The Kingdom

61

IN THE SECOND WEEK OF January I received a summons to attend a company meeting of the Os Spa and Mountain Hotel SL. It was scheduled for the first week in February. The order of business was simple and consisted of one point: Where do we go from here?

The formulation opened up all sorts of possibilities. Should the hotel be scrapped? Or should it be sold to other interested parties and only the SL company be scrapped? Or should the project continue, only with a new timetable?

The meeting wasn’t due to start until seven, and it was still only one as I pulled into the yard outside Opgard. A metallic white sun shone from a cloudless sky, and it was higher above the mountain peaks than it had been the last time I was home. As I stepped out of the car Shannon was standing there, so beautiful that it was painful.

‘I’ve learned to walk on these,’ she said, holding up a pair of skis in delight. I had to stop myself from taking her in my arms. Only four days earlier we had shared a bed in Notodden. I could still taste her on my tongue and feel the warmth of her skin.

‘She’s good!’ said Carl as he emerged from the house with my ski boots in his hands. ‘Let’s take a trip over to the hotel.’

We fetched our skis from the barn, fastened them on and set off. I realised that Carl had of course exaggerated; Shannon managed to stay on her feet most of the way, but she wasn’t good.

‘I think it’s the surfing I did as a child,’ she said, obviously pleased with herself. ‘It helps your balance, and—’ She squealed as one ski reared up in front of her and down she went on her arse in the fresh snow. Carl and I doubled over with laughter, and after a failed attempt to look offended Shannon had to start laughing too. As we helped her up I felt Carl’s hand on my back, felt it give my neck a little squeeze. And his blue gaze shone on me. He looked better than he had done at Christmas. A bit thinner, movements a little quicker, the whites of his eyes a little clearer, his diction clearer too.

‘Well?’ said Carl, leaning on his ski poles. ‘Can you see?’

All I saw was the same burnt-out ruins of the previous month.

‘Can’t you see it? The new hotel?’

‘No.’

Carl laughed. ‘Just wait. Fourteen months. I’ve spoken to my people, and we’re going to bloody well get it done in fourteen months. In a month’s time we’ll be cutting the ribbon down there for the start of the new building. And it’s going to be bigger than the first launch. Anna Falla has agreed to come and cut the ribbon.’

I nodded. Elected member of the Storting, leader of the Committee for Business and Industry. It was pretty big.

‘And afterwards, a party for the whole village at Årtun, just like the old days.’

‘Nothing can be just like the old days, Carl.’

‘Wait and see. I’m asking Rod to get the old band together for a reunion.’

‘You’re kidding!’ I laughed. Rod. That was way bigger than anyone the Storting could send.

Carl turned. ‘Shannon?’

She had struggled her way up the hill behind us. ‘It’s bakglatt. I kept slipping backwards,’ she said with a smile, panting. ‘Great Norwegian word. Easy to glide backwards, not so easy forwards.’

‘Want to show Uncle Roy how you’ve learned to ski downhill?’ Carl pointed to a sheltered slope. The fresh snow glistened like a carpet of diamonds.

Shannon made a face at him. ‘I’m not proposing to entertain you two.’

‘Just imagine you’re surfing at Surfer’s Point back home,’ he said teasingly.

She swung out at him with a ski pole and almost lost her balance again. Carl laughed.

‘You going to show her how to ski?’ Carl asked me.

‘No,’ I said, and closed my eyes, which were smarting, even though I was wearing sunglasses. ‘I don’t want to spoil.’

‘He means he doesn’t want to spoil the fresh snow,’ I heard Carl say to Shannon. ‘It used to drive Dad nuts. We’d come to some perfect downhill slope with untouched, powdery snow, and he’d ask Roy to go down first, because Roy’s the best of us on skis, and then Roy refuses. Says it’s so lovely and he doesn’t want to spoil it with ski tracks.’

‘I can understand that,’ said Shannon.

‘Not Dad,’ said Carl. ‘He said if you don’t spoil then you won’t get anywhere.’

We took off our skis, sat down on them and divided an orange into three.

‘Did you know that the orange tree came from Barbados?’ said Carl, squinting his eyes at me.

‘That’s the grapefruit tree,’ said Shannon. ‘And not even that is by any means certain. But then…’ She looked at me. ‘It’s all the things we don’t know that make history true.’

Once the orange had disappeared, Shannon said she was going to head back, so she wouldn’t have to worry about keeping us waiting.

Carl and I sat watching her until she disappeared over the rise.

Then Carl heaved a heavy sigh. ‘That bloody fire…’

‘Have they found out any more about how it happened?’

‘Only that someone started it, and that a rocket was put there so it would look like that was what started it. That Lithuanian…’

‘Latvian.’

‘…couldn’t even tell them the make of the car he’d seen, so they don’t exclude the possibility that he started it himself.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘Pyromaniac. Or else someone paid him to do it. There are a few jealous souls in this village who hate that hotel, Roy.’

‘Hate us, you mean.’

‘That too.’

There was a distant howl. A dog. Someone claimed to have seen wolf tracks up here on the mountain. And even bear tracks. Not impossible, of course, only pretty unlikely. Almost nothing is impossible. It’s just a question of time, and then everything happens.

‘I believe him,’ I said.

‘The Lithuanian?’

‘Not even a pyromaniac would want to go on living on the same plot of land he’s scorched himself. And if he was paid to do it, why complicate it by saying he’d seen a car with a defective brake light heading down from the site? He could have said it was already on fire when he got there; or that he was asleep in the cabin, that he knew nothing about it. And let the police find out if it was the rocket or something else.’

‘Not everyone thinks as logically as you, Roy.’

I wedged in another snuff pellet. ‘Maybe not. Who hates you enough to burn down your hotel?’

‘Let’s see now. Kurt Olsen, because he’s still convinced we had something to do with his father’s death. Erik Nerell, after we humiliated him with those naked pictures we got him to send. Simon Nergard, because he… because he lives at Nergard, you beat him up, and he’s always hated us.’

‘What about Dan Krane?’

‘No. Him and Mari are part-owners of the hotel.’

‘In whose name?’

‘Mari’s.’

‘If I know Mari, they’ll have a separate ownership agreement in that house.’

‘Definitely. But then Dan would never do anything to harm Mari—’

‘No? Consider a man whose wife has been unfaithful to him, and you’re the man she did it with. Who’s been threatened, censored, humiliated by an enforcer because he wants to write something about the hotel that is critical, but true. Who’s lost his friends in high places and has to mingle with people like me on New Year’s Eve. That marriage was already on the rocks, and on New Year’s Eve he was planning to put the final nail in the coffin with a character assassination of her father in the leader column of his paper. Would a man like that never harm the cause of all his misery? If he could at the same time ruin you? At Stanley’s party I met a Dan Krane who’d gone to the wall.’

‘Gone to the wall?’

‘Do you know how scary it is to have your life threatened by someone who knows exactly the right buttons to push?’

‘Sort of,’ said Carl with a sidelong glance at me.

‘It eats away at your soul, as people say.’

‘Yeah,’ said Carl quietly.

‘And what happens then?’

‘In the end you just can’t face being scared any more.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You don’t give a fuck, you’d rather die. Destroy yourself or destroy the other. Burn down, murder. Anything, not to go on being afraid. That’s what going to the wall means.’

‘Yes,’ said Carl. ‘That’s the wall. And it’s better on the other side of the wall, no matter what.’

We sat in silence. I heard rapid wingbeats above, a shadow crossed the snow. Grouse, maybe. I didn’t look up.

‘She seems happy,’ I said. ‘Shannon.’

‘Of course,’ said Carl. ‘She thinks she’s going to get her hotel, the way she drew it.’

‘Thinks?’

Carl nodded. He seemed to collapse imperceptibly and the smile, that bright smile, was gone.

‘I haven’t told her yet, but the news has somehow got out that the hotel wasn’t insured against fire. That it’s only Willumsen’s money that’s kept the project afloat until now. Dan Krane’s probably the source.’

‘Damn him!’

‘People are worried about their money. Even the board members are muttering about getting out while the going’s good. The meeting this evening could be the beginning of the end, Roy.’

