Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

I shrugged. ‘I can’t tell you. I swore on your soul.’

‘Did you say mine ?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah, that was lost a long time ago. Come on.’

I shrugged. I couldn’t remember if I’d sworn to keep silent for all eternity back then – after all I was only a teenager; or just to serve out a period of quarantine. ‘That young lover of Rita Willumsen’s,’ I said. ‘That was me.’

‘You?’ Carl stared at me, eyes wide open in astonishment. ‘You’re kidding.’ He slapped his thigh and laughed loudly. Clinked his bottle against mine. ‘Tell,’ he ordered.

I told. In rough outline at least. Sometimes he laughed, and sometimes he was serious.

‘And you’ve been keeping this secret from me ever since you were a teenager?’ he said when I finished, his head shaking from side to side.

‘Well, we’ve had plenty of practice at doing that in this family,’ I said. ‘Now your turn to tell me about Mari.’

Carl told me. At that very first reunion they’d ended up in the hay, as people say. ‘I mean, she’s had plenty of practice when it comes to seducing me,’ he said with an almost melancholic smile. ‘She knows what I like.’

‘So you think you had no chance,’ I said, and could hear it sounded more accusing than I had intended.

‘I take my share of the blame, but it’s obvious that’s what her aim was.’

‘To seduce you?’

‘To prove both to herself and to me that she would always be my first choice. To show me I was prepared to risk everything. That Shannon and anyone like her were and always would be substitutes for Mari Aas.’

‘ Betray everything,’ I said, taking out my snuffbox.

‘Eh?’

‘You said risk everything.’ This time I really couldn’t bring myself to even try to hide the accusatory tone.

‘Whatever,’ said Carl. ‘We carried on seeing each other.’

I nodded. ‘All those evenings you said you had meetings and Shannon and I waited at home.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’m no better than I should be.’

‘And that time you said you were at Willumsen’s, but you’d seen Erik Nerell and his wife out for an evening walk?’

‘Yeah, I nearly gave myself away there. Of course, I was on my way back from the cabin. Maybe I wanted to give myself away. It’s no fucking picnic walking around with a guilty conscience all the time.’

‘But you managed to survive,’ I said.

He acknowledged the barb, just lowered his head. ‘After we’d met a few times, Mari probably felt that she’d made her point and dumped me. Again. But it was OK by me too. It was just… nostalgia. We haven’t seen each other again since.’

‘Well, you’ve seen each other in town.’

‘Yes, it happens, of course. But she just smiles as if she’s won at something.’ Carl smirked contemptuously. ‘Shows Shannon the kids in the pram which is of course being wheeled by her newspaper guy, he trips along behind her like a fucking coolie. I’m sure he suspects something. Behind that straight, snobbish mug of his I see a guy that wants to kill me.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. If you ask me he’s definitely asked Mari, and she’s – quite deliberately – given him an answer that leaves room for doubt.’

‘Why would she do that?’

‘Keep him on his toes. That’s what they’re like.’

‘Who’s they?’

‘Oh, you know. The Mari Aases and Rita Willumsens. They suffer from queen syndrome. That’s to say it’s us, the male drones, who suffer. Of course even queens want their physical needs satisfied, but the most important thing is for them to be loved and worshipped by their subjects. So they manipulate us like puppets in their fucking schemes. You get so fucking tired of it.’

‘Aren’t you exaggerating a bit?’

‘No!’ Carl put his beer bottle down hard on the windowsill and two of the empties toppled over and fell to the floor. ‘Real love doesn’t exist between a man and a woman who aren’t related, Roy. There has to be blood. The same blood. The only place you find real, selfless love is in the family. Between brothers and sisters and between parents and their children. Outside of that…’ He gestured expansively, knocked over another bottle and I realised he was drunk. ‘Forget it. It’s jungle law. Every man is his own best friend.’ By now he was snuffling. ‘You and me, Roy, we’re all we’ve got. Nobody else.’

I wondered where that left Shannon, but I didn’t ask.

Two days later I drove back south.

As I passed the county sign I glanced in the rear-view mirror. It looked as though it said OZ.

IN AUGUST I GOT A text message.

My heart almost stopped beating when I saw it was from Shannon.

I read it over and over again during the next few days before finally figuring out what it meant.

That she wanted to meet me.

Hi Roy, it’s been a while. I’ll be in Notodden, meeting a possible client, on 3 September. Can you recommend a hotel? Hugs, Shannon.

When I first read the message I thought it had to mean that she knew I used to go there and meet Unni at a hotel. But I had never told her about that, and I couldn’t remember telling Carl about it either. Why hadn’t I mentioned it to Carl? I don’t know. It wasn’t because I was ashamed of having an affair with a married woman. And hardly that the taciturn Cain in me had kept quiet about it. I don’t know. Maybe it was just something I came to understand at a certain point. That Carl didn’t tell me everything either.

Shannon probably just figured I would have some idea about good places to stay in the vicinity of Os, I thought. And studied that text message – even though of course I knew it off by heart – one more time. Told myself not to read things into a text that consisted of three everyfuckingday sentences.

But all the same.

Why get in touch with me after a year’s silence and ask about hotels in Notodden? In reality there were two, at the most three hotels to choose between, and Tripadvisor had of course more relevant and up-to-date information than I could provide. I knew that, having checked online the day after receiving the text message. And why tell me the date when she was going to be there? And that she was meeting a potential client, which was another way of telling me she would be travelling alone. And as people say, last but not least: why spend the night there when it was just a two-hour drive home?

OK, so maybe she didn’t fancy driving those roads in the pitch-dark. Maybe her and the client were having dinner together, and she wanted to be able to have a glass of wine. Or maybe it was simply that she looked forward to spending the night at a hotel as a change from staying on the farm. Maybe she even wanted a short break from Carl. Maybe that’s what she was trying to tell me with that slightly laboured text message. No, no! It was just an ordinary text message, a slightly feeble opportunity to re-establish normal communications with her brother-in-law after he’d blown the whole thing by telling her he was in love with her.

I replied the same evening I received the message.

Hi – yes, long time. Brattrein’s pretty good. Got great views. Hugs, Roy.

Every single bloody syllable had, of course, been carefully considered. I had to force myself not to send anything with a question mark, along the lines of how are you? Or anything else that seemed to beg for a continuation. An echo of her own message, nothing more, nothing less, that’s what it had to be. I got a reply an hour later.

Thanks for the help. Big hug.

There was nothing you could read into that, and anyway, all she could do was relate to my own short and inhibited reply. So that sent me back to her initial message: was that an invitation to go to Notodden?