Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

I understood.

I suffered.

I counted the days.

In the middle of March, with the rain beating down on Søm and the Varodd Bridge in the evening dark outside my window, the doorbell rang. And there she stood. Rain dripping from the red hair that lay plastered to her head. I blinked. It looked like streaks of rust or blood running across the white skin of her neck. She had a bag in her hand. And a mixture of despair and determination in her eyes.

‘Can I come in?’

I stepped aside.

I only found out the next day why she’d come.

To tell me the news.

And to ask me to kill again.

THE SUN HAD JUST RISEN, the earth was still wet with rain from the night before, and the birdsong deafening as Shannon and I walked arm in arm through the woods.

‘These are birds of passage,’ I said. ‘They come back earlier here in the south of the country.’

‘They sound happy,’ said Shannon, and laid her head against my arm. ‘They’ve probably been longing to come home. Who was which bird again?’

‘Dad was the mountain lark, Mum the wheatear. Uncle Bernard was the bunting. Carl is—’

‘Don’t tell me! The meadow pipit.’

‘Correct.’

‘And I’m the dotterel. And you’re the ring ouzel.’

I nodded.

We had hardly spoken that night.

‘Can we talk about it tomorrow?’ Shannon had asked after I’d let her in and helped her out of her wet coat, firing off one question after another. ‘I need to sleep,’ she said, wrapping her arms around my waist and pressing her chin against my chest, and I felt how my shirt was soaked through. ‘But first I need you.’

I had to get up early, we were expecting a big goods delivery at the station in the morning and I had to be on site. She hadn’t said anything about why she’d come over breakfast either, and I hadn’t asked. It was as though once I knew why, nothing would ever be the same again. So now we closed our eyes and enjoyed the brief space of time we had, the free fall before we hit the ground.

I’d told her I had to stay at the station at least until lunch before I could get someone to cover for me, but that if she came to the station with me we could go for a walk after the delivery. She had nodded, we’d made the short drive and she had stayed waiting in the car while I checked and signed off for all the pallets.

We walked north. Behind us lay the motorway, with its Saturn-rings system of entry and exit roads, ahead of us the woods which already, this early in March, had a touch of green to them. We discovered a path that led deep into the woods. I asked if Os was still deep in winter.

‘It’s still winter in Opgard,’ she said. ‘In the village they already had two fake springs.’

I laughed and kissed her hair. We had reached a tall fence that barred any further progress and sat down on a large stone by the side of the path.

‘And the hotel?’ I asked with a glance at my watch. ‘How is that coming along?’

‘The official start-up will be in two weeks, as planned. So it’s going well. In a manner of speaking.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Tell me what isn’t going well.’

She straightened her back. ‘That’s one of the things I’ve come to talk to you about. An unforeseen problem came up. The engineers discovered a weakness in the ground, in the mountain itself.’

‘Discovered? But Carl knows the mountain is unstable, that’s the reason for the rockfalls in Huken, that’s why the highway tunnel wasn’t built ages ago.’ I could hear how irritated I sounded. Maybe it was at the thought that when she’d taken the trouble to drive all the way to Kristiansand, it wasn’t for my sake but because of her hotel.

‘Carl hasn’t said anything about the stability of the rock to anyone,’ she said. ‘Because, as you well know, he prefers to suppress anything he thinks might be a problem.’

‘And?’ I said impatiently.

‘It can be fixed, but that’ll need more money, and Carl said we don’t have it, and suggested we just keep quiet about it, that it would take at least twenty years before the building started looking a bit crooked. Of course, I wouldn’t accept that and I did some checking of the financial situation on my own, to see if there was room to borrow a bit more from the bank. They told me that for that they would require more security, and when I said I would talk to you and Carl to see if you were willing to offer the bank all the outlying land around Opgard as security, they told me…’ She stopped, swallowed before continuing. ‘…told me that according to the property register, Willumsen’s estate already had security in all the outlying land around Opgard. And on top of that, Carl Opgard was the sole registered owner after he bought you out in the autumn.’

I stared at her. I had to cough to get my voice to work. ‘But that’s not correct. There must be some mistake.’

‘That’s what I said too. So they showed me a printout from the property register with both Carl’s and your signatures.’ She held her mobile phone up to me. And there it was. My signature. That’s to say, something that looked like my signature. Resembled it so closely that only one person could have done it, and that was the person who had learned to copy his brother’s handwriting for his essays at school.

Something dawned on me. Something Carl had said to the enforcer while they were sitting in the kitchen. But Willumsen’s got security. And the enforcer’s response: Which he says ain’t worth much without a hotel. Willumsen, who normally took a man at his word, had not trusted Carl and demanded the land as security.

‘You know what Dad called that miserable little farm of ours?’

‘What?’

‘The kingdom. Opgard is our kingdom, he always used to say. As though he was worried Carl and I wouldn’t take owning our own land seriously enough.’

Shannon said nothing.

I coughed. ‘Carl’s forged my signature. He knows I would have said no to using our land as security for a loan from Willumsen, so he transferred the property to himself behind my back.’

‘And now Carl owns all the land.’

‘On paper, yes. I’ll get it back.’

‘You think so? He’s had plenty of time to discreetly hand it back to you after Willumsen cancelled the debt. Why hasn’t he done so?’

‘He’s probably been too busy.’

‘Wake up, Roy. Or do I know your brother better than you do? As long as it’s his name on the property register, then he owns the land. We’re talking about someone who didn’t hesitate to swindle his partner and friends in Canada and then run off. When I was in Toronto in the summer I found out more about what happened that time. I talked to one of his partners who was also a friend of mine. He told me Carl threatened to kill him when he said he was going to warn the investors about the size of their losses on the project, so that it could be stopped before they lost even more.’

‘Carl knows what to say.’

‘He called round to see this friend of ours when he was at home on his own. Carl held a gun on him, Roy. Said he would kill him and his family if he didn’t keep his mouth shut.’

‘He panicked.’

‘And what do you think he’s doing now?’

‘Carl doesn’t steal from me, Shannon. I’m his brother.’ I felt her hand on my arm, wanted to pull it away, but didn’t. ‘And he doesn’t kill people,’ I said, and heard how my own voice was shaking. ‘Not like that. Not because of money.’

‘Maybe not,’ she said. ‘Not because of money.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He won’t let me go. At least, not now.’

‘Not now? What’s different between now and then?’