Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘What’s that?’ asked Carl.

‘Something we use when we clean out the car wash,’ I said. ‘It gets rid of everything, diesel, asphalt, it even dissolves plaster. We dilute it, five litres of water per decilitre of this. Which is to say, if you don’t dilute it then it will get rid of absolutely everything. ’

‘You know that?’

‘Uncle Bernard told me. Or in his exact words: “Get it on your finger and if you don’t wash it off immediately, you can say goodbye to that finger.”’

I told him that to lighten the atmosphere a bit, but Carl couldn’t even raise a smile. As though all of this was my fault. I didn’t pursue the thought, because I knew that it would end up with me thinking that it really was my fault, that it always had been.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I guess that’s the reason it comes in metal drums and not plastic.’

We taped rags over our mouths and noses, removed the stoppers from the drums and emptied them into the scoop, one after another, until the grey-white liquid had completely covered Sigmund Olsen’s dismembered body.

Then we waited.

Nothing happened.

‘Shouldn’t we turn off the light?’ Carl asked from behind his cleaning cloth. ‘Someone might come in to say hello.’

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘They can see that’s my car outside, not Uncle Bernard’s. And I’m not exactly—’

‘Yeah yeah,’ Carl interrupted, so there was no need for me to go on. Not exactly the kind of guy people stop by to have a chat with.

Another few minutes passed. I tried to keep still so the overalls were in minimal contact with my crown jewels, as people say. I don’t really know what I had imagined would happen in the scoop, but whatever it was it didn’t. Was the Fritz overhyped?

‘Maybe we should bury him instead?’ said Carl, coughing.

I shook my head. ‘Too many dogs, badgers and foxes round here, they’d dig him up.’

It was true, foxes in the cemetery had dug holes all the way into the Bonaker family grave.

‘Hey, Roy?’

‘Mmm?’

‘If Olsen had still been alive when you got down there in Huken…’

I knew he was going to ask me that, and I wished he wouldn’t.

‘…what would you have done?’

‘That depends,’ I said, trying to resist the temptation to scratch my balls, because I’d realised I was wearing Uncle Bernard’s overalls on the inside.

‘Like with Dog?’ Carl asked.

I thought about it.

‘If he’d survived then at least he’d have been able to tell people it was an accident,’ I said.

Carl nodded. Moved his weight from one foot to the other. ‘But when I said that Olsen just, that’s not quite—’

‘Shh,’ I said.

There was a low, sizzling sound, like an egg in a frying pan. We peered into the scoop. The grey-white was now whiter, you could no longer see the body parts, and bubbles were floating on the surface.

‘Check it out,’ I said. ‘Fritz is playing.’

‘So what happened after that?’ asked Shannon. ‘Did the whole body dissolve?’

‘Yep,’ I said.

‘But not that night,’ said Carl. ‘Not the bones.’

‘So then what did you do?’

I took a deep breath. The moon had risen over the mountain ridge and peered down on the three of us sitting on the bonnet of the Cadillac on Geitesvingen. An unusually warm breeze was blowing in from the south-east, a foehn wind that I liked to imagine had come all the way from Thailand and those other countries down there I’ve never been to and never will.

‘We waited until just before daylight,’ I said. ‘Then we drove the tractor over to the car wash and emptied the scoop. A few bones and fleshy fibres got caught on the grate so we chucked them back into the scoop and doused them with more Fritz. Then we parked the tractor at the back of the workshop and raised the scoop to its top position.’ I illustrated this by raising both hands over my head. ‘In case any passers-by might be tempted to take a look inside. Two days later I emptied it into the car wash too.’

‘What about Uncle Bernard?’ asked Shannon. ‘Didn’t he ask questions?’

I shrugged. ‘He wondered why I’d moved the tractor and I told him I’d had three calls from people who wanted their cars repaired at the same time, so we needed the room. That none of the three showed up was weird, of course, but it does happen. He was more bothered that I hadn’t managed to finish work on Willumsen’s Toyota.’

‘Well, you’d been too busy,’ said Carl. ‘Anyway, like everyone else, he was more concerned by the fact that the sheriff had drowned himself. They’d found his boat with the boots in and were searching for the body – but I told you all this already.’

‘Yes, but not in such detail,’ said Shannon.

‘I guess Roy remembers it better than me.’

‘And that was it?’ asked Shannon. ‘You were the last people to see him alive; weren’t you questioned?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘A short conversation with the sheriff from the neighbouring district. We told him the truth, which was that Olsen asked us how we were doing after the accident, because he was such a considerate man. Although, actually, I said he is a considerate man, acting as though I was presuming he was still alive, even though everyone realised he must have drowned himself. A witness who owned a cabin out that way thought he’d heard Olsen’s car arrive after dark, the boat starting, and shortly afterwards something that might have been a splash. He had a quick look himself, in the lake in front of the boathouse. But without… finding anything.’

‘They weren’t surprised they never found the body?’ said Shannon.

I shook my head. ‘People seem to think that bodies in the sea always turn up sooner or later. Float to the surface, wash ashore, get spotted by someone. Those are the exceptions. As a rule they’re gone forever.’

‘So what might his son know that we don’t know he knows?’ Shannon – who was sitting on the bonnet between us – turned, first to me, then to Carl.

‘Probably nothing,’ said Carl. ‘There are no loose ends. At least nothing that hasn’t been washed away by the rain and the frost and the passage of time. I think it’s just that he’s the same as his father, he’s got this one unsolved case in particular he can’t let go of. For his father it was the Cadillac down there, and for Kurt it’s his own father disappearing without leaving any message. So he starts looking for answers that don’t exist. Am I right, Roy?’

‘Maybe, although I haven’t noticed him sniffing around this case before, so why start now?’

‘Maybe because I’ve come home,’ said Carl. ‘The last person to see his dad. The guy he was once in the same class with, a nobody from Opgard farm but it says in the local paper that he’s done well in Canada and now he thinks he’s going to come back and rescue the village. Put it this way, I’m big game, and he’s the hunter. But he’s got no ammunition, just a gut feeling that there’s something that doesn’t add up about his father driving away after a meeting with me and vanishing straight away. So when I come back home it starts him thinking again. The years have passed, he’s got a distance on things now, his head is cool, he can think more clearly. He starts guessing. If his father didn’t end up in the lake, then where did he end up? In Huken, he thinks.’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But he’s on to something. There’s a reason he’s so determined to get down there. And sooner or later he will.’

‘Didn’t you say Erik Nerell would be telling him not to, because of the risk from loose rocks?’ asked Carl.

‘Yes, but when I asked Olsen about that he said we’ll see in a cocky sort of way. I think he’s thought of another way to do it, but what’s even more important is: what the fuck is he looking for?’