Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘As I say, Anna has dementia, and everything she says you have to take with a pinch of salt. But I related it to a warning note from the school a few years earlier, from a teacher who had twice noticed that Carl had blood on the seat of his trousers.’

‘Nails,’ I said in a low voice.

‘Missed that?’

‘Nails!’

My voice floated over the strangely still surface of the water towards land. It struck the rock face and came bouncing back twice… ails … ails . Everything comes back at you, I thought.

‘I had hoped you might be able to help me shed light on why your father and mother didn’t want to live any more, Roy.’

‘It was an accident,’ I said. ‘Can we go back now?’

‘Roy, you must understand; I can’t just let this go. It’ll all come out sooner or later, so the best thing for you now is to tell me exactly what was going on between you and Carl. There’s no need to worry it’ll be used against you, because this isn’t an official interrogation in any judicial sense. It’s just you and me on a fishing trip. I’ll make it as easy as I can for everybody involved, and if you cooperate I’ll make sure any potential punishment is as lenient as possible. Because the way things are looking at the moment, this was going on while Carl was still underage. That means that you, being a year older, risk—’

‘Listen,’ I interrupted, my throat so tight my voice sounded as though it was coming up through a stovepipe, ‘I’ve a car that needs repairing, and it looks like you’re not going to get a bite today, sheriff.’

Olsen looked at me for a long time, as though he wanted me to believe he could read me like an open book, as people say. Then he nodded, moved to lay the rod down in the boat and cursed as the hook bit and stretched his sunburnt neck below his mop of hair. He detached the hook with two fingers, and I saw a single drop of blood that quivered on the skin, but didn’t run anywhere. Olsen started the outboard motor, and five minutes later we pulled the dinghy up into the boathouse below their cabin. From there we drove to the village in Olsen’s Peugeot and he dropped me off at the repair shop. It was a bloody quiet fifteen-minute drive.

I had only been working on the Corolla for half an hour and was about to change the steering box when I heard the phone ringing in the car wash. A few moments later Uncle Bernard’s voice:

‘Roy, it’s for you. It’s Carl.’

I dropped what I had in my hand. Carl didn’t call me at the repair shop. In our house we never rang anywhere unless there was a crisis.

‘What is it?’ I shouted above the sound of Bernard’s hosepipe, the note rising and falling all according to where the jet was hitting the car.

‘It’s Sheriff Olsen,’ said Carl. His voice was shaking.

I understood it really was a crisis and steeled myself. Had that bastard already gone public with his suspicions that it was me, the big brother, who was Carl’s shirtlifter?

‘He’s disappeared,’ said Carl.

‘Disappeared?’ I laughed. ‘Rubbish. I saw him three-quarters of an hour ago.’

‘I mean it. And I think he’s dead.’

I squeezed the phone hard. ‘What d’you mean, you think he’s dead?’

‘I mean I don’t know. Like I said, he’s disappeared. But I can just feel it, Roy. I’m pretty sure he’s dead.’

Three thoughts struck me in quick succession. The first was that Carl had lost it completely. He didn’t sound even remotely pissed, and although he was a bit soft he wasn’t the oversensitive type who actually saw things. The second was that it would be almost absurdly convenient if Sheriff Sigmund Olsen had disappeared from the surface of the earth just when that was what I needed most. The third was that this was a repeat, this was Dog all over again. I had no choice. By betraying my little brother I had incurred a debt I was going to have to go on paying until I died. This was just another instalment falling due.

‘THINGS CHANGED AFTER DAD DISAPPEARED,’ said Kurt Olsen as he placed a cup of coffee on the table in front of me. ‘It’s not like I was fated to be a policeman.’

He sat down, brushed the blond quiff aside and started rolling a cigarette. We were sitting in a room that functioned as a cell but was obviously used for storing stuff too. Folders and documents were piled on the floor along the walls. Maybe the idea was that people held in custody could while away the time checking their own records and anybody else’s too while they sat here.

‘But then things do look a bit different once your father’s gone, don’t they?’

I took a swig of coffee. He’d pulled me in here for a test that he knew as well as me wouldn’t show any blood alcohol content. Now he was offering a truce. OK by me.

‘You sort of grow up overnight,’ said Kurt. ‘Because you have to. And you begin to understand something about the responsibility he had, and how you did everything you could to make his job more difficult for him. You ignored all his advice, dismissed what he thought and said, did all you could to be as unlike him as you could. Maybe because there’s something inside telling you that’s how you’re going to end up. As a copy of your father. Because we go round in circles. The only place we’re going is back where we came from. Everyone’s like that. I know you were interested in mountain birds. Carl brought some feathers to school that he’d got off you. We teased him about it.’ Kurt smiled as though at a fond memory. ‘Take these birds, Roy, they move about all over the place. Migrate, I think it’s called. But they never go anywhere their forefathers haven’t been before them. The same habitats and mating sites at the same damned times. Free as a bird? We’re kidding ourselves. It’s just something we like to believe. And we move around inside the same damned circle. We’re caged birds, but the cage is so big and the bars so thin we don’t see it.’

He glanced over at me as though seeing if his monologue had had any effect. I considered giving the slow nod, but didn’t.

‘And it’s the same for you and me too, Roy. Big circles and little circles. The big circle is me taking over the sheriff’s office after my father. The little is that he had this one unsolved case he kept going back to, and I’ve got mine too. Mine is my own father’s disappearance. There are similarities, don’t you think? Two despairing or depressed men taking their own lives.’

I shrugged and tried to look uninterested. Shit, was that all this was about – the disappearance of Sheriff Sigmund Olsen?

‘The difference being that, in my father’s case, there’s no body, and no exact location,’ said Kurt. ‘Only the lake.’

‘ The great unknown ,’ I said, nodding slowly.

Kurt looked sharply at me. And then he too began to nod, in time to my own nodding, so that for a moment we were like two synchronised oil pumps.

‘And since the fact of the matter is that you were the next to last person to see my father alive, and your brother the last, I’ve got a few questions.’

‘I guess that’s something we all have,’ I said and took another swig of coffee. ‘But I’ve told you in detail about that fishing trip with your father – I’m sure you have a transcript of it here.’ I nodded towards the papers piled up against the wall. ‘And anyway, I’m here to take a blood alcohol test, aren’t I?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Kurt Olsen. He was done rolling his cigarette and put it away in his tobacco pouch. ‘So this isn’t an official interview. No notes will be taken, and there are no witnesses to anything that might be said here.’

Just like that fishing trip, I thought.