Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

So our faces don’t give anything away, I thought. ‘I’ll have that little chat with Erik tomorrow,’ I said. ‘And I’ll move out in the evening.’

Carl sighed. ‘Roy…’

I stood up. ‘I’m off to bed now. You’re fantastic people and I love you both, but I look forward to not having to see other people’s faces when I get up in the morning.’

That night I slept like a stone.

ERIK NERELL LIVED OUT OF town. I had explained to Shannon that when we said ‘out of town’, we meant up along the shore of Lake Budal, towards where the water ran out into the Kjetterelva River. And since the lake was shaped like an upside-down V, with the village in the apex, so ‘in town’ and ‘out of town’ weren’t compass directions but just a way of telling you which way to head from your starting point, since the main road followed the lake regardless. Aas, Moe the roofer and Willumsen lived ‘in town’, which was reckoned to be a touch better, because the fields were flatter and got more sun, whereas Olsen’s cabin and the Nerell farm were out of town, on the shadowed side. The path up to Aas’s cabin where Carl, Mari and a gang of other youngsters used to sneak off to in our teenage years and party to the break of day was also ‘out of town’.

I was thinking about this a bit as I drove along.

I parked behind a Ford Cortina sleeper in front of the barn. Gro, Erik’s partner, opened the door and as I asked for Erik I couldn’t help wondering how those short arms had managed to extend out beyond that bulging stomach to reach the doorknob, that maybe she tackled the problem by approaching it from the side. Which was the way I had planned to approach this.

‘He’s working out,’ she said, pointing towards the barn.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Not long to go now?’

She smiled. ‘Yes.’

‘But you and Erik still take your evening walk, I gather?’

‘Got to exercise the old lady and the dog.’ Gro laughed. ‘But never more than three hundred metres from the house now.’

Erik neither saw nor heard me when I entered. He was lying on a bench and pumping iron, wheezing and panting with the bar across his chest and giving a roar when it was time to lift it. I waited until the bar was once more back on its rack before entering his field of vision. He pinched the buds out of his ears and I heard the descant from ‘Start Me Up’.

‘Roy,’ he said. ‘You’re up early.’

‘You’re looking in good shape,’ I said.

‘Thanks.’ He got up and pulled a fleece jacket over the sweaty T-shirt with a picture of the Hollywood Brats. His cousin, Casino Steel, had played keyboards in the band, and Erik always insisted that if the timing had been a bit better the Hollywood Brats would have been bigger than the Sex Pistols and the New York Dolls. He’d played us a couple of their songs and I remember thinking the problem wasn’t just the timing. But I liked him for caring. In general, I actually quite liked Erik Nerell. But that wasn’t the point.

‘There’s something we need to sort out,’ I said. ‘The picture you sent Shannon did not go down all that fucking well.’

Erik turned pale. He blinked three times.

‘She came to me, didn’t want to show it to Carl because she said he’d go ballistic. But that she was going to go to the sheriff. In legal terms, this here is actually flashing.’

‘No no, wait a minute, she said—’

‘She said something about pictures of nature. Whatever, I persuaded her not to report it, explained it would mean a whole lot of bother for all of us and be bloody traumatic for Gro.’

I saw the muscles of his jaw tighten at the mention of his partner’s name.

‘When Shannon learned that you were expecting a kid she said she’d show the picture to your father-in-law and let him be the one to decide what to do. And I’m afraid I have to tell you that Shannon is a very determined lady.’

Erik’s mouth was still open, but nothing came out of it now.

‘I came here because I want to help you. See if I can stop her. I really don’t like a lot of fussing and fighting, you know that.’

‘Yes,’ said Erik, with an almost inaudible question mark at the end.

‘For example I don’t like it when people go rooting about on our property where Mum and Dad died. If they do then I really need to know what’s going on.’

Erik blinked again. Like he was trying to signal with his eye that he understood. That I was looking to do a trade.

‘Olsen’s going to send people down into Huken anyway, isn’t he?’

Erik nodded. ‘He’s ordered a safety suit from Germany. Like what bomb squads use. It means you’re safe unless actual boulders fall on you. Plus you can move about in them.’

‘What’s he looking for?’

‘All I know is that Olsen wants to get down there, Roy.’

‘No. He’s not the one going down there, you are. And that being so, he must have told you what to look for.’

‘If I knew I wouldn’t be allowed to tell anyone, Roy, you must understand that.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘And you must understand that I don’t feel I’m allowed to stop a lady who has been so outrageously offended as Shannon.’

Erik Nerell sat there on the bench and gave me a doleful dog-eyed stare. Shoulders sloping, hands in his lap. ‘Start Me Up’ was still buzzing from the earbuds lying on the bench between his thighs.

‘You tricked me,’ he said. ‘You and that cunt. It’s down there, isn’t it?’

‘What’s down there?’

‘The old sheriff’s mobile phone.’

I steered the Volvo with one hand while holding the phone in the other. ‘Sigmund Olsen’s mobile was still giving out signals until ten o’clock on the night he disappeared.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Carl grunted. He sounded like he had a hangover.

‘A mobile phone that’s turned on sends out a signal every half-hour, which is registered at the base stations that provide the phone with coverage. In other words, the base stations’ records are a logbook of where the phone was and when.’

‘And?’

‘Kurt Olsen was in town not long ago and spoke to the phone company. He got hold of the records for the day his father disappeared.’

‘They still have records from that far back?’

‘Apparently. Sigmund Olsen’s phone is registered at two base stations, indicating that he can’t – or at least his phone can’t – have been out at his cabin at the time when a witness says he heard a car stop there and a motorboat engine starting up. Because that was after dark. What the base stations show is that his phone was actually in an area that only covers our farm, Huken, Simon Nergard’s farm and the woods between there and the village. And that doesn’t square with what you told the police about Sigmund Olsen driving away from our farm at 6.30 p.m.’

‘I didn’t say where the sheriff drove to, only that he drove away from the farm.’ Carl sounded wide awake and clear now. ‘For all I know he might have stopped somewhere between our place and the village. And maybe that car and that boat the witness heard sometime after dark belonged to somebody else, after all there are other people besides Olsen who have cabins out there. Or maybe the witness is mistaken about the time – it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing to stick in the memory.’

‘Agreed,’ I said as I saw I was approaching a tractor. ‘But questions cropping up about the timeline aren’t what worry me most. It’s if Kurt finds the phone down there in Huken. Because according to Erik Nerell that is what Kurt wants to go down and look for there.’

‘Ah shit. But can it be down there? Didn’t you tidy up after him?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And none of his stuff got left behind. But you remember how it was getting dark when we dragged the body up, and I heard loose rocks falling and took cover inside the wreck?’