Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

The poster was an invitation to a meeting of investors at Årtun Village Hall. All welcome, it said. Coffee and waffles would be served, and attendance was without further obligation. I got the picture even before I reached the name and signature at the bottom. Here it was. The reason Carl had come home.

There was a title after the name. Carl Abel Opgard. Master of Business. No less.

I didn’t know what to think, only that it smelled like trouble already.

‘This is on all the bus stops and lamp posts along the main road,’ said the sheriff.

So the sheriff wasn’t the only one. Carl had obviously been up early too.

The sheriff rolled the poster up again. ‘Doing so without permission is an infringement of Paragraph 33 of the Highways Act. Can you ask him to take the posters down?’

‘Why not ask him yourself?’

‘I don’t have his phone number and…’ He wedged the poster under his arm, hooked his thumbs into the belt of his tight Levi’s and nodded in the direction of north. ‘Save me the trip if you do. Will you?’

I nodded slowly, looking up in the direction of where the sheriff wanted to save himself a trip. You couldn’t see Opgard from the service station, could just about glimpse the bend at Geitesvingen, and a grey area at the top of the precipice. The house lay out of sight above and behind it, where the land flattened out. But today I saw something there. Something red. And then I knew what it was. A Norwegian flag. Damned if Carl hadn’t hoisted the flag on a Monday. Wasn’t that what the king did, as a signal that he was home? I almost started laughing.

‘He can apply for permission,’ the sheriff said and looked at his watch. ‘And then we’ll see about it.’

‘OK then.’

‘Right.’ Kurt Olsen raised two fingers to the cowboy hat he should have been wearing.

We both knew it would take a day for the posters to come down, and by then the job would be done. Those who hadn’t seen the invitation would have heard about it.

I moved away and turned on the hose pipe again. But it was still there, that heat between the shoulder blades. The way it had been all these years. Kurt Olsen’s suspicion that slowly and surely etched its way through the clothing, through the skin and onto the flesh, stopping short only when it came up against solid bone. Against willpower and stubbornness. Against a lack of proof and hard facts.

‘What’s that there?’ I heard Kurt Olsen say.

I turned, acted surprised at still finding him there. He nodded towards the metal grid in the floor where the water gushed down. At the bits that lay there without being washed away.

‘Huh?’ I said.

The sheriff squatted down. ‘There’s blood coming out of them,’ he said. ‘This is flesh.’

‘Must be,’ I said.

He glanced up at me. All that remained of his cigarette was the glowing tip.

‘Moose,’ I said. ‘Run over. Got caught in the front mesh. They come here to wash the mess away.’

‘I thought you just said it was a tractor, Roy.’

‘I guess it’s from a car last night,’ I said. ‘I can ask Egil, if there’s anything you want to…’ The sheriff jumped back as I directed the stream of water onto the lump of flesh so that it was pulled clear of the mesh and floated out across the cement floor.

‘… investigate. ’ Kurt Olsen’s eyes flashed. He wiped off the thighs of his trousers, even though they were dry. I don’t know if he used the word deliberately, it was the same word he had used back then. Investigate . That of course this would have to be investigated. I didn’t dislike Kurt Olsen. He was an OK guy just doing his job. But I had very definitely disliked his investigating , and I doubt whether he’d have dragged these posters along with him if the name Opgard hadn’t been on them.

When I got back to the station shop two teenage girls were standing there. One was Julie who had taken over behind the counter after Egil. The other girl, the customer, was standing with her back to me. Her head was bowed, she was waiting and gave no indication she was about to turn even though the door had opened. All the same I thought I recognised the Moe girl, the roofer’s daughter. Natalie. I saw her now and then with the boy racer gang outside. Where Julie was open, the bubbly type, as people say, there was something sensitive and at the same time something closed off about Natalie Moe’s expressionless face, as though she thought that any feelings she showed would be either mocked or ridiculed. That’s the age she was at. Although, surely she was at high school by now? Whatever, I had got the picture, picked up on the shame and had it confirmed when Julie greeted me at the same time as she nodded towards the shelf with the morning-after pills. Julie’s only seventeen, so she’s not allowed to sell tobacco and medicines.

I stepped behind the counter, resolved to get the Moe girl’s embarrassment over as quickly as possible.

‘EllaOne?’ I asked and placed the little white box on the counter in front of her.

‘Uh?’ said Natalie Moe.

‘Your morning-after pill,’ said Julie mercilessly.

I entered it on the till with my own card, so that it would look as though some presumably responsible adult person had made the purchase. The Moe girl left.

‘She’s having it off with Trond-Bertil,’ said Julie and snapped her bubblegum. ‘He’s over thirty, got a wife and kids.’

‘She’s young then,’ I said.

‘Young for what?’ Julie looked at me. It was strange, she wasn’t a big girl, but everything about her seemed big. The curly hair, the hands, the heavy breasts beneath the broad shoulders. The mouth almost vulgar. And the eyes. Those enormous blue peepers that looked me straight in the eye. ‘To be having it off with someone over thirty?’

‘Young to be making sensible decisions all the time,’ I said. ‘Maybe she’ll learn.’

Julie snorted. ‘That’s not why it’s called a morning-after pill. And just because a girl is young doesn’t mean she doesn’t know what she wants.’

‘I’m sure you’re probably right about that.’

‘But when we put on an innocent face like that one there, then you men all think poor little girl. Just the way we want you to think.’ She laughed. ‘You’re so simple.’

I slipped on a pair of plastic gloves and began to butter some baguettes. ‘Is there a secret society?’ I asked.

‘Eh?’

‘All you women, you think you know how other women think. Do you tell each other how it works, so that you’ve got like a complete internal overview? Because when it comes to other men, all I know is that I don’t know shit. That anything is possible. That at the most forty per cent of what I think I know about a man turns out to be right.’ I added the salami and the egg, delivered ready-sliced to the door. ‘And it’s us who are supposed to be simple. So all I can do is congratulate you on having one hundred per cent insight into the other half of the human race.’

Julie didn’t answer. I saw her swallow. Must have been the lack of sleep last night that made me use heavy artillery like that against a teenage high-school dropout. The kind of girl who gets into all the wrong things too early and none of the right things. Although that could change. She had attitude , as Dad used to say, rebellious, but still, more in need of encouragement than resistance. Needing both of course, but mostly encouragement.

‘So you’re beginning to get the hang of how to change tyres,’ I said.

Despite still being September, it had snowed on the cabins highest up the mountain. And even though we didn’t sell tyres or advertise a tyre-changing service we still got city folk coming in with their SUVs begging for help. Men as well as women. They simply don’t know how to carry out the most basic tasks. They’ll be dead before the end of the week the day a solar storm knocks out all the electrical equipment in the world.