Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘Because…’ Carl swallows. ‘Because she’s God, creating in her own image. She couldn’t live with that hotel, it had to be the way she had drawn it. That or nothing. She didn’t know it wasn’t insured and figured it wouldn’t be a problem to start again from scratch and then, at the second attempt, she’d be able to insist we use her original drawings.’

‘Is that what she said?’

‘Yes. And when I asked if she didn’t consider the rest of us, you, and me, and the people in the village who had worked and invested in it, she said no.’

‘No?’

‘ Fuck no , was what she said. And laughed. And then I hit her again.’

‘With the iron?’

‘With the back of it. The cold side.’

‘Hard?’

‘Hard. I saw the light go out in her eyes.’

I had to concentrate in order to breathe. ‘Was she…’

‘I took her pulse, but I couldn’t feel shit.’

‘And then?’

‘I carried her out here.’

‘She’s lying in the boot?’

‘Yes.’

‘Show me.’

We climbed out. As Carl opened the boot I raised my eyes and looked into the west. Above the mountain tops the orange was eating into the pale blue. And I thought that this was maybe the last time I would be able to think that something was beautiful. But for a fraction of a second, before looking down into the boot, I thought it had all been just a joke, that there wouldn’t be anybody there.

But there she lay. A snow-white Sleeping Beauty. She slept the way she had done the two nights we had spent together in Kristiansand. On her side, with eyes closed. And I couldn’t help thinking: in the same foetal position as the child inside her.

The wounds to her head left no room for doubt that she was dead. I laid my fingertips against that smashed forehead.

‘This isn’t just from one blow with the back of an iron,’ I said.

‘I…’ Carl swallowed. ‘She moved when I laid her beside the car to open the boot, and I… I panicked.’

Automatically I looked down at the ground, and there, in the interior light from the boot, I saw a flash from one of the big stones Dad had made us carry up to the wall of the house, to improve the drainage one autumn when it rained more than usual. There was blood on it.

Carl’s sobbing whisper beside me sounded like porridge simmering. ‘Can you help me out, Roy?’

My gaze went back to Shannon. Wanted to look away but couldn’t look away. He had killed her. No, he had murdered her. In cold blood. And now he was asking for help. I hated him. Hated, hated, and now I felt my heart start to pump again, and with the blood came pain, finally the pain came, and I bit down so hard it felt as though I would crush my own jaws. I drew a breath and freed up my jaw enough to say three words:

‘Help you how?’

‘We can drive her out to the woods. Leave her somewhere where they’re bound to find her and leave the Cadillac next to her. Then I’ll say she took the Cadillac and went out for a spin earlier in the day and still hadn’t come back by the time I left for the opening ceremony. If we go now and leave her somewhere, then I’ll still have time to make it, and then I can report her missing when she doesn’t show up at the party as arranged. Sound good?’

I punched him in the stomach.

He folded in the middle and stood there like a fucking L, gasping for breath. I easily pushed him over onto the gravel, then sat on top of him so that his arms were trapped. He was going to die; he was going to die the same way she did. My right hand found the big stone, but it was sticky and slippery with blood and slipped out of my grasp. I was about to dry my hand on my shirt, but finally managed to think clearly enough to instead run my hand twice through the gravel and then picked up the stone again. Raised it above my head. Carl was still not breathing and lay with his eyes tight shut. I wanted him to see this, so I squeezed his nose with my left hand.

He opened his eyes.

He cried.

His eyes were on me, maybe he still hadn’t seen the stone I was holding up above my head, or maybe he didn’t understand what it meant. Or else he’d reached the same place as me and didn’t give a fuck any more. I felt the pull of gravity on the stone, it wanted to fall, it wanted to crush, I wouldn’t even have to use force, it was when I stopped using force, when I no longer kept it at arm’s length from my brother that it would do the job for which it was intended. He had stopped crying, and already I could feel the burn of the lactic acid in my right arm. I gave up. Let it happen. But then I saw it. Like some fucking echo from childhood. That look in his eyes. That fucking humiliated, helpless little-brother look. And the lump in my throat. I was the one who was going to start crying. Again. I let the stone come, added speed to it, smashed it down so hard I could feel it all the way up my shoulder. Sat there panting like a fucking hound dog.

And after I’d got my breath back, I rolled off Carl who lay there, motionless. Silent at last. Eyes wide open, as though finally he had seen and understood everything. I sat there next to him and looked at Ottertind Mountain. Our silent witness.

‘That was pretty damn close to my head,’ Carl groaned.

‘Not close enough,’ I said.

‘OK, so I fucked up,’ he said. ‘Have you got that out of your system now?’

I took the snuffbox from my trouser pocket.

‘Speaking of stones to the head,’ I said, and didn’t care a shit if he could hear the shaking in my voice. ‘When they find her in the woods, how do you think they’re going to explain her head wounds? Eh?’

‘Someone murdered her, I guess.’

‘And who’s the first person they’re going to suspect?’

‘The husband?’

‘Who is the guilty party in eighty per cent of all cases, according to True Crime magazine? Particularly when he’s got no alibi for the time of the murder.’

Carl raised himself up onto his elbows. ‘OK then, big brother, so what do we do?’

We. Naturally.

‘Give me a few seconds,’ I said.

I looked around. What did I see?

Opgard. A small house, a barn, a few outlying fields. And what, actually, was that? A name in six letters, a family with two surviving members. Because, when you take away all the rest, what was a family? A story we told each other because family was a necessity. Because, over thousands of years, it had worked as a unit of cooperation? Yeah, why not? Or was there something beyond the merely practical, something in the blood that bound parents, brothers and sisters together? They say you can’t live on just fresh air and love. But you can’t fucking well live without them either. And if there’s something we want, then it’s to live. I felt that now, perhaps even more strongly because death lay in the boot directly in front of us. That I wanted to live. And, for that reason, that we had to do what had to be done. That everything depended on me. That it had to be done now.

‘First,’ I said, ‘when I checked the Cadillac last autumn I told Shannon you should replace the brake hoses and the throttle cable. Have you done that?’

‘What?’ Carl coughed and held a hand to his stomach. ‘Shannon never said a word about that.’

‘Good, then we’re in luck,’ I said. ‘We move her into the driver’s seat. Before you wash the kitchen and the boot, take what blood there is and smear it on the steering wheel, the seat and the dashboard. Got that?’

‘Er, yes. But…’

‘Shannon is going to be found in the Cadillac down in Huken and that will explain her head wounds.’

‘But… that’s the third car down in Huken. The police are bound to wonder what the fuck is going on.’