Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘I remembered how slippery it was on Geitesvingen when we were here. And that it might – and this is just my brain that can’t stop looking for possible solutions to this riddle – it might be the case that it wasn’t a dream, that it was the Jaguar you heard, but that it just didn’t manage that last bend, started to skid backwards, and then…’

Olsen paused deliberately as he tapped the ash off his cigarette.

‘You think…’ I tried to look astonished. ‘You think that…’

‘I’d like to check it anyway. Ninety per cent of all detective work…’

‘…involves following leads that go nowhere,’ I said. ‘ True Crime . I read that article too. Fascinating stuff, isn’t it? Have you taken a look down into Huken?’

Kurt Olsen spat to one side of the steps and looked dissatisfied. ‘I tried. But it’s dark and steep, so I need someone to secure me so I can get far enough out to have a look.’

‘Sure thing,’ I said. ‘D’you need a torch?’

‘Got a torch,’ he said, put the cigarette back in the corner of his mouth and held up something black that looked like a smoked sausage.

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Carl, and shuffled back upstairs in his slippers to get dressed.

We walked down to Geitesvingen where Olsen’s Land Rover stood with its headlights on and shining out across the edge. The change in the weather had brought a rise in temperature and it was only a few degrees below zero. Kurt Olsen got a rope from the back of the car and tied it around his waist.

‘If one of you holds this,’ he said, giving the end to Carl and making his way carefully forward to the edge of the road, where there were a couple of metres of steep, stony slope before the edge and where the rock face disappeared from view below. And while he was standing there, bending forward, his back to us, Carl leaned towards my ear.

‘He’ll find the body,’ he said in a whispered hiss. ‘And he’ll realise something’s wrong.’ Carl’s face glistened with sweat, and I could hear the panic in his voice. ‘We need to…’ Carl nodded towards Olsen’s back.

‘Think straight!’ I hissed as quietly as I could. ‘He will find the body, and there is nothing wrong.’

Just then Kurt Olsen turned towards us. In the dark his cigarette glowed like a brake light.

‘Maybe best to fasten the end to the bumper bar,’ he said. ‘We could all find ourselves slipping here.’

I took the end from Carl, tied it in a bowline around the bumper, nodded to Kurt that it was secure and gave Carl a discreet warning look.

Kurt edged down the slope and leaned over as I held the rope taut. He switched on his torch and directed the beam downwards.

‘See anything?’ I asked.

‘ Oh yeah ,’ replied Kurt Olsen.

Low-lying steely-blue clouds filtered the flat light as the KRIPOS people lowered Sulesund and two colleagues down into Huken. Sulesund was wearing a quilted suit and had his hairdryer with him. Martinsen stood there with arms folded, observing the whole business.

‘You got here quickly,’ I said.

‘They’re forecasting snow,’ she said. ‘Crime scenes with a metre of snow on top are hard work.’

‘You do know it’s reckoned to be dangerous down there?’

‘Olsen said so, but you don’t often get loose rocks when it’s below freezing,’ she said. ‘The water in the mountain expands when it freezes, forces open the space it needs, but acts like glue. It’s when it melts the stones fall.’

She sounded like she knew what she was talking about.

‘OK, we’re down now,’ said Sulesund’s voice over her walkie-talkie. ‘Over.’

‘We await with excitement. Over.’

We waited.

‘Isn’t the walkie-talkie a bit Stone Age?’ I asked. ‘You could have just used your mobile phones.’

‘How do you know you can get a signal down there?’ she asked and looked at me.

Was she suggesting that I had just revealed I had been down there? Was there some last shred of suspicion still hanging there?

‘Well,’ I said, and wedged another pellet of snuff into place, ‘if the base station was picking up signals from Poul Hansen after he ended up down there, surely that proves it.’

‘First let’s wait and see if him and his phone are there,’ said Martinsen.

In response the walkie-talkie crackled. ‘There’s a body here,’ said Sulesund. ‘Squashed flat, but it’s Poul Hansen. He’s frozen stiff, we can forget about establishing an exact time of death.’

Martinsen spoke into the black box. ‘Can you see his mobile phone there?’

‘No,’ said Sulesund. ‘Or make that a yes, Ålgard just found it in his jacket pocket. Over.’

‘Scan the body, get the mobile phone and come back up. Over.’

‘Over. Over and out.’

‘Is this your farm?’ asked Martinsen as she fastened the walkie-talkie to her belt.

‘My brother and I own it together,’ I said.

‘It’s beautiful here.’ Her gaze wandered over the landscape the same way it had wandered over the kitchen the day before. I’m guessing she didn’t miss much.

‘You know much about how a farm is run?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Do you?’

‘No.’

We laughed.

I pulled out my tin of snuff. Took out a pellet. Offered her the tin.

‘No thanks,’ she said.

‘Packed it in?’ I asked.

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘You had the look of a user when I opened the tin, yes.’

‘OK, then give me one.’

‘I don’t want to be the person who—’

‘Just one.’

I handed her the tin. ‘Why isn’t Kurt Olsen here?’ I asked.

‘Your sheriff is already at work solving new cases,’ she said with a wry smile. With her index finger and extended middle finger she pressed the pellet in between the red, wet lips. ‘Going through the workmen’s cabins we found a Latvian, one of the builders working on the hotel.’

‘I thought the cabins were closed until work started up again.’

‘Yes they are, but the Latvian wanted to save money, so instead of going home for Christmas he was living illegally in the cabin. The first thing he said when the police knocked on the door was: “It wasn’t me who started the fire.” Turns out he was down in the village to see the New Year’s Eve rockets and when he’d headed there just before midnight a car had passed him coming the other way. And when he got there, the hotel was ablaze. It was him who phoned in and reported the fire. Anonymously, of course. And he didn’t tell the police about the car, he said, because then it would emerge that he’d been living in the workmen’s cabin all through Christmas and he would have lost his job. Anyway, he’d been so blinded by the car’s headlights that he wouldn’t have been able to tell the police what make it was or what colour. All he had noticed was that one of the brake lights wasn’t working. Anyway, Olsen’s talking to him now.’

‘You think this has anything to do with Willumsen’s murder?’

Martinsen shrugged. ‘We don’t exclude the possibility.’

‘And the Latvian?’

‘He’s innocent,’ she said. There was something different about her now, a calmness. The nicotine calm.

I nodded. ‘In general you’re fairly sure about who is guilty and who is innocent, aren’t you?’

‘Fairly,’ she said. She was about to say something else, but at that moment Sulesund’s face appeared above the edge of the precipice. He’d used a jumar to climb up the rope, and now he freed himself from the climbing harness and got into the passenger seat of the KRIPOS vehicle. He connected the hairdryer to the laptop and entered a command.

‘GSR!’ he shouted through the open door. ‘No doubt about it, Poul had fired a weapon not long before he died. And so far it matches the weapon from the crime scene.’