Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

I was standing less than a hundred metres away and could feel no heat from the fire. But when I picked out Carl’s face among the crowd, wet with sweat or maybe water from the hose, I saw that it was hopeless. All was lost.

THE GREY LIGHT OF THE first day of the year dawned.

It made the landscape look flat and featureless, and when I drove from the workshop up to the hotel site for a moment I had the feeling that I had lost my way, that this wasn’t a landscape I knew like the back of my hand but somewhere strange, some strange planet.

When I got there I saw Carl standing with three men next to the smouldering blackened ruins of what was to have been the pride of the village. Which still could be that, of course, though hardly this year. Black, charred pieces of wood pointed to the sky like warning fingers, telling us, them, anyone, that you do not build a bloody spa hotel on the bare mountain, it’s against nature, it awakens the spirits.

As I got out of the car and walked towards them I saw that the three other men were the sheriff Kurt Olsen, the council chairman Voss Gilbert, and the fire chief, a man named Adler who worked as an engineer for the council when he wasn’t on duty at the fire station. I don’t know whether they clammed up because I arrived or they’d just finished exchanging theories.

‘Well?’ I said. ‘Any theories?’

‘They found the remains of a New Year’s Eve rocket,’ Carl said so quietly I could only just hear him. His gaze was focused on something far, far away.

‘That’s right,’ said Kurt Olsen, cigarette held into his palm between index finger and thumb, like a soldier on night watch. ‘Obviously, it could have been carried up from the village by the wind and set fire to the timbers.’

Obviously and obviously. From the way he stressed the could it was evident he didn’t have much faith in the theory himself.

‘But?’ I said.

Kurt Olsen shrugged. ‘ But the fire chief here says that when they got here, they saw two sets of footprints half covered by snow leading towards the hotel. With a wind like that they can’t have been made much before the fire truck arrived.’

‘It wasn’t possible to tell whether the footprints were two people who went in, or one person who went in and then came out again,’ said the fire chief. ‘We had to operate on a worst-case scenario and send men in to check whether there was anyone in the modules. But they were already alight and it was too hot.’

‘There are no bodies here,’ said Olsen. ‘But it does look as though someone was here during the night. So obviously we can’t rule out arson.’

‘Arson?’ I almost shouted.

Olsen perhaps thought I sounded a little too conspicuously surprised; at any rate he gave me that scrutinising sheriff’s look of his.

‘Who would have anything to gain by that?’ I asked.

‘Yes, who might that be, Roy?’ said Kurt Olsen, and I did not like the fucking way he said my name.

‘Well,’ said the council chairman, with a nod down towards the village that lay half hidden beneath a layer of fog that had drifted in across the ice on Lake Budal, ‘This is one helluva a hangover for them to wake up to.’

‘Well,’ said I, ‘when you’re up to your neck in shit the only thing to do is start the rebuilding.’

The others looked at me as though I’d said something in Latin.

‘Maybe, but it’ll take some doing to get a hotel up this year,’ said Gilbert. ‘And that means people can’t be selling off land for cabin-building for a while.’

‘Really?’ I glanced over at Carl. He said nothing, didn’t even seem to have heard us, just stared vacantly at the site of the fire with a look on his face that reminded me of newly set cement.

‘Those are the terms of the agreement with the council.’ Gilbert sighed in such a way that I realised he was repeating something he’d just said. ‘First the hotel, then the cabins. Unfortunately quite a few in the village have been counting their chickens before they’re hatched and bought themselves more expensive cars than they should have.’

‘Good job the hotel was fully insured against fire,’ said Kurt Olsen with a glance at Carl.

Gilbert and the fire chief managed little smiles, as much as to say that yes, true enough, but right now that was small comfort.

‘Right, well,’ said the council chairman and stuck his hands into his coat pockets as a sign that he wanted to leave. ‘Happy New Year.’

Olsen and the fire chief trudged along behind him in the snow.

‘Is it?’ I asked quietly once they were out of earshot.

‘A happy new year?’ Carl asked with a voice like a sleepwalker’s.

‘Fully insured?’

Carl turned his whole body to face me, as though he really were cast in cement. ‘Why in the world wouldn’t it be fully insured?’ He spoke so slowly, so quietly. This wasn’t alcohol. Had he been taking pills of some kind?

‘But is it more than fully insured?’

‘What do you mean?’

I felt the anger beginning to bubble up in me, but knew I had to keep my voice down until they were inside their cars. ‘I mean Kurt Olsen is more or less implying that the fire was started deliberately and that the hotel is overinsured. He’s accusing you of an insurance fraud. Or didn’t you realise that?’

‘That I started the fire?’

‘Did you, Carl?’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘The hotel was pretty much shot to hell, the spending way over budget, but so far you’ve managed to keep it hidden. Maybe this was the only way out, for your neighbours in the village to avoid paying the bill and you to avoid the shame. Now you can make a fresh start, from scratch, build the hotel the way it should be built, with proper materials and a fresh injection of insurance money. See, you can still erect that monument to Carl Opgard.’

Carl looked at me with a kind of fascination, as though I had changed shape in front of his very eyes. ‘Do you, my own brother, really believe that I am capable of something like that?’ Then he put his head slightly to one side. ‘Yes, you do believe it. So then answer me this: why am I standing here and feeling like I want to commit hara-kiri? Why aren’t I at home breaking out the champagne?’

I held his gaze. And it began to dawn on me. Carl could lie, but not act grief in a way that could fool me. No way.

‘No,’ I whispered. ‘Not that, Carl.’

‘Not what?’

‘I know you were desperate and cutting costs. But not that.’

‘What?’ he roared, suddenly furious.

‘The insurance. You didn’t stop making the insurance payments on the hotel?’

He looked away, and the fury seemed to have passed. Had to be pills.

‘Yes, that would have been stupid,’ he whispered. ‘To stop making the insurance payments just before the fire. Because then…’ Slowly a smile spread across his face, the kind of smile I imagine the acid tripper on a balcony gives just before he demonstrates he can fly. ‘Yeah, because what actually happens then, Roy?’

IN MOUNTAIN LANDSCAPES SUCH AS ours, darkness doesn’t fall, it rises. It rises from the valleys, from the forests and the lake down there, and for a time we can see that evening has come to the village and the fields while up here it’s still day. But that day, the first of the year, was different. Maybe it was because of the cloud that lay so thick above us, colouring everything grey, maybe it was the blackened site of the fire that seemed to suck all the light from the mountainside, or maybe it was the despair that hung over Opgard, or the cold from space. Whatever it was, daylight just disappeared as though it had burned out.