The Kingdom

12

I HEARD IT THROUGH THE stovepipe hole late one evening. I was sixteen years old, and had almost fallen asleep to the steady sound of conversation down there in the kitchen. Even though she didn’t have much to say, she was the one who did the talking. Dad said mostly yes and no, apart from the few occasions when he stopped her and told her clearly and concisely how things were, how things should be done, or not done as the case might be. This almost always happened without him raising his voice, but afterwards, as a rule, she kept quiet for a while. Before starting to talk calmly about something else, as though the subject of their previous conversation had never been raised. I know it sounds strange, but I never really got to know my mum. Maybe because I didn’t understand her, or because I wasn’t interested enough, or because she was so self-effacing next to Dad that she simply disappeared for me. Of course it’s strange that the person you’ve been most intimate with, who gave life to you, whom you spent every day with for eighteen years, can remain someone whose thoughts and feelings are a complete mystery to you. Was she happy? What were her dreams? Why was she able to talk with Dad, and a bit with Carl, but almost never with me? Did she have as little understanding of me as I did of her? On only one occasion did I catch a glimpse of what lay behind Mum in the kitchen, Mum in the cowshed, Mum who mended clothes and told us to do as our father said, and that was that evening at the Grand when Uncle Bernard turned fifty. After the meal in the rococo room the grown-ups jived to the music of a trio of fat men in white jackets, and while Carl was shown around the hotel I sat at the table and saw that Mum was watching the dancers with a look on her face I’d never seen before, dreamy and half smiling, her gaze slightly veiled. And for the first time in my life it struck me that my mother might be pretty, pretty, as she sat there humming in a red dress that matched the drink in front of her. I had never seen Mum drinking except on Christmas Eve, and then only the one glass of aquavit, and she had an unfamiliar warmth in her voice when she asked Dad if he wanted to dance. He shook his head, but smiled at her, maybe he saw the same thing as me. Then a man a bit younger than Dad came up and asked Mum for a dance. Dad sipped his beer, nodded and smiled at the man, as though he felt proud. I didn’t want to, but my gaze followed Mum out onto the dance floor. I just hoped it wasn’t going to be too embarrassing. I saw her saying a few words to the man, he nodded, and they began. First Mum danced quite close to him, then closer, then further away, she danced quick, then slow. She really could dance, and I had never had the faintest idea. But there was something else too. The way she looked at this stranger. The half-closed eyes and that fixed half-smile, like a cat playing with a mouse it intends to make a meal out of, only just not quite yet. Then I noticed Dad beside me getting restless. And suddenly it struck me that it wasn’t the man who was the stranger, it was her, the woman I called Mum.

Then it was over and she sat down with us again. Later that evening, after Carl had fallen asleep beside me in the hotel room we shared, I heard voices in the corridor. I recognised Mum’s, it was unusually loud and piercing. I got up and opened the door just a fraction, enough to see across to the doorway of their room. Dad said something, Mum raised her hand and hit him. Dad touched his cheek and said something in a calm, low voice. She raised the other hand and struck him again. Then she grabbed the key from him, unlocked the door and disappeared into the room. Dad stayed where he was, hunched over slightly, rubbing his cheek and looking in the direction of the door where I was standing in the dark. He looked sad and lonely, almost, maybe like a kid that’s lost his teddy bear. I don’t know if he realised the door was ajar, all I know is that on that evening I got an insight into something to do with Mum and Dad. Something I didn’t quite understand. Something I wasn’t sure I wanted to know any more about. And next day, driving back home to Os, everything was just as it had always been. Mum talked to Dad, a quiet, even flow of everyday talk, with him saying yes, and sometimes no, or else having a coughing fit, at which she kept quiet for a while.

The reason I listened with particular interest that evening all those years ago was that it was my dad who, after a long pause, began to speak. And it sounded like it was something he had been wondering how best to say. Also he kept his voice even lower than usual. Almost whispering. Now of course my parents knew we could hear them up through the stovepipe hole to our bedroom; what they didn’t realise was how well we could hear them. The hole was one thing, but it was the pipe itself that did the trick, amplifying the sound so much that it was like sitting down there between them. Carl and I had agreed there was no point in making them aware of this.

‘Sigmund Olsen mentioned it today,’ he said.

‘Oh?’

‘He’s had what he referred to as a “warning report” from one of Carl’s teachers.’

‘And?’

‘She told him that on two occasions she’s seen blood on the back of Carl’s trousers, and when she asked Carl what had happened, he offered her what she called a “fairly unlikely explanation”.’

‘And that was?’ Mum had lowered her voice too by now.

‘Olsen wouldn’t give any details, he just wanted to pass on the message that the sheriff’s office wanted to talk to Carl. Apparently they have to inform the parents when they interrogate someone under sixteen.’

I felt like a bucket of ice-cold water had been emptied over my head.

‘Olsen said we could be present if Carl wanted, and that Carl isn’t legally obliged to talk to them. Just so we know.’

‘What did you say?’ my mum whispered.

‘That of course my son wouldn’t refuse to talk to the police, but that I would like to talk to him first myself, and so it would be useful to know what kind of unlikely explanation Carl had given his teacher.’

‘And what did the sheriff say to that?’

‘He thought about it. Said he knows Carl of course because he’s in the same class as his own lad, what’s his name?’

‘Kurt.’

‘Kurt, yes. So he knows that Carl is an honest and upright lad, and he says that personally he believes Carl’s explanation. He says the teacher is straight out of teacher training college and nowadays they’re indoctrinated to be on the lookout for things like this, so that means they see it everywhere.’

‘But of course they do, for chrissakes. What did he say Carl told the teacher?’

‘Carl said he’d sat on the pile of planks behind the barn and sat right down on a nail that was sticking out.’

I waited for Mum’s next question: Twice? It never came. Did she know? Had she guessed? I swallowed.

‘Oh my God, Raymond,’ was all she said.

‘That pile of planks should have been shifted a long time ago,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking I’ll get it done tomorrow. Then we’ll have a word with Carl. We can’t have him hurting himself like that and not telling us. Rusty nails – that can mean blood poisoning and God knows what else.’

‘We’d better talk to him. And tell Roy to keep an eye out for his little brother.’

‘That won’t be necessary, it’s all Roy ever does. Actually I think it might even be a bit unhealthy, the way he looks out for him all the time.’

‘Unhealthy?’

‘They’re like a married couple.’

Pause. Now here it comes, I thought.

‘Carl has to learn to stand on his own two feet,’ said Dad. ‘I’ve been thinking, it’s about time the boys each had a room of their own.’

‘But we don’t have the space.’

‘Come on, Margit. You know we can’t afford the bathroom you want between the bedrooms, but moving a couple of walls around for an extra bedroom won’t cost all that much. I can have it done in two or three weeks.’

‘You think so?’

‘I’ll start this weekend.’

Obviously the decision had been taken long before he aired this idea of a separation to Mum. What Carl and I might think was irrelevant. I bunched my fist and bit back my curses. I hated him, hated him. I trusted Carl to keep his mouth shut, but that wouldn’t be enough. The sheriff. The school. Mum. Dad. It was out of control, too many people who knew something, saw something and suddenly understood everything. Soon the tidal wave of shame would wash over us, dragging us all down with it. The shame, the shame, the shame. It was unendurable. None of us would be able to endure it.

13

THE FRITZ NIGHT.

Carl and I never called it that, but that was the name I gave it in my own head.

It was a blisteringly hot autumn day. I was twenty years old. Two years had passed since the Cadillac with Mum and Dad inside had gone down into Huken.

‘Feeling a little better now?’ asked Sigmund Olsen and swung the rod above his head. The line flew out, the reel made a clattering sound, descending in pitch, like some kind of bird I’d never heard before.

I didn’t answer, just followed the spinner with my eye as it glinted momentarily in the sunlight before disappearing beneath the surface of the water, so far from the boat we were sitting in I couldn’t hear if it made a splash. I wanted to ask why you had to cast the spinner so far away when you could just as well move the boat over to where you wanted it to go. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that it looks more like a living fish if it’s swimming more or less horizontal when you reel it in. I don’t know the first thing about fishing and don’t plan to find out either, so I kept my mouth shut.

‘Because even though it doesn’t always seem that way, it’s actually true what people say, that time heals all wounds,’ the sheriff said as he brushed his mop of hair off his sunglasses. ‘A few of them anyway,’ he added.

I had no answer to that.

‘How’s Bernard?’ he asked.

‘Doing fine,’ I said, there being no way I could know then he only had months left to live.

‘I hear you and your brother are mostly living up at Opgard and not so much at Bernard’s, like the childcare people said?’

I had no answer to that either.

‘Well, anyway, you’re old enough now for that not to matter any more, so I’m not going to make a fuss about it. Carl’s still at school, isn’t he?’

‘That’s right,’ I said.

‘And he’s doing all right?’

‘Yes.’ What else could I say? It wasn’t a porky. Carl said he still thought about Mum a lot, and he could spend entire days and evenings alone in the winter garden where he sat to do his homework and read over and over again the two American novels Dad had brought back to Norway with him, An American Tragedy and The Great Gatsby. I never saw him reading any other proper novels, but he loved those two, especially An American Tragedy, and some evenings he would sit and read to me from it and translate the difficult words.

Once he claimed to have heard Mum and Dad screaming from Huken, but I told him it was only ravens. I felt uneasy when he said he had nightmares about the two of us ending up in prison. But gradually things calmed down. He was still pale and thin, but he ate well, and he was shooting up, pretty soon he was a head taller than me.

So, incredibly enough, things had fallen into place. Calmed down. I could hardly believe it. The end of the world had come and gone, and we had survived. A fair few of us anyway. Were the ones who perished what Dad used to call collateral damage? Unintentional fatalities, but necessary when there’s a war to be won? I don’t know. I don’t even know if the war was won. There was certainly a ceasefire, and if a ceasefire lasts long enough it’s easy to confuse it with peace. That’s what things felt like the day before the Fritz night.

‘I used to bring Kurt along,’ said Olsen. ‘But I don’t think he’s all that interested in fishing.’

‘Never,’ I said, as though I found the thought incredible.

‘Tell the truth, I don’t think he’s that interested in anything I do. What about you, Roy? You gonna be a car mechanic?’

I didn’t know why he’d taken me out on Lake Budal in that dinghy of his. Maybe he thought it would get me to relax. Say something I hadn’t said when I was being interrogated. Or maybe it was simply that as sheriff he felt a certain responsibility and wanted to have a talk, find out how things were going.

‘Yes, why not?’ I said.

‘Yes, because you’ve always liked tinkering about with things,’ he said. ‘Right now all Kurt’s interested in is girls. Always some new one he’s off out to meet. What about you and Carl? Any girls on the radar for you two?’

He let his question drift while I peered into the darkness beneath the surface of the water, trying to spot the spinner.

‘I don’t think you’ve ever had a girlfriend, have you?’

I shrugged. There’s a difference between asking a twenty-year-old if he has a girlfriend and if he’s ever had a girlfriend. And Sigmund Olsen knew that. Have to wonder how old he was when he styled that moptop of his. Guess it must have worked for him anyway.

‘Haven’t seen anything that takes my fancy,’ I said. ‘No point having a girlfriend just to say you have.’

‘Of course not,’ said Olsen. ‘And some people don’t even want girls at all. To each his own.’

‘Yes,’ I said. If only he knew how true that was. But no one did. Only Carl.

‘So long as no one else gets hurt,’ said Olsen.

‘Sure.’ I wondered what we were actually talking about and how long this fishing trip was going to last. I had a car at the repair shop that was supposed to be ready by tomorrow and we were a bit too far from land for my taste. Lake Budal was big and it was deep. For a joke Dad called it the great unknown because it was the nearest thing we had to a sea. At school we’d learned that wind and inflow and outflow of three rivers created horizontal currents in Lake Budal, but the really scary thing was that the differences in temperature in the water – especially in the spring – brewed up strong vertical currents. I don’t know if they were enough to suck you down into the depths if you were so keen you went for a swim in March, but we sat wide-eyed in class and imagined they were. Maybe that’s the reason I’d never really felt comfortable either in the lake or on it. When Carl and I tested out that diving equipment we did it in one of the smaller mountain lakes where there were no currents and where we could swim ashore if the boat went over.

‘Do you remember when we had a chat just after your parents died, and me saying that a lot of people hide the fact that they’re suffering from depression?’ Olsen reeled in the dripping line.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You do? Good memory. Well, I’ve had a taste of what it’s like to be depressed myself.’

‘Have you?’ I said, a note of surprise in my voice since I supposed that was what he was expecting to hear.

‘Even been on medication for it.’ He looked at me and smiled. ‘It’s gotta be OK to admit that when even prime ministers do it. Anyway, it was a long time ago now.’

‘Blimey.’

‘But I’ve never thought of taking my own life,’ he said. ‘Know what it would take for me to do that? For me to just end it all and leave a wife and two kids behind?’

I swallowed. Something told me the ceasefire was in danger.

‘Shame,’ he said. ‘What d’you think, Roy?’

‘Dunno.’

‘You don’t?’

‘No.’ I gave a dry-nosed snuffle. ‘What are you actually fishing for here?’ I held his gaze for a couple of seconds before nodding at the water. ‘Cod and flounder, coalfish and salmon?’

He did something with the reel, locked it I think, and wedged the rod between the bottom of the boat and one of those things you sit on. Took off his sunglasses. Hoisted up his dungarees by the belt. There was a mobile phone in a leather holder dangling from it. Every once in a while he’d check it. He fixed his eyes on me.

‘Your parents were conservative people,’ he said. ‘Strict Christians.’

‘Not so sure about that,’ I said.

‘They were members of the Methodist Church.’

‘That was mostly just something my dad brought with him from the USA.’

‘Your parents were not exactly tolerant of homosexuality’

‘Mum didn’t really have any problem with it, but my dad was dead against it. Unless they were Americans and standing for election as Republicans.’ I wasn’t kidding, just repeating word for word what Dad had said himself, without mentioning that later he added Japanese soldiers to his shortlist, since they were – as he put it – worthy opponents. He said that as though he’d fought in the war himself. What Dad admired was the ritual of hara-kiri. He obviously believed it was something all Japanese soldiers did whenever the situation called for it. ‘See what a small population can achieve once they’ve realised there’s no option to fail,’ Dad said to me once as I sat and watched him polishing his hunting knife. ‘Once they’ve understood that whoever fails has to sever himself from the body of society, like a cancer.’ I could have told Olsen that. But why should I?

Olsen coughed. ‘What’s your own attitude towards homosexuality?’

‘My attitude? What’s to have an attitude about? What attitude should you have towards people with brown hair?’

Olsen took hold of the rod again and went on turning the reel. It struck me then that you move your hand in the same way when you want to encourage people to go on talking, to expand on things, as people say. But I kept my mouth shut.

‘Let me be direct, Roy. Are you gay?’

I don’t know why he switched from talking about ‘homosexuality’ to talking about being ‘gay’. Maybe he thought it was less liable to cause offence. I saw the lure glint down in the water, a muted and slightly protracted flash, as though light travels more slowly through water. ‘Are you coming on to me, Olsen?’

He probably hadn’t seen that coming. He stopped reeling and jerked the rod up, staring at me in horror. ‘Eh? Fucking hell, no. I…’

Just then the spinner broke the surface of the water, floating over the gunwale like a flying fish. It did a circuit of our heads before heading back towards the rod, landing softly on the back of Olsen’s head. The mop was clearly even thicker than it looked, because he didn’t even seem to have noticed it.

‘If I am gay,’ I said, ‘I haven’t come out the closet yet, otherwise you and everybody else in the village would have known within fifteen minutes. So that must mean I prefer the closet. The other possibility is that I’m not gay.’

At first Olsen looked surprised. Then he seemed to be chewing over the logic of it.

‘I am the sheriff, Roy. I knew your father, and I can never get that suicide to add up. At least, not that he would take your mother with him.’

‘That’s because it wasn’t a suicide,’ I said in a low voice, at the same time screaming the words inside my head. ‘I keep saying, he didn’t make the corner.’

‘Maybe.’ Olsen rubbed his chin.

He had something or other, the fucking cuckoo.

‘I spoke to Anna Olaussen a couple of days ago,’ he said. ‘You know, she used to be the nursing sister at the surgery. She’s in a care home now, got Alzheimer’s. She’s my wife’s cousin, so we called in to see her. While my wife was out getting some water for the flowers Anna said to me that there was one thing she had always regretted. That she had never broken her vow of confidentiality and told me about it when your brother Carl had been to the surgery and she had seen that he had anal ecchymosis. It means he had lacerations. Your brother didn’t want to tell her how it happened, but there aren’t that many options. On the other hand, Anna thought he seemed so calm about it when he said no, he hadn’t had sexual relations with a man, that she thought maybe it didn’t involve rape. That it may have been consensual. Because Carl was so…’ Olsen stared out over the water. The spinner dangling from the back of his head. ‘…well, such a pretty boy.’

He turned to me again.

‘Anna didn’t tell me, but she did alert your mother and father, she said. And two days after she did so, your father drove the car over the edge and into Huken.’

I averted my eyes from his penetrating gaze. Saw a seagull skimming low over the calm water, looking for prey.

‘As I say, Anna has dementia, and everything she says you have to take with a pinch of salt. But I related it to a warning note from the school a few years earlier, from a teacher who had twice noticed that Carl had blood on the seat of his trousers.’

‘Nails,’ I said in a low voice.

‘Missed that?’

‘Nails!’

My voice floated over the strangely still surface of the water towards land. It struck the rock face and came bouncing back twice… ails… ails. Everything comes back at you, I thought.

‘I had hoped you might be able to help me shed light on why your father and mother didn’t want to live any more, Roy.’

‘It was an accident,’ I said. ‘Can we go back now?’

‘Roy, you must understand; I can’t just let this go. It’ll all come out sooner or later, so the best thing for you now is to tell me exactly what was going on between you and Carl. There’s no need to worry it’ll be used against you, because this isn’t an official interrogation in any judicial sense. It’s just you and me on a fishing trip. I’ll make it as easy as I can for everybody involved, and if you cooperate I’ll make sure any potential punishment is as lenient as possible. Because the way things are looking at the moment, this was going on while Carl was still underage. That means that you, being a year older, risk—’

‘Listen,’ I interrupted, my throat so tight my voice sounded as though it was coming up through a stovepipe, ‘I’ve a car that needs repairing, and it looks like you’re not going to get a bite today, sheriff.’

Olsen looked at me for a long time, as though he wanted me to believe he could read me like an open book, as people say. Then he nodded, moved to lay the rod down in the boat and cursed as the hook bit and stretched his sunburnt neck below his mop of hair. He detached the hook with two fingers, and I saw a single drop of blood that quivered on the skin, but didn’t run anywhere. Olsen started the outboard motor, and five minutes later we pulled the dinghy up into the boathouse below their cabin. From there we drove to the village in Olsen’s Peugeot and he dropped me off at the repair shop. It was a bloody quiet fifteen-minute drive.

I had only been working on the Corolla for half an hour and was about to change the steering box when I heard the phone ringing in the car wash. A few moments later Uncle Bernard’s voice:

‘Roy, it’s for you. It’s Carl.’

I dropped what I had in my hand. Carl didn’t call me at the repair shop. In our house we never rang anywhere unless there was a crisis.

‘What is it?’ I shouted above the sound of Bernard’s hosepipe, the note rising and falling all according to where the jet was hitting the car.

‘It’s Sheriff Olsen,’ said Carl. His voice was shaking.

I understood it really was a crisis and steeled myself. Had that bastard already gone public with his suspicions that it was me, the big brother, who was Carl’s shirtlifter?

‘He’s disappeared,’ said Carl.

‘Disappeared?’ I laughed. ‘Rubbish. I saw him three-quarters of an hour ago.’

‘I mean it. And I think he’s dead.’

I squeezed the phone hard. ‘What d’you mean, you think he’s dead?’

‘I mean I don’t know. Like I said, he’s disappeared. But I can just feel it, Roy. I’m pretty sure he’s dead.’

Three thoughts struck me in quick succession. The first was that Carl had lost it completely. He didn’t sound even remotely pissed, and although he was a bit soft he wasn’t the oversensitive type who actually saw things. The second was that it would be almost absurdly convenient if Sheriff Sigmund Olsen had disappeared from the surface of the earth just when that was what I needed most. The third was that this was a repeat, this was Dog all over again. I had no choice. By betraying my little brother I had incurred a debt I was going to have to go on paying until I died. This was just another instalment falling due.

14

‘THINGS CHANGED AFTER DAD DISAPPEARED,’ said Kurt Olsen as he placed a cup of coffee on the table in front of me. ‘It’s not like I was fated to be a policeman.’

He sat down, brushed the blond quiff aside and started rolling a cigarette. We were sitting in a room that functioned as a cell but was obviously used for storing stuff too. Folders and documents were piled on the floor along the walls. Maybe the idea was that people held in custody could while away the time checking their own records and anybody else’s too while they sat here.

‘But then things do look a bit different once your father’s gone, don’t they?’

I took a swig of coffee. He’d pulled me in here for a test that he knew as well as me wouldn’t show any blood alcohol content. Now he was offering a truce. OK by me.

‘You sort of grow up overnight,’ said Kurt. ‘Because you have to. And you begin to understand something about the responsibility he had, and how you did everything you could to make his job more difficult for him. You ignored all his advice, dismissed what he thought and said, did all you could to be as unlike him as you could. Maybe because there’s something inside telling you that’s how you’re going to end up. As a copy of your father. Because we go round in circles. The only place we’re going is back where we came from. Everyone’s like that. I know you were interested in mountain birds. Carl brought some feathers to school that he’d got off you. We teased him about it.’ Kurt smiled as though at a fond memory. ‘Take these birds, Roy, they move about all over the place. Migrate, I think it’s called. But they never go anywhere their forefathers haven’t been before them. The same habitats and mating sites at the same damned times. Free as a bird? We’re kidding ourselves. It’s just something we like to believe. And we move around inside the same damned circle. We’re caged birds, but the cage is so big and the bars so thin we don’t see it.’

He glanced over at me as though seeing if his monologue had had any effect. I considered giving the slow nod, but didn’t.

‘And it’s the same for you and me too, Roy. Big circles and little circles. The big circle is me taking over the sheriff’s office after my father. The little is that he had this one unsolved case he kept going back to, and I’ve got mine too. Mine is my own father’s disappearance. There are similarities, don’t you think? Two despairing or depressed men taking their own lives.’

I shrugged and tried to look uninterested. Shit, was that all this was about – the disappearance of Sheriff Sigmund Olsen?

‘The difference being that, in my father’s case, there’s no body, and no exact location,’ said Kurt. ‘Only the lake.’

‘The great unknown,’ I said, nodding slowly.

Kurt looked sharply at me. And then he too began to nod, in time to my own nodding, so that for a moment we were like two synchronised oil pumps.

‘And since the fact of the matter is that you were the next to last person to see my father alive, and your brother the last, I’ve got a few questions.’

‘I guess that’s something we all have,’ I said and took another swig of coffee. ‘But I’ve told you in detail about that fishing trip with your father – I’m sure you have a transcript of it here.’ I nodded towards the papers piled up against the wall. ‘And anyway, I’m here to take a blood alcohol test, aren’t I?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Kurt Olsen. He was done rolling his cigarette and put it away in his tobacco pouch. ‘So this isn’t an official interview. No notes will be taken, and there are no witnesses to anything that might be said here.’

Just like that fishing trip, I thought.

