘You’re lying, aren’t you?’

‘Not half.’

I was racing into Oslo on the E18 when I realised how deep the mess I had landed myself in was.

Bellman had tried to drag me upstairs. To the bedroom. Where he had the pistol he chased me with. He was willing to fricking liquidate me to keep my mouth shut. Which could only mean he was up to his knees in shit. So, what would he do now? Get me busted of course. For stealing a car, drug dealing, not paying the hotel bill, there was quite a selection. Put me behind bars before I could blab to anyone. And as soon as I was banged up and gagged, there was little doubt about what would happen: they would make it look either like suicide or like another inmate had nobbled me. So the stupidest thing I could do would be to drive around in this car that they probably already had on their radar. So I put my foot down. The place I was going was on the east of town, and I could avoid going through the centre. I drove up the hill, headed for the quiet residential areas. Parked some distance away and started walking.