Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘What happened?’

Carl sat down in the middle of the bend, the way the goats often do. Bowed his head and hid his face in his hands. He cast a long, troll-like shadow across the gravel.

‘He came up here,’ he stammered. ‘He said you and him had been out fishing, and he started asking a lot of questions, and I…’ He clammed up.

‘Sigmund Olsen came here,’ I prompted, sitting down beside him. ‘He probably said I’d told him things and asked if you could confirm that I had messed about with you when you were underage.’

‘Yes!’ yelled Carl.

‘Shush!’ I said.

‘He said the best thing would be for us both to confess and get it over with as quickly as possible. The alternative was for him to use the evidence he had in a long, painful and very public court case. I said you’d never touched me, not like that, not…’ Carl spoke and gestured to the ground, as though I wasn’t even there. ‘He said it wasn’t uncommon for the victim to sympathise with the attacker in situations like this, that they took part of the responsibility themselves for what had taken place, especially if it had been going on for some time.’

And I thought that, well, Sheriff Olsen had got that just about right.

A sob broke from Carl’s lips. ‘Then he told me that Anna at the surgery had told Mum and Dad what we were doing just two days before they went over into Huken. Olsen said Dad knew it was bound to come out one day and that he, like the conservative Christian he was, couldn’t live with the shame.’

And took Mum along with him, I thought. Instead of the two sodomites in the boys’ room.

‘I tried to tell him no, that wasn’t right, it was an accident. A pure accident, but he wouldn’t listen, on he went. Said Dad’s blood alcohol level was minimal and no one drives right off a corner like that when they’re sober. And then I got desperate, I realised he was really going to go ahead with it…’

‘Yep,’ I said, flicking away a sharp stone I was sitting on. ‘Olsen just wants to clear up his big fucking case.’

‘But what about us, Roy? Will we go to jail?’

I grinned. Jail? Yeah, maybe so. I hadn’t even thought much about it. Because I knew that if the whole truth came out it was the shame I couldn’t live with, not the being in jail. Because if they, the others, the village found out, it wouldn’t just be the shame I had to deal with alone in the dark for so many years. The whole disgraceful, treacherous business would be exposed, condemned, ridiculed. The Opgard family would be humiliated. Maybe it’s an aberration of the personality, as people say, but Dad had understood the logic behind hara-kiri, and I did too. That death is the only way out for someone broken down by shame. On the other hand, you don’t want to die unless you have to.

‘We don’t have much time,’ I said. ‘What happened?’

‘I was desperate,’ said Carl and glanced up at me the way he did when he was about to confess something. ‘So I said I knew it was an accident, that I could prove it.’

‘You said what ?’

‘I had to say something , Roy! So I said one of the tyres had punctured, that that’s why they went over the edge. I mean, no one had checked anything at all on the car, they’d just winched up the bodies, that climber got hit by a loose boulder and after that no one dared go down there again. I said it wasn’t so surprising they never noticed the puncture, you can’t tell if a tyre’s got a puncture when the car’s on its back with the wheels sticking up in the air, but I said a couple of weeks ago I’d got a pair of binoculars and climbed down over the edge where there’s a couple of solid rocks you can hold on to and lean out so you can see the car. I said I saw how the left front tyre was noticeably a bit shrivelled, and that the puncture must have happened before the car went over the edge, because the undercarriage is completely undamaged, the car did a half somersault through thin air and landed on its roof, full stop.’

‘And Olsen bought that?’

‘No. He wanted to see for himself.’

I could see where this was going. ‘So you fetched the binoculars, and…’

‘He climbed right out to the very edge, and…’ Carl let the breath burst from his lungs and continued, his eyes closed. ‘I heard the sound of stones loosening, a scream. Then he was gone.’

Gone, I thought, but not completely gone.

‘Don’t you believe me?’

I looked down into the abyss. A memory from when I was twelve, from my uncle Bernard’s fiftieth birthday gathering at the Grand Hotel, flickered through my mind. ‘You realise what this is going to look like?’ I said. ‘The sheriff comes up here to interview you in connection with a serious criminal investigation, and he ends up dead down there. If he is dead.’

Carl nodded slowly. Of course he realised. That was why he had called me instead of the mountain rescue team, or the doctor.

I stood up and dusted myself off. ‘Fetch the rope from the barn,’ I said. ‘The long one.’

I fastened one end of the rope to the tow hitch of the car up by the house and the other round my waist. Then I began to walk down towards Geitesvingen with the rope uncoiling. I counted a hundred paces before it was taut. I was ten metres from the edge of the drop.

‘Now!’ I shouted. ‘And remember: slowly!’

Carl gave me a thumbs up through the window of the Volvo and began to reverse.

The trick was to keep the rope taut, I’d explained to him, and now there was no way back. I lay into the rope and headed towards the drop as though I was in a hurry to get us both down there. The edge was the worst. My body protested, it wasn’t as sure as my mind was that this would be OK and made me hesitant. The rope slackened because Carl didn’t notice that I’d stopped at the edge. I shouted to him to drive forward a bit, but he didn’t hear me. So I turned my back to Huken, took a step backwards and fell. It can’t have been more than a metre, but when the rope tightened round my waist it squeezed the breath out of me and I forgot to straighten my legs so that I hit the rock face with my knees and forehead as I was thrown inwards. I swore, managed to brace the soles of my shoes against the wall, and started to climb down the vertical stone wall. Looked up at the sky above me which was now pale blue and translucent and breaking up, already I could see a couple of stars. I could no longer hear the car, in fact there was complete silence. Maybe it was the silence, the stars and dangling weightless like that attached to a car that made me feel like an astronaut, floating in space and connected to a space capsule. I thought of Major Tom in Bowie’s song. For a moment I wished it could go on like that, and even end like that, that I could just float away.

And then the wall came to an end, I touched solid ground and watched the rope coiling like a cobra on the ground in front of me. Two, three coils and then the rope stopped. I followed it with my eyes to the top. Saw a tiny cloud of exhaust smoke. Carl must have stopped at the very edge. The rope had just been long enough and no more.

I turned. I was standing on a scree of large and small stones that time had chewed loose from the walls surrounding me on all sides and deposited at the bottom. The drop down from Geitesvingen was vertical, but the walls of the sharp, lower pillars sloped slightly, so that the square of evening sky above me was larger than the roughly hundred square metres of rocky ground I was standing on. Nothing grew down here in this place that never saw so much as a glint of sunlight and had no smell either. Just rock. Space and rock.

The spaceship, Dad’s black Cadillac DeVille, lay the way I had imagined it would that time the mountain rescue guys described the scene down here.