‘What do you intend to do?’

‘I’ve got to somehow try to turn the mood around. But after that thunderous oration Aas gave at Willumsen’s funeral, and what Dan wrote, and what he’s been spreading through the village, I’m not exactly wading in confidence right now.’

‘People here know you,’ I said. ‘In the final analysis that’s more important than what some newcomer of a hack journalist scribbles and babbles about. And they’ll have forgotten what Aas said once they see you standing tall again. When they realise the guy from Opgard doesn’t give up, not even when he’s been down for the count.’

Carl looked at me. ‘D’you think so?’

I gave him a punch on the shoulder. ‘You know what they say. Everybody loves a comeback kid. Anyway, the really rough work and the costliest investments on the site are behind you now, all that’s left is the actual building. It would be idiotic to give up now. You can do this, brother.’

Carl rested a hand on my shoulder. ‘Thanks, Roy. Thanks for believing in me.’

‘The problem is getting everyone to agree to Shannon’s original drawings. The council probably still wants trolls and timber. You need to get the investors to sanction the extra cost of the more expensive materials and solutions Shannon wants to use.’

Carl straightened up. It looked as if I’d pumped a little optimism back into him. ‘Shannon and I have been thinking about that. The problem when we showed the drawings at the first investors’ meeting was that we hadn’t done enough work on the visual aspect of the presentation, it looked too sad and bleak. Shannon’s done some drawings and sketches with completely different lighting using completely different perspectives. The biggest difference is that these are in a summer landscape, not winter. The previous time, all the concrete merged into a monotonous, colourless winter landscape, the hotel looked like an extension of the winter people round here hate, right? Now we’ve got a colourful landscape that borrows light and colour from the concrete, the hotel stands out against the background, it doesn’t look like a bunker trying to disappear into the landscape.

‘Same shit, new wrapping?’ I said in English.

‘And not a soul will realise that’s what it is. I promise you, they’re going to be beside themselves in their enthusiasm.’ He was back in the saddle now, sunlight flashing off his white teeth.

‘Like natives being offered glass beads.’ I smiled too.

‘The pearls are real enough, only this time we’re giving them a little polish before we offer them.’

‘That’s honest enough,’ I said.

‘Honest enough.’

‘One simply does what one must do.’

‘One does,’ said Carl. He turned his gaze to the west.

I heard him take a breath. Shrink a little. Had he fallen off his horse again?

‘Even when you know it’s very, very wrong,’ said Carl.

‘True enough,’ I said, though I knew he was talking about something else now. My eyes followed the tracks to where Shannon had vanished.

‘And yet still we go on doing it,’ he said slowly and with his new, clearer diction. ‘Day after day. Night after night. Committing the same sin.’

I held my breath. Of course he could well be talking about Dad. Or about himself and Mari. But unless I was mistaken, this was about Shannon. Shannon and me.

‘For example…’ said Carl. His voice was tight, and he swallowed hard. I steeled myself. ‘Like when Kurt Olsen stood there looking down into Huken for the Jaguar. And I freaked out and thought here we go again, now we’re going to be exposed. Exactly the same as when his father stood in the same place and looked down to see if the wheels of the Cadillac had punctures.’

I didn’t respond.

‘But that time you weren’t there to stop me. I pushed Sigmund Olsen over, Roy.’

My mouth was as dry as a bloody rusk, but at least I was breathing again.

‘But you knew that all along,’ he said.

I kept my gaze fastened on the ski tracks. Moved my head slightly. Nodded.

‘So why did you never let me tell you?’

I shrugged.

‘You didn’t want to be made an accomplice to a murder,’ he said.

‘You think I’m afraid of that?’ I said with a twisted smile.

‘Willumsen and his enforcer are something else,’ said Carl. ‘This was an innocent sheriff.’

‘You must have pushed him hard – he landed a long way out from the vertical.’

‘I made him fly.’ Carl closed his eyes, maybe the sunlight was too strong. Then he opened them again. ‘You already knew when I called you at the workshop, that it wasn’t an accident. But you didn’t ask. Because it’s always easier that way. To pretend that ugliness doesn’t exist. Like when Dad came into our room at night and—’

‘Shut up!’

Carl shut up. Rapid wingbeats. Sounded like the same bird on its way back.

‘I don’t want to know, Carl. I wanted to believe you were more of a human being than me. That you weren’t capable of killing in cold blood. But you’re still my brother. And when you pushed him, maybe you rescued me from being accused of the murder of Mum and Dad.’

Carl made a face. He put his sunglasses back on and tossed the orange peel into the snow.

‘Everybody loves a comeback kid. Do people say that, or is that just something you made up?’

I didn’t answer, looked at my watch instead. ‘They’re having problems with the stocktaking at the station and asked if I could help out. See you at Årtun at seven.’

‘But you’ll be spending the night with us?’

‘Thanks, but I’ll be driving straight home after the meeting. Got to be at work early tomorrow morning.’

Despite the fact that only the participants had a vote, the meeting at Årtun was advertised as being open to all. I had arrived early, taken a seat on the back row and watched as the hall gradually filled. But whereas there had been an atmosphere of excited anticipation at the first meeting eighteen months earlier, the mood this time was very different. Dark, sombre. A lynching mood, as people say. Everyone was there by the time the meeting began. On the front row Jo and Mari Aas sitting next to Voss Gilbert. A few rows behind them, Stanley next to Dan Krane. Grete Smitt was sitting next to Simon Nergard, leaning into him and whispering something in his ear, God knows when the two of them had become such friends. Anton Moe was there with his wife. Julie and Alex. Markus had taken time off from the station – I noticed him exchanging glances with Rita Willumsen sitting two rows behind him. Erik Nerell and his wife were next to Kurt Olsen, but when Erik tried to start a conversation it was obvious Kurt wasn’t in the mood for it, and Erik probably regretted sitting there but could hardly get up and move now.

At precisely seven o’clock Carl stepped out onto the stage. The room fell silent. Carl looked up. And I didn’t like what I saw. Now, when it was so important for him to be at his very best, to turn that tide of negativity, to part the waters like a Moses, he seemed overwhelmed by the gravity of the occasion. He seemed tired even before he started.

‘Fellow inhabitants of Os,’ he began. His voice sounded impotent, his gaze flitting about from place to place as though seeking eye contact but being rejected everywhere. ‘We are a mountain people. We live in a place where life has traditionally been hard. Where we have had to fend for ourselves.’

I’m guessing it was a pretty unusual way to open a partners’ meeting, but then most of those in the room probably didn’t know any more than me about the rituals involved in partners’ meetings.

‘In order to survive therefore, we have had to adopt the same maxim as the one my father taught my brother and me. Do what has to be done.’ His gaze met mine. And stopped its flitting. He still looked tormented, but a slight smile crossed his lips. ‘So that’s what we do. Every day, every time. Not because we can, but because we have to. So each time we meet adversity, each time a flock wanders over the clifftop, a crop freezes, or the village is cut off by a landslide, we find a way back out to the world again. And when the route of the main highway is changed, and there is no longer a way in for the world out there, then we make one. We build a mountain hotel.’ His voice was sounding a little livelier now and, almost imperceptibly, he stood up straighter. ‘And when the hotel burns down, and everything lies in ruins, then we look upon the scene of destruction and we despair…’ He held up his index finger and raised his voice. ‘…for one, single day.’

His gaze moved on from me and seemed to find other places to dwell, other invitations to accept.

‘When we’ve laid our plan, and things don’t work out as expected, then we do what we have to do. We make another. So things aren’t exactly as we had imagined they would be. Fine. Then let’s imagine something else.’ Again his gaze found mine. ‘For mountain people like us there is no place for useless sentimentality, no alternative in looking backwards. As our father used to say: kill your darlings and babies. Let us look forwards, my friends. Together.’

There was a long, deliberate pause. Was I mistaken, or did Jo Aas just move his head? Yes, that was a nod. And as though that had been the signal he had been waiting for, Carl continued.

