Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘But the mobile phone shows—’

‘The hotel site is just over the hill here,’ I said. ‘In the same base-station area as us, isn’t that right, Kurt? Because you once came up here looking for a mobile phone.’

Kurt Olsen sucked his moustache with something that looked like hatred in his eyes. Turned to the two KRIPOS investigators and gave a quick nod.

‘What that means then,’ said Martinsen without taking her eyes off me, ‘is that he left his phone behind in this workers’ cabin when he left to kill Willumsen. And that it’s still up there. Can you call up some reserves, Olsen? Looks as though we might need a search warrant for these cabins, and this sounds like a lot of searching.’

‘Good luck,’ I said, and stood up.

‘Oh, we’re not quite finished yet,’ said Kurt.

‘All right then,’ I said, and sat down again.

Kurt wriggled in his chair, as though to show he was sort of making himself even more comfortable. ‘When we asked Rita if Poul Hansen might conceivably have had a key to the basement door she said no. But then I saw her face twitch, and I’ve been a policeman long enough to be able to read faces just a little bit , so I pressed her on it, and she admitted that at one time you had been given such a key, Roy.’

‘OK,’ was all I said. I was tired.

Kurt was forwards on his elbows again. ‘So the question is, did you give that key to Poul Hansen? Or if you let yourself in at Willumsen’s the morning he died.’

I had to stifle a yawn. Not because I was tired, but because the brain needed more oxygen I suppose. ‘What in the world makes you think something like that?’

‘We’re just asking.’

‘Why would I kill Willumsen?’

Kurt sucked on his moustache and looked at Martinsen, who gave him the OK to continue.

‘Grete Smitt once told me that you and Rita Willumsen had a thing going up at the Willumsen cabin. And when I confronted Rita Willumsen with this after she’d told me about the basement key she admitted it.’

‘So what?’

‘So what? Sex and jealousy. Those are the two most common motives for murder in every developed nation in the world.’

That was straight out of True Crime too unless I was very much mistaken. I could no longer stifle that yawn. ‘No,’ I said, my trap wide open. ‘Of course I didn’t kill Willumsen.’

‘No,’ said Kurt. ‘Because, of course, you’ve just told us you were snoring away in bed up here at the time at which Willumsen was killed, meaning between six thirty and seven thirty in the morning?’

Kurt fiddled with his mobile phone holder again. It was like having a prompt. And now I got it; they’d checked the movements on my mobile phone too.

‘No, I got up,’ I said. ‘Then I drove down to one of the jetties on Lake Budal.’

‘Yes, we have a witness who thinks they saw a Volvo like yours come driving from up that way just before eight o’clock. What were you doing there?’

‘I went to spy on the bathing nymphs.’

‘Sorry?’

‘After I woke up and thought I’d heard the Jaguar I remembered that Shannon and Rita were going ice-bathing, but I didn’t know exactly where. So I guessed it would be somewhere on a straight line between Willumsen’s house and the lake. Parked at one of the boathouses and looked for them, but it was too dark and I couldn’t locate them.’

I saw Kurt’s face sort of implode, like when the air goes out of a beach ball.

‘Is there anything else?’ I asked.

‘Just to be on the safe side we’re going to check your hand for GSR,’ said Martinsen, still pretty much expressionless, although her body language had changed. She’d turned off that air of tense, hypersensitive awareness, something you maybe need to have done martial arts or street-fighting to notice. Perhaps she didn’t even realise it herself, but somewhere inside she had concluded that I was not the enemy, and now she eased off almost imperceptibly.

Enter the crime-scene technician who opened his bag. He took out a laptop and something that looked like a hairdryer. ‘XRF analyser,’ he said and opened the laptop. ‘I just need to scan your skin and we’ll get the result immediately. First I just need to connect it to the analysis software.’

‘OK. In the meantime shall I pop upstairs and fetch Carl and Shannon, so you can talk to them too?’

‘So you can scrub your hands first?’ asked Kurt Olsen.

‘Thanks, but we don’t need to talk to them,’ said Martinsen. ‘We’ve got what we need for the time being.’

‘I’m ready now,’ said Sulesund.

I rolled up my shirtsleeves, held my hands up in front of him and he scanned me as though I was an item from my service station shop.

Sulesund connected the hairdryer to the laptop with a USB cable and typed. I saw that Kurt was tensely scrutinising the technician’s face. I felt Martinsen’s gaze on my own as I let it glide out the window and thought it was a good thing I’d burned the gloves and the rest of the clothes I’d been wearing that morning. And that I should remember to wash the bloodstained shirt I’d been wearing on New Year’s Eve so that I could wear it at the funeral tomorrow.

‘He’s clean,’ said Sulesund.

I seemed to hear Kurt Olsen’s silent curse.

‘Well,’ said Martinsen as she stood up. ‘Thanks for your cooperation, Opgard. I hope you didn’t find this too unpleasant. But we need to be a little tougher in cases of murder, you know.’

‘You’re just doing your job,’ I said, and rolled down my shirtsleeve. ‘And that’s all there is to it. And…’ I pushed in a wedge of moist snuff, looked at Kurt Olsen and added, quite truthfully: ‘…I really do hope you find Poul Hansen.’

IN A STRANGE WAY WILLUM Willumsen’s funeral felt like the funeral of the Os Spa and Mountain Hotel.

It began with Jo Aas’s valedictory speech.

‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,’ he said. And went on to say how, one brick at a time, the departed had built up a company that prospered because it played a natural role in local society. It was and remained a response to a real need felt by those of us living here, said Aas.

‘We all knew Willum Willumsen as a hard but fair businessman. He made money where there was money to be made, and never made a deal he didn’t think would end up being to his advantage. But he kept to the deals he made, even when the wind changed and profit turned to loss. Always. And that is the kind of blind integrity that defines a man, that is the ultimate proof he has backbone.’

At this point Jo Aas’s gaze was fastened on Carl, who was sitting next to me on the second bench of a packed Os church.

‘Unfortunately, it seems to me that not all of today’s businessmen here in the village live up to Willum’s standards.’

I didn’t look at Carl, but it was as though I could feel the heat from the blush of shame burning in his face.

I’m guessing that Jo Aas chose that particular occasion for the character assassination of my little brother because he knew it was the best platform for what he wanted to say. And he wanted to say it because the same thing still drove him: he wanted to set the agenda. A couple of days earlier, Dan Krane had written a leader on current and former council leaders in which he had described Jo Aas as a politician whose outstanding talent was to have an ear to the ground and understand what he heard, and then adapt his responses in such a way as to make them seem in some magical way like a compromise of the views of all involved parties. It meant his suggestions were always accepted, which in turn created the impression of someone who was a powerful leader. Whereas in reality he had either simply adapted to his audience, or else merely gone with the flow. ‘Is it the dog wagging its tail, or the tail wagging the dog?’ wrote Dan Krane.