Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

What fru Willumsen did have was culture, as she herself referred to it. She came from a good family over in the east of the country, but after her father squandered the family fortune she chose security over insecurity and married the charmless but wealthy and hard-working used-car salesman and for twenty years persuaded him that she wasn’t using contraception and that there must be something wrong with his swimmers. And all the fine words, the useless knowledge of painting and the equally useless knowledge of literature that she didn’t manage to force-feed him, got handed on to me instead. She showed me paintings by Cézanne and van Gogh. Read aloud from Hamlet and Brand . And from Steppenwolf and The Doors of Perception , which up until then I had thought were bands, not books. But best of all she liked to read Francisco Petrarch’s sonnets to Laura. Usually in a refined New Norwegian translation, and usually with a slight quivering in her voice. We smoked hash, though Rita would never say where she got it from, and listen to Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations. I could say that the school I went to during the time Rita Willumsen and I had those secret meetings up at her cabin gave me more than any university or academy would have done; although that would probably be a serious exaggeration. But it had the same effect on me as the Volvo 240 did that time I drove it out of the village; it opened my eyes to the fact that there was a whole other world out there. One that I could dream about making mine, if only I could learn the esoteric codes. But that would never happen, not to me, the dyslexic brother.

Not that Carl seemed to have any urge to travel the world either.

Rather the opposite. As summer turned to autumn and winter, he isolated himself more and more. When I asked what he was brooding about, if he wouldn’t take a drive with me in the Volvo, he just looked at me with a vague, mild smile, almost as though I wasn’t there.

‘I have strange dreams,’ he said one evening, completely out of the blue, as we sat in the winter garden. ‘I dream that you’re a killer. That you’re dangerous. And I envy you for being dangerous.’

I knew of course that in some sense or other Carl knew that I had fixed things so the Cadillac would go over the edge at Geitesvingen that evening, but he’d never said a word about it, and I saw no reason to tell him and make him an accomplice as someone who’d heard a confession but not reported it. So I didn’t respond, just said goodnight and left him there.

It was the closest to a happy time I had ever had. I had a job I loved, a car to take me wherever I wanted, and I was living out the sex dreams of every teenage boy. Not that I could boast of it to anyone, not even Carl, because Rita had said ‘not a single soul’, and I had sworn it on my brother’s name.

And then one evening the inevitable happened. As usual Rita had left the cabin before me to avoid us being seen together. As usual I gave her twenty minutes, but that evening we were late, I’d been working hard at the workshop the night before and the whole day, and lying there in bed I was relaxing totally. Because even though the cabin had been bought and rebuilt with herr Willumsen’s money, according to Rita he would never set foot there again, being too fat and sedate and the path there too long and steep. She’d told me he’d bought the place partly because it was bigger than Chairman Aas’s cabin and he could look down on it, and partly as pure investment in the countryside wilderness at a time when oil was in the process of turning Norway into a wealthy nation – even back then Willumsen could smell the boom in mountain cabins that would come along many years later. That it came further up the highway was down to chance and certain councils that were quicker on the buzzer than ours, but it was still smart thinking by Willumsen. Anyway, lying there and waiting until I could leave, I fell asleep. When I woke up it was four o’clock in the morning.

Three-quarters of an hour later I was at Opgard.

Neither Carl nor I wanted to sleep in Mum and Dad’s room, so I crept into the boys’ room, not wanting to wake Carl. But as I was about to sneak into the upper bunk he gave a start and I was looking down at a pair of wide-open eyes shining in the dark.

‘We’re going to jail,’ he whispered groggily.

‘Eh?’ I said.

He blinked twice before he sort of shrugged it off, and I realised he had been dreaming.

‘Where have you been?’ he asked.

‘Fixing a car,’ I said, swinging my leg over the railing.

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘Uncle Bernard called by with some lapskaus . Asked where you were.’

I took a breath. ‘I was with a woman.’

‘A woman? Not a girl?’

‘We’ll talk about it tomorrow, Carl. We’ve got to get up in two hours.’

I lay there listening out to see if his breathing eased down. It didn’t.

‘What was that about jail?’ I finally asked.

‘I dreamed they were going to put us in jail for murder,’ he said.

I took a breath. ‘For murdering who?’

‘That’s the crazy thing about it,’ he said. ‘Each other.’

IT WAS EARLY IN THE morning. I was looking forward to a day with cars and simple mechanical problems to solve. Little did I know, as people say.

I was standing in the workshop as I’d done more or less every day for the past two years and was just about to start work on a car when Uncle Bernard came out and said there was a phone call for me. I followed him back into his office.

It was Sigmund Olsen, the sheriff. He wanted to have a word with me, he said. Hear how things were. Take me on a short fishing trip up near his cabin, it was just a few kilometres down the main road. He could pick me up in a few hours. And even though his voice had been soft as butter on the phone I could hear it wasn’t an invitation but an order.

Which naturally gave me pause for thought. Why the hurry if it was just a harmless little chat?

I carried on working on the engine, and after lunch lay down on the car creeper and shoved myself under the car and away from this world. There is nothing more calming than working on an engine when you’ve got ants in your brain. I don’t know how long I’d been lying there when I heard someone cough. I had a nasty premonition, which was maybe why I waited a bit before shoving myself out on the creeper.

‘You’re Roy,’ said the man standing there looking down at me. ‘You’ve got something that belonged to me.’

The man was Willum Willumsen. Belonged. Past tense.

I lay there beneath him, completely defenceless. ‘And what might that be, Willumsen?’

‘You know very well what it is.’

I swallowed. I wouldn’t have time to do anything before he stamped the breath and the life out of me. I’d seen it done at Årtun, had some idea of how to do it, but not how to avoid it. I’d learned to hit first and hit hard, not how to keep up a guard. I shook my head.

‘A wetsuit,’ he said. ‘Flippers, mask, diving cylinder, valve and a snorkel. Eight thousand five hundred and sixty kroner.’

He laughed loudly when he saw the look of relief on my face, which he obviously interpreted as astonishment. ‘I never forget a deal, Roy.’

‘Oh no?’ I said, getting to my feet and wiping my fingers with a long rag. ‘So not the one when my father bought the Cadillac either?’

‘Nope.’ Willumsen looked up into the air, chuckling, as though it were a fond memory. ‘He didn’t like haggling, your father. If I’d known how little he liked it I might even have started a little lower.’

‘Oh? You mean you’ve got a guilty conscience?’ Maybe I was hoping to get in before him if this was what he’d come to ask me. Attack is the best form of defence, people say. Not that I thought there was anything to defend, I wasn’t ashamed. Not about that. I was just a young lad that had got hit on by some married woman, so what? That was something they would have to sort out between themselves, I wasn’t going to get involved in a fight over territorial rights. All the same, I had twisted the rag around the knuckles of my right.