Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

In the story we’d worked out, Poul Hansen hadn’t come up to Opgard the day before the murder, as he had in reality, but directly after the murder, to demand from Carl the money he hadn’t managed to shake out of Willumsen. Because only a sequence of events like that could explain that Poul Hansen had both killed Willumsen and ended up along with his Jaguar in Huken. But Kurt’s outburst had been the raven’s call I needed. I made a decision and hoped that Carl and Shannon were listening hard at the stovepipe hole upstairs and hearing how I had changed our story.

‘That was the day before Willumsen was killed,’ I said.

Martinsen and Kurt exchanged looks.

‘That more or less fits with the time when Simon Nergard told us he saw an E-Type Jaguar pass his farm on the road that leads up here, and only up here,’ said Martinsen.

‘And to the hotel site,’ I said.

‘But he came here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then it’s odd that Simon Nergard says he never saw the Jaguar come down again.’

I shrugged.

‘But of course, the Jaguar is white, and there’s a lot of snow,’ said Martinsen. ‘Right?’

‘Could be,’ I said.

‘Help us out, you who know about cars; why did Simon Nergard neither see nor hear it?’

She was good. And she didn’t give up.

‘A sports job like that is easily heard when it’s climbing hills in low gear, isn’t it? But not when it’s coming back down, not if he lets the car freewheel. Think that’s what Hansen did? Rolled past Nergard in silence?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You have to brake too much on the corners, and the Jaguar is heavy. And people who drive cars like that don’t coast, they aren’t the types to worry about petrol. On the contrary, they like to hear their engines. So if I have to suggest something, it would be that Simon Nergard was having a shit in his toilet.’

I employed the ensuing silence to scratch my ear.

Then Martinsen gave me an almost imperceptible nod, like one boxer to another who has seen through a feint. The feint was to get me to be a little too keen to help explain why Simon hadn’t seen the Jaguar, and in doing so reveal how important it was for me that they believe the Jaguar had driven by Nergard and back down into the village. But why? Martinsen checked that her phone was still recording like it should be, and Kurt quickly interjected:

‘When you found out Willumsen was dead, why didn’t you say anything about the enforcer?’

‘Because everybody said it was suicide,’ I said.

‘And you didn’t find it strange that it happened at exactly the same time as you knew his life was being threatened?’

‘The enforcer didn’t say anything about threatening anyone’s life. Willumsen had cancer, and the alternative was maybe months of pain. I saw my uncle Bernard die of cancer, so no, I didn’t think it was so strange.’

Kurt took a breath and was about to continue, but Martinsen indicated with her hand that he’d said enough, and he kept his mouth shut.

‘And Poul Hansen hasn’t been here since?’ asked Martinsen.

‘No,’ I said.

I saw how her gaze followed mine, over to the stovepipe.

‘Sure?’

‘Yes.’

They had more, but what? What? I saw Kurt unconsciously fiddling with the leather mobile phone case attached to his belt. It even looked like the same type his father had used. The mobile phone. There it was again. The thing that had kept me awake, that I had forgotten, the flaw I didn’t see.

‘Because—’ Martinsen began, and at that moment I knew.

‘Actually, no,’ I interrupted, and gave her what I hoped looked like an embarrassed smile. ‘On the morning of Willumsen’s death, I actually woke to the sound of a Jaguar. The car, that is. Not the creature.’

Martinsen stopped speaking and looked at me expressionlessly. ‘Continue,’ she said.

‘It has a very distinctive sound in the low gears. It snarls, like one of the big cats, like a… well, a Jaguar, I guess.’

Martinsen looked impatient, but I took my time. I knew that in this minefield, the slightest false step would be punished without mercy.

‘But by the time I was properly awake, the sound had gone. I pulled the curtain open and half expected to see the Jaguar. It was still dark out, but there was no car there, I could see that. So I thought I’d dreamt it.’

Again Martinsen and Kurt exchanged glances. The Sulesund guy clearly didn’t take part in this aspect of the investigation. He was what they call a crime-scene technician, so what he was doing here I still didn’t know. But I had a feeling that I would soon find out. Well, at least I’d given them a story that held water even if they found the Jaguar down in Huken. Then it would look as though Poul Hansen had driven up here the morning after the murder, maybe to make another attempt to extort money from us, his summer tyres had lost their grip on Geitesvingen and he’d slid over the edge and down into Huken unnoticed by anybody. I took a breath. Wondered whether to get up for more coffee, felt I needed it, but stayed seated.

‘The reason we’re asking is that we spent some time tracing a mobile phone number for Hansen,’ said Martinsen. ‘Presumably on account of his occupation, he didn’t have a phone registered in his own name. But we checked the base stations round here and they had registered signals from only one phone with this Danish number over the last few days. When we looked at which base stations had received signals from this Danish number, they coincided with witness observations of the Jaguar. What’s odd is that if we look at the period around the time of the murder, that is, from roughly the point at which he visited you, the phone has remained within the same, very limited base-station area. This one. ’ Martinsen described a circle in the air with her index finger. ‘And there is no one else but you Opgards living up here. How do you explain that?’

THE KRIPOS WOMAN – SHE PROBABLY HAD a more formal title – had finally come to the point. The mobile phone. Of course the Dane had a mobile phone. I had quite simply neglected to think about it when we made the plan, and now Martinsen had traced his phone to a small area in the vicinity of our farm. Just like the time with Sigmund Olsen’s phone. How the hell could I have made the same mistake twice? Now they had established the enforcer’s phone had been somewhere near Opgard before, during and following the murder of Willum Willumsen.

‘Well,’ said Martinsen and repeated herself: ‘How do you explain that?’

It was like one of those video games where a load of objects come flying towards you at different speeds and in different patterns, and you know it’s just a question of time before you crash into at least one of them and then it’s game over. It takes quite a bit to get me worried, but now my back was sweating. I shrugged my shoulders and tried desperately to look relaxed: ‘How do you explain it?’

Martinsen seemed to take my question as rhetorical, as people say, ignored it and for the first time leaned forward in her chair. ‘Did Poul Hansen never leave here after he came? Did he spend the night here? Because no one else we’ve spoken to has put him up, no boarding house or anyone else, and the heater in that old Jaguar isn’t much good, so it would have been too cold to sleep in his car that night.’

‘Then he probably booked in at the hotel,’ I said.

‘The hotel?’

‘A joke. I mean, he drove up to the ruins and let himself into one of the workers’ cabins, because of course they’re unoccupied at the moment. If he’s so good at jemmying locks he’d manage that easy enough.’