Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘He thinks the body is in the perfect hiding place,’ said Shannon, her eyes closed, her face turned to the moon as though she were sunbathing. ‘He thinks we’ve put it in the boot of the wreck down there.’

I studied her from the side. Something about the moonlight on her face made it impossible to take your eyes off her. Did something like that happen to Erik Nerell when he was ogling her at the party? No, all he saw was a woman he wouldn’t mind having it away with. What I saw was… well, what did I see? A bird unlike any other I had ever seen in the mountains. Shannon Alleyne Opgard belonged to the Sylviidae family. Like Shannon, they are small, some smaller even than the hummingbird, and they’re quick to pick up the songs of other species which they immediately imitate. They’re highly adaptable, some even change their feathers and colouring to merge better with their surroundings when the dangers of winter approach. When Shannon included herself, when she said in that very natural way that we had put the body there, it seemed so completely right. She had adapted to the new territory she found herself in without feeling that she had had to renounce anything. She had called me brother without even hesitating or trying the word out first. Because now we were her family.

‘Exactly!’ said Carl. It was a word he had picked up and obviously fallen in love with while he’d been away. ‘And if Kurt believes that, then we ought to make it easy for him to get down there and see for himself how wrong he is, so that gets that out the way. We’ve got a business proposal that needs financing, we need the whole village behind us. We can’t afford to have any kind of suspicion hanging over us.’

‘Maybe,’ I said, and scratched my cheek. Not because it was itching, but now and then that kind of distraction can make you think something you haven’t thought before, and that was the feeling I got then. That there was something here that hadn’t occurred to me. ‘But I really wish I knew exactly what he was going to be looking for down there.’

‘Ask him?’ suggested Carl.

I shook my head. ‘When Kurt Olsen and Erik Nerell were here, Kurt lied and made out it was about the accident, not about his father. So there’s no way Kurt Olsen’s going to show us his hand.’

We sat in silence. The bonnet beneath had gone cold.

‘Maybe this Erik has seen his cards,’ said Shannon. ‘Maybe he could tell us.’

We looked at her. Her eyes were still closed.

‘Why would he do that?’ I asked.

‘Because it’ll be better for him than if he doesn’t tell us.’

‘Oh yeah?’

She turned to me, opened her eyes and smiled. Her moist teeth shone in the moonlight. Of course I didn’t know what she had in mind, but I did know that she was like my father and followed the law of nature that says family comes first. Before right and wrong. Before the rest of all mankind. That it’s always us against the rest.

NEXT DAY THE WIND HAD shifted.

When I got up and went downstairs to the kitchen, Shannon was standing beside the wood stove with her arms folded and wearing one of my old woollen sweaters. It looked comically oversized on her, and it occurred to me she must have run out of her own polo-neck ‘artist’s’ pullovers.

‘Good morning,’ she said. Her lips were pale.

‘You’re up early.’ I nodded towards the sheets of paper on the kitchen table. ‘How’s the drawing going?’

‘So-so,’ she said, took two paces forward and picked them up before I could take a look. ‘But doing mediocre work is better than lying in bed and not being able to sleep.’ She put the paper into a folder and went back to the stove again. ‘Tell me, is this normal?’

‘Normal?’

‘For the time of year.’

‘The temperature? Yes.’

‘But yesterday…’

‘…was normal too,’ I said, crossing to the window and peering up at the sky. ‘I mean, it’s normal for it to change so quickly. Up here in the mountains.’

She nodded. Seemed to have got used to that one word ‘mountain’ as being the explanation for most things. I noticed the coffee pot halfway over the hotplate.

‘Fresh and good,’ she said.

I poured myself a cup, looked at her, but she shook her head.

‘I’ve been thinking about Erik Nerell,’ she said. ‘He’s got a girlfriend who’s pregnant, right?’

‘Yes,’ I said, and drank. Good. That is, objectively speaking I knew it wasn’t good, but it was exactly how I liked it. Unless we shared the same taste in coffee, she must have been watching as I made mine. ‘I don’t think there’s any pressing need to get anything out of him right now.’

‘Oh?’ she said.

‘Looks like snow on the way.’

‘Snow?’ She looked at me in disbelief. ‘In September?’

‘If we’re lucky.’

She nodded slowly. An intelligent girl who didn’t need to ask why. Whatever the hell Kurt Olsen was thinking of doing down in Huken, snow would make the job of getting down there safely and possibly finding something much more difficult.

‘But it could disappear again,’ she said. ‘Things change so quickly here…’ She gave me a sleepy smile. ‘Up here in the mountains.’

I chuckled. ‘I thought it could get cold in Toronto too?’

‘In the house where we lived you didn’t notice the cold until you went outside.’

‘It gets better,’ I said. ‘Days like this are the worst, when the wind blows from the north and the first frost is on the bare ground. It gets milder when the winter comes and there’s more snow. It takes a few days after we start having a fire before the heat penetrates the walls.’

‘So until then,’ she said – and now I could see she was shivering – ‘we just freeze?’

I smiled and put my mug of coffee on the worktop. ‘I’ll help you get warm,’ I said, and walked towards her. Her eyes met mine, she gave a start and crossed her arms even more firmly across her narrow chest, a blush spreading like tongues of fire across her white cheeks. I bent down in front of her, opened the door of the wood stove and saw that, sure enough, the fire was going out because the logs were too big and there were too many of them. I pulled the largest out with my hand, put it on the base plate in front of the stove where it lay smouldering, used the bellows and by the time I closed the door again the fire was burning brightly.

Carl came in as I stood up. He was half dressed, hair sticking up all over the place. He was holding his phone in his hand and grinning broadly.

‘The order of business for the council meeting’s been announced. We’re number one on the agenda.’

At the station I told Markus to put the lightweight snow shovels on display, along with the ice scrapers and the bottles of antifreeze I’d ordered in a couple of weeks ago.

I read the Os Daily , which had dedicated most of its front page to the council elections due next year, but at least there was a reference to something inside about the investors’ meeting at Årtun. And there we had a whole page, with a few lines of text and two big pictures. One showed the packed meeting hall, the other Carl posing with a grin and one arm around the shoulder of the former chairman Jo Aas, who looked slightly nonplussed, like a man taken by surprise. Dan Krane’s editorial mentioned the new spa hotel, but it was hard to tell whether he was for or against. Or rather, it wasn’t hard to see that deep down he wanted to trash the entire business, as when he quoted an unnamed source who referred to it as the ‘spa-nic hotel’, something people were clinging to in hopes of saving the village. I guessed that source was Krane himself, but he was obviously in a dilemma. If he was too positive it would seem as though he was using the local paper to back his own father-in-law. Too negative and people might accuse him of wanting to get one over on his wife’s former boyfriend. Being a journalist on a local paper is a tough balancing act, I guess.