‘Because we are together, whether we like it or not. Like a family, you, me, all of us here this evening are together in a fateful union from which we cannot opt out. We, the mountain people of Os, will go down together. Or we will rise together.’

The mood turned. Slowly, but I could feel it. The lynching atmosphere was gone. Still a certain cool scepticism, of course. And as was only to be expected, an as yet unarticulated demand that Carl give his answers to certain vital questions. But they liked what they were hearing. Both what he said, and the Os way he said it. And I realised that the uncertain opening had been deliberate. That he had taken note of what I had said. Everybody loves a comeback kid.

But then, just as it seemed as though he had them hooked, Carl took a step backwards from the podium and showed the palms of his hands to the gathering.

‘I can’t guarantee anything. The future’s too uncertain for that, and my powers of prophecy too feeble. The only thing I can guarantee is that, as solitary individuals, we are condemned to failure. We are as the sheep that has wandered from the flock and will be eaten up or freeze to death. But together, and only together, we have at least this one, unique possibility of getting out of the bind we undeniably find ourselves in, as a result of the fire.’

Again he paused, standing there in the semi-darkness beyond the podium. I just had to admire him. That last sentence was a bloody rhetorical masterpiece. In that one sentence he had done three things. One: appeared honest in admitting it was a setback but putting all the blame on the fire. Two: through a sort of inspired moralism preached solidarity, at the same time as handing responsibility for doing something about the situation onto everyone sitting in front of him. Three: appeared cautious, by stressing that a newly built hotel wasn’t a guaranteed solution but only a possibility, at the same time as he implied that it was unique, and therefore the only one.

‘But if we do this right, then we’ll do more than just get out of a bind,’ said Carl, still from the semi-darkness.

I’m pretty sure that one of the reasons he arrived early was in order to arrange the lighting. Because when he once again moved forward into the light falling on the podium, the visual effect was as striking as his words. The man who had seemed so worn out and troubled when he entered the stage was suddenly transformed into a bullish demagogue.

‘We will make the village of Os blossom,’ he boomed. ‘And we will do it by building a hotel that is without compromises, that is without expensive tat like trolls and timber, because we believe that modern people, in search of an authentic experience, will find themselves entering the world of the Norwegian folk tale the moment they leave the city limits. The mountain is what they want, and that is without compromises too. So we’ll build a hotel that submits to the mountain, that fits in, that obeys the mountain’s own inexorable rules. Concrete is the material that comes closest to the mountain’s own conglomerate. We’ll build it like that not just because it’s cheaper, but because concrete is beautiful.’

He looked out over the gathering as though challenging them, urging them to protest. But the silence was total.

‘Concrete, this concrete, our concrete,’ he almost sang in the chanting, hypnotising rhythm of a salvationist preacher, at the same time as he beat out the same rhythm with his forefinger on the laptop standing on the lectern, ‘is like us. It is simple, it can withstand the storms of autumn, of winter, defy avalanches, lightning and thunder, extreme weather, hurricanes and New Year rockets. In a word it is a material that, like us, survives. And because it is like us, my friends, that makes it beautiful!’

This was obviously the cue for someone in charge of the projector, because at that moment music came pouring through the loudspeakers. And the hotel – the same hotel that I had seen on Shannon’s very first drawings – appeared on the illuminated screen. Green forests. Sunshine. A stream. Children playing, people strolling in summer clothing. And now the hotel didn’t look at all sterile but like a calm, firm canvas for the life that was drawn all around it, something permanent, like the mountain itself. It looked, quite simply, every bit as fantastic as Carl had described it.

I could see he was holding his breath. Dammit, I was holding my breath too. And then the room erupted.

Carl let the applause ring out, milking it. Stepped forward to the podium and silenced them with raised hands.

‘And since you clearly like it, how about a round of applause for the architect, Shannon Alleyne Opgard?’

She emerged from the wings and into the spotlight, and once again the room erupted.

She stopped after a few steps, smiled, waved to us, laughed happily, and remained there just long enough to show us that she appreciated the response but that she didn’t want to distract their attention from the village’s real hero.

After she’d left, and the applause died down, Carl coughed and gripped the sides of the lectern with both hands.

‘Thank you, friends. Thank you. But this meeting is about more than the appearance of the hotel. It’s also about future plans, a timetable, finances, accounting and the election of representatives for the owners.’

He had them in the palm of his hand now.

He was going to tell them that work on the resurrection of the hotel would begin in two months, in April, take just fourteen months, and that the cost would rise by only about twenty per cent. And that they had made a new deal with the Swedish operator who would be running the hotel.

Sixteen months.

In sixteen months from now, Shannon and I would be out of here.

Shannon sent a message she wouldn’t be coming to Notodden as arranged, that from now and until the recommencement of building work in April she, as leader of the project, had to give it her full and complete attention.

I understood.

I suffered.

I counted the days.

In the middle of March, with the rain beating down on Søm and the Varodd Bridge in the evening dark outside my window, the doorbell rang. And there she stood. Rain dripping from the red hair that lay plastered to her head. I blinked. It looked like streaks of rust or blood running across the white skin of her neck. She had a bag in her hand. And a mixture of despair and determination in her eyes.

‘Can I come in?’

I stepped aside.

I only found out the next day why she’d come.

To tell me the news.

And to ask me to kill again.

62

THE SUN HAD JUST RISEN, the earth was still wet with rain from the night before, and the birdsong deafening as Shannon and I walked arm in arm through the woods.

‘These are birds of passage,’ I said. ‘They come back earlier here in the south of the country.’

‘They sound happy,’ said Shannon, and laid her head against my arm. ‘They’ve probably been longing to come home. Who was which bird again?’

‘Dad was the mountain lark, Mum the wheatear. Uncle Bernard was the bunting. Carl is—’

‘Don’t tell me! The meadow pipit.’

‘Correct.’

‘And I’m the dotterel. And you’re the ring ouzel.’

I nodded.

We had hardly spoken that night.

‘Can we talk about it tomorrow?’ Shannon had asked after I’d let her in and helped her out of her wet coat, firing off one question after another. ‘I need to sleep,’ she said, wrapping her arms around my waist and pressing her chin against my chest, and I felt how my shirt was soaked through. ‘But first I need you.’

I had to get up early, we were expecting a big goods delivery at the station in the morning and I had to be on site. She hadn’t said anything about why she’d come over breakfast either, and I hadn’t asked. It was as though once I knew why, nothing would ever be the same again. So now we closed our eyes and enjoyed the brief space of time we had, the free fall before we hit the ground.

I’d told her I had to stay at the station at least until lunch before I could get someone to cover for me, but that if she came to the station with me we could go for a walk after the delivery. She had nodded, we’d made the short drive and she had stayed waiting in the car while I checked and signed off for all the pallets.

We walked north. Behind us lay the motorway, with its Saturn-rings system of entry and exit roads, ahead of us the woods which already, this early in March, had a touch of green to them. We discovered a path that led deep into the woods. I asked if Os was still deep in winter.

‘It’s still winter in Opgard,’ she said. ‘In the village they already had two fake springs.’

I laughed and kissed her hair. We had reached a tall fence that barred any further progress and sat down on a large stone by the side of the path.

‘And the hotel?’ I asked with a glance at my watch. ‘How is that coming along?’

‘The official start-up will be in two weeks, as planned. So it’s going well. In a manner of speaking.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Tell me what isn’t going well.’

She straightened her back. ‘That’s one of the things I’ve come to talk to you about. An unforeseen problem came up. The engineers discovered a weakness in the ground, in the mountain itself.’

‘Discovered? But Carl knows the mountain is unstable, that’s the reason for the rockfalls in Huken, that’s why the highway tunnel wasn’t built ages ago.’ I could hear how irritated I sounded. Maybe it was at the thought that when she’d taken the trouble to drive all the way to Kristiansand, it wasn’t for my sake but because of her hotel.

‘Carl hasn’t said anything about the stability of the rock to anyone,’ she said. ‘Because, as you well know, he prefers to suppress anything he thinks might be a problem.’

‘And?’ I said impatiently.