‘What I’m quite specifically interested in is finding out what happened after my father dropped you off at the car repair shop at six o’clock, for you to work on a car.’

I took a deep breath. ‘Quite specifically? I changed the steering box and the bearings on a Toyota Corolla. I think it was a 1989 model.’

Kurt’s eyes stiffened, the truce was obviously under threat. I made a strategic withdrawal.

‘Your father drove up to the farm and talked to Carl. After he left Carl phoned me because the power was down and he couldn’t work out why. The generator is old and we’ve had a few earth faults. He’s not exactly a handyman so I drove up and fixed it. It took a few hours because it was getting dark, so it was late by the time I got back to the workshop.’

‘According to the transcript you got back there at eleven o’clock.’

‘Sounds about right. It was a long time ago.’

‘And a witness thinks he saw my father driving through the village at nine o’clock. But it was already dark and the person concerned can’t be sure.’

‘All right.’

‘The question is: what was my father doing between six thirty, when he left the farm, according to Carl, and nine o’clock?’

‘There’s your riddle.’

He stared at me. ‘Any theories?’

I gave him a look of surprise. ‘Me? No.’

I heard a car pull up outside. Must be the doctor. Kurt glanced at his watch. I was guessing he’d told him to take his time.

‘By the way, how did things work out with that car?’ Kurt asked casually.

‘Car?’

‘The Toyota Corolla.’

‘OK, I supppose.’

‘I’ve checked the interviews and who owned old Toyotas. You’re right, it was an ’89 model. Turns out Willumsen wanted it repaired before selling it on. Just enough so it would start, I’m guessing.’

‘Sounds about right,’ I said.

‘Only it didn’t.’

‘Eh?’ I exclaimed.

‘I talked to Willumsen yesterday. He remembered Bernard promising that you would have the car driveable. He remembers it clearly because the customer came a hundred kilometres to test-drive it and the repairs hadn’t been fixed the way you promised they would be.’

‘Oh yeah?’ I narrowed my eyes, trying to look like a man peering into the mists and darkness of the past. ‘Then I was probably delayed by the time it took me to find and fix that earth fault.’

‘Well, you certainly spent long enough on it.’

‘I did?’

‘I spoke to Grete Smitt day before yesterday. It’s amazing what everyday little trivia people remember when they can relate it to a special event, such as their sheriff being reported missing. She recalls waking up at five in the morning, looking out the window and seeing there was a light on in the workshop, and that your car was parked there.’

‘When you make a promise to a customer, you do everything you can to keep that promise,’ I said. ‘Even if you don’t succeed, it’s still a good rule of life.’

Kurt Olsen glowered at me as though I’d just told a particularly offensive joke.

‘Yeah yeah,’ I said breezily. ‘So what’s happening about sending the guys down into Huken?’

‘We’ll have to see.’

‘Nerell advises against it?’

‘We’ll have to see,’ Olsen said again.

The door opened. It was the doctor, Stanley Spind, the doctor who’d been an intern here and afterwards come back to work full-time, a guy from the Bible Belt. He was in his thirties, a friendly and outgoing man whose clothes and hair were artfully unkempt in an I-just-threw-these-on-and-they-seem-to-match-anyway sort of way and an I-didn’t-comb-my-hair-this-is-just-how-it-is fashion. His body was an odd mixture of firmness and softness, as though he’d bought the muscles somewhere. People said he was gay, and that he had a lover in Kongsberg with a wife and kids.

‘Ready for your blood test?’ he asked, ferociously rolling his ‘r’s’.

‘Looks like it,’ said Kurt Olsen without taking his eyes off me.

I left with Stanley after he’d taken the blood sample.

From the moment the doctor had entered the room Kurt Olsen had stopped talking about the case, confirming what he’d said earlier, that at this stage the investigation was still a purely private matter. Kurt gave me only the slightest nod of his head as we left.

‘I was at Årtun,’ said Stanley as we inhaled the fine, sharp evening air in the square outside the sheriff’s office. It was in the same featureless 1980s building that also housed the local authority offices. ‘Your brother certainly got everybody all fired up. So now maybe we’ll be getting a spa hotel?’

‘It’s got to go through the council first.’

‘If they say yes then I definitely want in.’

I nodded.

‘Can I drive you somewhere?’ asked Stanley.

‘No thanks, I’ll call Carl.’

‘Are you sure? It’s not too far out of my way.’ He might have held my gaze a fraction of a second too long. Or else, what’s just as likely, I’m a little paranoid.

I shook my head.

‘Another time,’ he said and opened his car door. He’d obviously stopped locking his car after moving here, the way city people often do. They have the romantic idea that people in country villages don’t do that. They’re wrong. We lock our houses, boathouses and we definitely lock our cars. I watched the rear lights of his car disappearing as I took out my phone and set off on foot to meet Carl. When the Cadillac pulled up on the hard shoulder in front of me twenty minutes later, however, Shannon was at the wheel. She explained that Carl had broken out the champagne after they got home. And since he’d drunk most if it and she’d only had a taste, she’d persuaded him to let her drive.

‘You two celebrating that I was in jail?’ I asked.

‘He said he knew you would say that, and I was to say that he was celebrating that you were definitely going to be released. He’s good at finding reasons to celebrate.’

‘True,’ I said. ‘I envy him that too.’ I realised that the too was open to misunderstanding and was about to explain. Tell her that when I stressed envy, the too bit meant both that it was true and that I envied him his ability to compartmentalise, as people say. So, not too in the sense that there was something else that I also envied him for. But then I’ve always had a tendency to complicate things.

‘You think,’ said Shannon.

‘Not much,’ I said.

She smiled. The wheel seemed enormous between her small hands.

‘Can you see properly?’ I asked, nodding towards the darkness that the cones of light swept away in front of us.

‘It’s called ptosis,’ she said. ‘It’s Greek for “to fall”. In my case it’s congenital. You can train your eye so there’s less chance of developing amblyopia, what people call “lazy eye”. I’m not lazy. I see everything.’

‘Good,’ I said.

She changed down approaching the first hairpin bend. ‘For example I can see it’s a problem for you, to you it seems as if I’ve taken Carl away from you.’ She accelerated and a spray of gravel rattled under the wheel arch. For a moment I wondered whether to pretend I hadn’t heard what she’d just said. But I had the definite feeling that if I did, she’d just repeat it.

I turned towards her.

‘Thanks,’ she said, before I could get a word out.

‘Thanks?’

‘Thanks for everything you’re giving up. Thank you for being a wise and good man. I know how much you and Carl mean to each other. Besides being a complete stranger who’s married your brother I’ve pushed my way into your physical domain. I’ve quite literally taken over the place where you used to sleep. You should hate me.’

‘Well,’ I said, and took a deep breath. It had already been a very long day. ‘I’m not exactly known for being a good man. The real problem is that unfortunately there’s very little about you to hate.’

‘I’ve talked to a couple of the people who work for you.’

‘You have?’ I asked, genuinely surprised.

‘This is a very small place,’ said Shannon. ‘I probably speak to people a bit more than you do. And you’re wrong. You are thought of as a good man.’

I snorted. ‘Then you haven’t talked to anyone whose teeth I’ve knocked out.’

‘Maybe not. But even that was something you did to protect your brother.’

‘I don’t think you should expect too much of me,’ I said. ‘I’ll only let you down.’

‘I think I know already what to expect of you,’ she said. ‘The advantage of having a lazy eye is that people reveal themselves to you, they think you’re not listening properly.’

‘So you think you know all there is to know about Carl, is that what you’re saying?’

She smiled. ‘Love is blind, is that what you’re saying?’

‘In Norwegian we say love makes you blind.’

‘Aha.’ She gave a low laugh. ‘But that’s even more precise than my English love is blind. Which people use in the completely wrong way anyway.’

‘They do?’

‘They use it to mean that we see only the good side of people we love. But actually it refers to the fact that Cupid wears a blindfold when he shoots his arrows. Meaning that the arrows strike at random, and it isn’t us who chooses who to fall in love with.’

‘But is that right? At random?’

‘Are we still talking about Carl and me?’

‘For example.’

‘Well, maybe not at random, but falling in love isn’t always a voluntary thing.

‘I’m really not so sure that we mountain people are as practical in matters of love and death as you seem to think we are.’

The headlights strafed the wall of the house as the car climbed the final incline. A face, ghostly white in the light, its eyes black holes, stared out at us from behind the living-room window.

She stopped, shoved the gearstick into P, turned off the lights and the engine.

Silence descends so quickly up here when you turn off the only source of sound. Like a sudden roar. I remained in my seat. So did Shannon.

‘How much do you know?’ I asked. ‘About us. About this family?’

‘Pretty much everything, I think,’ she said. ‘As a condition of marrying and coming here I told him he would have to tell me absolutely everything. Including the bad stuff. Especially the bad stuff. And anything he didn’t tell me I’ve seen for myself since I came here.’ Shannon pointed to her half-drawn eyelid.

‘And you…’ I swallowed. ‘You feel you can live with the you know what?’

‘I grew up on a street where brothers fucked sisters. Fathers raped daughters. Sons repeated the sins of the fathers and became parricides. But life goes on.’

I nodded slowly, and not ironically, as I pulled out my tin of snuff. ‘Guess it does. But it seems a lot to put up with.’

‘Yes,’ said Shannon. ‘It is. But everyone has something. And it was a long time ago. People change, I truly believe that.’

I sat there and wondered why it was I had imagined that this was the worst thing that could happen – that some outsider found out – when it just didn’t feel that way. And the answer was obvious. Shannon Alleyne Opgard wasn’t an outsider.

‘Family,’ I said as I wedged tobacco in below my upper lip. ‘That means a lot to you, doesn’t it?’

‘Everything,’ she replied without hesitation.

‘Does love of family make you blind too?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘In the kitchen, when you talked about Barbados, I thought you said you believed that people’s loyalty is attached more to family and feelings than principles. More than political views and people’s ideas in general of right and wrong. Did I get that right?’

‘Yes. Family is the only principle. And right and wrong proceed from that. Everything else is secondary.’

‘Is it?’

She peered out through the windscreen at our little house. ‘We had a professor of ethics in Bridgetown. He told us that Justitia, who symbolises the rule of law, holds a pair of scales and a sword in her hands that stand for justice and punishment, and that she wears a blindfold, like Cupid. The usual interpretation is that this means all people are equal in the eyes of the law. That the law doesn’t take sides, doesn’t concern itself with family and love, only the law.’

She turned and looked at me, her snow-white face glowing in the dark interior of the car.

‘But with a blindfold you can see neither the scales nor where your sword strikes. He told us that in Greek mythology, blindfolded eyes meant only the inner eye was used, the eye that found the answer within. Where the wise and blind see only what they love, and what’s on the outside has no meaning.’

I nodded slowly. ‘We – you, me and Carl – are family?’

‘We’re not blood, but we are family.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Then as a family member you can join Carl and me when we have our councils of war, instead of just listening to the stovepipe.’

‘The stovepipe?’

‘A turn of phrase.’

Carl had walked round from the front door and was now heading towards us across the gravel.

‘And why council of war?’ asked Shannon.

‘Because this is war,’ I said.

I looked at her. Both eyes flashed like a battle-ready Athena. God, how beautiful she was.

And then I told her about the Fritz night.

15

I SPOKE INTO THE PHONE hoping Uncle Bernard couldn’t hear me over the sound of the hosepipe.

‘Carl, what d’you mean, you’re certain he’s dead?’

‘He must have fallen a long way. And I can’t hear anything from down there. But I can’t be sure, he’s disappeared.’

‘Disappeared where?’

‘Down Huken, of course. He’s gone, even when I lean over the edge I can’t see him.’

‘Carl, stay right where you are. Don’t say a word to anyone, don’t touch anything, don’t do anything, OK?’

‘How quickly can you—’

‘Fifteen minutes. OK?’

I hung up, left the car wash and looked up towards Geitesvingen. You can’t see the track itself where it’s hewn into the mountain, but if someone’s driving there you can see the top half of the car. If a person is standing on the edge of the drop and wearing brightly coloured clothing you can see them on a clear day, but now the sun was too low.

‘I’ve got to go home and sort something out,’ I called out.

Uncle Bernard twisted the mouthpiece on the hose and cut off the stream.

‘What’s up?’

‘Earthing problem.’

‘Oh yeah? Is it that urgent?’

‘Carl’s got to have power tonight,’ I said. ‘Some school stuff he has to finish. I’ll come back down afterwards.’

‘I see. Well, I’ll be off in half an hour, but you’ve got your own keys.’

I got into the Volvo and drove. Kept to the speed limit, even though the chances of being stopped were low, considering that the village’s only lawman was lying at the bottom of a ravine.

Carl was standing on Geitesvingen when I arrived. I parked in front of the house, turned off the engine, pulled on the handbrake.

‘Heard anything?’ I asked, nodding in the direction of Huken.

Carl shook his head. He was quiet, and there was a wild look in his eyes. I’d never seen him like that before. His hair was sticking up all over the place, as though he’d been rubbing his head with his hands. His pupils were dilated, as though he were in shock. He probably was in shock, the poor bastard.

‘What happened?’

Carl sat down in the middle of the bend, the way the goats often do. Bowed his head and hid his face in his hands. He cast a long, troll-like shadow across the gravel.

‘He came up here,’ he stammered. ‘He said you and him had been out fishing, and he started asking a lot of questions, and I…’ He clammed up.

‘Sigmund Olsen came here,’ I prompted, sitting down beside him. ‘He probably said I’d told him things and asked if you could confirm that I had messed about with you when you were underage.’

‘Yes!’ yelled Carl.

‘Shush!’ I said.

‘He said the best thing would be for us both to confess and get it over with as quickly as possible. The alternative was for him to use the evidence he had in a long, painful and very public court case. I said you’d never touched me, not like that, not…’ Carl spoke and gestured to the ground, as though I wasn’t even there. ‘He said it wasn’t uncommon for the victim to sympathise with the attacker in situations like this, that they took part of the responsibility themselves for what had taken place, especially if it had been going on for some time.’

And I thought that, well, Sheriff Olsen had got that just about right.

A sob broke from Carl’s lips. ‘Then he told me that Anna at the surgery had told Mum and Dad what we were doing just two days before they went over into Huken. Olsen said Dad knew it was bound to come out one day and that he, like the conservative Christian he was, couldn’t live with the shame.’

And took Mum along with him, I thought. Instead of the two sodomites in the boys’ room.

‘I tried to tell him no, that wasn’t right, it was an accident. A pure accident, but he wouldn’t listen, on he went. Said Dad’s blood alcohol level was minimal and no one drives right off a corner like that when they’re sober. And then I got desperate, I realised he was really going to go ahead with it…’

‘Yep,’ I said, flicking away a sharp stone I was sitting on. ‘Olsen just wants to clear up his big fucking case.’

‘But what about us, Roy? Will we go to jail?’

I grinned. Jail? Yeah, maybe so. I hadn’t even thought much about it. Because I knew that if the whole truth came out it was the shame I couldn’t live with, not the being in jail. Because if they, the others, the village found out, it wouldn’t just be the shame I had to deal with alone in the dark for so many years. The whole disgraceful, treacherous business would be exposed, condemned, ridiculed. The Opgard family would be humiliated. Maybe it’s an aberration of the personality, as people say, but Dad had understood the logic behind hara-kiri, and I did too. That death is the only way out for someone broken down by shame. On the other hand, you don’t want to die unless you have to.

‘We don’t have much time,’ I said. ‘What happened?’

‘I was desperate,’ said Carl and glanced up at me the way he did when he was about to confess something. ‘So I said I knew it was an accident, that I could prove it.’

‘You said what?’

‘I had to say something, Roy! So I said one of the tyres had punctured, that that’s why they went over the edge. I mean, no one had checked anything at all on the car, they’d just winched up the bodies, that climber got hit by a loose boulder and after that no one dared go down there again. I said it wasn’t so surprising they never noticed the puncture, you can’t tell if a tyre’s got a puncture when the car’s on its back with the wheels sticking up in the air, but I said a couple of weeks ago I’d got a pair of binoculars and climbed down over the edge where there’s a couple of solid rocks you can hold on to and lean out so you can see the car. I said I saw how the left front tyre was noticeably a bit shrivelled, and that the puncture must have happened before the car went over the edge, because the undercarriage is completely undamaged, the car did a half somersault through thin air and landed on its roof, full stop.’

‘And Olsen bought that?’

‘No. He wanted to see for himself.’

I could see where this was going. ‘So you fetched the binoculars, and…’

‘He climbed right out to the very edge, and…’ Carl let the breath burst from his lungs and continued, his eyes closed. ‘I heard the sound of stones loosening, a scream. Then he was gone.’

Gone, I thought, but not completely gone.

‘Don’t you believe me?’

I looked down into the abyss. A memory from when I was twelve, from my uncle Bernard’s fiftieth birthday gathering at the Grand Hotel, flickered through my mind. ‘You realise what this is going to look like?’ I said. ‘The sheriff comes up here to interview you in connection with a serious criminal investigation, and he ends up dead down there. If he is dead.’

Carl nodded slowly. Of course he realised. That was why he had called me instead of the mountain rescue team, or the doctor.

I stood up and dusted myself off. ‘Fetch the rope from the barn,’ I said. ‘The long one.’

I fastened one end of the rope to the tow hitch of the car up by the house and the other round my waist. Then I began to walk down towards Geitesvingen with the rope uncoiling. I counted a hundred paces before it was taut. I was ten metres from the edge of the drop.

‘Now!’ I shouted. ‘And remember: slowly!’

Carl gave me a thumbs up through the window of the Volvo and began to reverse.

The trick was to keep the rope taut, I’d explained to him, and now there was no way back. I lay into the rope and headed towards the drop as though I was in a hurry to get us both down there. The edge was the worst. My body protested, it wasn’t as sure as my mind was that this would be OK and made me hesitant. The rope slackened because Carl didn’t notice that I’d stopped at the edge. I shouted to him to drive forward a bit, but he didn’t hear me. So I turned my back to Huken, took a step backwards and fell. It can’t have been more than a metre, but when the rope tightened round my waist it squeezed the breath out of me and I forgot to straighten my legs so that I hit the rock face with my knees and forehead as I was thrown inwards. I swore, managed to brace the soles of my shoes against the wall, and started to climb down the vertical stone wall. Looked up at the sky above me which was now pale blue and translucent and breaking up, already I could see a couple of stars. I could no longer hear the car, in fact there was complete silence. Maybe it was the silence, the stars and dangling weightless like that attached to a car that made me feel like an astronaut, floating in space and connected to a space capsule. I thought of Major Tom in Bowie’s song. For a moment I wished it could go on like that, and even end like that, that I could just float away.

And then the wall came to an end, I touched solid ground and watched the rope coiling like a cobra on the ground in front of me. Two, three coils and then the rope stopped. I followed it with my eyes to the top. Saw a tiny cloud of exhaust smoke. Carl must have stopped at the very edge. The rope had just been long enough and no more.

I turned. I was standing on a scree of large and small stones that time had chewed loose from the walls surrounding me on all sides and deposited at the bottom. The drop down from Geitesvingen was vertical, but the walls of the sharp, lower pillars sloped slightly, so that the square of evening sky above me was larger than the roughly hundred square metres of rocky ground I was standing on. Nothing grew down here in this place that never saw so much as a glint of sunlight and had no smell either. Just rock. Space and rock.

The spaceship, Dad’s black Cadillac DeVille, lay the way I had imagined it would that time the mountain rescue guys described the scene down here.

The car was lying on its roof with its wheels in the air. The rear part of the coupé was squashed flat, with the front so little damaged you might even have supposed it possible for the passengers sitting there to have survived. Mum and Dad had been found outside the car; they’d been thrown through the windscreen when the front end hit the ground. The fact that they hadn’t been wearing seat belts strengthened the suicide theory, even though I had explained that Dad was against seat belts on principle. Not because he didn’t see the point, but because it was a mandatory requirement made by what he called the ‘nanny state’. The only reason Sheriff Olsen thought he’d seen Dad using the belt several times when driving in the village was that Dad would wear one when he thought the law was around, because he hated getting fined even more than he hated the nanny state.

A raven stood on Sheriff Olsen’s stomach watching me cautiously, claws clutched around the big belt buckle with the buffalo skull. Olsen had landed in such a way that the lower half of his body lay across the back end of the chassis, with the rest of him hanging over the side and out of view from where I was standing. The raven’s head swivelled, following me as I made my way round the car. Broken glass crunched beneath my feet, and I had to use my hands to get past a couple of enormous loose boulders. The upper part of Olsen’s body hung down in front of the licence plate and the boot. The unusual ninety-degree angle at which his back was broken made him look like a scarecrow, a figure with no joints, straw stuffed inside clothes, with a mop hanging from its head, dripping with blood onto the stones below with a low, soft smacking sound. Hanging there with his hands in the air – that’s to say, towards the ground – as though trying to signal that he was giving up. Because as Dad always said: ‘If you’re dead then you’ve lost.’ Olsen was as dead as a dodo. And he smelled.

I took a step closer, and the raven screeched at me without moving. It probably saw me as a kind of Arctic skua, that’s a sneaky type of seabird that lives by stealing food from other birds. I picked up a stone and threw it at the raven and it flew off with two shrieks, the one hate-filled and aimed at me, the other an expression of his own regret.

Darkness was already swelling out from the mountainside and I had to work fast.

Had to think through how we were going to get Olsen’s body up the rock face using just one rope and with a minimum risk of the body getting caught on something or sliding out of the rope. Because the human body is like a bloody Houdini. If you tie the rope around the chest, the arms and shoulders squeeze themselves together and the body slips out that way. Tie it to the belt buckle or round the waist and drag the body up like a trussed shrimp and at some point the centre of gravity will move and the body tip upside down and slip out of the rope or out of his trousers. I decided that the simplest thing would be to make a slip knot and tie it round his neck. The centre of gravity would be so low that he couldn’t tip in any direction and with the head and shoulders clearing the way there was less chance of him getting caught on something. And of course you might well ask yourself how come I knew how to tie a knot that’s usually only learned by people who intend to hang themselves.

I worked systematically, concentrating entirely on the practical aspects. I’m good at that. I knew that these were images that would come back again – Olsen as a gaping figurehead mounted on the stern of a black spaceship – but that would be another time, another place.

It was dark by the time I called up to Carl that the package was ready. I had to call him three times, he had Whitney Houston on the car’s CD player and the sound of her singing ‘I will always love you’ was echoing across the mountains. He started the engine and I heard him riding the clutch to keep it going slowly enough. The rope tightened and I held round the body, helped it over to the rock face where I let go. Stood below and watched as it rose to the heavens like an angel with neck outstretched. Slowly it was swallowed up by the dark until all I could hear was the scraping sound of the body against the rock. Then a brief swishing noise through the dark and the crack of something hard hitting the ground just a few metres away from me. Shit, the body must have dislodged some rocks, and there could be more. I took shelter in the only place there was shelter. Crawled in through the windscreen of the Cadillac. Sat there and looked at the dials on the instrument panel, tried to read them upside down. Thought of what came next. How to deal with the next part of the plan. The practical details, everything that had to be done right, other options if something went wrong with plan A. It must have been this simple act of thinking that made me feel calmer. The situation was crazy, of course. I was trying to cover up the fact that a man was dead, and that settled me down. Or maybe it wasn’t these practical thoughts but the smell. The smell of the leather seats, impregnated with Dad’s sweat, Mum’s cigarettes and perfume, and Carl’s vomit from the time we drove to the city in the newly purchased Cadillac and he got carsick and puked over the seats even before we’d navigated all the hairpin bends on the way down to the village. Mum put out her cigarette, wound down the window and took a wad of tobacco from Dad’s silvery snuffbox. But Carl carried on puking as we drove out of the village, so suddenly and without any warning that he never had time to open the sick bag and the coupé stank like a fucking gas chamber even with all the windows open. Carl had lain down in the back seat with his head in my lap, closed his eyes and everything had calmed down. After Mum had wiped up the sick she’d handed us the bag of biscuits, and Dad had sung ‘Love Me Tender’ at half speed and with double vibrato. Looking back on it I recalled it as the best trip we ever had.

