Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘Kurt!’ called a voice behind us. ‘You should be out there now, Kurt!’

Laughter. Cigarette in mouth Kurt Olsen grinned in the direction of the voice and nodded before turning his attention back to us. ‘Anyway, I’m glad you’re here, because there’s something I want to ask you, Carl. And you’re very welcome to listen in too, Roy. You want to do this here or on the way over to the hot-dog stand?’

Carl hesitated. ‘A hot dog sounds like a good idea,’ he said.

We made our way through the blustery wind and rain towards the hot-dog stand behind one of the goalposts. I’m guessing the other spectators were watching us. At that particular moment, with the team 2–nil down and that council resolution passed, Carl Opgard was probably more interesting than Os FC.

‘It’s about the timeline on the day my father disappeared,’ said Kurt Olsen. ‘You said he left Opgard at six o’clock. Is that right?’

‘It’s a long time ago now,’ said Carl. ‘But yes, if that’s what it says in the report.’

‘It is. But signals received by the base stations show that my father’s phone was in the area around your farm until ten o’clock that evening. After that there’s nothing. It could be that the battery ran out, someone removed the SIM card, or the phone was damaged. Or that the phone was buried so deeply the signals no longer carried. What it means is, we have to check the area around the farm with metal detectors. It means that nothing up there should be touched, and that starting date I’ve been hearing about will have to be postponed until further notice.’

‘Wh-what?’ stammered Carl. ‘But…’

‘But what?’ Olsen stopped by the hot-dog stand, stroked his moustache and looked calmly at him.

‘How long are we talking about?’

‘Hmm.’ Olsen stuck his lower lip out and looked as if he was calculating. ‘It’s a large area. Three weeks. Maybe four.’

Carl groaned. ‘Jesus, Kurt, that’s going to cost us a fucking fortune. We’ve got contractors coming in at agreed times to do their work. And the frost—’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Olsen. ‘But investigations into a suspicious death can’t take your desire to turn a profit into consideration.’

‘It isn’t just my profit we’re talking about,’ said Carl, his voice shaking slightly. ‘It’s the whole village. And I think you’ll find Jo Aas is of the same opinion.’

‘The old chairman, you mean?’ Kurt held up one finger to the lady at the hot-dog stand which obviously meant something since she grabbed the sausage tongs and plunged it down into the pan in front of her. ‘I was talking earlier today to the new one, the one that actually makes the decisions . Voss Gilbert up there.’ Olsen nodded in the direction of the stand. ‘When Gilbert heard what I had to say about the matter he was most worried about news leaking out that the man behind the new hotel project was involved in a possible murder case.’ The woman handed Olsen his hot dog on a piece of waxed sandwich paper. ‘But he said that of course he had no authority to stop me.’

‘And what are we going to say to the press?’ I asked. ‘When we announce that the start has been postponed?’

Kurt Olsen turned and stared at me. Chomped into his sausage which gave off a wet, flaccid sound. ‘I really don’t know,’ he said, his mouth full of pig’s intestines. ‘But yes, it could well be that Dan Krane will think it’s an interesting story. OK then, now I’ve got my answer about the timeline, and you’ve been informed that you can’t start building, Carl. Better luck in the second half.’

Kurt Olsen raised two fingers to his imaginary Stetson and left.

Carl turned and looked at me.

Naturally, he looked at me.

We left the game with a quarter of an hour to go and the team losing 4–nil.

We drove straight to the workshop.

I’d been thinking.

There were certain things we had to do.

‘Like that?’ asked Carl. His voice echoed around the walls of the empty workshop.

I leaned over the turning lathe and inspected the result. Carl had used a gimlet to scrape the capital letters into the metal of Olsen’s mobile phone. SIGMUND OLSEN, it read in clear script. Maybe a bit too clear.

‘We better green it a bit,’ I said and slipped the phone back into its leather case. Clipped it onto a thick piece of string that was lying about, swung it up and down a bit and checked that the clip held the phone in place. ‘Come on.’

I pulled open the door to the metal wardrobe that stood in the corridor between the workshop and the office. And there it was.

‘Jesus,’ said Carl. ‘Have you had it here all the time?’

‘Well, apart from that one time we tried it out it was never used,’ I said, and rocked the yellow oxygen tank and squeezed the slightly rotten wetsuit. The mask and snorkel were up on the shelf.

‘I better ring Shannon and say I’m going to be late,’ he said.

WHEN I RETURNED TO THE workshop that night I was so cold I couldn’t stop shivering. Carl had handed me his hip flask in the car, to drive out the cold as people say. I hung on to the hip flask when Carl drove on home to Shannon, who I guessed was lying in the warm double bed waiting for him. Too bloody right I was jealous, I’d given up pretending otherwise. But what was the use? I couldn’t have it. I didn’t want to have it. I was like Moe the roofer, fighting a hopeless battle against my own lust. It was a fucking awful illness I thought I’d got rid of, but now here it was again. I knew that distance and forgetting were my only hope, but I knew no one would be intervening here, no one would be sending anyone to Notodden, it was a move I had to make myself.

I unlocked the car wash, attached the hose to a standpipe, turned up the hot tap, pulled off my clothes and stood in front of the scalding hot jet. And I don’t know if it was the sudden rise in temperature, if it was the same physiological reaction as you get when men are hanged from the gallows, or whether the heat of the water was transformed in my head to the heat beneath the duvet in the double bed, and that I was the one lying there. But standing there with my eyes closed I felt two things at least. A sobbing in my throat. And a throbbing erection.

The hissing of the water must have drowned out the sound of the key turning in the door. I only heard it open at the same time as I opened my eyes. I saw the outline of her in the darkness outside the door and turned my back as quickly as I could.

‘Oh, sorry!’ I heard Julie call above the hissing of the water. ‘I saw lights and the car wash is supposed to be closed, so—’

‘OK!’ I interrupted in a voice thick with whisky, unshed tears and shame.

I heard the door close behind me and stood there, my head bent. Looked down at myself. The excitement had passed, the erection was fading, there was only a heart beating in panic, as though I had just been exposed. As though now they all knew who he was and what he had done, that damned traitor, the coward, the murderer, the lecher. Naked, so fucking naked. But then my heart slowed down too. ‘The good thing about losing everything is that you have nothing left to lose,’ Uncle Bernard said to me when I went to see him in hospital after he’d been told he was going to die. ‘And in a way that’s a relief, Roy. Because then there’s nothing else to fear.’

So then I can’t have lost everything after all. Because I was still afraid.

I dried myself and pulled on my trousers. Turned to pick up my shoes.

Julie was sitting on a chair next to the door.

‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve bust my finger.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I saw you.’