‘It can be fixed, but that’ll need more money, and Carl said we don’t have it, and suggested we just keep quiet about it, that it would take at least twenty years before the building started looking a bit crooked. Of course, I wouldn’t accept that and I did some checking of the financial situation on my own, to see if there was room to borrow a bit more from the bank. They told me that for that they would require more security, and when I said I would talk to you and Carl to see if you were willing to offer the bank all the outlying land around Opgard as security, they told me…’ She stopped, swallowed before continuing. ‘…told me that according to the property register, Willumsen’s estate already had security in all the outlying land around Opgard. And on top of that, Carl Opgard was the sole registered owner after he bought you out in the autumn.’

I stared at her. I had to cough to get my voice to work. ‘But that’s not correct. There must be some mistake.’

‘That’s what I said too. So they showed me a printout from the property register with both Carl’s and your signatures.’ She held her mobile phone up to me. And there it was. My signature. That’s to say, something that looked like my signature. Resembled it so closely that only one person could have done it, and that was the person who had learned to copy his brother’s handwriting for his essays at school.

Something dawned on me. Something Carl had said to the enforcer while they were sitting in the kitchen. But Willumsen’s got security. And the enforcer’s response: Which he says ain’t worth much without a hotel. Willumsen, who normally took a man at his word, had not trusted Carl and demanded the land as security.

‘You know what Dad called that miserable little farm of ours?’

‘What?’

‘The kingdom. Opgard is our kingdom, he always used to say. As though he was worried Carl and I wouldn’t take owning our own land seriously enough.’

Shannon said nothing.

I coughed. ‘Carl’s forged my signature. He knows I would have said no to using our land as security for a loan from Willumsen, so he transferred the property to himself behind my back.’

‘And now Carl owns all the land.’

‘On paper, yes. I’ll get it back.’

‘You think so? He’s had plenty of time to discreetly hand it back to you after Willumsen cancelled the debt. Why hasn’t he done so?’

‘He’s probably been too busy.’

‘Wake up, Roy. Or do I know your brother better than you do? As long as it’s his name on the property register, then he owns the land. We’re talking about someone who didn’t hesitate to swindle his partner and friends in Canada and then run off. When I was in Toronto in the summer I found out more about what happened that time. I talked to one of his partners who was also a friend of mine. He told me Carl threatened to kill him when he said he was going to warn the investors about the size of their losses on the project, so that it could be stopped before they lost even more.’

‘Carl knows what to say.’

‘He called round to see this friend of ours when he was at home on his own. Carl held a gun on him, Roy. Said he would kill him and his family if he didn’t keep his mouth shut.’

‘He panicked.’

‘And what do you think he’s doing now?’

‘Carl doesn’t steal from me, Shannon. I’m his brother.’ I felt her hand on my arm, wanted to pull it away, but didn’t. ‘And he doesn’t kill people,’ I said, and heard how my own voice was shaking. ‘Not like that. Not because of money.’

‘Maybe not,’ she said. ‘Not because of money.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He won’t let me go. At least, not now.’

‘Not now? What’s different between now and then?’

She looked me straight in the eye. There was a groan from the trees behind us. Then she put her arms around me.

‘I wish I’d never met Carl,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘But then I wouldn’t have met you either, so I don’t know. But we need a miracle. We need God to do something, Roy.’

She rested her chin on my shoulder so that we were looking in different directions, her through the fence and into the dark forest, me towards the clearing and the motorway that led out, away, to other places.

There was another groan, a shadow fell over us, and the chorus of birdsong stopped abruptly, as though a conductor had raised his baton.

‘Roy…’ whispered Shannon. She raised her chin from my shoulder.

I looked at her, saw that she was staring upwards, with one eye wide open and one almost closed. I turned and saw four legs directly behind the fence. I followed the legs upwards. And upwards. And there at last was a body, and above it a neck. That continued upwards, parallel with the tree trunks.

A wondrous thing to behold: a giraffe.

Chomping away and looking down on us without interest. Eyelashes like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange.

‘I forgot to tell you, this is a zoo,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Shannon as the giraffe’s lips and tongue pulled at one of the thin, bare branches, making the sunlight flicker across her upturned face. ‘They forgot to tell us this is a zoo.’

After our walk in the woods, Shannon and I headed back to the station.

I said she could take the Volvo and that I would call her when I was finished so she could pick me up. I had accounts to go through, but I couldn’t concentrate. Carl had sold me out. Swindled me, stolen my birthright, sold it to the highest bidder. He’d allowed me to go ahead and become a killer, let me kill Willumsen to save his own skin. As usual. And still kept quiet about how he had betrayed me. Yes, he had betrayed me.

I was so angry my whole body was trembling and would not fucking stop. Finally I had to go to the toilet and throw up. And afterwards I sat there whimpering and hoped no one heard me.

What the fuck should I do?

My eye fell on the poster in front of me. I’d pinned the same one up there as I had in the staff toilet at Os. DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE. EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON YOU. DO IT NOW.

I think I made my decision there and then. I’m pretty sure about that. But of course, it could have been later that evening. When I heard the other thing Shannon had come to Kristiansand to tell me.

63

I SAT IN SILENCE AT the kitchen table Shannon and I had carried into the living room.

She’d been to the shopping centre and made cou cou, which she explained was the national dish of Barbados. It consisted of cornmeal, bananas, tomatoes, onions and peppers. Though she had to make do with cod instead of flying fish, she was pleased to have found okra and breadfruit.

‘Is anything wrong?’ asked Shannon.

I shook my head. ‘It looks delicious.’

‘Finally food shops with a bit of choice,’ she said. ‘You’ve got the highest standard of living in the world, but you eat as though you were paupers.’

‘True,’ I said.

‘And I think the reason you all eat so quickly is that you aren’t used to food that actually tastes of something.’

‘True.’ I poured wine into our glasses from the bottle of white Pia Syse and head office had sent me two weeks earlier, when it became clear that the station would take third place in the ranking list. Put the bottle down on the table but didn’t touch my glass.

‘You’re still thinking about Carl,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You’re asking yourself how he could betray you like this?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m asking myself how I could betray him like this.’

She sighed. ‘You can’t decide who you fall for, Roy. You told me you mountain people fall in love with someone it makes practical sense to fall in love with, but now you see that isn’t true.’

‘Maybe not,’ I said. ‘But maybe it isn’t so completely random after all.’

‘No?’

‘Stanley told me about some French something-or-other who believes we desire the things other people desire. That we imitate.’

‘Mimetic desire,’ said Shannon. ‘René Girard.’

‘That was it.’

‘He believes it’s a romantic illusion that a person can follow their heart and their own inner desires, because beyond satisfying our most basic needs we don’t have any inner desires of our own. We desire what we see others around us desiring. Like dogs that are not interested in a toy bone suddenly have to have it when they see another dog wanting it.’

I nodded. ‘And like when you feel a stronger desire to own your own service station once you know other people want to own it too.’

‘And architects have to land the job when they know they’re competing with the best.’

‘And the ugly, stupid brother who has to have the woman that belongs to the smart, handsome brother.’

Shannon prodded at the food in front of her. ‘Are you saying your feelings for me are really about Carl?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not saying anything. Because I don’t know anything. Maybe we’re as much a riddle to ourselves as we are to others.’

Shannon touched her wine glass with her fingertips. ‘Isn’t it sad if we can only love what others love?’

‘Uncle Bernard said a lot of things seem sad if you look at them too long and too closely,’ I said. ‘That we ought to be blind in one eye.’

‘Maybe so.’

‘Shall we try being blind?’ I said. ‘For one night, at least.’

‘Yes,’ she said, struggling to smile.

I raised my glass. She raised hers.

‘I love you,’ I whispered.

Her smile widened, her eyes glistened like Lake Budal on a calm summer’s day, and for a moment I managed to forget all the rest, and hoped only that we could have this night, and then let the nuclear bomb drop. Yes, I wanted a nuclear bomb to drop. Because I had – I think I remember I already had – made up my mind. And I would have preferred a nuclear bomb.

As I put my glass down I saw that Shannon hadn’t drunk from hers. She stood up, leaned over the table and blew out the candles.