The rest happened quickly.

Carl tossed the rope down, I tied myself in, called up that I was ready and I made my way up the rock face the same way I had come down, like a film shown backwards. I couldn’t see what I was standing on, but nothing came loose. If I hadn’t just nearly been hit on the head I would have said the mountain was quite safe.

Olsen was laid out on Geitesvingen, in the light from the Volvo’s headlamps. There weren’t many visible signs of external damage to the body. His mane of hair was soaked in blood, one hand looked as though it had been crushed, and he had livid markings on his neck from the slip knot. I don’t know whether it was discolouring from the rope, or if a fresh corpse can haemorrhage. But of course, there was a broken spine in there, and enough internal injuries for a pathologist to be able to determine that the cause of death was not exactly hanging. And not drowning either.

I stuck my hand into one of Olsen’s wet back pockets, fished out his car keys, and in the other found the bunch of keys he had used when he locked the boathouse.

‘Go and fetch Dad’s hunting knife,’ I said.

‘Eh?’

‘It’s hanging in the entrance hall, next to the shotgun. Get a move on.’

While Carl ran back to the house I took out the snow shovel any mountain dweller has in the back of the car all year round, scooped up the gravel where Olsen had been dragged and tossed it down into Huken, vanishing without a sound.

‘Here,’ said Carl, panting.

He handed me the knife, the one with the grooves in the blade that I had used to finish off Dog.

And now, as then, Carl was standing behind me and looking away as I used the knife. I grabbed hold of Olsen’s mop of hair, holding his head the same way I had held Dog, put the point of the blade in his forehead, forced it through the skin until it hit bone, then cut an angled circle down and around the head, directly above the ear and the knotty clump of bone at the top of the neck, the point of the blade all the time following the line of the cranium. Dad had shown me how you flay a fox, but this was different. This was scalping.

‘Move, Carl, you’re blocking the light.’

I heard Carl turn towards me, yawn and walk round to the other side of the car.

As I worked away at loosening the bottom of the head from the scalp I heard Whitney Houston start singing again, about how she would never, absolutely bloody never, stop loving you.

We spread rubbish bags along the floor of my Volvo, pulled off Sigmund Olsen’s snakeskin boots and loaded the mangled corpse into the boot. Then I sat behind the wheel of Olsen’s Peugeot, glanced in the mirror and adjusted the scalp. Even with that mop of fair hair on my head I didn’t look like Sigmund Olsen, but when I put on his sunglasses the illusion was good enough to fool anyone seeing me from outside, in the dark, who would be hardly likely to suppose that it wasn’t the sheriff driving his own car.

I drove slowly, but not too slowly, through the village. No need to blow the horn or attract attention in some other way. A couple of people out walking and I saw their heads automatically turn and knew their brains would register the sheriff’s car and half consciously wonder where he was off to, at any rate he was heading out along the lakeside. Maybe in their half-asleep farmers’ brains they figured he was off to his cabin, if they knew where that was.

When I arrived at the cabin I drove down to the boathouse and turned off the engine but left the keys in the ignition. Switched off the headlights, not because anyone else lived within view but because you never know. If someone who knew Sigmund Olsen drove by and saw lights they might decide to drop in to say hello. I wiped off the steering wheel, the gearstick, the door handles. Looked at my watch. Carl had been told to drive my Volvo to the workshop, park outside so that it was clearly visible, open the place with the keys I had given him and turn on the lights so that it looked as though I was at work. Leave Olsen’s body where it was, in the boot of the car. Wait twenty minutes or so, check first there was no one walking down the road when he pulled out from the workshop, and then join me at the cabin.

I unlocked the boathouse and dragged out the dinghy. It rumbled as it glided over the track of horizontal timbers until at last the lake received the boat with what sounded like a sigh of relief. I dried the snakeskin boots with a cloth, dropped Sigmund Olsen’s bunch of keys into the right boot, tossed both boots into the dinghy and pushed it out onto the water. Stood there and watched as it glided out towards the great unknown and felt almost proud of myself. The business with the boots was a touch of genius, as people say. I mean, when they find an empty boat with just keys and a pair of boots, what else can you say? And aren’t the boots in themselves a kind of suicide note, an announcement that your wanderings on this earth are over? Yours sincerely, the depressed sheriff. You might almost say it was beautiful if it wasn’t so fucking idiotic. Fall a hundred metres down a gulley right in front of someone you’re investigating. Completely fucking unbelievable. In fact, I was far from sure I believed it myself. And as I stood there thinking all this, the idiocy just got more idiotic as the boat started drifting back towards the shore. I shoved it again, harder this time, but the same thing happened again, and a minute later the keel was rubbing against the lakeside stones again. I couldn’t figure it out. From what I remembered our teacher saying about Budalvannet’s horizontal currents, the wind direction and outflow, the boat should have been drifting away from me. Maybe we were in a backwater where everything circled round and came back in an eternal recurrence. That must be it. The boat needed to be further from the shore before it met the outflow currents and the Kjetterelva River down in the south, so that the area where Olsen could potentially have jumped overboard was so big that it was no surprise his body was never found. I stepped on board, started the motor and chugged along for a bit, turning it off again while it was still gliding away from the shore. Wiped the rudder clean, but only that. If it occurred to them to check the boat for fingerprints, it would be more suspicious if they did not find some of mine – after all, I’d been on board earlier the same day. I glanced over at the shore. Two hundred metres. Should be able to manage that. I considered climbing over the side of the boat and into the water but then realised this would stop the boat’s forward motion so instead I stepped up onto the thwart and dived. The shock of the cold water felt surprisingly like a liberation as my overheated brain suddenly cooled down for a few moments. Then I started to swim. Swimming with clothes on was more difficult than I had expected and my movements awkward. I thought of my teacher’s vertical currents, and it seemed as though I could feel them, pulling me down, and I had to remind myself it was autumn, not spring, as I parted the water in a long, clumsy breaststroke. I had no landmarks to guide me, so perhaps I should have left the headlights on after all. I remembered being taught that the legs are stronger than the arms and kicked and kicked away for all I was worth.

And then, suddenly and without any warning, I was caught.

I went under, swallowed water, rose to the surface again, splashing out wildly to get free of whatever it was that had attacked me. It wasn’t the current, it was… something else. Something that wouldn’t let go of my hand, I could feel teeth or at least jaws clamped around my wrist. I went under again, but at least this time managed to keep my mouth closed. I pressed my fingertips together, narrowed my hand and jerked it towards me. I was free. Back up on the surface I gasped for air. There, a metre in front of me in the dark, I saw something light floating on the water. Cork. I had swum into a seine net.

I calmed my breathing, and when a car with headlights on full beam drove past along the main highway I saw the outline of Olsen’s boathouse. The rest of the swim was uneventful, as people say. Apart from the fact that when I crawled ashore I realised it wasn’t Olsen’s boathouse I had seen, but possibly the owner of the seine net. I hadn’t gone far out, but it just shows how easy it is to lose your way completely. My shoes squelching, I made my way through a stand of trees towards the highway, and from there back to Olsen’s cabin.

I sat hiding behind a tree when Carl eventually arrived in the Volvo.

‘You’re soaking wet!’ he exclaimed, as though this was the most surprising thing he’d experienced all evening.

‘I’ve got dry clothes at the workshop,’ I tried to say, but my teeth were chattering like a two-stroke East German Wartburg 353. ‘Drive.’

Fifteen minutes later I was dry and wearing two pairs of overalls, one on top of the other, and my body was still shivering. We backed the Volvo into the workshop, closed the door and got the body out of the boot and onto the floor, where we sat him on his back in an X position. I looked at him. Something seemed to be missing from him, something he had had during our fishing trip. Maybe it was that mop of hair. Or the boots. Or was it something else? I don’t believe in souls, but there was definitely something, something that had made Olsen Olsen.

I drove the Volvo out again and parked it in a clearly visible spot outside the workshop. The task that lay ahead of us was a purely practical, technical business, something for which we needed neither luck nor inspiration but only the correct tools. And if there was something we had here, it was tools. There’s no need for me to go into detail about what we used where, only to say that we first removed Olsen’s belt and then cut off his clothes, and after that all his bodily parts. Or rather, I did. Carl was carsick again. I went through Olsen’s pockets and removed everything metal; coins, belt and buckle, and the Zippo lighter. I’d chuck them into the lake when I got the chance. Then I loaded all the body parts and the mane of hair in the scoop of the tractor Uncle Bernard used for clearing snow in winter. When I was done I fetched six metal drums of Fritz heavy-duty workshop cleaner.

‘What’s that?’ asked Carl.

‘Something we use when we clean out the car wash,’ I said. ‘It gets rid of everything, diesel, asphalt, it even dissolves plaster. We dilute it, five litres of water per decilitre of this. Which is to say, if you don’t dilute it then it will get rid of absolutely everything.’

‘You know that?’

‘Uncle Bernard told me. Or in his exact words: “Get it on your finger and if you don’t wash it off immediately, you can say goodbye to that finger.”’

I told him that to lighten the atmosphere a bit, but Carl couldn’t even raise a smile. As though all of this was my fault. I didn’t pursue the thought, because I knew that it would end up with me thinking that it really was my fault, that it always had been.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I guess that’s the reason it comes in metal drums and not plastic.’

We taped rags over our mouths and noses, removed the stoppers from the drums and emptied them into the scoop, one after another, until the grey-white liquid had completely covered Sigmund Olsen’s dismembered body.

Then we waited.

Nothing happened.

‘Shouldn’t we turn off the light?’ Carl asked from behind his cleaning cloth. ‘Someone might come in to say hello.’

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘They can see that’s my car outside, not Uncle Bernard’s. And I’m not exactly—’

‘Yeah yeah,’ Carl interrupted, so there was no need for me to go on. Not exactly the kind of guy people stop by to have a chat with.

Another few minutes passed. I tried to keep still so the overalls were in minimal contact with my crown jewels, as people say. I don’t really know what I had imagined would happen in the scoop, but whatever it was it didn’t. Was the Fritz overhyped?

‘Maybe we should bury him instead?’ said Carl, coughing.

I shook my head. ‘Too many dogs, badgers and foxes round here, they’d dig him up.’

It was true, foxes in the cemetery had dug holes all the way into the Bonaker family grave.

‘Hey, Roy?’

‘Mmm?’

‘If Olsen had still been alive when you got down there in Huken…’

I knew he was going to ask me that, and I wished he wouldn’t.

‘…what would you have done?’

‘That depends,’ I said, trying to resist the temptation to scratch my balls, because I’d realised I was wearing Uncle Bernard’s overalls on the inside.

‘Like with Dog?’ Carl asked.

I thought about it.

‘If he’d survived then at least he’d have been able to tell people it was an accident,’ I said.

Carl nodded. Moved his weight from one foot to the other. ‘But when I said that Olsen just, that’s not quite—’

‘Shh,’ I said.

There was a low, sizzling sound, like an egg in a frying pan. We peered into the scoop. The grey-white was now whiter, you could no longer see the body parts, and bubbles were floating on the surface.

‘Check it out,’ I said. ‘Fritz is playing.’

‘So what happened after that?’ asked Shannon. ‘Did the whole body dissolve?’

‘Yep,’ I said.

‘But not that night,’ said Carl. ‘Not the bones.’

‘So then what did you do?’

I took a deep breath. The moon had risen over the mountain ridge and peered down on the three of us sitting on the bonnet of the Cadillac on Geitesvingen. An unusually warm breeze was blowing in from the south-east, a foehn wind that I liked to imagine had come all the way from Thailand and those other countries down there I’ve never been to and never will.

‘We waited until just before daylight,’ I said. ‘Then we drove the tractor over to the car wash and emptied the scoop. A few bones and fleshy fibres got caught on the grate so we chucked them back into the scoop and doused them with more Fritz. Then we parked the tractor at the back of the workshop and raised the scoop to its top position.’ I illustrated this by raising both hands over my head. ‘In case any passers-by might be tempted to take a look inside. Two days later I emptied it into the car wash too.’

‘What about Uncle Bernard?’ asked Shannon. ‘Didn’t he ask questions?’

I shrugged. ‘He wondered why I’d moved the tractor and I told him I’d had three calls from people who wanted their cars repaired at the same time, so we needed the room. That none of the three showed up was weird, of course, but it does happen. He was more bothered that I hadn’t managed to finish work on Willumsen’s Toyota.’

‘Well, you’d been too busy,’ said Carl. ‘Anyway, like everyone else, he was more concerned by the fact that the sheriff had drowned himself. They’d found his boat with the boots in and were searching for the body – but I told you all this already.’

‘Yes, but not in such detail,’ said Shannon.

‘I guess Roy remembers it better than me.’

‘And that was it?’ asked Shannon. ‘You were the last people to see him alive; weren’t you questioned?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘A short conversation with the sheriff from the neighbouring district. We told him the truth, which was that Olsen asked us how we were doing after the accident, because he was such a considerate man. Although, actually, I said he is a considerate man, acting as though I was presuming he was still alive, even though everyone realised he must have drowned himself. A witness who owned a cabin out that way thought he’d heard Olsen’s car arrive after dark, the boat starting, and shortly afterwards something that might have been a splash. He had a quick look himself, in the lake in front of the boathouse. But without… finding anything.’

‘They weren’t surprised they never found the body?’ said Shannon.

I shook my head. ‘People seem to think that bodies in the sea always turn up sooner or later. Float to the surface, wash ashore, get spotted by someone. Those are the exceptions. As a rule they’re gone forever.’

‘So what might his son know that we don’t know he knows?’ Shannon – who was sitting on the bonnet between us – turned, first to me, then to Carl.

‘Probably nothing,’ said Carl. ‘There are no loose ends. At least nothing that hasn’t been washed away by the rain and the frost and the passage of time. I think it’s just that he’s the same as his father, he’s got this one unsolved case in particular he can’t let go of. For his father it was the Cadillac down there, and for Kurt it’s his own father disappearing without leaving any message. So he starts looking for answers that don’t exist. Am I right, Roy?’

‘Maybe, although I haven’t noticed him sniffing around this case before, so why start now?’

‘Maybe because I’ve come home,’ said Carl. ‘The last person to see his dad. The guy he was once in the same class with, a nobody from Opgard farm but it says in the local paper that he’s done well in Canada and now he thinks he’s going to come back and rescue the village. Put it this way, I’m big game, and he’s the hunter. But he’s got no ammunition, just a gut feeling that there’s something that doesn’t add up about his father driving away after a meeting with me and vanishing straight away. So when I come back home it starts him thinking again. The years have passed, he’s got a distance on things now, his head is cool, he can think more clearly. He starts guessing. If his father didn’t end up in the lake, then where did he end up? In Huken, he thinks.’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But he’s on to something. There’s a reason he’s so determined to get down there. And sooner or later he will.’

‘Didn’t you say Erik Nerell would be telling him not to, because of the risk from loose rocks?’ asked Carl.

‘Yes, but when I asked Olsen about that he said we’ll see in a cocky sort of way. I think he’s thought of another way to do it, but what’s even more important is: what the fuck is he looking for?’

‘He thinks the body is in the perfect hiding place,’ said Shannon, her eyes closed, her face turned to the moon as though she were sunbathing. ‘He thinks we’ve put it in the boot of the wreck down there.’

I studied her from the side. Something about the moonlight on her face made it impossible to take your eyes off her. Did something like that happen to Erik Nerell when he was ogling her at the party? No, all he saw was a woman he wouldn’t mind having it away with. What I saw was… well, what did I see? A bird unlike any other I had ever seen in the mountains. Shannon Alleyne Opgard belonged to the Sylviidae family. Like Shannon, they are small, some smaller even than the hummingbird, and they’re quick to pick up the songs of other species which they immediately imitate. They’re highly adaptable, some even change their feathers and colouring to merge better with their surroundings when the dangers of winter approach. When Shannon included herself, when she said in that very natural way that we had put the body there, it seemed so completely right. She had adapted to the new territory she found herself in without feeling that she had had to renounce anything. She had called me brother without even hesitating or trying the word out first. Because now we were her family.

‘Exactly!’ said Carl. It was a word he had picked up and obviously fallen in love with while he’d been away. ‘And if Kurt believes that, then we ought to make it easy for him to get down there and see for himself how wrong he is, so that gets that out the way. We’ve got a business proposal that needs financing, we need the whole village behind us. We can’t afford to have any kind of suspicion hanging over us.’

‘Maybe,’ I said, and scratched my cheek. Not because it was itching, but now and then that kind of distraction can make you think something you haven’t thought before, and that was the feeling I got then. That there was something here that hadn’t occurred to me. ‘But I really wish I knew exactly what he was going to be looking for down there.’

‘Ask him?’ suggested Carl.

I shook my head. ‘When Kurt Olsen and Erik Nerell were here, Kurt lied and made out it was about the accident, not about his father. So there’s no way Kurt Olsen’s going to show us his hand.’

We sat in silence. The bonnet beneath had gone cold.

‘Maybe this Erik has seen his cards,’ said Shannon. ‘Maybe he could tell us.’

We looked at her. Her eyes were still closed.

‘Why would he do that?’ I asked.

‘Because it’ll be better for him than if he doesn’t tell us.’

‘Oh yeah?’

She turned to me, opened her eyes and smiled. Her moist teeth shone in the moonlight. Of course I didn’t know what she had in mind, but I did know that she was like my father and followed the law of nature that says family comes first. Before right and wrong. Before the rest of all mankind. That it’s always us against the rest.

16

NEXT DAY THE WIND HAD shifted.

When I got up and went downstairs to the kitchen, Shannon was standing beside the wood stove with her arms folded and wearing one of my old woollen sweaters. It looked comically oversized on her, and it occurred to me she must have run out of her own polo-neck ‘artist’s’ pullovers.

‘Good morning,’ she said. Her lips were pale.

‘You’re up early.’ I nodded towards the sheets of paper on the kitchen table. ‘How’s the drawing going?’

‘So-so,’ she said, took two paces forward and picked them up before I could take a look. ‘But doing mediocre work is better than lying in bed and not being able to sleep.’ She put the paper into a folder and went back to the stove again. ‘Tell me, is this normal?’

‘Normal?’

‘For the time of year.’

‘The temperature? Yes.’

‘But yesterday…’

‘…was normal too,’ I said, crossing to the window and peering up at the sky. ‘I mean, it’s normal for it to change so quickly. Up here in the mountains.’

She nodded. Seemed to have got used to that one word ‘mountain’ as being the explanation for most things. I noticed the coffee pot halfway over the hotplate.

‘Fresh and good,’ she said.

I poured myself a cup, looked at her, but she shook her head.

‘I’ve been thinking about Erik Nerell,’ she said. ‘He’s got a girlfriend who’s pregnant, right?’

‘Yes,’ I said, and drank. Good. That is, objectively speaking I knew it wasn’t good, but it was exactly how I liked it. Unless we shared the same taste in coffee, she must have been watching as I made mine. ‘I don’t think there’s any pressing need to get anything out of him right now.’

‘Oh?’ she said.

‘Looks like snow on the way.’

‘Snow?’ She looked at me in disbelief. ‘In September?’

‘If we’re lucky.’

She nodded slowly. An intelligent girl who didn’t need to ask why. Whatever the hell Kurt Olsen was thinking of doing down in Huken, snow would make the job of getting down there safely and possibly finding something much more difficult.

‘But it could disappear again,’ she said. ‘Things change so quickly here…’ She gave me a sleepy smile. ‘Up here in the mountains.’

I chuckled. ‘I thought it could get cold in Toronto too?’

‘In the house where we lived you didn’t notice the cold until you went outside.’

‘It gets better,’ I said. ‘Days like this are the worst, when the wind blows from the north and the first frost is on the bare ground. It gets milder when the winter comes and there’s more snow. It takes a few days after we start having a fire before the heat penetrates the walls.’

‘So until then,’ she said – and now I could see she was shivering – ‘we just freeze?’

I smiled and put my mug of coffee on the worktop. ‘I’ll help you get warm,’ I said, and walked towards her. Her eyes met mine, she gave a start and crossed her arms even more firmly across her narrow chest, a blush spreading like tongues of fire across her white cheeks. I bent down in front of her, opened the door of the wood stove and saw that, sure enough, the fire was going out because the logs were too big and there were too many of them. I pulled the largest out with my hand, put it on the base plate in front of the stove where it lay smouldering, used the bellows and by the time I closed the door again the fire was burning brightly.

Carl came in as I stood up. He was half dressed, hair sticking up all over the place. He was holding his phone in his hand and grinning broadly.

‘The order of business for the council meeting’s been announced. We’re number one on the agenda.’

At the station I told Markus to put the lightweight snow shovels on display, along with the ice scrapers and the bottles of antifreeze I’d ordered in a couple of weeks ago.

I read the Os Daily, which had dedicated most of its front page to the council elections due next year, but at least there was a reference to something inside about the investors’ meeting at Årtun. And there we had a whole page, with a few lines of text and two big pictures. One showed the packed meeting hall, the other Carl posing with a grin and one arm around the shoulder of the former chairman Jo Aas, who looked slightly nonplussed, like a man taken by surprise. Dan Krane’s editorial mentioned the new spa hotel, but it was hard to tell whether he was for or against. Or rather, it wasn’t hard to see that deep down he wanted to trash the entire business, as when he quoted an unnamed source who referred to it as the ‘spa-nic hotel’, something people were clinging to in hopes of saving the village. I guessed that source was Krane himself, but he was obviously in a dilemma. If he was too positive it would seem as though he was using the local paper to back his own father-in-law. Too negative and people might accuse him of wanting to get one over on his wife’s former boyfriend. Being a journalist on a local paper is a tough balancing act, I guess.

At nine o’clock a light drizzle started falling. I could see it was falling as snow up on Geitesvingen.

At eleven o’clock it started falling as snow in the village too.

At twelve o’clock the head of sales walked in through the door.

‘Ready for all eventualities as usual,’ he grinned, once I had finished serving a customer who headed out with one of my shovels in his hand.

‘We live in Norway,’ I said.

‘We’ve got an offer for you,’ he said, and I supposed it was yet another sales campaign he was about to force onto us. Nothing at all wrong with the campaigns, eight out of ten of them work well, so the people at head office know their business. But sometimes those countrywide special offers of a parasol and volleyball or some exotic type of Spanish sausage with a Pepsi Max are a little bit too generalised. Local knowledge of local needs and likes matters too.

‘You’re going to get a call from one of the bosses,’ said the head of sales.

‘Oh?’

‘One of the bigger stations down in Sørlandet is struggling a bit. Good location with modern facilities, but the station boss hasn’t managed to get things moving down there. He doesn’t follow up on the campaigns, doesn’t report when and how he should, his staff aren’t motivated, and… well, you know. They need someone who can turn it round. It’s not part of my job, I’m just giving you a heads-up since I’m the one who suggested they have a word with you.’ He spread his arms as if to say it was nothing, from which I realised he was expecting an expansive display of gratitude.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

He smiled, waiting. Maybe he thought I owed it to him to tell him what my answer would be.

