Jo Nesbo - Midnight Sun

Sure enough, the church was open, although the door was swollen, so it didn’t open as readily as those of other churches I had been inside. The nave was fairly small, soberly furnished, but attractive in its simplicity. The midnight sun lit up the stained-glass windows, and above the altar Jesus hung from the customary cross in front of a triptych with the Virgin Mary in the middle and David and Goliath and the baby Jesus on either side.

I found the door to the sacristy off to one side behind the altar. I searched through the cupboards and found vestments, cleaning equipment and buckets, but no altar wine, just a couple of boxes of wafers from Olsen’s bakery. I chewed my way through four or five of them, but it was like eating blotting paper; they dried out my mouth so much that in the end I had to spit them out onto the newspaper on the table. Which told me — if it was that day’s edition of the Finnmark Dagblad — that it was 8 August 1978 and that the protests against the exploitation of the Alta river were growing, and showed me what local council leader Arnulf Olsen looked like, and said that Finnmark, as the only Norwegian district that shared a border with the Soviet Union, felt a little safer now that the spy Gunvor Galtung Haavik was dead, and that at long last the weather here was better than in Oslo.

The stone floor of the sacristy was too hard to sleep on, and the pews were too narrow, so I took the vestments inside the altar rail with me, hung my jacket over the rail and lay down on the floor with my leather case under my head. I felt something wet hit my face. I wiped it away with my hand and looked at my fingertips. They were rust red.

I looked up at the crucified man hanging directly above me. Then I realised that it must have come from the pitched roof. Leaky, damp, coloured by clay or iron. I turned over so I wasn’t lying on my bad shoulder and pulled the cassock over my head to shut out the sun. I closed my eyes.

There. Don’t think. Shut everything out.

Shut in.

I tugged the cassock aside, gasping for breath.

Fuck.

I lay there staring at the ceiling. When I couldn’t sleep after the funeral, I started taking Valium. I don’t know if I got addicted to it, but it had become difficult to sleep without it. Now the only thing that worked was being sufficiently exhausted.

I pulled the cassock over me again and closed my eyes. Seventy hours on the run. One thousand, eight hundred kilometres. A couple of hours’ sleep on trains and buses. I ought to be exhausted enough.

Now — happy thoughts.

I tried thinking about the way everything was before. Before before. It didn’t work. Everything else popped up instead. The man dressed in white. The smell of fish. The black barrel of a pistol. Glass shattering, the fall. I thrust it aside and held out my hand, whispering her name.

And then she came at last.

I woke up. Lay perfectly still.

Something had nudged me. Someone. Gently, not so as to wake me, just to confirm that there was someone lying under the cassock.

I concentrated on breathing evenly. Maybe there was still a chance, maybe they hadn’t worked out that I had woken up.

I slid my hand down to my side before remembering that I’d hung the jacket with my pistol in it on the altar rail.

Very amateurish for a professional.

I carried on taking slow, even breaths, and felt my pulse calm down. My body had realised what my head still hadn’t worked out: that if it had been them, they wouldn’t have poked me, they’d just have pulled off the vestments, checked it was the right person, then peppered me worse than over-spiced mutton stew.

I carefully pulled the cassock away from my face.

The one looking down at me had freckles, a snub nose, a plaster on its forehead and pale eyelashes surrounding a pair of unusually blue eyes. Topping this was a thick fringe of red hair. How old could he be? Nine? Thirteen? I had no idea, I’m hopeless at anything to do with kids.

‘You can’t sleep here.’

I looked round. He seemed to be alone.

‘Why not?’ I said in a hoarse voice.

‘Because Mum’s got to clean there.’

I got to my feet, rolled up the cassock, took my jacket from the altar rail and checked that the pistol was still in the pocket. Pain stabbed through my left shoulder as I forced it into the jacket.

‘Are you from the south?’ the boy asked.

‘That depends what you mean by “south”.’

‘That you’re from south of here, of course.’

‘Everyone’s from south of here.’

The boy tilted his head. ‘My name’s Knut, I’m ten. What’s your name?’

I was on the verge of saying something else before I remembered what I’d said the day before. ‘Ulf.’

‘How old are you, Ulf?’

‘Old,’ I said, stretching my neck.

‘More than thirty?’

The sacristy door opened. I spun round. A woman emerged, then stopped and stared at me. The first thing that struck me was that she was very young to be a cleaner. And that she looked strong. You could see the veins in her lower arm, and on the hand holding the bucket, which was overflowing with water. She had broad shoulders but a narrow waist. Her legs were hidden under an old-fashioned, black pleated skirt. The other thing that struck me was her hair. It was long, and so dark that the light from the high windows made it glisten. It was held back by a simple hairclip.

She started moving again and came towards me, her shoes clattering on the floor. When she got close enough I could see that she had a fine mouth, but with a scar, perhaps from an operation to correct a harelip, on her top lip. It seemed almost unnatural, considering her dark complexion and hair, that she should have such blue eyes.

‘Good morning,’ she said.

‘Good morning. I arrived on the bus last night. And there was nowhere to...’

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘The door here is high, and the gate is wide.’ She said this without warmth in her voice, put down the bucket and broom and held out her hand.

‘Ulf,’ I said, holding out my hand to shake hers.

‘The cassock,’ she said, waving my hand away. I looked down at the bundle in my other hand.

‘I couldn’t find a blanket,’ I said, handing her the vestments.

‘And nothing to eat apart from our communion wafers,’ she said, unrolling and inspecting the heavy white garment.

‘Sorry, of course I’ll pay for—’

‘You’re welcome to it, with or without a blessing. But please don’t spit on our council leader next time, if you don’t mind.’

I wasn’t sure if that was a smile I could see, but the scar on her top lip seemed to twitch. Without saying anything else she turned and disappeared back into the sacristy.

I picked up my case and stepped over the altar rail.

‘Where are you going?’ the boy asked.

‘Outside.’

‘What for?’

‘What for? Because I don’t live here.’

‘Mum’s not as cross as she seems.’

‘Say goodbye from me.’

‘From whom?’ her voice called. She was walking back towards the altar rail.

‘Ulf.’ I was starting to get used to the name.

‘And what are you doing here in Kåsund, Ulf?’ She wrung out a cloth above the bucket.

‘Hunting.’ I thought it was best to stick to one and the same story in such a small community.

She fixed the cloth to the end of the broom. ‘What for?’

‘Grouse,’ I chanced. Did they have grouse this far north? ‘Or anything with a pulse, really,’ I added.

‘It’s been a bad year for mice and lemmings this year,’ she said.

I hummed. ‘Well, I was thinking something a bit bigger than that.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘I just meant that there aren’t many grouse.’