‘Time is tight,’ she said. ‘Too tight not to be lying naked beside you.’

The time was eight minutes to four when Shannon again collapsed on top of me. Her sweat mingled with mine, we smelled and tasted the same. I raised my head to look at the clock on the bedside table.

‘We’ve got three hours,’ said Shannon.

I dropped back onto the pillow and fumbled for the snuffbox next to the clock.

‘I love you,’ she said. She had said it every time she woke up, before we made love again. And before she went back to sleep again.

‘I love you, dotterel,’ I said, in the same tone as hers, as though the deep meaning of these words was now so familiar to us we didn’t need to add emotion, or meaning or conviction to them, just to say them was enough, chant them like a mantra, a creed we knew off by heart.

‘I cried today,’ I said, wedging a pellet of snuff beneath my lip.

‘You probably don’t do that often,’ said Shannon.

‘No.’

‘What were you crying for?’

‘You know what for. For everything.’

‘Yes, but exactly what? And why today?’

I thought about it. ‘I was crying for what I lost today.’

‘The family property,’ she said.

I gave a brief laugh. ‘No, not the farm.’

‘Me,’ she said.

‘I’ve never had you,’ I said. ‘I was crying for Carl. I lost my little brother today.’

‘Of course,’ Shannon whispered. ‘Sorry. Sorry for being so stupid.’

Then she laid a hand on my chest. And I could feel that this was different from the ostensibly innocent touching that we both knew was a prelude to a new bout of lovemaking. And I had a premonition when she placed her hand there. It was almost as though she were trying to take hold of my heart. Or no, not take hold of, but feel. She was trying to feel the beating of my heart, and how it would react now when she said what she was about to say.

‘I said earlier today that the hotel was just one of the things I’d come here to tell you about.’

She took a breath, and I held mine.

‘I am pregnant,’ she said.

I still held my breath.

‘By you. Notodden.’

Even though these six words held the answers to all the questions I might conceivably have had about what had happened, an avalanche of thoughts raced through my brain, and each one of them had a question mark attached.

‘The endometriosis…’ I started.

‘That makes it difficult to get pregnant, not impossible,’ she said. ‘I took a pregnancy test and at first I didn’t believe it, but now I’ve been to the doctor and had it confirmed.’

I started breathing again. Stared at the ceiling.

Shannon snuggled into me. ‘I thought of getting rid of it, but I can’t, I don’t want to. Maybe this is the one time in my life when all the planets were aligned in just such a way as to enable this body to get pregnant. But I love you, and the child is as much yours as it is mine. What do you want?’

I lay there in silence, breathing into the dark and wondering whether my heart had given her hand the answers it wanted.

‘I want you to have what you want,’ I said.

‘Are you afraid?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Are you happy?’

Was I happy? ‘Yes.’

I could tell from her breathing that she was on the verge of crying again.

‘But of course, you’re very confused, and wonder what we should do now,’ she said. Her voice was trembling, and she spoke quickly, as though to finish before her crying started. ‘And I don’t know how to answer you, Roy. I have to stay in Os until the hotel is up. You think maybe that this child is more important than a building, but…’

‘Hush,’ I said, and stroked her soft lips with my finger. ‘I know. And you’re wrong. I’m not confused. I know exactly what I have to do.’

In the darkness I saw the whites of her eyes almost turned on and off as she blinked.

DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE, I thought. EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON YOU. DO IT NOW.

As I say, I’m not completely sure whether my mind was made up back there in the staff toilet, or later, in bed with Shannon after she had told me she was carrying my child. And maybe it doesn’t matter too much, maybe the question is academic, as people say.

Anyway, I leaned close to Shannon’s ear and in a whisper told her what had to be done.

She nodded.

I lay awake the rest of that night.

The restart was in fourteen days’ time, the invitation advertising Rod at Årtun afterwards was pinned above the kitchen worktop.

I was already beginning to count down the hours.

I suffered.

The huge black beast was moving. Cruising slowly, almost reluctantly, the gravel crunching beneath its tyres. On the fins sticking out at the back two long, narrow red lights lit up. A Cadillac DeVille. The sun had set, but behind the bend a rim of orange framed Ottertind. And a 200-metre-deep crevice in the mountain, as though split by a blow from an axe.

‘You and me, Roy, we’re all we’ve got.’ That was what Carl used to say. ‘All those others we think we love, the ones we think love us, they’re mirages in a desert. But you and me, we’re one. We’re brothers. Two brothers in a desert. If one checks out, the other one checks out too.’

Yes. And death does not part us. It brings us together.

The beast was rolling faster now. On its way towards that hell for which we are all bound, all those of us with the heart for murder.

64

RESUMPTION OF WORK ON THE project wasn’t due to kick off until seven o’clock in the evening.

Nevertheless I left Kristiansand at the crack of dawn, and morning sunlight glinted on the county signpost as I drove into Os.

Apart from the dirty grey remnants lining the road after the snowploughs had done their work, the snow was gone. The ice on Lake Budal looked rotten, like sorbet. Here and there I could see surface water.

I’d called Carl a couple of days earlier and told him I was coming, but that I would be busy all day until the opening because the station at Os had been asked to show the books for the preceding five years. Spot checks, routine stuff, I had lied, I was just going to help them go through the figures from my time as boss. I didn’t know how long it would take, a few hours or a couple of days, but if necessary I would sleep down at the workshop. Carl replied that was fine, that anyway he and Shannon would be busy getting things ready for the opening ceremony and the party at Årtun afterwards.

‘But there is something I wanted to talk to you about,’ he said. ‘I can meet you down there at the station if that’s easier.’

‘I’ll let you know if there’s a window and we can have a beer at Fritt Fall,’ I said.

‘Coffee,’ he said. ‘I’ve dropped alcohol completely. My New Year’s resolution was to be boring, and according to Shannon it’s looking good so far.’

He sounded in good spirits. Laughing and joking. A man with the worst behind him.

Unlike me.

I parked the car in front of the workshop and looked up towards Opgard. In the slanting morning sunlight it looked as though the mountain was painted in gold. The open slopes were bare, but snow still lay in the shadows.

On my way into the station I noticed rubbish in the pump areas. And sure enough, Egil was behind the till inside. He was dealing with a customer, and it took me a few seconds to recognise that stooping back. Moe. The roofer. I remained standing in the doorway. Egil hadn’t noticed me, and now he reached up to the shelf behind him. The shelf where the EllaOne morning-after pills were. I held my breath.

‘Was that all?’ asked Egil, placing a packet in front of Moe.

‘Yes thanks.’ Moe paid, turned and came walking towards me.

I stared at the packet in his hand.

Paracetamol.

‘Roy Opgard,’ he said. Stopped in front of me with a broad smile. ‘God bless you.’

I didn’t know what to say. I kept an eye on his hands as he put the packet of headache pills into his coat pocket, but I can read the body language of people whose intention is to harm you, and Moe’s wasn’t talking that language now. My first reaction as he took my hand was to pull away; maybe his relaxed manner and the unhealthy and yet mild light shining in his eyes persuaded me not to. In an almost careful way he squeezed my hand between his own.

‘Thanks to you, Roy Opgard, I am back in the flock.’

‘Oh?’ was all I could say.

‘I was a prisoner of the devil, but you freed me. Me and my family. You thrashed the devil out of me, Roy Opgard.’

I turned and followed him with my eyes. Uncle Bernard said that now and then, when you couldn’t find the solution to a mechanical problem, the best thing to do was take a hammer and hit as hard as you could and the problem would be solved. Now and then. Maybe that was what had happened.

Moe got into his Nissan Datsun pickup and drove off.

‘Boss,’ said Egil behind me, ‘are you back?’

‘As you can see,’ I said, and turned towards him. ‘How are the sausages selling?’

It took him a moment to suspect that maybe I was only joking, and he laughed hesitantly.

At the workshop I opened the bag I had brought from Kristiansand. It contained certain car parts obtained during more than a week of searching through breakers’ yards and vehicle cemeteries. Most of these lay in a sparsely populated area west of the city where for a hundred years they had been worshipping everything American – and cars in particular – as intensely as they worshipped Jesus in their meeting houses.