‘That’s pretty sudden,’ I said. ‘I’ll hear what they have to say and give it some thought.’

‘You’ll give it some thought?’ The head of sales laughed. ‘This is something you should be giving a lot of thought to. An offer like this doesn’t just mean more money, Roy, it’s a chance to show what you can do on the big stage.’

If he was trying to get me take the job so he would look like some kind of small-town kingmaker he’d made a bad choice of metaphor, as people say. But of course, he wasn’t to know that the mere thought of appearing on any stage, big or small, was enough to make my palms sweat.

‘There will be thinking,’ I said. ‘How about a cheeseburger campaign? What d’you think?’

At one o’clock Julie came in.

There was no one in the station and she came straight up and kissed me on the cheek. Deliberately, kept her lips soft, left them there a little too long. I don’t know what perfume she had on, only that there was too much of it.

‘Yes, and?’ I said as she let me go and looked up at me.

‘Just had to try out my new lipstick,’ she said, wiping my cheek. ‘I’m meeting Alex after work.’

‘Granada-Alex? You’re checking how much lipstick is left after a kiss?

‘No, how much feeling you lose in the lips with lipstick. Like you men and condoms, more or less, right?’

I didn’t answer. This was a conversation I didn’t want to be having.

‘Alex is actually quite sweet,’ said Julie. She put her head on one side and studied me. ‘Maybe we’ll do more than just kiss.’

‘Lucky Alex,’ I said as I pulled on my jacket. ‘You going to be all right alone?’

‘Alone?’ I saw the disappointment in her face. ‘Aren’t we going to—’

‘Sure, and I’ll be back in an hour at most. OK?’

The disappointment vanished. Then a wrinkle appeared in her forehead. ‘The shops are closed. Is it a woman?’

I smiled. ‘Call if there’s anything.’

I drove through the village and then turned in along Lake Budal. The snow was gone the moment it hit the road and the fields down here, but I could see it lying higher up on the hills. I looked at my watch. The chances of finding an unemployed roofer at home and on his own at one o’clock on a normal working day should be pretty high. I yawned. Had slept badly. Lain awake listening out for sounds from their bedroom. There were none, which made it almost worse, since it made me listen out even more intently, made me feel tense.

Driving up to the roofer’s I noticed there was at least a hundred metres of cultivated land between his white house and the nearest neighbour.

Anton Moe had probably heard and seen the car coming. He opened the door seconds after I rang the bell, his wispy hair blowing about in the wind. He looked at me quizzically.

‘Can I come in?’ I asked.

Moe hesitated, maybe thinking up some excuse to say no, then stepped aside to let me in.

‘Keep your shoes on,’ he said.

We sat down opposite each other at the kitchen table. On the wall above were a couple of framed embroideries with verses from the Bible and a cross. He could see that I had noticed the full pot of coffee standing on the worktop.

‘Some coffee?’

‘No thanks.’

‘If you’re looking for people to invest in your brother’s hotel I can save you the bother. Not much cash flowing here at the moment.’ Moe smiled sheepishly.

‘It’s about your daughter.’

‘Oh yeah?’

I looked at a little hammer lying on the windowsill. ‘She’s sixteen years old and she attends Årtun secondary school, right?’

‘That’s right.’

There was an inscription on the hammer. Roofer of the Year 2017.

‘I want her to move away and start at Notodden secondary,’ I said.

Moe looked at me in amazement. ‘Why is that?’

‘The courses they offer there are more oriented to the future.’

He looked at me. ‘What exactly do you mean, Opgard?’

‘I mean that that’s what you should say to Natalie when you tell her why you’re sending her there, that the courses are more oriented towards the future.’

‘Notodden? It’s two hours’ drive away.’

His face showed nothing, but I guess it was dawning on him. ‘It’s good of you to concern yourself with Natalie’s welfare, Opgard, but I think Årtun is fine. She’s in her second year there already. Notodden is a big place, and bad things can happen in big places, you know.’

I coughed. ‘What I mean is, Notodden is best for all concerned.’

‘All?’

I took a deep breath. ‘Your daughter can go to bed each night without worrying about whether her father will be coming in to fuck her. You can go to bed without degrading your daughter, your family and yourself night after night, so that at some point in the future you might perhaps all be able to forget about it and pretend it never happened.’

Anton Moe stared at me, his face blazing, his eyes looking as though they were about to explode. ‘What are you talking about, Opgard? Are you drunk?’

‘I’m talking about shame,’ I said. ‘The sum total of shame in your family. Because everyone knows and no one’s done anything, everyone thinks part of the blame is on them, that it’s all lost already so there’s nothing to lose by allowing it to continue. Because when all is lost, one thing at least remains. The family. Each other.’

‘You’re sick, man!’ He had raised his voice, and yet it sounded thinner and diminished. He stood up. ‘I think you better leave now, Opgard.’

I stayed seated. ‘I can go into your daughter’s bedroom, pull off the sheet and hand it over to the sheriff to check for sperm stains and whether they’re yours. You won’t be able to stop me, but I’m guessing that won’t matter, because your daughter won’t help the police by being a witness against you, she’ll want to help her father. Always, no matter what. So the only way to put a stop to this is…’ I paused, looked up, caught his eyes. ‘Because we all want to put a stop to this, don’t we?’

He didn’t respond, just stood staring at me, a cold, dead look in his eyes.

‘This is another way; I’ll kill you if Natalie doesn’t move to Notodden. She’ll spend her weekends there and you will not visit her. Her mother, yes, but not you. Not one single visit. When Natalie is at home for Christmas you will invite your own parents or your in-laws to celebrate and stay with you.’ I smoothed my hand over a crease in the gingham check cloth on the table. ‘Questions?’

A fly buzzed and buzzed against the windowpane.

‘How would you propose killing me?’

‘By smiting you, I was thinking. That’s probably appropriately…’ I smacked my lips. Mind games. ‘…appropriately biblical?’

‘Well, you certainly had a reputation for hitting people.’

‘Are we agreed, Moe?’

‘You see that Bible verse up there, Opgard?’ He pointed to one of the embroideries above us and I spelled my way through its convoluted lettering. The lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.

I heard a soft thump and howled as the pain ran up my arm from my right hand. Moe was holding the Roofer of the Year hammer aloft ready to bring it down again and I just about managed to withdraw my left hand before the hammer struck the table. My right hand was so painful that I felt dizzy as I rose, but I used my speed to throw a left uppercut. I struck his chin, but with the table between us the angle was too great for me to get enough power in the blow. He swung the hammer at my head and I ducked and stepped away. He came rushing towards me, the table legs scraped and chairs went flying. I feinted, he fell for it and my left fist met his nose. He howled, swung the hammer again. He might have been Roofer of the Year back in 2017, but he messed up this time. I moved in close to his body while he was still off balance and used my left to deliver three quick punches to his right kidney. I heard him gasp with pain and when I followed up by lifting my foot and bringing it down hard on his knee I felt something snap and give and I knew that he was finished. He collapsed to the floor, then whipped round on the grey linoleum and fastened his arms around my legs. I tried to stay upright by holding on to the cooker with my right hand, but realised Moe’s hammer must have damaged something there, I couldn’t get a purchase. I fell onto my back and moments later Moe was on top of me, his knees holding my arms and the handle of the hammer pressed across my larynx. In vain I gasped for air, could feel myself blacking out. His head was right next to mine and he hissed into my ear:

‘Who do you think you are, coming into my house, threatening me and mine? I’ll tell you who you are, you filthy mountaintop heathen.’

He gave a low laugh and leaned forward so that the weight of his body pressed the last of the air out of my lungs and I felt the onset of a delicious dizziness, like the moment before you fall asleep in the back seat, entangled in the soft, sleeping body of your little brother, you see stars in the sky through the rear window and your parents are talking and laughing in low voices in front of you. And you let go, let yourself tumble backwards into yourself. I could feel coffee and cigarette breath on my face, and spittle.

‘You’re a bow-legged, dyslexic, goat-fucking queer,’ Moe hissed.

Like that, I thought. That’s the way he talks to her.

I tensed my stomach muscles, made a bridge of my back, tensed again and then swung. Hit something, usually it would be the nose, but whatever it was, it was enough to relieve the pressure on my larynx for a moment and I was able to drag enough air into my lungs to fill the rest of my musculature with oxygen. I jerked my left hand free of his knee and hit him hard in the ear. He lost his balance, I tipped him off me and hit out again with my left. And again. And again.

By the time I was done a little stream of blood was running from Moe’s nose as he crouched there in a foetal position on the linoleum. The blood stopped as it reached the seat of one of the upended chairs.

I leaned over him, and I don’t know whether he heard me, but anyway I whispered it into his bloodied ear:

‘I am not fucking bow-legged.’

‘The bad news is that the inner joint is probably shattered,’ said Stanley Spind from behind his desk. ‘The good news is that your blood alcohol test from the other day gave a reading of zero.’

‘Shattered?’ I said and looked down at my middle finger. It was sticking out at a strange angle and had swollen to twice its normal size. The skin was split, and where it wasn’t it had assumed a darkly livid colour that made me think of the plague. ‘You sure?’

‘Yes. But I’ll write you a referral so you can have it X-rayed at the hospital in town.’

‘Why should I, if you’re so sure?’

Stanley shrugged. ‘You’ll probably need an operation.’

‘And if I don’t…?’

‘Then I can guarantee you’ll never be able to move that finger again.’

‘And with the operation?’

‘In all probability you’ll never be able to move that finger again.’

I looked at the finger. Not good. But obviously much worse if I’d still been working as a mechanic.

‘Thanks,’ I said and stood up.

‘Wait, we’re not finished,’ said Stanley, moving his roller chair over to a bench with a paper sheet covering it. ‘Sit here. That finger is out of position, we need to repone it.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Straighten it.’

‘Sounds painful.’

‘You’ll have a local anaesthetic.’

‘Still sounds painful.’

Stanley gave a crooked smile.

‘On a scale of one to ten?’ I asked.

‘A stiff eight,’ said Stanley.

I smiled back at him.

After he’d given me the injection he told me it would take a few minutes for the injection to take effect. We sat in silence, something which he seemed more comfortable with than me. The silence went on building until it became deafening, and finally I pointed to the headphones on his desk and asked what he liked to listen to.

‘Audio books,’ he said. ‘Anything by Chuck Palahniuk. Have you seen Fight Club?’

‘No. What’s so good about him?’

‘I didn’t say he was that good.’ Stanley smiled. ‘But he thinks like me. And manages to express it. Are you ready?’

‘Palahniuk,’ I repeated and held out my hand. His gaze met mine.

‘Just for the record, I don’t buy that explanation about slipping on the fresh snow and trying to break your fall,’ said Stanley.

‘OK,’ I said.

I could feel him place a warm hand around my finger. And there was me hoping it would be completely anaesthetised.

‘And speaking of Fight Club,’ he said as he started pulling, ‘it looks to me as though you’ve come straight from a club meeting.’

A stiff eight was no exaggeration.

On my way out of the surgery I passed Mari Aas in the waiting room.

‘Hi, Roy,’ she said. She was smiling that superior smile of hers, but I could see she was blushing. This business of using a person’s name when you say hello was something she and Carl had started doing when they were going out together. Carl had read about a research project which concluded that people’s positive response increased by forty per cent without their realising it when researchers used their names in addressing them. I hadn’t been part of that research project.

‘Hi,’ I said, keeping my hand behind my back. ‘Early for snow.’ See, that’s the way you say hello to someone else from your village.

Back in the car I wondered how I was going to turn on the ignition without using the bandaged and throbbing finger, and why Mari had blushed back there in the surgery. Was there something wrong with her she was ashamed of? Or was she ashamed of the fact that there was anything at all wrong with her? Because Mari wasn’t a blusher. When she and Carl were together, I was the one who blushed if she appeared unexpectedly in front of me. Although actually, yes, I had seen her blush a couple of times. Once was after Carl had bought a necklace for her birthday. Even though it wasn’t flashy, Mari knew Carl was completely penniless and forced him to admit that he had stolen two hundred kroner from the drawer in Uncle Bernard’s desk. I knew about it of course, and when Uncle Bernard complimented Mari on her nice necklace, I’d seen Mari blush so fiercely I was afraid she might burst a blood vessel. Maybe she was the same as me in that regard, that stuff like that – a minor theft, a trivial rejection – you never get over. They’re like lumps in the body that get encapsulated but can still ache on cold days, and some nights suddenly begin to throb. You can be a hundred years old and still feel the blush of shame washing up into your cheeks.

Julie said she felt sorry for me, that Dr Spind should have given me some stronger painkiller, and that business about Alex was just something she’d made up, she wasn’t really meeting anyone and certainly not going to let anyone kiss her. I only half listened. My hand was throbbing and I should have gone home, but I knew that all I could expect there was more pain.

Julie leaned into me as she studied my bandaged finger with a concerned expression on her face. I could feel her soft chest against my upper arm and sweet, bubblegum breath on my face. Her mouth was so close to my ear that her chewing sounds were like a cow grazing in a bog.

‘You didn’t start to feel just a little jealous?’ she whispered with all the sly innocence of which a seventeen-year-old is capable.

‘Start to?’ I said. ‘Listen, I’ve been jealous since I was five years old.’

She laughed as though I was joking, and I forced a smile to confirm that I was.

17

MAYBE I’D BEEN JEALOUS OF Carl since the day of his birth. Maybe even before that, maybe when I saw my mother tenderly stroking her swollen stomach and saying that a brother was on the way. But I was five years old the first time I can remember being confronted by jealousy, when someone gave a name to this painful, jabbing sensation. ‘Don’t be jealous of your little brother.’ I think it was Mum who said that, with Carl sitting on her lap. He’d been sitting there a long time. Mum said later that Carl was given more love because he needed more love. Maybe so, but she didn’t say the other thing she could have said, that Carl was easier to love.

And I was the one who loved him most of all.

That’s why I was jealous not just of the unconditional love people around him showed him, but also of those Carl showed love for. Like Dog.

Like the boy whose family rented a cabin here one summer, who was as good-looking as Carl, and whom Carl hung out with morning, noon and night, while I counted the days until the summer was over.

Like Mari.

During the first months they were together I used to fantasise about Mari having an accident, and that I was the one who had to comfort Carl. I don’t know exactly when it was that jealousy turned into love, or if it ever did, maybe the two feelings existed side by side, but at any rate it was love that drowned everything else out. It was like some terrible sickness. I couldn’t eat, sleep or concentrate on a normal conversation.

I both dreaded and longed for her visits to see Carl, blushed when she gave me a hug or suddenly spoke to me without any warning or looked at me. Naturally I felt deeply ashamed of my feelings, of not being able to let go of them and being grateful for any small crumbs, of sitting in the same room as them, trying to justify my presence by pretending to be what I wasn’t, such as amusing, or interesting. In the end I found my role. It was to be the silent one, the one who listened, who laughed at Carl’s jokes or nodded slowly at something Mari had read, or heard her father, the chairman, say. I drove them to parties where Carl got drunk and Mari did what she could to make sure he behaved. When Mari asked if I thought it was boring always to be sober I said it was fine, I liked driving cars better than drinking alcohol, and sometimes Carl needed two to look out for him, right? She smiled and didn’t ask me again. I think she understood. I think everyone understood. Everyone but Carl.

‘Of course Roy must come with us!’ he would say whenever there was talk of going skiing, or a party in town at the weekend, or riding Aas’s old nags. He didn’t give a reason, his happy, open face was argument enough. It said that the world was a good place, with only good people living in it, and everyone should be happy just to be there.

Naturally, I never made a move, as people say. I wasn’t stupid enough to think that Mari saw in me anything other than a rather silent but self-sacrificing big brother who was always ready to help them out.

But then one Saturday evening at the village hall Grete came over and told me Mari was in love with me. Carl was in bed at home with the flu I’d had the week before, so I had no driving duties and I’d drunk some of the home brew Erik Nerell always brought with him. Grete was drunk too, and it was dancing in her eyes, that evil witch’s dance. And I knew she was just shit-stirring, trying to fuck things up a bit, because I knew her and I’d seen the way she looked at Carl. All the same, it was like when Armand the preacher in his dance-band Swedish accent boomed out that our redeemer liveth, and there is life after death. If someone says something that is clearly unlikely but that you desperately want to hear, there’s a small part of you – the weak part – that chooses to believe it.

I saw Mari standing over by the entrance. She was talking to a boy, not someone from the village, because boys from round here were too afraid of Mari to come on to her. Not because she was Carl’s girl, but because they knew she was smarter than them, looked down on them, and that when she spurned them it would be very obvious, and in front of everyone, since everyone in Årtun kept half an eye on anything the daughter of the council chairman did.

But it was OK for me, Carl’s brother, to approach her. OK for me and her at least.

‘Hi, Roy.’ She smiled. ‘This is Otto. He’s studying political science in Oslo. He thinks I should do the same.’

I looked at Otto. He lifted a beer bottle to his lips and was looking off in another direction, probably not wanting me to join the conversation, wanting me to get lost as quickly as possible. I had to struggle not to thump the bottom of his bottle. I concentrated on Mari. I wet my lips.

‘Shall we dance?’

She looked at me in mildly amused surprise. ‘But you don’t dance, Roy.’

I shrugged. ‘I can learn.’ I was obviously drunker than I had thought.

Mari laughed loudly and shook her head. ‘Not from me. I need a dancing teacher myself.’

‘I can help there,’ said Otto. ‘I actually teach swing in my spare time.’

‘Yes please!’ said Mari. She gave him that radiant smile she could turn on just like that, the one that made you feel like you were the only other person in the world. ‘As long as you’re not afraid of people laughing.’

Otto smiled. ‘Oh, I don’t think it’ll look that bad,’ he said, putting his beer bottle down on the step and making me wish I’d shoved it into his mouth when I had the chance.

‘Now that’s what I call a brave man,’ said Mari, laying a hand on his shoulder. ‘Is that OK with you, Roy?’

‘Yeah, sure,’ I said, looking round for a wall I could butt my head against.

‘So two brave men then,’ said Mari, putting her other hand on my shoulder. ‘Teacher and pupil, I’m going to enjoy seeing the two of you on the dance floor together.’

And with that she left, and it was a couple of seconds before I understood what had happened. This Otto guy and me were left standing there looking at each other.

‘Would you rather fight?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ he said. He rolled his eyes, picked up his beer bottle and moved off.

Fair enough, I was too drunk anyway, but the headache and hangover guilt when I woke up next morning were worse than any beating Otto could have given me. Carl coughed and laughed and coughed again when I told him what had happened, leaving out the bit about what Grete had said.

‘You are absolutely the fucking tops! You’ll even dance to keep those other jerks away from your brother’s girl.’

I grunted. ‘Only with Mari, not with that Otto guy.’

‘All the same, let me give you a big kiss!’

I pushed him off. ‘No thanks – don’t want flu again.’

I didn’t have an especially guilty conscience about not telling Carl how I felt about Mari. Mostly I was amazed he hadn’t realised it himself. I could have told him everything. I could have, and he would have understood. At any rate said he understood. Put his head on one side, given me a thoughtful look and said things like that happen, things like that pass. I knew that, and that was why I kept my mouth shut and waited for it to pass. I never asked Mari to dance again, neither metaphorically nor literally.

But Mari asked me.

It happened a few months after Grete had told Mari about her and Carl having it away, and Mari had dumped Carl. Carl had gone to Minnesota to study, and I was living alone on the farm. One day there was a knock on the door. It was Mari. She gave me a hug, pushing her breasts against my chest, wouldn’t let me go and asked if I wanted to sleep with her. ‘Will you sleep with me?’ were the words she whispered in my ear. And then added ‘Roy’. Hardly because of the research that shows that using a person’s name puts them in a more receptive frame of mind, but more to emphasise that it was me, Roy, she meant.

‘I know you want to,’ she said when she noticed my hesitation. ‘I’ve known it all along, Roy.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re mistaken.’

‘Don’t lie,’ she said, slipping her hand down between us.

I pulled myself away from her. Of course I knew why she’d come. Even though she was the one who had broken with Carl, she was the one who felt scorned. Maybe she didn’t even really want to break up but felt she had no choice. Because of course Mari Aas, the chairman’s daughter, couldn’t live with the fact that the son of a mountain farmer had been unfaithful to her, not when Grete had made sure half the village knew about it. But just to send Carl packing, as people say, wasn’t enough. The balance had to be restored. The fact that two months had passed indicated that she’d reached her decision reluctantly. In other words, if we went to bed together now it wouldn’t be a case of me exploiting a woman in a vulnerable situation after a break-up; she would be the one exploiting a brother who had just been abandoned by the person he loved most of all.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let me help you.’

I shook my head. ‘It isn’t you, Mari.’

She stopped in the middle of the floor and stared at me in disbelief. ‘So then it’s true?’

‘What’s true?’

‘What people say.’

‘Damned if I know what they say.’

‘That you’re not interested in girls. That the only things on your mind are…’ She paused. Pretended to be looking for the right words. And then Mari Aas found them: ‘…are cars and birds,’ she said.

‘I mean that the problem isn’t you, Mari. It’s Carl. I just don’t think it would be right.’

‘Correct. It wouldn’t be.’

Now I saw it too, that condescending contempt people down in the village thought she viewed them with. But there was something else, as though she knew something she wasn’t supposed to know. What had Carl said?

‘Better find some other way to take your revenge,’ I said. ‘Ask Grete for advice. She’s good on stuff like that.’

And then Mari blushed, and this time she really was lost for words. She marched out and got into her car, gravel flying behind her as she sped down towards Geitesvingen.

When I saw her in town a few days later she blushed again and pretended not to see me. It happened several times – in a village like ours it’s impossible not to bump into people. But time passed, Mari went to Oslo and studied political science, and when she came back we were able to speak to each other almost like before. Almost. Because we had lost each other. She knew what I knew, that, for her, this was like a cancerous lump inside her body: not that I had rejected her, but that I had seen her. Seen her naked. Naked and ugly.

As for cancerous lumps of my own, there was probably still one there with Mari’s name on, but it had stopped growing. I’d waited out that crush. It’s funny, but I stopped being in love with Mari at almost exactly the same time it was over between her and Carl.

18

TWO DAYS AFTER MY VISIT to Moe the roofer, head office called and offered me the station down in Sørlandet. They sounded disappointed when I said no thanks. They asked for a reason, so I gave them one. I said the station I was running faced some interesting challenges now that the main highway was being rerouted, and that I looked forward to getting to grips with them. They sounded impressed and said it was a pity, they really believed I was the man they needed down there.

Later that day Kurt Olsen called in at the station.

He stood, legs apart, in front of the counter, drew his index finger and thumb over his Easy Rider moustache and waited until I had finished serving a customer and the shop was empty.

‘Anton Moe has reported you for grievous bodily harm.’

‘That’s a cute choice of phrase,’ I said.

‘Maybe,’ said Olsen. ‘He told me about the accusations you made, and I’ve had a chat with Natalie. She confirms that her father has never touched her.’

‘What did you expect? That she’d say yes, since you ask, my father is actually screwing me?’

‘If it was a question of rape, then I don’t doubt—’

‘Jesus, I never said it was rape. Not technically. But it’s rape all the same, you must surely see that.’

‘No.’

‘Maybe she thinks she didn’t resist enough, that she should have known it was wrong, even if she was only young when it started.’

