Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘If only it were that easy,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s pretty obvious what you’re going to do as soon as I leave here. You’ll call another enforcer or contract killer and try to wipe out the Opgard family before we deliver this document to your lawyer. Then once you realise you won’t have time you’ll report us to the police for blackmail and refute the validity of what you just signed. You will also, naturally, deny all knowledge of any enforcer.’

‘Is that what you believe?’

‘Yes it is, Willumsen. Unless you can persuade me to the contrary.’

‘And if I can’t?’

I shrugged. ‘You could certainly try.’

Willumsen looked at me. ‘Is that why you’re wearing the gloves and the bathing cap?’

I didn’t answer.

‘So you don’t leave behind any hairs or fingerprints?’ he went on.

‘Don’t worry about that, Willumsen. Instead try to find a way for us to get this done.’

‘Hm. Let’s see.’ Willumsen clasped his hands together at the top of his chest, where a forest of black hair peered out from his pyjamas. In the ensuing silence I could hear the traffic up on the highway. I had loved those early mornings at the service station, being there when a village awakens to a new day, when people emerge to take their appointed places in the machinery of our little society. To have the big view, to sense the invisible hand behind everything that went on, that made sure everything worked out more or less as it should.

Willumsen coughed. ‘I won’t be getting in touch with any other enforcer or the police because both of us have too much to lose if I do.’

‘You’ve lost everything already,’ I said. ‘You’ve only got everything to gain. Come on, you’re a used-car salesman. Persuade me.’

‘Hm.’

There was silence in the room again.

‘Time’s running out for you, Willumsen.’

‘ Leap of faith ,’ he said in English.

‘Now you’re trying to sell the same dodgy car two times in a row,’ I said. ‘Come on. You managed to foist that Cadillac off on my father, you got Carl and me to pay what we later found out was twice what second-hand diving gear costs in Kongsberg.’

‘I need more time to think of something,’ said Willumsen. ‘Come back in the afternoon.’

‘Alas, we need to do this before I leave, and before it’s light enough for people to see me leaving here.’ I raised the pistol and touched it to his temple. ‘I really do wish there was another way, Willumsen. I’m not a killer, and in a way I like you. Yes, I really do. But it’ll have to be you who shows me that other way, because I don’t see it. You’ve got ten seconds.’

‘This is so unreasonable,’ said Willumsen.

‘Nine,’ I said. ‘Is it unreasonable of me to give you the chance to argue for your own life, even though Shannon never got the chance to argue for hers? Is it unreasonable for me to deprive you of your few remaining months instead of the rest of your wife’s natural life? Eight.’

‘Perhaps not, but—’

‘Seven.’

‘I give up.’

‘Six. Want me to wait till I’ve finished counting down, or…?’

‘Everyone wants to live as long as possible.’

‘Five.’

‘I feel like a cigar.’

‘Four.’

‘Let me have a cigar. Come on.’

‘Three.’

‘They’re in the desk drawer over there, let me—’

The crack was so loud it felt as though someone had stuck a sharp object through my eardrums.

Of course, I’ve seen in films how shots to the head like that always result in blood cascading all over the wall. But, to tell the truth, I was surprised to see that that’s actually what really does happen.

Willumsen slumped backwards in the bed with what looked like an injured expression on his face, perhaps because I had cheated him of two seconds of life. Moments later I felt the mattress underneath me getting wet, and then I smelled the shit. They don’t make much out of that in films, the way all the dead person’s orifices open up like sluice gates.

I pressed the pistol into Willumsen’s hand and got up from the bed. When I worked at the service station in Os I used to read not just Popular Science but also True Crime , so as well as the bathing cap and gloves I’d taped my trouser legs to my socks and the sleeves of my jacket to the gloves so no bodily hairs would fall out and leave DNA traces for the police, if this ever got investigated as a murder.

I hurried down the stairs to the basement, grabbed a shovel I found down there, left the basement door unlocked and walked backwards through the garden, turning over the footprints in the snow behind me. I took the lane that slopes down towards Lake Budal, there weren’t many houses there. Tossed the shovel into a waste container at the entrance to a newly built house, and only now noticing how cold my ears were and remembering the woollen hat I had in my pocket, pulled it on over the bathing cap and followed the lane to one of the small jetties. I had parked the Volvo behind the boathouses. I peered out over the ice. Standing out there were two of the three women in my life. And I’d killed the husband of one of them. Weird. The engine was still warm and the car started without difficulty. I drove to Opgard. It was seven thirty in the morning, and still pitch-dark.

That same afternoon the news was on national radio.

‘A man was found dead in his home in Os county in Telemark. The police are treating the death as suspicious.’

The news of Willumsen’s death hit the village like a sledgehammer. I think that’s an appropriate image. I imagine the shock was greater than when the hotel burned down. It hit people hard now that mean, friendly, snobbish, folksy used-car salesman who had always been there was gone forever. It was bound to be something people talked about in every shop and cafe, on every street corner and within the four walls of every home. Even the ones I met who knew Willumsen’s cancer had come back were ashen-faced with grief.

I slept badly the next two nights. Not because I had a guilty conscience. I’d really tried to help Willumsen save himself, but how can you, as a chess player, help your opponent once it’s checkmate? It just isn’t your move. No, there was another reason altogether. I had an uneasy feeling of having forgotten something. Something crucial I hadn’t thought of when I planned the murder. I just couldn’t put my finger on what that might be.

On the third day after Willumsen’s death, two days before the funeral, I found out. Where it was I’d fucked up.

IT WAS ELEVEN O’CLOCK IN the morning when Kurt Olsen pulled up in front of the house.

Two other cars behind him. Oslo number plates.

‘Damned slippery down on the corner there,’ said Kurt, who stood grinding out a smoking cigarette with his foot when I opened the door to him. ‘You making an ice rink or what?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We grit. It should be the council’s job, but we do it.’

‘We’re not going to start talking about that again now,’ said Kurt Olsen. ‘This is Vera Martinsen and Jarle Sulesund from KRIPOS.’ Behind him stood a policewoman in those black trousers and matching short jacket and a man who looked Pakistani or Indian. ‘We’ve got a few questions for you, so let’s go inside.’

‘We’re wondering if we might ask you some questions,’ interrupted the woman, Martinsen. ‘If it’s convenient. And if you’ll allow us to come in.’ She looked at Kurt. And then at me. Smiled. Short, fair hair in a plait, broad-featured, wide shoulders. I was thinking handball or cross-country skiing. Not because you can tell by looking which sports people enjoy but because those are the most popular sports among women and you’ve got a better chance of getting things right if you take account of the actual statistics rather than your own overblown gut feeling. These were the kind of irrelevant wisps of thought flitting through my head as I stood there. And looking at Martinsen realised I was going to have to be at my sharpest unless I wanted to be her breakfast, as people say. But OK, we were ready too.