‘Those parts there are no good,’ the last car breaker had said as he looked down at the rotten brake hoses and the frayed throttle cable I had unscrewed from two of his wrecks, a Chevy El Camino and a Cadillac Eldorado. Behind him hung a gaudy picture of a long-haired guy with a shepherd’s crook and a lot of sheep milling round him.

‘I guess that means I get them cheap,’ I said.

He closed one eye, gave me a price that made me realise you get Willumsens in other places too besides Os. I consoled myself with the thought that most of the money probably went to charity, handed over the hundreds and confirmed that I didn’t need any receipt.

I picked up the throttle cable and examined it. It wasn’t from a Cadillac DeVille, but it was so similar it would do. And sure enough, it was defective. Frayed so that, when fitted in the right way, it would catch when the driver put his foot down, and even if he took his foot off the pedal his speed would just keep on increasing. If he was a car mechanic he might perhaps realise what was happening, and if in addition to that he was quick and kept a cool head maybe turn off the ignition or put the car in neutral. But Carl wasn’t any of those things. He would, even supposing he had the time, simply try to brake.

I picked up the rotting, punctured brake hoses. I’d removed hoses like that before. Never fitted them. I put them down next to the throttle cable.

Any car mechanic examining the wreck afterwards would tell the police the parts hadn’t been sabotaged but showed signs of ordinary wear and tear, and that it was likely water had got in under the plastic collar on the accelerator cable.

I chucked the tools I would be needing into the bag, closed it and stood there, breathing heavily. It felt as though my chest was wrapping itself around my lungs.

I checked the clock. 10.15. I had good time.

According to Shannon, Carl was meeting the organisers of the party at the building site at two. After that they would be going down to Årtun to decorate the place. That would take at least two hours, probably three. Good. At the most I would need an hour to switch the parts.

And since there was no audit that gave me plenty of time.

Way too much time.

I crossed to the bed and lay down. Put my hand to the mattress where Shannon and I had lain. Looked at that licence plate from Barbados on the wall above the kitchen alcove. I’d done a bit of reading. There were over a hundred thousand vehicles on the island, a surprising number for such a small population. And the standard of living was high, the third highest in North America, they had money to spend. And everyone spoke English. It should definitely be possible to run a service station there. Or a repair shop.

I closed my eyes and turned the clock forward two years. I saw myself and Shannon on a beach with a toddler eighteen months old beneath a parasol. All three of us pale, Shannon and me with sunburnt legs. Redlegs.

I wound backwards and now we were just fourteen months into the future. The suitcases ready in the hall. A child wailing from the bedroom upstairs and Shannon’s comforting voice. Just details left now. Turn off the electricity and the water. Nail the shutters over the windows. Gathering up the last loose threads before leaving.

The loose threads.

I checked the time again.

It wasn’t important any more, but I didn’t like loose threads. Didn’t like rubbish in the pump area.

I should let it go. The other thing was what I had to concentrate on now. Keep your eyes on the prize, as Dad always said in his American English.

Rubbish in the pump area.

At eleven o’clock I stood up and went out.

‘Roy!’ said Stanley, rising to his feet behind the small desk in his surgery. Walked round and gave me a hug. ‘Did you have to wait long?’ he asked, with a nod towards the waiting room.

‘Only twenty minutes,’ I said. ‘Your receptionist slipped me in so I won’t take up much of your time.’

‘Sit down. Everything all right? How’s that finger?’

‘Everything’s fine. I’ve really only come to ask you something.’

‘Oh really?’

‘On New Year’s Eve, after I left for the village square, can you remember if Dan Krane left too? And if he had a car? And if maybe he didn’t show up at the square until a little later?’

Stanley shook his head.

‘What about Kurt Olsen?’

‘Why are you wondering about this, Roy?’

‘I’ll explain afterwards.’

‘OK. No, neither of them left. There was such a bloody wind and we were having such a good time that we carried on sitting there drinking and talking. Until we heard the fire engines.’

I nodded slowly. So much for that theory.

‘The only ones who left before midnight were you, Simon and Grete.’

‘But none of us were driving.’

‘No, Grete was driving – she said she’d promised her parents she’d be with them when the clock struck twelve.’

‘I see. And what kind of car does she drive?’

Stanley laughed. ‘You know me, Roy. I can’t tell one make of car from another. I just know that it’s fairly new and it’s red. Yes, actually, it’s an Audi I think.’

I nodded even more slowly.

Saw in my mind’s eye that red Audi A1 turning up towards Nergard on New Year’s Eve. Where the only other thing besides Nergard and Opgard is the hotel site.

‘Speaking of new,’ Stanley exclaimed. ‘I completely forgot to offer my congratulations.’

‘Congratulations?’ Automatically I thought of that third place on the earnings list; but then realised, of course, that news from the world of service stations is really only for the specially interested.

‘You’re going to be an uncle,’ he said.

A couple of seconds, and then Stanley laughed even louder.

‘You really are brothers! Carl reacted in exactly the same way. Went white as a sheet.’

I wasn’t aware that I had turned pale, but now it felt as though my heart had stopped beating too. I pulled myself together.

‘You were the one who examined Shannon?’

‘How many other doctors do you see here?’ said Stanley, spreading his arms out wide.

‘So you told Carl he was going to be a father?’

Stanley wrinkled his brow. ‘No, I’m assuming it was Shannon who did that. But Carl and I met in the shop and I congratulated him then and mentioned a couple of things Shannon should look out for as her pregnancy advances. And he turned pale, just like you are now. Understandable really, when people come up to you like that and remind you you’re going to be a dad, and all that frightening responsibility overwhelms you again. Didn’t know the same thing happened with uncles, but it looks like it does.’ He laughed again.

‘Have you told anyone else besides Carl and me?’ I asked.

‘No, I’m bound by professional confidentiality.’ He stopped abruptly. Put three fingers to his forehead. ‘Ouch. Maybe you didn’t know Shannon was pregnant? I just assumed that… since you and Carl are so close.’

‘They probably wanted to keep it to themselves until they feel fairly sure it’s going well,’ I said. ‘Given Shannon’s history of trying to get pregnant…’

‘Yes, but it was very unprofessional of me,’ said Stanley. He looked genuinely upset.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘If you don’t tell anyone, I won’t either.’

I was out of the door before Stanley could remind me that I was going to tell him why I’d asked about New Year’s Eve. Out of the surgery. Into the Volvo. Sat there, staring through the windscreen.

So Carl knew Shannon was pregnant. He knew, and he hadn’t confronted Shannon with it. Hadn’t told me either. Did that mean he knew he wasn’t the father? Did he realise what was going on? That it was me and Shannon against him. I pulled out my phone. Hesitated. Among other things, Shannon and I had planned everything in such detail so as to avoid having more phone contact than would otherwise seem natural between a brother-in-law and sister-in-law. According to True Crime, that’s the first thing the police check, who the victim’s closest relatives or other potential suspects have been in phone contact with at the time immediately preceding the murder. I made up my mind, tapped in the number.

‘Now?’ said the voice at the other end.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve got some free time now.’

‘Fine,’ said Carl. ‘Fritt Fall in twenty.’

65

FRITT FALL WAS OCCUPIED BY the usual early-afternoon gang of horse-racing enthusiasts and people who keep the social security system ticking over.

‘A beer,’ I said to Erik Nerell.

He gave me such a cold stare. I had had him on my list of people I suspected of torching the hotel, but today that list had been reduced to one.

Heading for an empty table by the window I saw Dan Krane sitting alone with his beer at another window table. He was staring out emptily. He looked – how shall I put it? – a bit scruffy. I left him alone, and reckoned he’d show me the same courtesy.

I was halfway through my beer when Carl trotted in.

He gave me a bear hug and bought a cup of coffee, getting the same frosty treatment at the counter as I had. I saw Dan Krane register Carl’s presence, finish his beer and leave the premises with demonstratively heavy footsteps.