‘Steady on now, you don’t know—’

‘Listen: kids think everything their parents do is right, OK, but she remembers too that she was told to keep it secret. So perhaps some part of her understood that it wasn’t right? And because she’s been party to the secrecy, because loyalty to the family comes before loyalty to God and the sheriff, she takes some of the blame herself. When she turns sixteen maybe it makes the burden easier to bear if she persuades herself that she was a willing participant.’

Olsen stroked his moustache. ‘Sounds like you’ve just done a course in social studies and been living over at Moe’s while you did it.’

I didn’t answer.

He sighed. ‘I can’t force a sixteen-year-old to give evidence against her father, you must realise that. On the other hand she’s old enough to take responsibility for whatever she says.’

‘So what you’re saying is, you choose to look the other way because it could be consensual and the girl is no longer legally a minor?’

‘No!’ Kurt Olsen looked round to make certain we were still alone and lowered his voice again. ‘Incest in the direct line of descent is punishable by law, regardless. Moe risks six years in jail even if the girl was thirty and it was all a hundred per cent consensual; but how can I prove anything when no one talks? All that happens if I arrest the father is a scandal that will ruin the lives of all those involved. There would be a massive investment of resources in something that wouldn’t lead to a conviction. Plus the village name would be dragged through the mud in the national newspapers.’

You forgot to add that you personally would end up with a very black mark against your name, I thought. But when I looked at Olsen I could see that the despair in his face and voice were genuine.

‘So what can you do?’ he sighed, opening his arms wide.

‘Make sure the girl gets away from her father,’ I said. ‘By moving to Notodden, for example.’

He turned his gaze away from mine. Fastened it on the newspaper stand, as though there was something of interest there. Nodded slowly.

‘In any case, he’s lodged a complaint against you, and I need to do something about it, you realise that? The maximum penalty is four years.’

‘Four years?’

‘His jaw is broken in two places and he risks permanently impaired hearing in one ear.’

‘Then he’s still got one left. Whisper to him in his good ear that if he drops the summons then at least this business with his daughter won’t become public knowledge. I know, and you know, and he knows that the only reason he’s taking out this summons is that if he didn’t it would look like there was something in what I accuse him of.’

‘I understand your logic, Roy, but as the sheriff I can’t turn a blind eye to the fact that you’ve incapacitated another man.’

I shrugged. ‘Self-defence. He attacked me with the hammer before I even touched him.’

Olsen gave a short laugh that never reached his eyes. ‘And how are you going to get me to believe that? That a Pentecostalist who’s never been in trouble before attacks Roy Calvin Opgard, a guy known throughout the village as someone who likes nothing better than a punch-up?’

‘By using your head and your eyes.’ I placed my hands flat on the counter.

He stared. ‘And?’

‘I am right-handed. Everyone I’ve ever had a fight with will tell you, I knocked them out with my right. How come there isn’t a scrap of skin on the knuckles of my left, while my right is completely untouched apart from that finger? Explain to Moe how this whole thing is going to look, not just his daughter but the grievous bodily harm, when it emerges that he was the one who attacked me.’

Olsen stroked his moustache intently. Gave a nod. ‘I’ll have a word with him.’

‘Thank you.’

He raised his head and fixed me with his gaze. I saw a flash of anger there. As though with my thank you I was making fun of him. That he wasn’t doing it for my sake but his own. Maybe for Natalie’s and the village’s too, but at any rate, not for me.

‘The snow won’t last long,’ he said.

‘No?’ I said casually.

‘The forecast is for mild weather next week.’

The council meeting started at five o’clock. Before he left, Carl, Shannon and I ate a meal of mountain trout with potatoes, cucumber salad and sour cream which I served in the dining room.

‘You’re a good cook,’ said Shannon as she cleared the table.

‘Thanks, but that’s actually about as simple as it gets,’ I said, listening to the throb of the Cadillac’s engine as it faded away.

We sat in the living room where I served our coffees.

‘The hotel is first up on the agenda,’ I said with a glance at the clock. ‘So he’ll probably be in action pretty soon. We’ll just have to cross our fingers and hope he manages to klare brasene.’

‘Klare brasene?’ said Shannon.

‘You haven’t heard that phrase? It means overcome the difficulties.’

‘What are braser?’

‘No idea. Something maritime. Not my scene.’

‘We must have some wine.’ Shannon went out to the kitchen and returned with two glasses and a bottle of sparkling wine that Carl had kept in the fridge to cool.

‘So, Roy, what is your scene?’

‘My scene?’ I said, watching as she opened the bottle. ‘I want my own service station and… well, I guess that’s actually about it.’

‘Wife? Kids?’

‘If that’s what happens then OK.’

‘Why have you never had a girlfriend?’

I shrugged. ‘I guess I just don’t have what it takes.’

‘You mean you don’t think you’re attractive? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘I was sort of half joking, but yes.’

‘Well then, let me tell you that’s not true, Roy. I’m not saying that because I feel sorry for you, but because it’s a fact.’

‘A fact?’ I took the glass she offered me. ‘Aren’t things like that subjective?’

‘Some things are subjective. And the sum attractiveness of a man is probably more in the eye of the woman doing the looking than is the case the other way round.’

‘You think that’s unfair?’

‘The man is maybe freer because less importance is attached to his appearance, but then more importance is attached to his social status. When women complain about being judged on their looks, men ought to complain about the pressures of status.’

‘And if you possess neither beauty nor social status?’

Shannon had kicked off her shoes and drawn her feet up onto the chair. She took a long drink of wine. Seemed to be enjoying herself.

‘Just like beauty, status is measured using differing weights and differing scales,’ she said. ‘A dirt-poor painter who’s a genius might have a whole harem of women. Women are attracted to resourceful men, men who stand out from the crowd. If you possess neither beauty nor status then you have to compensate by having charm, or strength of character, humour or some other quality.’

I laughed. ‘And that’s where I score, is that what you think?’

‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘Cheers.’

‘Cheers and thanksafuckingmillion,’ I said and raised my glass. The tiny bubbles fizzed and whispered something to me, though I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

‘You’re welcome.’

‘So with Carl, what was it you fell for? The looks, the status or the charm?’ I said, noticing to my surprise that my glass was almost empty.

‘The insecurity,’ she said. ‘The kindness. That’s where Carl’s beauty lies.’

I raised my right hand to wag a warning index finger but being unable to bend the bandaged middle finger had to use my left instead. ‘You can’t advance that kind of Darwinian theory of reproduction and at the same time claim to be an exception to it. Insecurity and kindness won’t do.’

She smiled and replenished our glasses. ‘You’re right, of course, but that’s what it felt like. I know my rational animal brain must have been looking for someone to father my offspring, but what my scatterbrained humanity saw and fell in love with was this vulnerable beauty of a man.’

I shook my head. ‘Appearance, status or other compensatory qualities?’

‘Let me see,’ said Shannon, holding up her glass to the light from the table lamp. ‘Appearance.’

I said nothing but nodded and thought of Carl and Grete in the woods. The ominous rubbing of her jacket before it tore. There was another sound there too. A squishing sound. Like a cow in a bog. A soft breast. Julie. I forced the thought away.

‘Of course beauty isn’t an absolute quality,’ said Shannon. ‘It’s what we, each of us as individuals, say it is. Beauty is always in a context, it’s in relation to our previous experiences, everything we’ve sensed, learned and put together. People in countries all over the world have a tendency to think their own national anthem just happens to be the best in the world, that their mothers are the best cooks, that the most beautiful girl in town is also the most beautiful on the planet, and so on. The first time you come across music that’s new and strange you won’t like it. That’s to say, if it’s really strange. When people claim to like or even love music that’s completely new to them, it’s because they like the idea of the exotic, it’s stimulating, and what’s more it gives them the feeling of possessing a sensitivity and a cosmic understanding that is superior to their neighbour’s. But what they really like is what they unconsciously recognise. In the course of time that which was once new becomes a part of their experiential basis, and the conditionally learned, the indoctrination into what is lovely and what is beautiful, a part of their aesthetic sense. Early in the twentieth century American films began teaching people all over the world to find beauty in white film stars. And in time black too. Over the last fifty years Asian films have done the same for their stars. Although it’s like music, their beauty has to be something the public recognise, an Asian mustn’t be too Asiatic, but have a similarity to an established idea of beauty, an ideal which is still white. Seen from that perspective, the word sense when used of aesthetics is, at best, imprecise. We are born with vision and hearing, but in aesthetics we all start from a clean sheet. We—’

She stopped abruptly. Smiled fleetingly and raised the wine glass to her lips, as though realising she was lecturing to an audience that was probably not interested. We sat a while in silence. I coughed.

‘I read somewhere that everyone, even the most isolated tribes, like symmetry in a face. Doesn’t that suggest that some things are congenital?’

Shannon looked at me. A smile glided across her face and she leaned forward in her chair.

‘Maybe. On the other hand, the rules governing symmetry are so simple and strict that it’s not surprising we share the taste for it all over the world. The same way belief in a higher power is something that’s easy to turn to, which makes it universal but not congenital.’

‘So if I was to say that I think you’re pretty?’ The words just slipped out of me.

At first she looked surprised, then she pointed to her droopy eye, and when she spoke now her voice wasn’t warm and dark, but had a harsh, metallic ring to it. ‘Then it’s either a lie or you’ve failed to comprehend the most elementary principles behind the idea of beauty.’

I realised I had crossed some kind of line. ‘So then there are principles?’ I said, trying get back over on the right side again.

She gave me a look as though trying to decide whether to let me get away with it or not. ‘Symmetry,’ she said at last. ‘The golden ratio. Shapes that imitate nature. Complementary colours. Harmonising notes.’

I nodded, relieved that the conversation was back on the rails again but knowing I’d have a hard time forgiving myself for that slip.

‘Or in architecture, where you have functional shapes,’ she went on. ‘Which are actually the same as shapes that imitate nature. The hexagonal cells in a beehive. The beaver’s regulatory dam. The fox’s network of tunnels. The woodpecker’s hole of a nest which becomes a home for other birds. None of these are built to be beautiful, and yet they are. A house that’s good to live in is beautiful. It’s actually as simple as that.’

‘How about a service station?’

‘That can also be beautiful, provided its function is something we regard as praiseworthy.’

‘So then a gallows…?’

Shannon smiled. ‘…can be beautiful as long as the death penalty is regarded as necessary.’

‘Wouldn’t you have to hate the condemned person to think like that?’

Shannon licked her lips, as though testing the notion. ‘I think it would be enough to find it necessary.’

‘But a Cadillac is beautiful,’ I said, pouring more wine. ‘Even though compared with modern cars its shape isn’t especially functional.’

‘It has lines that imitate nature, it looks as if it was built to fly like an eagle, bare its teeth like a hyena, glide through the water like a shark. It looks as though it’s aerodynamic and has room for a rocket engine that could launch us into outer space.’

‘But the form lies about the function, and we know it. But we still find it beautiful.’

‘Well, even atheists can find churches beautiful. But believers probably find them even more beautiful because they’re associated with everlasting life, the same way the female body affects a man who wants to pass on his own genes. Without his being aware of it a man’s desire for a female body will be slightly less if he knows that she is not fertile.’

‘You think so?’

‘We can test it out.’

‘How?’

She smiled weakly. ‘I’ve got endometriosis.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a condition in which cells similar to those in the layer of tissue that normally covers the inside of the uterus grow outside it. It means I’m unlikely ever to have children. You agree that an awareness of something lacking in the content makes the exterior a little less attractive?’

I looked at her. ‘No.’

She smiled. ‘That’s your superficial, conscious self answering. Let your unconscious chew over the information for a while.’

Maybe it was the wine that coloured her usually snow-white cheeks. I was on the point of answering when she interrupted with a peal of laughter.

‘Anyway, you’re my brother-in-law so not very suitable as a guinea pig.’

I nodded. Then I got up and crossed to the CD player. Put on J. J. Cale’s Naturally.

We listened to the album in silence, and when it was over, Shannon asked me to play the whole thing again from the start.

The door opened in the middle of ‘Don’t Go to Strangers’ and there on the threshold stood Carl. He had a serious, resigned look on his face. He nodded in the direction of the bottle of sparkling wine.

‘Why did you open that?’ he asked in a subdued voice.

‘Because we knew you would persuade the council that what this place needs is a hotel,’ said Shannon, raising her glass. ‘That they’ll allow you to build as many cabins as you ask for. We’re celebrating in advance.’

‘Do I look as though that’s what happened?’ he said, staring gloomily at us.

‘What you look like is a very bad actor,’ said Shannon. She took a drink. ‘Get yourself a glass, sweetie.’

Carl’s mask dropped. He gave a loud laugh and came towards us with his arms outspread. ‘Only one vote against. They loved it!’

A halo of enthusiasm seemed to hover over Carl as he drank up most of what was left of the sparkling wine and gave a vivid description of events at the meeting.

‘They lapped it up, every word. Know what one of them said? “One of our mantras in the Left Party is that everything can be done better; but today, he said, nothing could have been done better.” They agreed to the zoning plans on the spot, so now we have our cabins.’ He pointed to the window. ‘After the meeting Willumsen came over to me, said he’d been sitting on the public bench and congratulated me not just for making me and my family rich but for turning the farmland of every villager into nothing less than an oilfield. He said how much he regretted he didn’t own even more of the mountain than he did, and on the spot he offered us three million for our land.’

‘And what did you say?’ I asked.

‘That maybe that was double what the land was worth yesterday, but that now the price had gone up tenfold. No, fifty-fold! Cheers!’

Shannon and I raised our empty glasses.

‘What about the hotel?’ asked Shannon.

‘They loved it. Loved it. The changes they asked for were minimal.’

‘Changes?’ The light brow over her right eye rose.

‘They thought it was a bit… sterile, I think the word was. They want a bit more Norwegian local colour. Nothing to worry about.’

‘Local colour? Meaning what?’

‘Details. They want turfed roofs, some lafted timber here and there. Two big trolls carved in wood on each side of the entrance. Stupid things like that.’

‘And?’

Carl shrugged. ‘And I said yes. It’s no big deal,’ he added in English.

‘You what?’

‘Listen, darling, it’s psychology. They need to feel they’re in control, that they aren’t just a bunch of peasants being ridden roughshod over by some loudmouth who’s just come back from abroad, understand? So we have to give them something. I acted as though these concessions were going to cost us, so now they think they’ve pushed it as far as they can and they won’t be asking for anything else.’

‘No compromises,’ said Shannon. ‘You promised.’ Her staring eye flashed.

‘Relax, darling. In a month’s time, when we turn over the first shovelful of earth, we’re going to be the ones in the driving seat, and then we’ll give them some practical explanation of why we can’t use this kitschy stuff after all. Until then we let them think they’ll get what they want.’

‘The way you let everyone think they’ll get what they want?’

There was a chill in her voice that I had never heard before.

Carl wriggled in his chair. ‘Darling, this is a time for celebrating, not—’

Shannon stood up suddenly. Marched out.

‘What was all that about?’ I asked as the front door slammed.

Carl sighed. ‘It’s her hotel.’

‘Hers?’

‘She designed it.’

‘She designed it? Not an architect?’

‘Shannon is an architect, Roy.’

‘She is?’

‘Best in Toronto if you ask me. But she has her own style and her own opinions, and unfortunately she’s a bit of a Howard Roark.’

‘A bit of a who?’

‘He’s an architect who blew his own work up because it wasn’t built exactly the way he drew it. Shannon’s going to make trouble about every little detail. If she’d been a bit more flexible she would have been not only the best but also the most in-demand architect in Toronto.’

‘Not that it matters all that fucking much but why the hell did you never say it was her who designed the hotel?’

Carl sighed. ‘The drawings are signed with the name of her firm. I figured that was enough. When the project leader allows his young, foreign wife to design the place then people are automatically going to suspect the project lacks professionality. Of course, everything’ll be fine once they see her track record, but my thinking was, we could do without all that fuss until the investors and the council were on board. Shannon agreed.’

‘OK, but why did neither of you tell me?’

Carl opened his arms wide. ‘So you wouldn’t have to go round and tell lies as well. What I mean is, it’s not lies, the name of her company is there, but… well, you understand.’

‘Not so many loose ends? Fewer loose cannons?’

‘For fuck’s sake, Roy.’ He fixed me with his sorrowing, beautiful eyes. ‘I’m juggling a million balls in the air here. I’m just trying to keep the distractions to a minimum.’

I sucked my teeth. It’s something I must have started doing recently. Dad did it and it used to annoy me. ‘OK,’ I said.

‘Good.’

‘Speaking of balls in the air and distractions, I met Mari at the surgery the other day. She blushed when she saw me.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘As if she was ashamed of something.’

‘Such as?’

‘I don’t know. But after all that stuff involving you and Grete and you going to the States, she tried to get her revenge on you.’

‘What did she do?’

I took a deep breath. ‘She came on to me.’

‘To you?’ Carl laughed uproariously. ‘And you complain about me not keeping the family informed?’

‘That’s what she wanted, for you to find out. And get hurt.’

Carl shook his head. Putting on a local accent he said: ‘Never underestimate a woman scorned. Did you go for it?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘When I saw that deep blush of shame it struck me that she’d never got her revenge, and that Mari Aas is not the type to forget, that that business is still inside her like some kind of encapsulated cyst. So I think you better watch out for her.’

‘You think she’s planning something?’

‘Or she’s already done it, something so extreme that she feels ashamed when she sees a member of our family.’

Carl rubbed his chin. ‘Like something for example that could affect our project?’

‘She might have arranged something that’s going to screw things up for you. I’m just saying.’

‘And you base this on the fact that you saw her blush as you happened to be passing by?’

‘I realise it sounds idiotic,’ I said. ‘But Mari isn’t the type to blush, we know that. She’s a self-assured lady and there’s almost nothing that embarrasses her. But she’s also a moralist. Remember that necklace you bought for her with money you nicked from Uncle Bernard?’

Carl nodded.

‘That’s what she looked like. As though she’d been party to something she knew was wrong, and it was too late to regret it.’

‘Got it,’ said Carl. ‘I’ll watch out for her.’

I went to bed early. Through the floor I could hear Carl and Shannon in the living room. Not the words, just the quarrelling. And then they fell silent. Footsteps on the stairs, the bedroom door closing. And then fucking.

I pressed the pillow over my ears and sang J. J. Cale’s ‘Don’t Go to Strangers’ inside my head.

19

THE SNOW HAD MELTED.

I stood at the kitchen window and looked out.

‘Where’s Carl?’ I asked.

‘Talking to the contractors,’ said Shannon, who was sitting on the worktop behind me reading the Os Daily. ‘They’re probably on site.’

‘Shouldn’t the architect be there too?’

She shrugged. ‘He wanted to handle it alone, he said.’

‘What does the paper say?’

‘That the council has opened the floodgates. That Os will turn into a holiday camp for rich city folk, and we’ll be the servants. That we would be better off building refugee camps for people who really need us.’

‘Jesus, is that Dan Krane saying that?’

‘It’s something sent in by a reader, but they’ve given it plenty of prominence and there’s a reference to it on the front page.’

‘What’s Krane’s editorial about?’

‘A story about a Pastor Armand. Revivalist meetings and miracle cures. That one week after he left Os with his collecting box full the people he cured were back in their wheelchairs again.’

I laughed and studied the sky above Ottertind, the mountain at the southern end of Lake Budal. It was full of contradictory signs and revealed little about the kind of weather we could expect. ‘So Krane doesn’t dare to criticise Carl directly,’ I said. ‘But he gives plenty of space to those who do.’

‘Well, anyway it doesn’t sound as if we have much to fear from that quarter,’ said Shannon.

‘Maybe not from there.’ I turned to her. ‘If you still think you can find out what Kurt Olsen’s looking for, I think now might be a good time.’

Fritt Fall was the type of bar that defines itself by the size of its market. Which in this case meant satisfying everyone’s demands. A long counter with stools for the thirsty beer drinkers, small round tables for the diners, a little dance floor with disco lights for people looking for action, a billiard table with holes in the cloth for the restless, and betting slips, coupons and a TV screen showing races for the hopeful. Who the black rooster that sometimes strutted between the tables was for I don’t know, but it didn’t bother anyone, no one bothered it, and it would neither take orders for beer nor respond when called by its name, Giovanni. But Giovanni would certainly be missed when he died and would – according to Erik Nerell – be dished up to the regulars as a slightly tough but agreeable coq au vin.

Shannon and I entered the bar at three o’clock. I saw no sign of Giovanni, just two men staring at the TV screen where horses with flowing manes were swarming round a gravel track. We sat at one of the window tables and as agreed I took out Shannon’s laptop, placed it on the table between us, stood up and walked to the bar from where Erik Nerell had been watching us since we came in, while pretending to read the Os Daily.

‘Two coffees,’ I said.

‘OK.’ He put a cup under the tap of a black Thermos and pressed the top.

‘What’s happening?’ I said.

He gave me a funny look. I nodded at his newspaper.

‘Oh, here,’ he said. ‘No. Well, actually…’ He changed the cups over. ‘No.’

Shannon had turned the laptop on by the time I returned with the coffees. I sat down beside her. The screensaver was a rather sombre-looking, rectangular and to my eyes quite ordinary-looking skyscraper which, she had explained to me, was a masterpiece, the IBM building in Chicago. She said it was designed by someone called Mies.

I looked around. ‘OK. How do you want to do this?’

‘You and I just make small talk while we’re drinking our coffee. Which by the way is disgusting, but I’m not going to pull a face because he’s looking at us.’

‘Erik?’

‘Yes. And those two over by the TV as well. Once you’ve finished your coffee, take over the laptop and act as if you’re very preoccupied by something there, use the keyboard a bit. Don’t look up and leave the rest to me.’

‘OK,’ I said and took a swig of coffee. She was right, it was chemically revolting, plain hot water would have tasted better. ‘I googled endometriosis. It says if the old way doesn’t work, you can try artificial insemination. Have you two thought about that?’

She opened one eye wide, looked furious.

‘You’re the one who said small talk,’ I said.

‘That isn’t small talk,’ she said in a low hiss. ‘That’s big talk.’

‘I could talk about service stations if you prefer,’ I said with a shrug. ‘Or the comical and humiliating problems that arise when the middle finger on your right hand is stiff.’

She smiled. Her mood changed like the weather over the 2,000-metre mark, but to be enfolded in that smile was like slipping into a warm bath.

‘I do want children,’ she said. ‘It’s what I want most of all. Not with my brain, of course, but my heart.’

She looked over my shoulder in the direction of Erik. Smiled as though her look had been returned. What if Erik didn’t know what Kurt was looking for? I wasn’t so sure any more that this was a good idea.

‘What about you?’ she asked.

‘Me?’

‘Kids.’

‘Oh Jesus, yes. Indeed. I just…’

‘Yes?’

‘I don’t know if I’d be much good as a dad.’

‘You know you would be, Roy.’

‘Well, it would have to be with a mother who could be everything I’m not at least. And who understood how much time running a service station takes.’

‘The day you become a dad maybe you’ll stop thinking the world is made up of nothing but service stations.’

‘Or skyscrapers in anodised aluminium.’

She smiled. ‘It’s time.’

Our eyes met for a moment, then I pulled the computer over, opened a Word document and started to write. I just let the words come, concentrating only on spelling them correctly. After I’d been doing that for a while I heard her get up and walk across the floor. I didn’t have to look to know that she gave her hips an extra sway. That fucking soca swing. I had my back to the counter, heard the legs of a bar stool scrape and knew she’d sat down and was chatting to Erik Nerell and that his gaze was riveted on her just the way it had been at the homecoming party. As I sat there deep in my spelling exercises someone slumped down in the chair on the other side of the table. For a moment I thought it was Shannon, back already with her mission unaccomplished, and felt a strangely paradoxical relief. But it wasn’t Shannon.

