Ю Несбё - Blood on Snow

“I haven’t asked yet,” I said. “But—”

“I’ll pay you five times your usual fee,” Hoffmann said. “So you can take the person in question on a never-ending Christmas holiday afterwards if you want.”

I tried to do the math. But like I said, I’m pretty useless.

“Here’s the address,” Hoffmann said.

I had worked for him for four years without knowing where he lived. But then, why should I have known? He didn’t know where I lived. And I’d never met his new wife either, just heard Pine going on about how hot she was, and how much he’d be able to rake in if he had a bitch like that on the streets.

“She’s on her own in the house most of the day,” Hoffmann said. “At least that’s what she tells me. Do it whatever way you like, Olav. I trust you. The least I know, the better. Understood?”

I nodded. The less I know, I thought.

“Olav?”

“Yes, sir, understood.”

“Good.”

“Let me think about it till tomorrow, sir.”

Hoffmann raised one of his neatly manicured eyebrows. I don’t know much about evolution and stuff like that, but didn’t Darwin say there were only six universal facial expressions for human emotions? I’ve no idea if Hoffmann had six human emotions, but I think what he was hoping to communicate with his raised eyebrow — in contrast to what he would have meant by an open-mouthed stare — was mild annoyance combined with reflection and intelligence.

“I’ve just given you the details, Olav. And now — after that — you’re thinking about refusing ?”

The threat was barely audible. No, actually, if that was the case then I probably wouldn’t have picked up on it. I’m completely tone-deaf when it comes to noticing the undertones and subtexts in what people say. So we can assume that the threat was obvious enough. Daniel Hoffmann had clear blue eyes and black eyelashes. If he was a girl I’d have said it was make-up. I don’t know why I mention that, it’s got nothing to do with anything.

“I didn’t have time to respond before you gave me the details, sir,” I said. “You’ll have an answer by this evening, if that’s okay, sir?”

He looked at me. Blew cigar smoke in my direction. I sat there with my hands in my lap. Fiddling with the brim of the labourer’s cap I didn’t actually have.

“By six,” he said. “That’s when I leave the office.”

I nodded.

As I walked home along the city streets through the snowstorm, four o’clock came and darkness settled over the city again after just a few hours of grey daylight. The wind was still strong, and there was an unsettling whistling sound from dark corners. But like I said, I don’t believe in ghosts. The snow crunched under the soles of my boots, like the snapping spines of dusty old books, but I was thinking. I usually try to avoid doing that. It’s not an area where I see any hope of improvement with practice, and experience has taught me that it rarely leads to anything good. But I was back in the first of those two calculations. The fix itself ought to be fine. To be honest, it would be easier than the other jobs I had done. And the fact that she was going to die was fine as well: like I said, I think all of us — men and women alike — have to accept the consequences when we make mistakes. What worried me more was what was bound to happen afterwards. When I was the guy who had fixed Daniel Hoffmann’s wife. The man who knew everything and had the power to determine Daniel Hoffmann’s future once the police started their investigation. Power over someone who wasn’t capable of subordination. And a man Hoffmann owed five times the usual fee. Why had he offered that for a job that was less complicated than normal?

I felt like I was sitting at a poker table with four heavily armed, innately suspicious bad losers. And I’d just managed to get a hand of four aces. Sometimes good news is so improbably good that it’s bad.

Okay, so what a smart poker player would do here is get rid of the cards, soak up the loss and hope for better — and more appropriate — luck in the next round. My problem was that it was far too late to fold. I knew Hoffmann was going to be behind the murder of his wife, regardless of whether it was me or someone else who did it.

I realised where my steps had taken me, and stared into the light.

She had her hair pulled up in a bun, the way my mum used to. She was nodding and smiling at customers who spoke to her. Most of them probably knew she was deaf and dumb. Wishing her “Happy Christmas,” thanking her. The typical pleasantries that people say to each other.

Five times the usual fee. A never-ending Christmas holiday.

I rented a room in a small hotel right opposite the Hoffmanns’ apartment in Bygdøy Allé. The plan was to watch what the wife did for a couple of days, see if she went anywhere while her husband was at work, or if she had any visitors. Not that I was interested in finding out who her lover was. My aim was simply to work out the best, least risky time to strike, when she was on her own at home and wasn’t likely to be disturbed.

The room turned out to be the perfect vantage point not only to watch Corina Hoffmann coming and going, but also to see what she got up to inside the apartment. Evidently they never bothered to close the curtains. Most people don’t, in a city where there’s no sun to shut out, and people outside are more interested in getting into the warm somewhere than they are in standing and staring.

For the first few hours I didn’t see anyone in there. Just a living room bathed in light. The Hoffmanns weren’t exactly sparing with the electricity. The furniture wasn’t English; it looked more French, especially the strange sofa in the middle of the room that only had a back at one end. Presumably it was what the French call a chaise longue which — unless my French teacher was having me on — means “long chair.” Ornate, asymmetrical carving, with some sort of nature-inspired upholstery. Rococo, according to my mum’s art history books, but it could just as well have been knocked together by a local craftsman and painted in the traditional style out in the Norwegian countryside for all I knew. Either way, it wasn’t the sort of furniture someone young would choose, so I guess it was Hoffmann’s ex-wife’s. Pine had said Hoffmann threw her out the year she turned fifty. Because she’d turned fifty. And because their son had moved out and she no longer filled any function in his home. And — according to Pine — he had said all this to her face, and she had accepted it. Along with a flat by the sea and a cheque for one and a half million kroner.

To pass the time I took out the sheets of paper I’d been writing on. It was really just a form of scribbling. Well, that’s not quite true, I suppose it was more of a letter. A letter to someone whose identity I didn’t know. Actually, maybe I did. But I’m not exactly much good at writing, so there were a lot of mistakes, a lot that had to be cut. To be honest, a lot of paper and ink had gone into every word that I’d kept. And things went so slowly this time that I eventually just put the paper down, lit a cigarette and did some daydreaming instead.

Like I said, I’d never seen any member of Hoffmann’s family, but I could see them in my mind’s eye as I sat there looking into the apartment on the other side of the street. I liked looking in on other people. Always had done. So I did what I always did, and imagined family life in there. A nine-year-old son, home from school, sitting in the living room reading all the strange books he’d taken out from the library. The mother singing quietly to herself as she prepared dinner in the kitchen. The way mother and son tense for a moment when there’s a noise from the door. Then how they suddenly relax when the man in the hall calls out “I’m home!” in a clear, cheerful voice, and they run out to greet him and give him a hug.