‘Yes, I saw Dan,’ said Carl before I had a chance to ask him and sat down. ‘Apparently he’s no longer living at the Aas place.’

I nodded slowly. ‘Anything else?’

‘Oh yes…’ said Carl and took a drink of coffee. ‘Excited about the owners’ meeting this evening, of course. And Shannon’s taking more and more of the decisions at home. Today she decided she’s going to use the Cadillac up until the meeting, so I’m driving the wifemobile.’ He nodded towards the Subaru out on the car park.

‘The most important thing is that you arrive for the ceremony in style,’ I said.

‘Of course, of course,’ he said and took another sip. Waited. Almost dreading things, the way it looked. Two brothers sitting there, full of dread. Lying in bunk beds, dreading the sound of the door opening.

‘I think I know who torched the hotel,’ I said.

Carl looked up. ‘Oh?’

I saw no reason to milk it and told him straight out. ‘Grete Smitt.’

Carl gave a loud laugh. ‘Grete’s a bit touched, Roy, but not that touched. And she’s quietened down now. It’s done her good, hooking up with Simon.’

I stared at him. ‘Simon? You mean, Simon Nergard?’

‘You didn’t know that?’ Carl chuckled humourlessly. ‘The rumour is that Simon got her to drive him home to Nergard on New Year’s Eve and she stayed over. And ever since they’ve been like peanut butter and jelly.’

My brain was processing this as fast as it could. Could Grete and Simon have torched the hotel together? I mulled it over. It tasted funny. On the other hand, a lot of things had tasted funny recently. But that wasn’t something I needed to take up with Carl. In fact, I didn’t actually need to take it up with anyone, because what the fuck did it matter who had done it? I cleared my throat. ‘There was something you wanted to talk to me about.’

Carl looked down into his coffee cup, nodded. Looked up, checked that the six other customers were sitting far enough away, leaned forward and said in a low voice: ‘Shannon is pregnant.’

‘Oh wow!’ I smiled, trying not to overact. ‘Congratulations, brother!’

‘No,’ said Carl, shaking his head.

‘No? Something wrong?’

The shaking turned into nodding.

‘With the kid?’ I asked. Even though I was lying, the very thought of there being something wrong with the child Shannon was carrying, our child, made me feel ill.

Carl’s head went back to shaking.

‘Then what?’ I asked.

‘It isn’t me who’s the…’

‘Who’s the what?’

His head finally stopped and he gave me a defeated, broken look.

‘Not the father?’

He nodded.

‘How…?’

‘Shannon and I haven’t had sex since she came home from Toronto. I haven’t been allowed to touch her. And it wasn’t her who told me she was pregnant, it was Stanley. Shannon doesn’t even know that I know.’

‘Fucking hell,’ I said.

‘Yeah, fucking hell.’ His heavy gaze wouldn’t let go of me. ‘And you know what, Roy?’

He waited, but I didn’t answer.

‘I think I know who it is.’

I swallowed. ‘Oh?’

‘Yeah. Early last autumn Shannon suddenly had to go to Notodden, see. An interview about an architect job, she said. When she came back she was absolutely frantic, for days on end. Didn’t eat, didn’t sleep. I thought it was because obviously, nothing had come of the architect job. When I gathered from Stanley that Shannon was pregnant, I asked myself how in the world she’d managed to meet another man. I mean, Shannon and I, we live in each other’s pockets. And so I began to think differently about that trip to Notodden. Shannon tells me everything, and what she doesn’t tell me, I can easily read on her. But there’s been something there I haven’t quite managed to get hold of. Something she’s been hiding. As if she had a guilty conscience about something. And when I think back, it happened after that night away she had in Notodden. And suddenly she’s taking these day trips to Notodden, says she has to go shopping. You follow?’

I had to cough to get some volume into my voice. ‘I think so.’

‘So the other day I asked her where she stayed when she spent the night at Notodden, and she said the Brattrein Hotel, I called to check. Sure enough, the reception said a Shannon Alleyne Opgard had booked a room there on 3 September. But when I asked who with, he said she’d booked the room just for herself.’

‘He told you all this? Just like that?’

‘It’s just possible I said my name was Kurt Olsen and I was calling from the sheriff’s office in Os.’

‘For God’s sake,’ I said, and could feel the back of my shirt getting wet.

‘So I asked them to go through the guest register for that particular date. And then an interesting name cropped up, Roy.’

My mouth felt dry. What the fuck had happened? Had Ralf remembered I was there and given my name? Wait, now I remember, that’s right: he said he’d reserved a room for me when he saw me going into the restaurant, he’d presumed I was going to be staying there. Had he put me down as a booking and then forgotten to delete it when it turned out I didn’t need a room?

‘An interesting and very familiar name,’ said Carl.

I steeled myself.

‘Dennis Quarry.’

I stared at Carl. ‘What?’

‘Dennis Quarry. The actor. The director. The American who stopped by the service station. He was staying at the hotel.’

I didn’t realise I’d stopped breathing until I inhaled again. ‘So what?’

‘So what? He gave his autograph to Shannon at the service station, don’t you remember?’

‘Sure. But…’

‘Shannon showed me the piece of paper afterwards, in the car. She laughed because he’d written his phone number and email address there too. Said he reckoned on being in Norway for quite a while. Was going to be –’ Carl made quotation marks in the air with his fingers – ‘directing. I thought no more about it, and I don’t think she did either. Not until after what happened between Mari and me…’

‘You think she met him to get her revenge?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe she loves him?’

‘Shannon doesn’t love anyone. The only thing she loves is that hotel of hers. She needs a good hiding.’

‘And I guess someone’s given her that.’

It just came out of me. Carl pounded his fist on the table, and his eyes looked as if they might explode out of his skull. ‘Did that bitch say that?’

‘Shush,’ I said, and grabbed hold of my beer glass as though it were a lifebuoy. In the ensuing silence I noticed everyone in the place had turned to look at us. Carl and I stayed quiet until we heard the conversations resume, and saw Erik Nerell bent over his mobile again.

‘I saw the bruises when I was at home at Christmas,’ I said in a low voice. ‘She came out of the bathroom.’

I saw Carl’s brain was trying to cook up an explanation. Why the hell did I have to blurt that out just when I needed him to trust me?

‘Carl, I…’

‘It’s OK,’ he said in a hoarse voice. ‘You’re right. It happened a few times after she came back from Toronto.’ He breathed in so heavily I saw his ribcage rise. ‘I was so stressed out by all that hotel chaos, and she kept going on at me about what happened with Mari. And when I’d had a few bevvies, sometimes I… sometimes I snapped. But it hasn’t happened since I stopped drinking. Thanks, Roy.’

‘Thanks?’

‘For confronting me with that. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it for a long time. I was starting to get afraid I had the same thing as Dad. That you start doing stuff you don’t really want to, and then you find you can’t stop, right? But I did it. I changed.’

‘You’re back in the flock,’ I said.

‘Eh?’

‘Are you sure you’ve changed?’

‘Yes, you can bet on it.’

‘Or you can do it for me. In fact, why not do it for both of us while you’re at it?’

He just looked at me as though it was some stupid word game he didn’t understand. And I was coming out with a lot of stuff now I didn’t even understand myself.

‘Anyway,’ he said, and drew a hand across his face, ‘I just had to talk to someone about this kid. And that someone always turns out to be you. Sorry about that.’

‘Think nothing of it,’ I said, and turned the knife in myself. ‘I’m your brother, after all.’

‘Yes, you’re the one who’s always there when I need someone. God, I’m so glad I have you at least.’

Carl laid his hand on top of mine. His was bigger, softer, warmer than mine, which was ice-cold.

‘Always,’ I said hoarsely.

He looked at his watch. ‘I’ll have to sort out this business with Shannon later,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘And this about me not being the father, that stays between us, OK?’

‘Of course,’ I said. Weirdly, I almost laughed.

‘Start of the new building. We’ll show ’em, Roy.’ He clamped his jaws together and his eyes tight into a fighting face, shook a bunched fist at me. ‘The Opgard boys are gonna win.’

I smiled and raised my glass, showed I intended to stay and finish my drink.