‘Hi,’ said Grete.

The first thing I noticed was that her perm was now blonde.

‘Hi,’ I said, trying to convey in that monosyllabic way that I was extremely bloody busy.

‘Well, well, pretty and flirty,’ said Grete.

My gaze automatically followed hers.

Shannon and Erik were leaning towards each other across the short end of the bar, so that we saw them in profile. Shannon laughed at something, smiled, and I saw Erik enjoying that same warm bath I had just been sitting in. And maybe it was only because Grete had primed me with that ‘pretty’, but now I actually saw it. That Shannon Alleyne Opgard was not just pretty, she was beautiful. There was something in the way she simultaneously absorbed and reflected the light. And I could not take my fucking eyes off her. Not until I heard Grete’s voice again.

‘Uh-oh.’

I turned to her. She was no longer looking at Shannon but at me.

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ she said, a sour little smile on those wormlike lips of hers. ‘Where’s Carl today?’

‘At the hotel site I should think.’

Grete shook her head, and I tried not to think how she could know.

‘Then I’ve no idea. Talking with the partners maybe.’

‘That’s probably more like it,’ she said, looking as though she was wondering whether or not to say more.

‘Didn’t know you were a Fritt Fall regular,’ I said to change the subject.

She held up a handful of coupons she must have picked up from the table below the TV on her way in. ‘For Dad,’ she said. ‘Even though he says he’s thinking of backing the hotel instead of the horses. The principle’s the same, according to him. Minimum outlay with the possibility of a big profit. Has he got that right?’

‘No outlay,’ I said. ‘Possibility of some profit, yes. But also of a hefty bill. First he should check that he can afford a worst-case scenario.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning if it all goes to hell.’

‘Oh, that.’ She slipped the coupons into her bag. ‘I think Carl does a better job of selling it than you, Roy.’ She looked up at me and smiled. ‘But then he always has done. Say hello from me. And watch out for that Barbie doll of his. Looks like she’s trying to outdo him over there.’

I turned and looked at Shannon and Erik. Both had their phones out and were entering text. When I turned back again Grete was on her way out.

I looked at the screen. Started to read what I had written. Dammit. Had I completely lost my mind? I heard the scraping of the bar stool again and hurriedly dragged the document over to the rubbish.

‘Done?’ asked Shannon.

‘Yup,’ I said, closing the laptop and standing up.

‘Well?’ I said as we sat in the Volvo.

‘I’m guessing it’s going to happen tonight,’ she said.

After driving Shannon back to the farm I headed back down to the station and relieved Markus who had asked if he could finish early.

‘Any news?’ I asked Julie.

‘Nah,’ she said and blew a gum bubble. ‘Alex is pissed off. Calling me a prick teaser. And Natalie’s going to move.’

‘Move where?’

‘To Notodden. I can understand that, nothing happens here.’

‘Absolutely nothing,’ I said and took a key from a drawer under the till. ‘I’m just going over to the workshop, OK?’

I left the garage door locked and used the office door instead. Could smell from the stale air that it was a while since I’d been in. We took cars in here to change the tyres if it was too cold out, but the grease pit had hardly been used once the workshop closed. After Carl left and I was alone on the farm I’d rigged up a little hole-in-the-wall at the rear of the place with a bed, a TV and a hotplate. I lived there during the coldest months of the winter, when the road up and the farm were deep in snow and there seemed no point in heating the house for the few hours I was alone and not at the station. I closed the doors to the car wash and showered. Never been cleaner. Went back to the repair shop and checked the mattress. Dry. The hotplate working. Even the TV worked after a little initial hesitation.

I walked into the workshop.

Stood there where we had chopped the arms, legs and head of old Olsen. I had chopped. Carl couldn’t stand to even watch, and that was fine, why should he? The tractor had remained outside with its scoop in the air for three days before I drove it into the car wash and emptied its contents and watched as they ran away smoothly through the sluice grid. Then I had hosed the scoop clean, and that was that. How did it feel to be standing back in the same place? Were there ghosts here? It was sixteen years ago. And I hadn’t felt much that night, there just hadn’t been room for it. And any ghosts there might be were down in Huken, not here.

‘Roy,’ said Julie when I returned, drawing the vowels out as though it was an extremely long name, ‘do you have a dream place where you’d really like to go?’ She flipped through a travel magazine and showed me a beach where a scantily clad young pair reclined in blistering sunshine.

‘That would have to be Notodden, I guess,’ I said.

She gawped at me. ‘What’s the furthest away place you’ve ever been?’

‘I’ve not been anywhere,’ I said.

‘Oh come on.’

‘I’ve been south. And north. But I’ve never been abroad.’

‘Course you have!’ She put her head on one side, studying me, and then added slightly less cockily. ‘Hasn’t everyone?’

‘I’ve been to a few faraway places,’ I said. ‘But that was here.’ I tapped my bandaged finger carefully on my forehead.

‘What do you mean?’ She smiled faintly. ‘You mean like you’ve been mad?’

‘I’ve dismembered human beings and shot defenceless dogs.’

‘Sure, and you tossed a lifebelt to your wife when she was drunk on champagne and drowning.’ Julie laughed. ‘Why aren’t boys of my own age as funny as you?’

‘It takes a long time to be funny,’ I said. ‘Time and hard work.’

When I got back to the farm that evening Shannon was sitting in the winter garden wearing Carl’s old quilted anorak, one of my hats and a woollen blanket over her lap.

‘It’s cold, but it’s so nice here just after the sun goes down,’ she said. ‘In Barbados it happens so quickly, suddenly it’s just dark. And in Toronto it’s so flat and there are so many tower blocks that at some point the sun just vanishes. But here you can see everything happening in slow motion.’

‘Sakte kino in Norwegian,’ I told her.

‘Sakte kino? Slow cinema?’ She laughed. ‘Yeah, I like that. Because so much happens to the light. The light on the lake, the light on the mountain, the light behind the mountain. It’s like a photographer has gone crazy with his lighting. I love Norwegian nature.’ And added, with ironic, exaggerated sincerity, ‘Wild, naked Norwegian nature.’

I sat down beside her with the cup of coffee I had brought from the kitchen. ‘Carl?’

‘He had to sweet-talk someone who’s important for the project. A used-car salesman.’

‘Willumsen,’ I said. ‘Anything else?’

‘Anything else?’

‘Anything else happened?’

‘Such as what?’

Through a gap in the clouds the moon showed her pale face. Like an actor taking a peek at the audience from behind the curtain before the show begins. And in the reflected light falling on Shannon’s face I could see now that that’s exactly what she was: an actress who couldn’t wait to get started.

‘He held out until eight o’clock,’ she said, pulling her hand out from under the blanket and handing me the phone. ‘I told him I liked him, that I was bored here, and asked if he could send me some pictures. He asked what sort. I said I wanted Norwegian nature. Naked, wild Norwegian nature. Preferably in full bloom.’

‘And he sent you this?’ I looked at Erik Nerell’s customised selfie. Dick pic was putting it mildly. He was lying naked in front of an open fireplace on what looked like a reindeer hide and with some kind of lotion that gave his flexed muscles a dull sheen. And in the middle of the picture, an exemplary erection.

No, the face wasn’t visible, but there was more than enough for a pregnant girlfriend to recognise.

‘He might claim to have misunderstood me,’ said Shannon. ‘But I find this incredibly offensive. And I think his father-in-law will too.’

‘His father-in-law?’ I said. ‘Not his girlfriend?’

‘I’ve given that some thought. Erik was a little too clever at knowing what to say. So I think he knows he can talk his way out of it with a pregnant girlfriend. Prostrate himself, beg for forgiveness, blah blah. A father-in-law, on the other hand…’

I chuckled. ‘You really are wicked.’

‘No,’ she said seriously. ‘I’m good. I love the ones I love and do what I have to in order to protect them. Even if that means doing bad things.’

I nodded. Something told me this wasn’t necessarily the first time. I was on the point of saying something when I heard the low rumble of an eight-cylinder American. Cones of light, and then the Cadillac rounding Geitesvingen. We saw it park and Carl get out. He stood by the car, lifted his phone to his ear. Spoke quietly as he headed towards the house. I leaned back in my chair and switched on the light on the wall behind us. I saw Carl give a start when he caught sight of us. As though he were the one caught red-handed at something. But I was the one who didn’t want to be caught red-handed hiding away in the dark with Shannon. I switched the light off again to show that we preferred it dark, that was all. And I knew as I did so that the decision I had made was the right one.

‘I’m going to be moving down to the workshop,’ I said in a low voice.

‘What?’ said Shannon, her voice also low. ‘Why?’

‘Give you two a bit more space.’

‘Space? Space is all we’ve got. A whole house and a whole mountain for just three people. Can’t you stay, Roy? For my sake?’

I tried to see her face, but the moon had hidden herself again, and that was all she said.

Carl came through the door of the living room and joined us.

‘And with that the deadline for being part of Os Spa and Mountain Hotel SL is closed,’ he said, and slumped down in one of the wickerwork chairs with an open beer in his hand. ‘Four hundred and twenty participants – in effect that’s everybody in the village who can afford it. The bank’s ready and I’ve talked to the contractors. In principle we could get the diggers in there after the company meeting tomorrow.’

‘To dig what?’ I asked. ‘It’ll have to be dynamited first.’

‘Sure, sure, it was just an image. I sort of look on the diggers as tanks that are going to move in and conquer this mountain.’

‘Do like the Americans do and bomb it first,’ I said. ‘Extinguish all life. And then advance and conquer.’

I heard the scrape of his stubble against his collar as he turned his head towards me in the dark. He was probably wondering if I meant a little bit more than what I was actually saying. Whatever that might be.

‘Willum Willumsen and Jo Aas have agreed to sit on the board,’ said Carl. ‘On condition that the company votes for me as manager.’

‘Sounds like you’ll have complete control.’

‘You could say that,’ said Carl. ‘The advantage of SL is that, unlike a limited company, the law doesn’t require you to have a board, an accountant and all that kind of control stuff. We will have a board and an accountant because the bank demands it, but in practice it’s possible for the manager to run the company like an enlightened despot, and that makes everything that much fucking easier.’ There was a klunk from the beer bottle.

‘Roy says he’s moving,’ said Shannon. ‘To the workshop.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Carl.

‘He says we need more space.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Maybe I’m the one who needs space. Maybe all these years of living alone have turned me into a weirdo.’

‘Then it should be me and Shannon that move,’ said Carl.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m happy there’s more than one person living here. The house is happy too.’

‘In that case three has to be even better than two,’ said Carl, and I sensed he lay his hand in Shannon’s lap. ‘And who knows, one day we may even be four.’ For a couple of seconds there was complete silence, and then he sort of woke up again. ‘Or not. What made me think of it was I just saw Erik and Gro out for an evening stroll. She’s pretty big now.’ Still no response. More chugging from the bottle. Carl belched. ‘Why do the three of us spend so much time sitting in the dark when we talk?’

So our faces don’t give anything away, I thought. ‘I’ll have that little chat with Erik tomorrow,’ I said. ‘And I’ll move out in the evening.’

Carl sighed. ‘Roy…’

I stood up. ‘I’m off to bed now. You’re fantastic people and I love you both, but I look forward to not having to see other people’s faces when I get up in the morning.’

That night I slept like a stone.

20

ERIK NERELL LIVED OUT OF town. I had explained to Shannon that when we said ‘out of town’, we meant up along the shore of Lake Budal, towards where the water ran out into the Kjetterelva River. And since the lake was shaped like an upside-down V, with the village in the apex, so ‘in town’ and ‘out of town’ weren’t compass directions but just a way of telling you which way to head from your starting point, since the main road followed the lake regardless. Aas, Moe the roofer and Willumsen lived ‘in town’, which was reckoned to be a touch better, because the fields were flatter and got more sun, whereas Olsen’s cabin and the Nerell farm were out of town, on the shadowed side. The path up to Aas’s cabin where Carl, Mari and a gang of other youngsters used to sneak off to in our teenage years and party to the break of day was also ‘out of town’.

I was thinking about this a bit as I drove along.

I parked behind a Ford Cortina sleeper in front of the barn. Gro, Erik’s partner, opened the door and as I asked for Erik I couldn’t help wondering how those short arms had managed to extend out beyond that bulging stomach to reach the doorknob, that maybe she tackled the problem by approaching it from the side. Which was the way I had planned to approach this.

‘He’s working out,’ she said, pointing towards the barn.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Not long to go now?’

She smiled. ‘Yes.’

‘But you and Erik still take your evening walk, I gather?’

‘Got to exercise the old lady and the dog.’ Gro laughed. ‘But never more than three hundred metres from the house now.’

Erik neither saw nor heard me when I entered. He was lying on a bench and pumping iron, wheezing and panting with the bar across his chest and giving a roar when it was time to lift it. I waited until the bar was once more back on its rack before entering his field of vision. He pinched the buds out of his ears and I heard the descant from ‘Start Me Up’.

‘Roy,’ he said. ‘You’re up early.’

‘You’re looking in good shape,’ I said.

‘Thanks.’ He got up and pulled a fleece jacket over the sweaty T-shirt with a picture of the Hollywood Brats. His cousin, Casino Steel, had played keyboards in the band, and Erik always insisted that if the timing had been a bit better the Hollywood Brats would have been bigger than the Sex Pistols and the New York Dolls. He’d played us a couple of their songs and I remember thinking the problem wasn’t just the timing. But I liked him for caring. In general, I actually quite liked Erik Nerell. But that wasn’t the point.

‘There’s something we need to sort out,’ I said. ‘The picture you sent Shannon did not go down all that fucking well.’

Erik turned pale. He blinked three times.

‘She came to me, didn’t want to show it to Carl because she said he’d go ballistic. But that she was going to go to the sheriff. In legal terms, this here is actually flashing.’

‘No no, wait a minute, she said—’

‘She said something about pictures of nature. Whatever, I persuaded her not to report it, explained it would mean a whole lot of bother for all of us and be bloody traumatic for Gro.’

I saw the muscles of his jaw tighten at the mention of his partner’s name.

‘When Shannon learned that you were expecting a kid she said she’d show the picture to your father-in-law and let him be the one to decide what to do. And I’m afraid I have to tell you that Shannon is a very determined lady.’

Erik’s mouth was still open, but nothing came out of it now.

‘I came here because I want to help you. See if I can stop her. I really don’t like a lot of fussing and fighting, you know that.’

‘Yes,’ said Erik, with an almost inaudible question mark at the end.

‘For example I don’t like it when people go rooting about on our property where Mum and Dad died. If they do then I really need to know what’s going on.’

Erik blinked again. Like he was trying to signal with his eye that he understood. That I was looking to do a trade.

‘Olsen’s going to send people down into Huken anyway, isn’t he?’

Erik nodded. ‘He’s ordered a safety suit from Germany. Like what bomb squads use. It means you’re safe unless actual boulders fall on you. Plus you can move about in them.’

‘What’s he looking for?’

‘All I know is that Olsen wants to get down there, Roy.’

‘No. He’s not the one going down there, you are. And that being so, he must have told you what to look for.’

‘If I knew I wouldn’t be allowed to tell anyone, Roy, you must understand that.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘And you must understand that I don’t feel I’m allowed to stop a lady who has been so outrageously offended as Shannon.’

Erik Nerell sat there on the bench and gave me a doleful dog-eyed stare. Shoulders sloping, hands in his lap. ‘Start Me Up’ was still buzzing from the earbuds lying on the bench between his thighs.

‘You tricked me,’ he said. ‘You and that cunt. It’s down there, isn’t it?’

‘What’s down there?’

‘The old sheriff’s mobile phone.’

I steered the Volvo with one hand while holding the phone in the other. ‘Sigmund Olsen’s mobile was still giving out signals until ten o’clock on the night he disappeared.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Carl grunted. He sounded like he had a hangover.

‘A mobile phone that’s turned on sends out a signal every half-hour, which is registered at the base stations that provide the phone with coverage. In other words, the base stations’ records are a logbook of where the phone was and when.’

‘And?’

‘Kurt Olsen was in town not long ago and spoke to the phone company. He got hold of the records for the day his father disappeared.’

‘They still have records from that far back?’

‘Apparently. Sigmund Olsen’s phone is registered at two base stations, indicating that he can’t – or at least his phone can’t – have been out at his cabin at the time when a witness says he heard a car stop there and a motorboat engine starting up. Because that was after dark. What the base stations show is that his phone was actually in an area that only covers our farm, Huken, Simon Nergard’s farm and the woods between there and the village. And that doesn’t square with what you told the police about Sigmund Olsen driving away from our farm at 6.30 p.m.’

‘I didn’t say where the sheriff drove to, only that he drove away from the farm.’ Carl sounded wide awake and clear now. ‘For all I know he might have stopped somewhere between our place and the village. And maybe that car and that boat the witness heard sometime after dark belonged to somebody else, after all there are other people besides Olsen who have cabins out there. Or maybe the witness is mistaken about the time – it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing to stick in the memory.’

‘Agreed,’ I said as I saw I was approaching a tractor. ‘But questions cropping up about the timeline aren’t what worry me most. It’s if Kurt finds the phone down there in Huken. Because according to Erik Nerell that is what Kurt wants to go down and look for there.’

‘Ah shit. But can it be down there? Didn’t you tidy up after him?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And none of his stuff got left behind. But you remember how it was getting dark when we dragged the body up, and I heard loose rocks falling and took cover inside the wreck?’

‘Yeah?’

I crossed into the other lane. Saw the tractor was much too close to the corner but did it anyway. Put my foot down and slipped in front of the tractor at the start of the corner, just in time to see the driver shaking his head in the rear-view mirror.

‘It wasn’t rocks falling, it was his phone. He had it in one of those holders that just clips onto the belt. And when he was dragged up the rock face it was pulled off and fell down, but of course in the dark I couldn’t see that.’

‘How can you be so sure about that?’

‘Because when we were at the workshop dismembering the body, I pulled off his belt and cut off his clothes. Went through his pockets to remove anything metal before leaving the rest to Fritz. There were coins, the belt buckle and a lighter. But no mobile phone. It didn’t even fucking occur to me, and I knew he had that stupid leather holder.’

Silence for a few moments at Carl’s end. ‘So what do we do?’ he asked.

‘We’ve got to go down into Huken again,’ I said. ‘Before Kurt does.’

‘And when is that?’

‘Kurt’s safety suit arrived yesterday. Erik’s meeting him to try it on at ten o’clock and then they’re going straight to Huken.’

Carl’s breathing crackled through the phone. ‘Oh shit,’ he said.

21

IT WAS AS THOUGH THE repeat, this second descent, was slower but at the same time quicker. Quicker, because we had solved the practical problems and actually remembered our solutions. Slower, because it had to happen fast because we didn’t know when Kurt and his climbing crew would be here, and that gave me the same feeling as you get in those nightmares where someone’s after you and you’re trying to run fast but it’s like you’re running in water. Shannon was posted at the outer edge of Geitesvingen, from where she could see cars turning up off the highway.

Carl and I used the same rope as previously, meaning that Carl knew exactly how close to the edge he had to reverse the Volvo before I was down.

When at last I touched ground, my face to the rock face, I freed myself from the rope before turning round slowly. Seventeen years. But it was as though time had stood still down here. On account of the lower but partly overhanging wall on the south side the rain didn’t fall straight down here, it came trickling down the higher, vertical wall from Geitesvingen and drained away through the rocks. That was probably why there was so remarkably little rust on the wrecked car and the tyres were still intact, though the rubber looked slightly rotten. Nor had any animal made its home in Dad’s Cadillac and the seat coverings and panelling all seemed intact.

I looked at my watch. Ten thirty. Shit. Closed my eyes and tried to recall where I had heard that sound of something hitting the ground back then. No, it was too long ago. But, exposed only to the force of gravity, the phone should have fallen in a vertical line from the body. The plumb line. The simple law of physics that says anything that doesn’t have a horizontal speed will fall straight down. I had consciously dismissed the thought back then, and I might just as well do the same thing now. I had a torch with me and started to search among the boulders close to the rock face where the rope was dangling. Since we had done everything in exact repetition, reversing the car along the same narrow track up there, I knew the phone must have fallen somewhere there. But there were hundreds of different places between the rocks where it could have slipped down and hidden itself. And naturally it might also have ricocheted off the rocks and landed somewhere else entirely. One good thing was that, being in a leather case, bits of it were unlikely to be scattered all over the place. If, that is, I found the fucking thing.

I knew I had to be more systematic, not let myself get carried away by hunches about where it might have landed and start running round like those chickens Mum couldn’t bear to keep hold of once Dad had chopped their heads off. I defined a square within which it was reasonable to assume the phone had to be and started in the upper left corner. On my knees I began the search, lifting the stones that weren’t too heavy, and shining my torch into the spaces between those that were. In the spaces where I could neither see nor feel with my hand I used Carl’s smartphone and selfie stick. Put the camera on video and turned on the flash.

After fifteen minutes I was in the middle of my square and had just poked the stick between two rocks the size of fridges when I heard Carl’s voice from above.

‘Roy…’

I knew of course what it was.

‘Shannon’s seen them coming!’

‘Where?’ I called back.

‘They’re starting up the mountain now.’

At the most we had three minutes. I withdrew the stick and played back the video. Jumped when I saw a pair of eyes in the dark. A fucking mouse. It turned away from the light and with a flick of the tail it was gone. And that was when I saw it. There were holes chewed in the black leather holder, but there was no doubting it, I had found Sheriff Olsen’s phone.

I lay on my stomach and reached my arm in under the rocks but it wasn’t long enough, my fingers scraped against granite or thin air. Shit! If I found it, they could find it. I had to move that fucking rock out of the way. I pressed my back against it, bent my knees, wedged my feet against the rock face and heaved. It didn’t move.

‘They’re just taking the bend at Japansvingen,’ called Carl.

I tried again. Felt the sweat break out on my forehead, my muscles and sinews straining to breaking point. Was that a slight movement in the rock? I heaved again and felt it, yes, there was movement. In my back. I yelled in pain. Jeeezus! Slumped down. Was I still able to move? Yes, dammit, it just hurt like fuck.

‘Roy, they’re—’

‘When I say drive put your foot down and drive forward two metres!’

I jerked on the rope. I didn’t have enough slack to twine it more than once around the rock, fastening it with what Dad called a bowline knot. I stood behind the rock, ready to push if the Volvo managed to lift the rock slightly.

‘Drive!’

I heard the engine revving, and suddenly a hail of small stones was falling over me. One struck me right on top of the head. But I could feel the rock moving and I pushed up against it like an American linebacker. The rock stood poised and swaying as gravel from the spinning tyres of the Volvo up there rained down. And then it toppled over, and a whiff of something like rotting bad breath rose up from the ground. I had a glimpse of insects scurrying away from the sudden light as I sank to my knees and took hold of the phone. At that same instant there was a loud noise. I looked up, just in time to see the frayed end of the rope shooting up the rock face as the rock began toppling back towards me. I leapt back and landed on my arse, shaking and out of breath, glaring at the rock that had returned to its place, like a jaw I had just escaped from.

Up there the Volvo had stopped, probably realising that the resistance had stopped. Instead now I heard another engine, the tractor-like rumble of a Land Rover climbing a steep incline. The sound carried well, they could still be a couple of turns away, but the end of the rope was now seven or eight metres away up the rock face.

