Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘Roy!’ It was Shannon’s voice. ‘They’re coming round the final bend.’

‘Drive!’ I shouted, grabbing onto the rope half a metre higher up at the same time as I managed to wind it one and a half times around my wrist. ‘Drive! Drive!!’ I heard the message being passed on up there, and as I felt the rope begin to pull me up I moved my left hand onto the rope, at the same time tensing my stomach muscles, raising my legs and planting my feet against the rock face. And then I ran straight to heaven. I’d told Carl to accelerate hard not because Olsen and his crew were approaching but because there is a limit to the number of seconds you can hang on to a rope using just your hands. And I like to tell myself that on that morning I set some kind of world record for the hundred metres vertical. And like the world’s best sprinters, I don’t think I breathed even once the whole way. I thought only of the drop growing below me, death that was ever more certain with every second that passed, every ten metres covered. And when I jerked up over the top of Geitesvingen I didn’t let go but held on tight and let myself be dragged across the gravel for several metres before I felt it was safe to let go. Shannon helped me to my feet, we ran to the car and dived in. ‘Drive to the back of the barn,’ I said.

Just as we turned onto the muddy field I caught a glimpse of Olsen’s Land Rover rounding the bend at Geitesvingen and hoped that he neither saw us nor the rope that twisted like an anaconda through the grass behind the Volvo.

I sat in the front passenger seat, fighting to catch my breath as Carl jumped out and started to coil the rope. Shannon ran to the corner of the barn and looked down at Geitesvingen.

‘They’ve stopped down there,’ she said. ‘It looks like they’ve got a… what’s a beekeeper in Norwegian?’

‘ Birøkter,’ said Carl. ‘They’re probably worried there might be wasps down there.’

I laughed, and the shaking felt as though someone was sticking knives into my back.

‘Carl,’ I said quietly, ‘why did you say you were at Willumsen’s last night?’

‘What?’

‘Willumsen lives in town. Erik and his missus who you met last night live out of town’

Carl didn’t reply. ‘What do you think?’ he finally asked.

‘You want me to take a guess,’ I said. ‘So you can work out whether to confirm it instead of the truth?’

‘OK,’ said Carl, checking in the mirror that Shannon was still standing by the corner of the barn and watching Olsen and his crew. ‘I could have told you I needed to take a drive just to think. And that would’ve been true enough. Our main contractor suddenly raised his estimate yesterday by fifteen per cent.’

‘Really?’

‘They’ve been up here. They’re postponing the start because they say we didn’t give them a proper description of the site conditions and how exposed to weather it is.’

‘And what does the bank say to that?’

‘They don’t know. And now that I’ve sold this whole enterprise to the participants for four hundred million, I can’t very well present them with a revised estimate of another sixty million before we’ve even started.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to tell the chief contractor to go fuck himself and I’ll make deals with the subcontractors myself. It means more work, I’ll have to deal with carpenters, masons, electricians, the whole lot of them, and make sure everything’s being done. But it’ll be a lot cheaper than the chief contractor taking his ten or twenty per cent just for hiring a firm of electricians.’

‘But that’s not why you went out of town last night?’

Carl shook his head. ‘I…’

He stopped as the door opened and Shannon sat in the back seat.

‘They’re getting ready to go down,’ she said. ‘It might take a while. What are you talking about?’

‘Roy was asking where I was yesterday. And I was about to say I’d driven to Olsen’s cabin. Went down to the boathouse. Tried to imagine everything Roy must have gone through that evening.’ Carl took a deep breath. ‘You faked a suicide and you almost got drowned, Roy. And all of it to save me. Don’t you ever get tired, Roy?’

‘Tired?’

‘Of clearing up after me?’

‘It wasn’t your fault Olsen fell into Huken,’ I said.

He looked at me. And I don’t know if he could see what I was thinking about. About the plumb line law. About Sigmund Olsen landing on the back of the car, five metres away from the rock face. If that was what made him take a deep breath and start to speak: ‘Roy, there’s something you need to know about all that—’

‘I know all I need to know,’ I interrupted. ‘And that is that I am your big brother.’

Carl nodded. He was smiling but seemed to be close to tears. ‘Is it that simple, Roy?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It really is.’

WE WERE SITTING IN THE kitchen drinking coffee by the time they had finished down in Geitesvingen. I had fetched the binoculars and focused on the faces down there. It was three o’clock, they had been down there for almost four hours and I opened the window slightly so that we could hear as Kurt Olsen shouted something. Kurt’s mouth – no cigarette for once – formed words that were unmistakable, and his flushed face was no longer entirely due to that overdose of UV radiation. Erik’s body language expressed more indifference and probably the desire to get away from there. Perhaps he guessed that Olsen suspected something. The two men helping the sheriff and Nerell looked slightly confused. They probably knew little of the actual purpose of the operation since Olsen almost certainly knew enough about village gossip to keep things on a need-to-know basis, as people say.

Once Erik was out of that comical bomb-disposal suit, he and the other two got into Kurt’s Land Rover, while Kurt himself remained standing with his head turned towards the house. Of course I realised that with the sunlight directly on the window he couldn’t see us, but perhaps there had been a flash of light reflected from the binoculars. And maybe he’d noticed the fresh marks of spinning tyres and a rope in the gravel. And maybe I’m just paranoid. Anyway, he spat on the ground, got into the car and they drove off.

I went from room to room, packing my things. At least the things I figured I’d have a use for. And even though I wasn’t going far and didn’t exactly need to think hard about it I did so. Packed as though I’d never be coming back.

I was in the boys’ room stuffing the duvet and my pillow into a big blue IKEA bag when I heard Shannon’s voice behind me.

‘Is it that simple?’

‘Moving?’ I asked without turning round.

‘That you’re his big brother. Is that why you always help him?’

‘Why else?’

She came in and closed the door behind her. Leaned against the wall, her arms crossed. ‘When I was in second grade at primary school I pushed a friend of mine once. She banged her head on the asphalt. Shortly afterwards she started wearing glasses. She’d never complained about her sight before and I became convinced that it was my fault. I didn’t say so, but I hoped she would push me so I would hit my head on the asphalt too. By the time we were in fifth grade she’d still not got a boyfriend and said it was because of the glasses, and I blamed myself for that too, and spent more time with her than I actually really wanted to. She wasn’t very good at school and had to take the sixth grade again. I was certain it was because of that blow to the head. So I took sixth grade again with her.’

I stopped. ‘You did what?’

‘I skipped classes, never did my homework, and at the orals I deliberately gave wrong answers to the easiest questions.’