Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘If you can remember that then you can remember what it is he buys. Come on.’

Egil stared at me. And in that sheep-like gaze I saw a prayer for permission to confess.

I sighed. ‘This is something that’s been eating away at you, Egil.’

‘Eh?’

‘He’s got something on you, is that it? Is he threatening you in some way?’

‘Moe? No.’

‘Then why are you covering up for him?’

Egil stood there blinking. Behind him, in the living room, a war was raging. I saw chaos behind that desperate look.

‘He… he…’

I really didn’t have the patience for this, but for added effect I lowered my voice. ‘Now don’t make anything up, Egil.’

The boy’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a lift and he’d taken a half-step back into the hallway, looked almost ready to slam the door shut in panic, but then stopped. Maybe he saw something in my eyes, something his brain connected to what he’d heard about guys getting their lights punched out in Årtun. And he gave in.

‘He let me keep the change for whatever it was he bought.’

I nodded. Naturally I had told Egil when he started working for me that we don’t accept tips, that if the customer insisted then we punch the amount into the till and leave the money out for the times when one of us made a mistake and handed over too much change. Usually that would be Egil, but he might have forgotten, and right now I wasn’t about to tell him; what I wanted was to have my suspicions confirmed.

‘And what did he buy?’

‘We didn’t do anything illegal,’ said Egil.

I didn’t bother to tell him that him using the imperfect like that told me he understood that whatever arrangement he might have had with Moe was as of now over, and was therefore unlikely to have been legit. I waited.

‘EllaOne,’ said Egil.

So that was it. The morning-after pill.

‘How often?’ I asked.

‘Once a week,’ said Egil.

‘Did he ask you not to tell anyone?’

Egil nodded. He was pale. Pale and stupid, but not mentally defective, as people call it. I mean, they change the words like they change dirty underwear, so probably they call it something else now, but anyway: Egil had probably managed to put two and two together, even if Moe had gambled he wouldn’t. I saw it now, that he wasn’t just ashamed of himself, he was totally mortified. There’s no heavier punishment than that. And I say that as someone who’s drunk cup after cup of that bitter stuff. Someone who knows that there’s nothing a judge could do that would add to that shame.

‘Then let’s say you’re sick today and good tomorrow,’ I said. ‘OK?’

‘Yes,’ he said, at the second time of trying to get sound into his voice.

I didn’t hear the door close behind me. He was probably still standing there watching me. Wondering what was going to happen now.

I entered Grete Smitt’s hair salon. It was like emerging from a time machine that had landed in the USA straight after the war. There was an enormous and much patched red leather barber’s chair in one corner. According to Grete, Louis Armstrong had once sat in it. The other corner housed a salon hairdryer from the 1950s, one of those helmets on a stand that the old biddies sit under while reading magazines and gossiping in old American movies, though it always makes me think of Jonathan Pryce and the lobotomy scene in Brazil . Grete uses that helmet for something she calls a shampoo and set , which is when you first wash the hair with a special shampoo, put in the curlers and then dry the hair slowly by sticking your head up inside this helmet, preferably with a headscarf so you don’t touch any of the elements which in her fifties version look like the glowing insides of a toaster. According to Grete, a shampoo and set was now retro-hip and on its way back in again. The thing is, here in Os it had probably never really been away in the first place. Anyway, if you ask me, Grete herself was probably the most frequent user of that helmet, to maintain those rat-brown permed curls that hung from her head.

Pictures of old American film stars hung on the walls. The only thing that wasn’t American must have been that famous pair of salon scissors Grete used, a stainless-steel affair which she told anyone who would listen was a Japanese Niigata 1000 that cost fifteen thousand kroner and came with a lifetime guarantee.

Grete looked up, but the Niigata went on cutting.

‘Olsen,’ I said.

‘Hi, Roy. He’s sunning himself.’

‘I know that, I saw his car. Where’s the sun?’ I watched as the Japanese superscissors snipped dangerously close to the customer’s earlobe.

‘I don’t think he wants to be disturbed…’

‘In there?’ I pointed towards the other door in the room. There was a poster on it showing a sun-bronzed and desperately smiling girl in a bikini.

‘He’ll be finished in…’ She glanced down at a remote control on the table next to her. ‘Fourteen minutes. Can’t you wait outside?’

‘Could do. But even men can manage to do two things at once if all that’s involved are sunning yourself and speaking.’ I nodded to the lady in the barber’s chair who was staring at me in the mirror, and opened the door.

It was like entering a lousy horror film. The room was in darkness apart from a bluish light that seeped out from the crack along the side of a Dracula’s coffin, one of two sunbeds that were all the room contained, apart from a chair over the back of which hung Kurt Olsen’s jeans and his light leather jacket. A threatening, juddering sound came from the lamps inside, heightening the sense that something terrible was about to happen.

I pulled the chair up to the side of the sunbed. Heard music buzzing from a couple of earphones. For a moment I thought it was Roger Whittaker and that this really was a horror film, before recognising John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’.

‘I’ve come to warn you,’ I said.

I heard movement from inside, something hit the lid of the coffin so it shook and there was a low cursing. The buzzing of the music stopped.

‘It’s about a possible case of sexual assault,’ I said.

‘Oh yeah?’ Olsen’s voice sounded as if he was talking inside a tin can, and I couldn’t tell if he recognised my voice on the outside.

‘A person having sexual relations with someone in his own immediate family,’ I said.

‘Go on.’

I stopped. Maybe because it suddenly struck me that the situation had bizarre similarities to the Catholic confessional. Apart from the fact that it wasn’t me who was the sinner. Not this time.

‘Moe – the roofer – is buying morning-after pills once a week. As you know, he has a teenage daughter. She bought morning-after pills the other day.’

I waited as I left it up to Sheriff Olsen to reach the obvious conclusion.

‘Why once a week, and why here?’ he asked. ‘Why not bulk-buy in town? Or put the girl on the contraceptive pill?’

‘Because he thinks that every time is the last time,’ I said. ‘He thinks he can manage to stop.’

I heard the clicking of a lighter from inside the sunbed. ‘How do you know that?’

I searched for the right way to answer as the cigarette smoke seeped out of Dracula’s coffin, dissipated in the blue light and vanished into the darkness. Felt the same urge as Egil had felt: to confess. To drive over the edge. To fall.

‘We all like to believe that we’ll be a better person tomorrow,’ I said.

‘It isn’t easy to keep something like that quiet in a village like this for any length of time,’ said Olsen. ‘I’ve never heard anyone suspect Moe of anything.’

‘He’s gone bankrupt,’ I said. ‘Hangs around at home with nothing to do.’