‘Back up!’ I called as I loosened what was left of the rope around the rock, coiled it and squeezed it into my jacket pocket on top of Olsen’s old phone.

The hanging end of the rope was closer now, but it was still almost three metres up, and I realised Carl had reversed all the way to the edge. With my good left hand I found a hold to climb up, and felt the whole rock move. I was the one who’d lied about all the loose rocks I said we heard falling here – but it was true, they were loose! Still I had no choice. I put my right hand on a ledge, and fortunately the pain in my back was so great I didn’t even notice the throbbing middle finger. I managed to get my feet on top of the rock, my hand found a hold above it, and I moved my legs upward, my arse sticking out like a caterpillar until I straightened up and got hold of the rope with my right hand. And then what? I had to use the other hand to hold on with, and I couldn’t be tying any knot with just one hand.

‘Roy!’ It was Shannon’s voice. ‘They’re coming round the final bend.’

‘Drive!’ I shouted, grabbing onto the rope half a metre higher up at the same time as I managed to wind it one and a half times around my wrist. ‘Drive! Drive!!’ I heard the message being passed on up there, and as I felt the rope begin to pull me up I moved my left hand onto the rope, at the same time tensing my stomach muscles, raising my legs and planting my feet against the rock face. And then I ran straight to heaven. I’d told Carl to accelerate hard not because Olsen and his crew were approaching but because there is a limit to the number of seconds you can hang on to a rope using just your hands. And I like to tell myself that on that morning I set some kind of world record for the hundred metres vertical. And like the world’s best sprinters, I don’t think I breathed even once the whole way. I thought only of the drop growing below me, death that was ever more certain with every second that passed, every ten metres covered. And when I jerked up over the top of Geitesvingen I didn’t let go but held on tight and let myself be dragged across the gravel for several metres before I felt it was safe to let go. Shannon helped me to my feet, we ran to the car and dived in. ‘Drive to the back of the barn,’ I said.

Just as we turned onto the muddy field I caught a glimpse of Olsen’s Land Rover rounding the bend at Geitesvingen and hoped that he neither saw us nor the rope that twisted like an anaconda through the grass behind the Volvo.

I sat in the front passenger seat, fighting to catch my breath as Carl jumped out and started to coil the rope. Shannon ran to the corner of the barn and looked down at Geitesvingen.

‘They’ve stopped down there,’ she said. ‘It looks like they’ve got a… what’s a beekeeper in Norwegian?’

‘Birøkter,’ said Carl. ‘They’re probably worried there might be wasps down there.’

I laughed, and the shaking felt as though someone was sticking knives into my back.

‘Carl,’ I said quietly, ‘why did you say you were at Willumsen’s last night?’

‘What?’

‘Willumsen lives in town. Erik and his missus who you met last night live out of town’

Carl didn’t reply. ‘What do you think?’ he finally asked.

‘You want me to take a guess,’ I said. ‘So you can work out whether to confirm it instead of the truth?’

‘OK,’ said Carl, checking in the mirror that Shannon was still standing by the corner of the barn and watching Olsen and his crew. ‘I could have told you I needed to take a drive just to think. And that would’ve been true enough. Our main contractor suddenly raised his estimate yesterday by fifteen per cent.’

‘Really?’

‘They’ve been up here. They’re postponing the start because they say we didn’t give them a proper description of the site conditions and how exposed to weather it is.’

‘And what does the bank say to that?’

‘They don’t know. And now that I’ve sold this whole enterprise to the participants for four hundred million, I can’t very well present them with a revised estimate of another sixty million before we’ve even started.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to tell the chief contractor to go fuck himself and I’ll make deals with the subcontractors myself. It means more work, I’ll have to deal with carpenters, masons, electricians, the whole lot of them, and make sure everything’s being done. But it’ll be a lot cheaper than the chief contractor taking his ten or twenty per cent just for hiring a firm of electricians.’

‘But that’s not why you went out of town last night?’

Carl shook his head. ‘I…’

He stopped as the door opened and Shannon sat in the back seat.

‘They’re getting ready to go down,’ she said. ‘It might take a while. What are you talking about?’

‘Roy was asking where I was yesterday. And I was about to say I’d driven to Olsen’s cabin. Went down to the boathouse. Tried to imagine everything Roy must have gone through that evening.’ Carl took a deep breath. ‘You faked a suicide and you almost got drowned, Roy. And all of it to save me. Don’t you ever get tired, Roy?’

‘Tired?’

‘Of clearing up after me?’

‘It wasn’t your fault Olsen fell into Huken,’ I said.

He looked at me. And I don’t know if he could see what I was thinking about. About the plumb line law. About Sigmund Olsen landing on the back of the car, five metres away from the rock face. If that was what made him take a deep breath and start to speak: ‘Roy, there’s something you need to know about all that—’

‘I know all I need to know,’ I interrupted. ‘And that is that I am your big brother.’

Carl nodded. He was smiling but seemed to be close to tears. ‘Is it that simple, Roy?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It really is.’

22

WE WERE SITTING IN THE kitchen drinking coffee by the time they had finished down in Geitesvingen. I had fetched the binoculars and focused on the faces down there. It was three o’clock, they had been down there for almost four hours and I opened the window slightly so that we could hear as Kurt Olsen shouted something. Kurt’s mouth – no cigarette for once – formed words that were unmistakable, and his flushed face was no longer entirely due to that overdose of UV radiation. Erik’s body language expressed more indifference and probably the desire to get away from there. Perhaps he guessed that Olsen suspected something. The two men helping the sheriff and Nerell looked slightly confused. They probably knew little of the actual purpose of the operation since Olsen almost certainly knew enough about village gossip to keep things on a need-to-know basis, as people say.

Once Erik was out of that comical bomb-disposal suit, he and the other two got into Kurt’s Land Rover, while Kurt himself remained standing with his head turned towards the house. Of course I realised that with the sunlight directly on the window he couldn’t see us, but perhaps there had been a flash of light reflected from the binoculars. And maybe he’d noticed the fresh marks of spinning tyres and a rope in the gravel. And maybe I’m just paranoid. Anyway, he spat on the ground, got into the car and they drove off.

I went from room to room, packing my things. At least the things I figured I’d have a use for. And even though I wasn’t going far and didn’t exactly need to think hard about it I did so. Packed as though I’d never be coming back.

I was in the boys’ room stuffing the duvet and my pillow into a big blue IKEA bag when I heard Shannon’s voice behind me.

‘Is it that simple?’

‘Moving?’ I asked without turning round.

‘That you’re his big brother. Is that why you always help him?’

‘Why else?’

She came in and closed the door behind her. Leaned against the wall, her arms crossed. ‘When I was in second grade at primary school I pushed a friend of mine once. She banged her head on the asphalt. Shortly afterwards she started wearing glasses. She’d never complained about her sight before and I became convinced that it was my fault. I didn’t say so, but I hoped she would push me so I would hit my head on the asphalt too. By the time we were in fifth grade she’d still not got a boyfriend and said it was because of the glasses, and I blamed myself for that too, and spent more time with her than I actually really wanted to. She wasn’t very good at school and had to take the sixth grade again. I was certain it was because of that blow to the head. So I took sixth grade again with her.’

I stopped. ‘You did what?’

‘I skipped classes, never did my homework, and at the orals I deliberately gave wrong answers to the easiest questions.’

I opened the wardrobe and started packing folded T-shirts, socks and underwear in a bag. ‘Did she end up OK?’

‘Yes,’ said Shannon. ‘She stopped wearing glasses. And one day I surprised her with my boyfriend. She said how sorry she was and that she hoped one day I’d have the chance to break her heart the way she’d broken mine.’

I smiled as I packed the licence plate from Barbados into the bag. ‘What’s the moral of the story?’

‘Sometimes feelings of guilt are wasted and no good to anyone involved.’

‘You think I feel guilty about something?’

She put her head on one side. ‘Do you?’

‘And what might that be?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Me neither,’ I said, zipping up the bag.

As I was about to open the door she put a hand on my chest. The touch made hot and cold run through me.

‘I don’t think Carl has told me everything, has he?’

‘Everything about what?’

‘About you two.’

‘It’s never possible to tell everything,’ I said. ‘About anyone.’

And then I was out the door.

Carl saw me off in Mum’s haaall with a big, warm silent hug.

And then I was out the door.

I chucked the bag and the IKEA holdall into the back seat of the car, climbed in, beat my forehead against the steering wheel before turning on the ignition and accelerating off down towards Geitesvingen. And for an instant the possibility flashed through my mind. A permanent solution. And a pile of wrecked cars and corpses that just grew and grew.

Three days later I was standing on Os FC’s home ground and almost regretting I had turned the steering wheel at all by Geitesvingen. It was pouring down, five degrees and 3–nil. Not that the score bothered me, I don’t give a damn about football. But I had just realised that the other match, the one against Olsen and the past, the one I’d thought we’d won, wasn’t even halfway played.

23

CARL PICKED ME UP IN the Cadillac.

‘Thanks for coming along,’ he said as he wandered around the workshop.

‘Who are we playing?’ I asked as I pulled on my wellingtons.

‘Can’t remember,’ said Carl, who had stopped in front of the lathe. ‘But it’s apparently a game we must win if we’re not to get relegated.’

‘To which division?’

‘What makes you think I know any more about football than you do?’ He brushed his hand over the tools hanging on the wall, the ones Willumsen hadn’t taken. ‘Jesus Christ I’ve had some nightmares about this place.’ Maybe he recalled some of them I had used for the dismemberment. ‘That night, I puked up, didn’t I?’

‘A bit,’ I said.

He chuckled. And I remembered something Uncle Bernard said. That in time all memories turn into good memories.

He took a plastic bottle down from the shelf. ‘You still use that cleaning fluid?’

‘Fritz heavy-duty workshop cleaner? Sure. But by law they’re no longer allowed to make it so concentrated. EU rules. I’m ready.’

‘Well then, let’s go.’ Carl smiled and twirled his flat cap. ‘Heia Os, knus og mos, tygg og spytt en aprikos! Remember that?’

I remembered, but the rest of the home supporters, about 150 shivering souls, seemed to have forgotten the chant from back then. Or else saw no reason to sing it since we were already 2–nil down after ten minutes.

‘Remind me why we’re here,’ I said to Carl. We were standing at the bottom of the round seven-metre-wide and two-and-a-half-metre high stand that was built halfway along the western side of the AstroTurf pitch. As several posters made clear, the wooden stand had been sponsored by Os Sparebank. Everyone knew that it was Willumsen who had paid for the artificial grass that now lay atop the old cinder pitch. Willumsen claimed he’d bought it only slightly used from a top club in the east of the country, but in truth it was an old surface from the early days of artificial grass, from a time when teams rarely left the pitch without burn marks, twisted ankles and at least one torn ligament. And Willumsen had been offered it free on condition that he removed it himself so that it could be replaced by a newer pitch that was less of a health hazard.

The stand provided a degree of overview, but its most important function was to provide shelter from the westerly winds, and act as an unofficial VIP area for the village’s more affluent citizens, who occupied the topmost of the seven rows. That was where the arbiter, the new chairman Voss Gilbert, stood. The manager of Os Sparebank, whose logo adorned the front of Os FC’s blue shirts. Along with Willum Willumsen, who had managed to get Willumsen’s Used Cars and Breaker’s Yard squeezed in above the numbers on the back of the shirts.

‘We’re here to show our support for our local club,’ said Carl.

‘Then maybe we should start making a noise,’ I said. ‘We’re being slaughtered here.’

‘Today is just about showing we care,’ said Carl. ‘So next year when we support the club financially people will know the money comes from two real fans who’ve followed the club through thick and thin.’

I snorted. ‘This is the first match I’ve been to in two years, and the first time you’ve been here in fifteen.’

‘But we’ll be at all three of the remaining home games this season.’

‘Even if they’re already relegated?’

‘Because they’re already relegated. We didn’t abandon them in the hour of their defeat, people notice things like that. And when they get the money, all the matches we never went to will be forgotten. By the way, from now on it’s not “they” and “them”, it’s “we” and “us”. The club and Opgard are a team.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the hotel needs all the goodwill it can get. We need to be regarded as supporters. This time next year the club’s going to be buying a great new striker from Nigeria, and where it says “Os Sparebank” on the shirts it’s going to say “Os Spa and Mountain Hotel”.’

‘You mean a professional player?’

‘No, are you crazy? But I know someone who knows a Nigerian who works at the Radisson Hotel in Oslo who’s played football. No idea how good he is but we’ll offer him the same job at our hotel only at a better wage. Maybe that’ll tempt him.’

‘Yeah, why not?’ I said. ‘He can’t be any worse than this lot.’ Out on the pitch our left back had just chanced a sliding tackle in the rain. Alas, there was still plenty of friction in those bright green plastic tufts and he’d ended up tripping and landing on his belly five metres away from his man.

‘And I’m going to want you to stand up there,’ said Carl with a nod back towards the top row. I half turned. Voss Gilbert, the new chairman, was standing there, along with the bank manager and Willumsen. Carl had told me that Gilbert had agreed to dig the first shovelful of earth to mark the official start of the building process. Carl had already made deals with the most important contractors, and now it was about making a start before the first frost came, so the building process had been brought forward.

Turning, I caught sight of Kurt Olsen standing by the substitutes bench and talking to the manager of Os FC. I could see the manager looked uncomfortable, but he could hardly openly refuse to take advice from Os’s old record goal scorer. Kurt Olsen spotted me, laid a hand on the manager’s shoulders, gave him a last piece of advice and strode bow-legged up towards Carl and me.

‘Didn’t know the Opgard boys were interested in football,’ he said.

Carl smiled. ‘Hey, I remember the time you scored in the Cup against one of the big teams. Odd, was it?’

‘Yes,’ said Olsen. ‘We lost 9–1.’

‘Kurt!’ called a voice behind us. ‘You should be out there now, Kurt!’

Laughter. Cigarette in mouth Kurt Olsen grinned in the direction of the voice and nodded before turning his attention back to us. ‘Anyway, I’m glad you’re here, because there’s something I want to ask you, Carl. And you’re very welcome to listen in too, Roy. You want to do this here or on the way over to the hot-dog stand?’

Carl hesitated. ‘A hot dog sounds like a good idea,’ he said.

We made our way through the blustery wind and rain towards the hot-dog stand behind one of the goalposts. I’m guessing the other spectators were watching us. At that particular moment, with the team 2–nil down and that council resolution passed, Carl Opgard was probably more interesting than Os FC.

‘It’s about the timeline on the day my father disappeared,’ said Kurt Olsen. ‘You said he left Opgard at six o’clock. Is that right?’

‘It’s a long time ago now,’ said Carl. ‘But yes, if that’s what it says in the report.’

‘It is. But signals received by the base stations show that my father’s phone was in the area around your farm until ten o’clock that evening. After that there’s nothing. It could be that the battery ran out, someone removed the SIM card, or the phone was damaged. Or that the phone was buried so deeply the signals no longer carried. What it means is, we have to check the area around the farm with metal detectors. It means that nothing up there should be touched, and that starting date I’ve been hearing about will have to be postponed until further notice.’

‘Wh-what?’ stammered Carl. ‘But…’

‘But what?’ Olsen stopped by the hot-dog stand, stroked his moustache and looked calmly at him.

‘How long are we talking about?’

‘Hmm.’ Olsen stuck his lower lip out and looked as if he was calculating. ‘It’s a large area. Three weeks. Maybe four.’

Carl groaned. ‘Jesus, Kurt, that’s going to cost us a fucking fortune. We’ve got contractors coming in at agreed times to do their work. And the frost—’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Olsen. ‘But investigations into a suspicious death can’t take your desire to turn a profit into consideration.’

‘It isn’t just my profit we’re talking about,’ said Carl, his voice shaking slightly. ‘It’s the whole village. And I think you’ll find Jo Aas is of the same opinion.’

‘The old chairman, you mean?’ Kurt held up one finger to the lady at the hot-dog stand which obviously meant something since she grabbed the sausage tongs and plunged it down into the pan in front of her. ‘I was talking earlier today to the new one, the one that actually makes the decisions. Voss Gilbert up there.’ Olsen nodded in the direction of the stand. ‘When Gilbert heard what I had to say about the matter he was most worried about news leaking out that the man behind the new hotel project was involved in a possible murder case.’ The woman handed Olsen his hot dog on a piece of waxed sandwich paper. ‘But he said that of course he had no authority to stop me.’

‘And what are we going to say to the press?’ I asked. ‘When we announce that the start has been postponed?’

Kurt Olsen turned and stared at me. Chomped into his sausage which gave off a wet, flaccid sound. ‘I really don’t know,’ he said, his mouth full of pig’s intestines. ‘But yes, it could well be that Dan Krane will think it’s an interesting story. OK then, now I’ve got my answer about the timeline, and you’ve been informed that you can’t start building, Carl. Better luck in the second half.’

Kurt Olsen raised two fingers to his imaginary Stetson and left.

Carl turned and looked at me.

Naturally, he looked at me.

We left the game with a quarter of an hour to go and the team losing 4–nil.

We drove straight to the workshop.

I’d been thinking.

There were certain things we had to do.

‘Like that?’ asked Carl. His voice echoed around the walls of the empty workshop.

I leaned over the turning lathe and inspected the result. Carl had used a gimlet to scrape the capital letters into the metal of Olsen’s mobile phone. SIGMUND OLSEN, it read in clear script. Maybe a bit too clear.

‘We better green it a bit,’ I said and slipped the phone back into its leather case. Clipped it onto a thick piece of string that was lying about, swung it up and down a bit and checked that the clip held the phone in place. ‘Come on.’

I pulled open the door to the metal wardrobe that stood in the corridor between the workshop and the office. And there it was.

‘Jesus,’ said Carl. ‘Have you had it here all the time?’

‘Well, apart from that one time we tried it out it was never used,’ I said, and rocked the yellow oxygen tank and squeezed the slightly rotten wetsuit. The mask and snorkel were up on the shelf.

‘I better ring Shannon and say I’m going to be late,’ he said.

24

WHEN I RETURNED TO THE workshop that night I was so cold I couldn’t stop shivering. Carl had handed me his hip flask in the car, to drive out the cold as people say. I hung on to the hip flask when Carl drove on home to Shannon, who I guessed was lying in the warm double bed waiting for him. Too bloody right I was jealous, I’d given up pretending otherwise. But what was the use? I couldn’t have it. I didn’t want to have it. I was like Moe the roofer, fighting a hopeless battle against my own lust. It was a fucking awful illness I thought I’d got rid of, but now here it was again. I knew that distance and forgetting were my only hope, but I knew no one would be intervening here, no one would be sending anyone to Notodden, it was a move I had to make myself.

I unlocked the car wash, attached the hose to a standpipe, turned up the hot tap, pulled off my clothes and stood in front of the scalding hot jet. And I don’t know if it was the sudden rise in temperature, if it was the same physiological reaction as you get when men are hanged from the gallows, or whether the heat of the water was transformed in my head to the heat beneath the duvet in the double bed, and that I was the one lying there. But standing there with my eyes closed I felt two things at least. A sobbing in my throat. And a throbbing erection.

The hissing of the water must have drowned out the sound of the key turning in the door. I only heard it open at the same time as I opened my eyes. I saw the outline of her in the darkness outside the door and turned my back as quickly as I could.

‘Oh, sorry!’ I heard Julie call above the hissing of the water. ‘I saw lights and the car wash is supposed to be closed, so—’

‘OK!’ I interrupted in a voice thick with whisky, unshed tears and shame.

I heard the door close behind me and stood there, my head bent. Looked down at myself. The excitement had passed, the erection was fading, there was only a heart beating in panic, as though I had just been exposed. As though now they all knew who he was and what he had done, that damned traitor, the coward, the murderer, the lecher. Naked, so fucking naked. But then my heart slowed down too. ‘The good thing about losing everything is that you have nothing left to lose,’ Uncle Bernard said to me when I went to see him in hospital after he’d been told he was going to die. ‘And in a way that’s a relief, Roy. Because then there’s nothing else to fear.’

So then I can’t have lost everything after all. Because I was still afraid.

I dried myself and pulled on my trousers. Turned to pick up my shoes.

Julie was sitting on a chair next to the door.

‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve bust my finger.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I saw you.’

‘Well,’ I said as I pulled on my shoes, ‘since you saw me, it’s a little hurtful of you to ask if everything’s all right.’

‘Stop being silly, I said. You were crying.’

‘No. But it’s not unusual to get water on your face when you’re showering. You’re not supposed to be working this evening.’

‘I’m not. I was sitting in one of the cars and I needed to pee. I didn’t want to go into the trees, so can I use yours?’

I hesitated. I could have suggested she use the station toilet, but we’d told the boy racers it was bad enough them using our parking space as a meeting place without having them running in and out of the station toilet. And now that she’d asked I couldn’t exactly tell her to go behind a tree either.

I finished dressing and she padded after me through the workshop.

‘Cosy,’ she said after she’d finished in the toilet. She glanced round the walls of my room. ‘Why is there a wet wetsuit hanging out there in the corridor?’

‘For it to dry,’ I said.

She pouted. ‘Can I have a cup?’ She crossed uninvited to the coffee maker, took a clean mug from the drying rack and filled it.

‘They’ll be waiting for you,’ I warned her. ‘Soon they’ll start searching the woods.’

‘No way,’ she said, and sat down on the bed beside me. ‘I quarrelled with Alex, so I think they went home. What do you do here? Watch TV?’

‘That kind of thing.’

‘What’s that?’ She pointed to the licence plate I’d mounted on the wall above the kitchen alcove. I’d looked it up in my licence-plate book, Vehicle Registration Plates of the World, and found that the J stood for the parish of St John. Four numbers followed the letter. There was no flag or anything else to denote nationality, like the Monaco plates on the Cadillac. Maybe that was because Barbados was an island and the cars registered there would probably never cross an international border. I’d also googled redlegs and found out that St John was the parish in which most of them lived.

‘It’s a car registration plate from Johor,’ I said. Finally my body was feeling warm. Warm and relaxed. ‘A former sultanate in Malaysia.’

‘Shit,’ she said in an awed tone that referred to the plate or the sultanate or me. Julie was sitting so close her arm touched mine and now she turned her head towards me and waited for me to do the same. I was trying to work out some way of retreat from the situation when Julie tossed my phone to the end of the bed and wrapped her arms around me. Pressed her face into the hollow of my neck. ‘Can’t we lie down for a bit?’

‘You know very well we can’t, Julie.’ I neither moved nor responded to the embrace.

She lifted her face to mine. ‘You smell of booze, Roy. Have you been drinking?’

‘A bit. And so have you, I gather.’

‘Then in that case we’ve both got an excuse,’ she said and laughed.

I didn’t reply.

She pushed me back, sat on top of me and pressed her heels against my thighs as though spurring on a horse. I could easily have bounced her off, but I didn’t. She sat there and looked down at me. ‘I’ve got you now,’ she said in a low voice.

I still didn’t reply. But I could feel myself getting hard again. And I knew she could feel it too. She started moving, carefully. I didn’t stop her, just watched her as her gaze clouded over and her breathing grew heavier. Then I closed my eyes and imagined the other one. Felt Julie’s hands pressing my wrists against the mattress, her bubblegum breath in my face.

I rolled her off towards the wall and stood up.

‘What?’ Julie called after me as I walked over to the worktop. I filled a glass of water from the tap, drank it, filled it again.

‘You better go,’ I said.

