Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

The car was lying on its roof with its wheels in the air. The rear part of the coupé was squashed flat, with the front so little damaged you might even have supposed it possible for the passengers sitting there to have survived. Mum and Dad had been found outside the car; they’d been thrown through the windscreen when the front end hit the ground. The fact that they hadn’t been wearing seat belts strengthened the suicide theory, even though I had explained that Dad was against seat belts on principle. Not because he didn’t see the point, but because it was a mandatory requirement made by what he called the ‘nanny state’. The only reason Sheriff Olsen thought he’d seen Dad using the belt several times when driving in the village was that Dad would wear one when he thought the law was around, because he hated getting fined even more than he hated the nanny state.

A raven stood on Sheriff Olsen’s stomach watching me cautiously, claws clutched around the big belt buckle with the buffalo skull. Olsen had landed in such a way that the lower half of his body lay across the back end of the chassis, with the rest of him hanging over the side and out of view from where I was standing. The raven’s head swivelled, following me as I made my way round the car. Broken glass crunched beneath my feet, and I had to use my hands to get past a couple of enormous loose boulders. The upper part of Olsen’s body hung down in front of the licence plate and the boot. The unusual ninety-degree angle at which his back was broken made him look like a scarecrow, a figure with no joints, straw stuffed inside clothes, with a mop hanging from its head, dripping with blood onto the stones below with a low, soft smacking sound. Hanging there with his hands in the air – that’s to say, towards the ground – as though trying to signal that he was giving up. Because as Dad always said: ‘If you’re dead then you’ve lost.’ Olsen was as dead as a dodo. And he smelled.

I took a step closer, and the raven screeched at me without moving. It probably saw me as a kind of Arctic skua, that’s a sneaky type of seabird that lives by stealing food from other birds. I picked up a stone and threw it at the raven and it flew off with two shrieks, the one hate-filled and aimed at me, the other an expression of his own regret.

Darkness was already swelling out from the mountainside and I had to work fast.

Had to think through how we were going to get Olsen’s body up the rock face using just one rope and with a minimum risk of the body getting caught on something or sliding out of the rope. Because the human body is like a bloody Houdini. If you tie the rope around the chest, the arms and shoulders squeeze themselves together and the body slips out that way. Tie it to the belt buckle or round the waist and drag the body up like a trussed shrimp and at some point the centre of gravity will move and the body tip upside down and slip out of the rope or out of his trousers. I decided that the simplest thing would be to make a slip knot and tie it round his neck. The centre of gravity would be so low that he couldn’t tip in any direction and with the head and shoulders clearing the way there was less chance of him getting caught on something. And of course you might well ask yourself how come I knew how to tie a knot that’s usually only learned by people who intend to hang themselves.

I worked systematically, concentrating entirely on the practical aspects. I’m good at that. I knew that these were images that would come back again – Olsen as a gaping figurehead mounted on the stern of a black spaceship – but that would be another time, another place.

It was dark by the time I called up to Carl that the package was ready. I had to call him three times, he had Whitney Houston on the car’s CD player and the sound of her singing ‘I will always love you’ was echoing across the mountains. He started the engine and I heard him riding the clutch to keep it going slowly enough. The rope tightened and I held round the body, helped it over to the rock face where I let go. Stood below and watched as it rose to the heavens like an angel with neck outstretched. Slowly it was swallowed up by the dark until all I could hear was the scraping sound of the body against the rock. Then a brief swishing noise through the dark and the crack of something hard hitting the ground just a few metres away from me. Shit, the body must have dislodged some rocks, and there could be more. I took shelter in the only place there was shelter. Crawled in through the windscreen of the Cadillac. Sat there and looked at the dials on the instrument panel, tried to read them upside down. Thought of what came next. How to deal with the next part of the plan. The practical details, everything that had to be done right, other options if something went wrong with plan A. It must have been this simple act of thinking that made me feel calmer. The situation was crazy, of course. I was trying to cover up the fact that a man was dead, and that settled me down. Or maybe it wasn’t these practical thoughts but the smell. The smell of the leather seats, impregnated with Dad’s sweat, Mum’s cigarettes and perfume, and Carl’s vomit from the time we drove to the city in the newly purchased Cadillac and he got carsick and puked over the seats even before we’d navigated all the hairpin bends on the way down to the village. Mum put out her cigarette, wound down the window and took a wad of tobacco from Dad’s silvery snuffbox. But Carl carried on puking as we drove out of the village, so suddenly and without any warning that he never had time to open the sick bag and the coupé stank like a fucking gas chamber even with all the windows open. Carl had lain down in the back seat with his head in my lap, closed his eyes and everything had calmed down. After Mum had wiped up the sick she’d handed us the bag of biscuits, and Dad had sung ‘Love Me Tender’ at half speed and with double vibrato. Looking back on it I recalled it as the best trip we ever had.

The rest happened quickly.

Carl tossed the rope down, I tied myself in, called up that I was ready and I made my way up the rock face the same way I had come down, like a film shown backwards. I couldn’t see what I was standing on, but nothing came loose. If I hadn’t just nearly been hit on the head I would have said the mountain was quite safe.

Olsen was laid out on Geitesvingen, in the light from the Volvo’s headlamps. There weren’t many visible signs of external damage to the body. His mane of hair was soaked in blood, one hand looked as though it had been crushed, and he had livid markings on his neck from the slip knot. I don’t know whether it was discolouring from the rope, or if a fresh corpse can haemorrhage. But of course, there was a broken spine in there, and enough internal injuries for a pathologist to be able to determine that the cause of death was not exactly hanging. And not drowning either.

I stuck my hand into one of Olsen’s wet back pockets, fished out his car keys, and in the other found the bunch of keys he had used when he locked the boathouse.

‘Go and fetch Dad’s hunting knife,’ I said.

‘Eh?’

‘It’s hanging in the entrance hall, next to the shotgun. Get a move on.’

While Carl ran back to the house I took out the snow shovel any mountain dweller has in the back of the car all year round, scooped up the gravel where Olsen had been dragged and tossed it down into Huken, vanishing without a sound.

‘Here,’ said Carl, panting.

He handed me the knife, the one with the grooves in the blade that I had used to finish off Dog.

And now, as then, Carl was standing behind me and looking away as I used the knife. I grabbed hold of Olsen’s mop of hair, holding his head the same way I had held Dog, put the point of the blade in his forehead, forced it through the skin until it hit bone, then cut an angled circle down and around the head, directly above the ear and the knotty clump of bone at the top of the neck, the point of the blade all the time following the line of the cranium. Dad had shown me how you flay a fox, but this was different. This was scalping.