‘But you want to!’ she protested.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And that’s why you should go.’

‘But no one need know. They think I’ve gone home, and at home they think I’m staying over at Alex’s.’

‘I can’t, Julie.’

‘Why not?’

‘You’re seventeen years old…’

‘Eighteen. I’ll be eighteen in two days.’

‘…I’m your boss…’

‘I can finish tomorrow!’

‘…and…’ I stopped.

‘And?’ she yelled. ‘And?’

‘And I like someone else.’

‘Like?’

‘Love. I’m in love with someone else.’

In the silence that ensued I heard the dying echo of my own words. Because I had said them to myself. Said them aloud to hear if they sounded true. And they did. Of course they did.

‘Who then?’ she hiccupped. ‘The doctor?’

‘What?’

‘Dr Spind?’

I couldn’t answer, just stood there, glass in hand, as she climbed off the bed and pulled on her jacket.

‘I knew it!’ she hissed as she pushed past me on her way out.

I followed, stood in the doorway and watched as she stamped across the forecourt as though she was trying to crack the asphalt. Then I locked the door, went back and lay on my bed. Plugged the headphones into my phone and pressed play. J. J. Cale. ‘Crying Eyes’.

25

THE FOLLOWING MORNING A PORSCHE Cayenne turned into the station forecourt. Two men and a woman climbed out. One of the men filled up with petrol while the other two stretched their legs. The woman had blonde hair and was sensibly dressed in the Norwegian way, but still she didn’t strike me as one of the cabin people. The man was wearing an immaculate woollen overcoat and scarf and had on a pair of comically large sunglasses, the kind women wear when they want you to know that they might not be good-looking but they’ve still got something. Active body language with much waving of the arms. Pointed and explained things to the woman though I was prepared to bet he’d never been here before. I would also have bet he wasn’t Norwegian.

It was quiet, and I was bored, and travellers sometimes have interesting tales to tell. So I went out to them, gave the windscreen of the Porsche a wash and asked where they were headed.

‘West country,’ said the woman.

‘Well, you can’t miss that,’ I said.

The woman laughed and translated into English for the guy in the sunglasses, who laughed too.

‘We’re scouting locations for my new film,’ he said in English. ‘This place looks interesting too.’

‘Are you a director?’ I asked.

‘Director and actor,’ he said and removed his sunglasses. He had a pair of extremely blue eyes in his well-looked-after face. I could see he was waiting for a reaction.

‘This is Dennis Quarry,’ the woman discreetly prompted me.

‘Roy Calvin Opgard.’ I smiled, dried off the windscreen and left them to give the other pumps a clean while I was at it. Well, OK, but sometimes they really do have interesting stories.

The Cadillac glided into the forecourt and Carl jumped out, unhooked one of the pump nozzles, caught sight of me and raised his eyebrows quizzically. He’d asked me the same question ten times in the two days that had passed since the football match and the dive. Have they taken the bait? I shook my head, and at the same time my heart skipped a beat when I saw Shannon in the passenger seat. And maybe her heart skipped a beat when she saw the American with the blue eyes, because she put a hand in front of her mouth, fumbled for pen and paper in her bag, got out and went over to him and I saw him smiling as he signed his autograph. His assistant walked over and sat in the SUV while Dennis Quarry stood there talking to Shannon. She was about to leave when he stopped her, took the pen and paper back and scribbled something else down.

I went over to Carl. His face was grey.

‘Worried?’ I asked.

‘Some,’ he said.

‘He’s a film star.’

Carl smiled wryly. ‘Not about that.’ He knew I was kidding. Carl never understood jealousy, which was one reason he had never managed to read the situations right at the dances at Årtun until it was too late. ‘It’s the official start.’ He sighed. ‘Gilbert called and said he can’t dig the first shovelful after all, something came up. He wouldn’t say what but it’s obviously Kurt Olsen. Fuck him!’

‘Easy now.’

‘Easy? We’ve invited journalists from all over the place. This is a crisis.’ Carl wiped his free hand over his face but managed to say ‘hi’ and smile at a guy I think works in the bank. ‘Can’t you just see the headlines?’ Carl went on once the guy was out of earshot. ‘Hotel construction delayed owing to murder investigation. Entrepreneur himself chief suspect.’

‘In the first place they’ve no grounds for writing about either murder or suspects, and in the second the official start is still two days away. Things could well have changed before that.’

‘It needs to happen now, Roy. If we’re going to cancel the opening it’ll have to be this afternoon.’

‘A fishing net that’s set out in the evening usually gets taken up the next morning,’ I said.

‘You’re saying something’s gone wrong?’

‘I’m saying it’s possible the owner is letting it hang there a while longer.’

‘But you said that if they leave the net there for too long the catch gets eaten by the other fish down there.’

‘Exactly,’ I said, and wondered when it was I had started saying ‘exactly’. ‘So that net was probably pulled up this morning. Or maybe the owner is just slow to report it. Stay cool now.’

The SUV carrying the film people swung out onto the main highway as Shannon approached us, her face radiant, a hand held to her chest as though to keep her heart in place.

‘You in love?’ asked Carl.

‘Not at all,’ said Shannon, and Carl roared with laughter as though he’d already put our conversation behind him.

An hour later another familiar vehicle pulled in at the forecourt by the diesel pump and I thought how this day was just getting more and more interesting. I came out from the station as Kurt Olsen climbed out of his Land Rover, and when I saw the angry look on his face I thought at last, here comes an interesting story.

I dipped the sponge in the bucket and pulled up his windscreen wipers.

‘Not necessary,’ he protested, but I’d already splashed soapy water all over the windscreen.

‘You can never have too much visibility,’ I said. ‘Especially now with autumn on the way.’

‘I think I see well enough without your help, Roy.’

‘Don’t say that,’ I said, spreading the dirty water across the glass. ‘Carl called in. He’s going to have to cancel the official opening at some point today.’

‘Today?’ said Kurt Olsen and looked up.

‘Yeah. Damn shame. The school brass band is going to be really disappointed, they’ve been practising. And we bought fifty Norwegian flags – there isn’t a single one left. Absolutely no chance of a last-minute reprieve for the condemned man?’

Kurt Olsen looked down. Spat on the ground.

‘Tell your brother he can go ahead with the opening.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes,’ Olsen said in a low voice.

‘Have there been developments in the case?’ Apart from my choice of words I was trying not to sound ironic. I splashed on more soapy water.

Olsen straightened up. Coughed. ‘I got a phone call from Åge Fredriksen this morning. He lives out near our cabin and sets his fishing net right outside our boathouse. He’s done it for years.’

‘You don’t say?’ I said, dropping the sponge into the bucket and picking up the squeegee, pretending not to notice Kurt’s penetrating stare.

‘And this morning he caught a queer fish all right. My father’s mobile phone.’

‘Jesus,’ I said. The rubber emitted a low squeal as I drew the squeegee over the glass.

‘Fredriksen thinks the phone’s been lying there in the same place for sixteen years, covered by sludge so the divers who went down looking for Dad that time found nothing. Every time he’s set out his net, it’s brushed over the phone. And when he pulled up the net this morning the bottom rungs of the net just happened to glide in under the clip on the holder so the phone came up with the net.’

‘Quite something,’ I said, tearing a strip off the paper roll and wiping the blade of the squeegee.

‘Quite something is an understatement,’ he said. ‘Sixteen years putting out that net, and the phone gets caught up in it now.’

‘Isn’t that the essence of what they call chaos theory? That sooner or later everything happens, including the most unlikely things?’

‘I’ll accept that. What I’m not buying is the timing. It’s a bit too good to be true.’

He might as well have said: too good for you and Carl.

‘And it doesn’t fit in with the timeline from back then,’ he said. He looked at me and waited.

I knew what he wanted. For me to argue. Say that witnesses can’t always be relied on. Or that the movements of a man in such deep despair that he takes his own life maybe aren’t always the most logical. Or even that base stations themselves can be mistaken. But I resisted the temptation. I held my chin between my index finger and thumb. And nodded slowly. Very slowly. And said: ‘Sure sounds like it. Diesel?’

He looked as if he wanted to hit me.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘at least now you can see the road.’

He slammed the door hard behind him and revved the engine. But then eased off on the pedal, made a calm U-turn and rolled slowly out onto the highway. I knew he was watching me in the mirror and I had to struggle to stop myself giving him a wave.

26

IT WAS A CURIOUS SIGHT.

A harsh wind was blowing from the north-west and it was raining cats and rabbits, as people say round here. And yet some hundred shivering souls in rain gear were up there on the mountain watching a besuited Carl as he posed with Voss Gilbert wearing his chain of office and his best politician’s smile, both holding spades. The local paper and other press photographers were clicking away and in the background you could just about hear the Årtun school brass band playing ‘Mellom Bakkar og Berg’ between the gusts of wind. With a touch of humour Gilbert was introduced as ‘the new chairman’, although he hardly resented it, all the chairmen since Jo Aas had been referred to in that way. I had nothing special against Voss Gilbert, but he had that bald patch at the front of his head and a second name for his first name, so there was definitely something suspicious about him. But not definite enough to stop him being Os county council chairman. Obviously, though, any future expansion in the size of the county would lead to tougher competition for the hammer of office, and with that hairstyle Gilbert would definitely be struggling.

Carl signalled to Gilbert that he should make the first mark with his spade, since the one he was holding had been decorated for the occasion with ribbons and flowers. So Gilbert did so, smiling to the photographers, evidently unaware that his wet lug of hair now lay plastered across his bald spot in a sort of inadvertent comb-over. Gilbert shouted out some witticism which no one heard but which those around him dutifully laughed at. Everyone clapped and Gilbert hurried over to an assistant holding his inside-out umbrella, and we all marched down the mountainside to the buses that stood parked by the road ready to take us to Fritt Fall where the occasion would be celebrated.

The black-feathered Giovanni strutted nervously between the guests and the legs of the tables as I fetched my drink from the bar where Erik stood scowling at me. I thought of joining Carl who was talking to Willumsen, Jo Aas and Dan Krane, but instead walked over to where Shannon was standing at the betting table with Stanley, Gilbert and Simon Nergard. I gathered they were talking about Bowie and Ziggy Stardust, probably because ‘Starman’ was blasting from the loudspeakers.

‘Course the guy was a pervert, he dressed up like a woman,’ said Simon, already slightly drunk and aggressive.

‘If by pervert you mean homosexual, well, you also get heterosexual men who’d rather look like women,’ said Stanley.

‘Fucking sick if you ask me,’ said Simon, looking at the new chairman. ‘It’s not natural.’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Stanley. ‘Animals cross-dress too. You, Roy, with your interest in birds, you probably know that in certain species of bird the male imitates the female. They camouflage themselves as females by using the same feathering.’

The others looked at me and I felt myself turning red.

‘And not just on special occasions,’ Stanley continued. ‘They carry this female phenotype throughout their lives, don’t they?’

‘Not any of the mountain birds I’m familiar with,’ I said.

‘See?’ said Simon, and Stanley gave me a quick look as much as to say I’d let him down. ‘Nature’s practical, so what the hell would be the point of dressing up like a woman?’

‘It’s quite simple,’ said Shannon. ‘The disguised males avoid the attention of the alpha males who want to fight off possible competitors in the sexual market. While the alpha males are fighting it out, the cross-dressers are mating on the quiet, so to speak.’

Chairman Gilbert laughed good-naturedly. ‘Not a bad strategy.’

Stanley laid a hand on Shannon’s arm. ‘Here, at last, we have someone who understands the complexities of the game of love.’

‘Well, it isn’t exactly rocket science,’ said Shannon, smiling. ‘We’re all looking for the most comfortable survival strategy. And if we find ourselves in a situation, personal or social, in which it no longer works, then we try another one that’s necessary, although possibly a little less comfortable.’

‘What do you mean, the most comfortable strategy?’ asked Voss Gilbert.

‘The one that follows the rules of society, so that we don’t risk sanctions. Also known as morality, Mr Chairman. If that doesn’t work, then we break the rules.’

Gilbert raised one of his heavy brows. ‘Many people behave in a moral way even though it isn’t necessarily the most comfortable.’

‘The reason for that is just that for some people the idea of being thought of as immoral is so unpleasant that this becomes an important part of the decision. But if we were invisible and had nothing to lose we wouldn’t care at all. We’re all of us at heart opportunists with survival and the furtherance of our own genetic heritage as the overriding goal in life. That’s why we’re all willing to sell our souls. It’s just that some of us ask a different price from others.’

‘Amen to that,’ said Stanley.

Gilbert chuckled and shook his head. ‘That there is big-city talk. It goes way over our heads. Or am I right, Simon?’

‘Also known as bollocks,’ said Simon, emptying his glass and looking round for a refill.

‘Now now, Simon,’ said the chairman. ‘But you should remember, fru Opgard, that we come from a part of the country in which people sacrificed their lives for the right moral values during the Second World War.’

‘He means the twelve men in that heavy water sabotage action we keep making films about,’ said Stanley. ‘The rest of the population more or less let the Nazis do what they wanted.’

‘You shut your mouth,’ said Simon, his eyelids drooping halfway over his pupils.

‘Those twelve men hardly sacrificed their lives for moral values,’ said Shannon. ‘They did it for their country. Their village. Their families. If Hitler had been born in Norway where the economic and political situation was the same as in Germany, he would have come to power here just the same. And your saboteurs would have been fighting for Hitler instead.’

‘What the fuck!’ Simon snarled, and I took a step forward in case he had to be stopped.

Shannon, however, couldn’t be stopped. ‘Or do you believe that the Germans who lived in the thirties and forties were a generation of out-and-out immoralists, while Norwegians of the time were lucky enough not to be?’

‘Those are pretty strong claims, fru Opgard.’

‘Strong? I can see that they’re provocative and perhaps offensive to Norwegians with a deep emotional attachment to their history. All I’m trying to say is that morality as a motivating force is overrated in us humans. And that our loyalty to our flock is underestimated. We shape morality so that it suits our purposes when we feel our group is under threat. Family vendettas and genocides throughout history are not the work of monsters but of human beings like us who believed they were acting in a way that was morally correct. Our loyalty is primarily to our own and secondarily to the changing morality that at any given time serves the needs of our group. My great-uncle took part in the Cuban revolution, and even today there are still two diametrically opposed but morally equally dogmatic ways of looking at Fidel Castro. And what determines your view of him is not whether you are politically on the right or the left but the degree to which Castro affected the history of your close family, the extent to which they ended up part of the government in Havana or refugees in Miami. Everything else is secondary.’

I felt someone tugging at my jacket sleeve and turned.

It was Grete.

‘Can I have a word with you?’ she whispered.

‘Hi, Grete. We’re just in the middle of a conversation about—’

‘Mating on the quiet,’ said Grete. ‘I heard that.’

Something in the way she said it made me look more closely at her. And those words, they resonated with a hunch I’d had, something I’d already thought.

‘A word then,’ I said, and as we headed towards the bar I could feel both Stanley’s and Shannon’s eyes on my back.

‘There’s something I want you to pass on to Carl’s wife,’ said Grete once we were out of earshot.

‘Why is that?’ I asked ‘why’ instead of ‘what’ because I already knew the ‘what’. Saw it in her murky eyes.

‘Because she’ll believe you.’

‘Why should she believe it if it’s something I’m just passing on?’

‘Because you’ll tell her as though it comes directly from you.’

‘And why should I do that?’

‘Because you want the same thing as me, Roy,’

‘And that is?’

‘For them to split up.’

I wasn’t shocked. Not even surprised. Just fascinated.

‘Come on, Roy, we both know that Carl and that southern girl don’t belong together. We’re only doing what’s best for them. And it’ll save her the slow torment of finding it out herself, poor girl.’

I tried to moisten my throat. Wanted to turn and go but couldn’t. ‘Find out what?’

‘That Carl’s having it away with Mari again.’

I looked at her. The perm stood out around her pale face like a halo. It’s always surprised me that people fall for shampoo adverts that say it revitalises the hair. Hair has never had any life in it that can be revitalised. Hair’s dead, a cuticle of keratin growing out of a follicle. It’s got as much of life and you in it as the excrement you squeeze out. Hair is history, it’s what you’ve been, eaten and done. And you can’t go back. Grete’s perm was a mummified past, a permafrost, frightening as death itself.

‘They do it at the Aas’s cabin.’

I didn’t answer.

‘I’ve seen it with my own eyes,’ said Grete. ‘They park in the woods so you can’t see the cars from the road and then they meet in the cabin.’

I wanted to ask how much of her time she spent shadowing Carl but didn’t.

‘But it’s no wonder Carl fucks around,’ she said.

She obviously wanted me to ask what she meant by that. But something – the look on her face, the certainty of something, reminded me of when Mum read ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ to us – persuaded me not to. Because as a child I had never understood why Red Riding Hood has to ask the disguised wolf that final question, why it has such big teeth, when she already has a suspicion that it is the wolf. Didn’t she understand that once the wolf realises he’s been unmasked he would grab her and eat her up? What I learned from it was: stop after ‘why do you have such big ears?’ Say you’re going to fetch more wood from the woodshed, and then get the hell out of there. But I just stood there. And like any fucking Little Red Riding Hood I asked: ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘That he fucks around? Because they usually do, the ones who were sexually abused when they were kids.’

I had stopped breathing. Couldn’t move a muscle. And my voice was hoarse when I spoke. ‘What the hell makes you think Carl was abused?’

‘He said so himself. When he was drunk, after he fucked me in the woods at Årtun. Sobbed, said he regretted it, but he couldn’t help it, that he’d read somewhere that people like him became promiscuous.’

I moved my tongue around in my mouth looking for saliva, but it was dry as the inside of a hay barn.

‘Promiscuous,’ was all I could manage to whisper, but she didn’t seem to hear.

‘And he said you blamed yourself for him being abused. That that was why you always looked out for him. That you sort of owed him.’

I got a little more sound from my vocal cords. ‘You’ve been lying for so long you believe it yourself.’

Grete smiled as she shook her head in pretended regret. ‘Carl was so drunk that he’s bound to have forgotten he said it, but he did. I asked him why you blamed yourself when it wasn’t you but his own father who was abusing him. Carl said he thought it was because you were his big brother. That you thought it was your job to look after him. And that was why in the end you rescued him.’

‘So you think you can remember him saying that?’ I tried, but I could see it had no effect on her.

‘That’s what he said,’ she nodded. ‘But when I asked he wouldn’t tell me how you rescued him.’

I was finished. I saw those wormlike lips moving. ‘So I’m asking you now: what did you do, Roy?’

I raised my head and looked into her eyes. Expectant. Gleeful. Mouth half open, all that was left was to pop the fork in. I felt a bubbling in my chest, a smile coming, I just couldn’t stop it.

‘Eh?’ said Grete, and the look on her face turned to surprise as I burst out laughing.

I was… actually, what was I? Happy? Relieved? The way exposed murderers feel liberated because the waiting is over and finally they are no longer alone with their terrible secret. Or was I just crazy? Because surely you must be crazy if you prefer people to believe you’ve been abusing your little brother rather than know that it was your father who did it and that you, the big brother, didn’t do a thing about it. Or maybe it isn’t madness, maybe it’s as simple as that you can tolerate the disgust of a whole village which is rooted in lies and false rumours, but not if there’s the tiniest element of truth in it. And the truth about what happened at Opgard wasn’t just about a father who was an abuser, it was also about a cowardly, crawling big brother who could have intervened but didn’t dare to, who knew but kept his mouth shut, who was ashamed of himself but kept his head down so low he could hardly bear the sight of his own reflection in the mirror. And now the worst that could happen had happened. When Grete Smitt knew something and talked about it then the whole hair salon found out about it followed by the whole village, that’s how straightforward it was. So then why did I laugh? Because the worst that could happen had just happened, and it was already several seconds in the past. Now everything could go to hell in a handcart, and I was free.

‘Well?’ said Carl brightly. ‘What do people do for kicks around here?’ He put one arm across my shoulder, laid the other round Grete’s. Breathed champagne breath on me.

‘Hm,’ I said. ‘What do you say, Grete?’

‘Trotting,’ said Grete.

‘Trotting?’ Carl laughed loudly and took a glass of champagne from the tray on the counter. He was getting very drunk, no question about that. ‘I didn’t know Roy followed the gee-gees.’

‘I’m trying to get him interested,’ said Grete.

‘And what’s your pitch?’

‘My pitch?’

‘Your sales pitch.’

‘If you don’t play, you can’t win. And I think Roy knows that.’

Carl turned to me. ‘Do you?’

I shrugged.

‘Roy’s more the type that thinks if you don’t play, you can’t lose,’ said Carl.

‘It’s just a question of finding a game where everyone’s a winner,’ said Grete. ‘Just like with your hotel, Carl. No losers, only winners and a happy ending.’

‘Let’s drink to that!’ said Carl. He and Grete clinked their glasses together and then Carl turned to me, his glass still raised.

I realised I was still wearing that idiotic smile.

‘Left my glass over there,’ I said, nodding towards the Bowie colloquy, and then walked away, with no plans to return.

As I walked back towards them my heart was singing. Paradoxical, carefree, and almost mockingly, like the wheatear that sat on a gravestone and sang his zip-tuk song as the priest tossed the earth down onto my parents’ coffins. There are no happy endings, but there are moments of meaningless happiness, and each one of those moments might be the last, so why not sing at the top of your voice? Tell the world. And then let life – or death – knock you down another day.

As I approached Stanley turned his head towards me as though he had known I was coming. He didn’t smile, just sought out my eyes. A warmth flowed through my body. I didn’t know why, all I knew was that the time had come. The time when I would drive into Geitesvingen and not come out of the turn. I would drive off the road and out in free fall, secure in the knowledge that the only prize awaiting me was those few seconds of freedom, understanding, truth and all of that stuff. And then I would come to the end, crushed against the ground in a place where the wreck could never be recovered, where I could rot in a blessed loneliness, peace and quiet.

I don’t know why I chose that particular moment. Maybe because that one glass of champagne had given me just enough courage. Maybe because I knew I had straight away to crush the little hope Grete had given me before I could pursue it and let it grow. Because I did not want the prize she was offering, it would be worse than all the loneliness a life could offer.

I passed Stanley, picked up the champagne glass beside the trotting coupons and stood behind Shannon, who was listening to the new chairman as he spoke enthusiastically about what the hotel would mean for the village, although what he probably meant was for the coming council election. I touched Shannon’s shoulder lightly, leaned towards her ear, so close I could pick up the smell of her, so unlike the smell of any woman I had known or made love to, and yet so familiar, as though it could have been my own.

‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered. ‘But there’s nothing I can do about it. I love you.’

She didn’t turn to me. Didn’t ask me to repeat what I had just said. She just carried on looking at Gilbert with the same unchanged expression on her face, as though I had whispered a translation of something he was saying. But for an instant I could feel the smell of her grow stronger, the same warmth that flowed through me flowing through her too, lifting the scent molecules from her skin as it rose up towards me.

I carried on towards the door, stopped by the old payazzo machine, downed the rest of the champagne and placed the glass up on the wooden frame. Noticed that Giovanni was standing there looking at me with his sharp and censorious rooster look before he – almost in contempt – turned away with a cock-a-doodle-doo that made his little red Hitler-quiff jump.

I went out. Closed my eyes and inhaled the air, washed clean by the rain, as sharp as the blade of an open razor against the cheek. Oh yes, winter would be coming early this year.

When I reached the station I called head office and asked to be put through to the personnel manager.

‘This is Roy Opgard. I was wondering if that position as manager of the station in Sørlandet is still open?’