Watched Carl as he hurried towards the door. Saw through the window as he got into the Subaru. Shannon had arranged for her to use the Cadillac today. But Carl would be driving the Cadillac to the launch up at the hotel site. Or more accurately, driving in that direction.

A single brake light flared as the Subaru stopped for a trailer before swinging out onto the main road.

I ordered another beer. Drank it slowly as I thought.

I thought of Shannon. Of what it is that drives us human beings. And I thought about myself. About why I had practically asked to be exposed. Told Carl that I knew he beat Shannon. Hinted that I knew he had forged my signature. Asking to be exposed so that I didn’t have to go through with it. Didn’t have to go on filling Huken with cars and corpses.

66

AFTER FOUR BEERS AT FRITT Fall I left the place.

The time was only one thirty, time enough to get stone-cold sober again, but I knew those beers were a sign of weakness. A flight response. A single false step would be enough to screw up the whole plan, so why drink now? It was probably a sign that there was a part of me that perhaps didn’t want to succeed. The reptile me. No, the reptile brain didn’t have anything to do with this, see, I wasn’t thinking straight, I was already getting my concepts mixed up. Anyway, the me-me was absolutely certain of what he wanted, and that was to get what was rightfully his, whatever was left of it. And get rid of those who stood in the way and threatened the people it was my duty to defend. Because I was no longer the big brother. I was her man. And father to the child. That was my family now.

All the same, there was something that didn’t add up.

I left the Volvo at the workshop, and from the centre I walked south-east on the pedestrian and cycle track that ran alongside the main road. When I reached the workshop I stood and looked across the road, to the wall of the house with the poster advertising Grete’s Hair and Sun Salon.

Checked my watch again.

I just about had time; but I should have let it rest, this wasn’t the time to deal with it. Maybe no time was the time to deal with it.

So God knows why I suddenly found myself there on the other side of the road, peering into the garage, at the red Audi A1 standing there.

‘Hi!’ Grete called from the hairdressing chair. She had her head inside the pride of the place, the 1950s salon hairdryer. ‘I didn’t hear the phone or the doorbell.’

‘I didn’t ring,’ I said, and established that we were alone. The fact that she was giving herself a perm indicated that she didn’t have any imminent appointments. All the same, I locked the door behind me.

‘I can do you in ten minutes,’ she said. ‘Just need to get my own hair into shape here first. Got to look presentable yourself when you’re a hairdresser, right?’

She sounded nervous. Maybe because I had arrived with no warning. Maybe because she noticed something about me. That I hadn’t just come in for a trim. Or maybe because, deep down, she had been expecting me for a long time now.

‘Nice car,’ I said.

‘What? I can’t hear so well in here.’

‘Nice car! I saw it outside Stanley’s on New Year’s Eve, but I didn’t know it was yours.’

‘Oh yeah. It’s been a good year for the hairdressing business. Like it’s been a good year for all the businesses here.’

‘Same make and same colour that passed me just before midnight when I was on my way to the square. Not many red Audis in the village, so I imagine it was you, right? But then Stanley tells me you were going home to your parents to bring in the New Year with them, and that’s in the opposite direction. Besides, the car turned off towards Nergard and the road up to the hotel. Not much there, apart from Nergard. Opgard. And the hotel. And that got me to thinking…’

I leaned forward and looked at the scissors lying on the worktop in front of the mirror. They all looked pretty similar to me, but I guessed it must be her famous Niigata 1000 scissors that lay in the open box, almost as if they were being exhibited.

‘You said to me on New Year’s Eve that Shannon hates Carl, but she needs him for her hotel. Did you think that if the hotel burned down and the project was abandoned then Shannon wouldn’t need Carl any more, and then you could have him?’

Grete Smitt studied me calmly, all trace of nervousness gone. Her forearms lay motionless on the armrests of the large, heavy chair, her head swathed in a crown of plastic and filaments. She looked like a fucking queen on the throne.

‘Of course that thought occurred to me,’ she said, her voice lower now. ‘And you have too, Roy. That’s why I suspected you of starting the fire. You disappeared some time before midnight.’

‘It wasn’t me,’ I said.

‘Well, then there’s only one other person it could be,’ said Grete.

My mouth felt dry. It made no fucking difference who torched the fucking hotel. There was a vague buzzing sound; I couldn’t tell if it was coming from inside the hair-drying helmet or my own head.

She stopped talking when she saw I had taken the scissors out of the box. And she must have seen something in my eyes, because she raised her arms up in front of her.

‘Roy, you’re not going to…’

And I don’t know. I don’t fucking know what I was going to. I only know that everything burst out of me. Everything that had happened, everything that shouldn’t’ve happened, everything that was going to happen and mustn’t happen, but that there was no longer a way round. It rose up in me like shit in a blocked toilet, had been doing so for a long time now, and now it had reached the rim and was overflowing. The scissors were sharp, all that remained was to stab them into that repulsive mouth of hers, cut open those white cheeks, cut out those ugly words.

And yet I stopped.

Stopped, looked at the scissors. Japanese steel. And Dad’s words about hara-kiri flitted through my brain. Because wasn’t I failing here? Wasn’t it me, and not Grete, who had to be removed from the body of society like a malignant tumour?

No. Both. Both of us must be punished. Burned.

I grabbed the old black flex attached to the hairdryer, opened the scissors, and cut. The sharp blades cut straight through the insulation and when the steel made contact with the copper the electric jolt almost caused me to let go. But I was prepared and managed to sustain an even pressure on the scissors without cutting completely through the flex.

‘What are you doing?’ Grete shrieked. ‘Those are Niigata 1000 scissors! And this is a vintage hairdryer from the 1950s—’

With my free hand I grabbed her hand and her mouth shut as the circuit closed and the current began to circulate. She tried to tear herself free, but I didn’t let go. I saw her body shake, the eyes roll over backwards as the sparks crackled and flashed inside the helmet. A continuous scream, at first thin and pleading, then wild and demanding, rose up from her throat. My chest was pounding, I knew there was a limit to how long the heart can withstand two hundred milliamperes, but I never fucking let go. Because Grete Smitt was where we deserved to be now, united in a circle of pain. And now I saw blue flames rising from the helmet. And even though it took all my concentration to hold on, I still noticed the smell of burning hair. I closed my eyes, squeezed with both hands, muttering speechless words, the way I had seen the preacher do when he was healing or saving souls at Årtun. Grete’s screams were deafening, so loud that I could only just hear the smoke alarm that began to howl.

Then I let go and opened my eyes.

Saw Grete tear off the helmet. Saw a mixture of melting rollers and burning hair before she rushed to the hair-washing basin, turned on the hand shower and started the work of extinguishing.

I walked over to the door. In the stairwell outside I heard tumbling footsteps on their way down. Seemed like the neuropath was taking a break. I turned and looked at Grete again. She was safe. Grey smoke drifted from what remained of her perm, which turned out to be not so permanent after all. Right now it looked like a blazing outdoor grill someone had emptied a bucket of water over.

I walked out into the corridor, waited until Grete’s father was far enough down the stairs to see my face properly, saw him say something, my name, perhaps, though drowned out by the howling from the smoke alarm. Then I left the salon.

An hour passed. The time was quarter past three.

I sat in the workshop and stared at the bag.

Kurt Olsen hadn’t arrived, arrested me and put an end to the whole thing.

There was no way out. Time to get started.

I grabbed the bag, walked out to the Volvo and drove up to Opgard.

67

I SLID OUT FROM BENEATH the Cadillac. Shannon stood looking down at me in that cold barn, shivering in her thin, black pullover, arms folded and a worried look on her face. I said nothing, just got to my feet and dusted off my overalls.

‘Well?’ she said impatiently.

‘It’s done,’ I said, and started working the jack to get the car back down to the ground.

Afterwards Shannon helped me to push the car out and over to the winter garden with its front pointing down the road towards Geitesvingen.

I looked at my watch. Quarter past four. A little later than I’d expected. I headed quickly back to the barn to fetch the tools and was putting them into the bag on the workbench when Shannon came up behind me and put her arms around me.

‘We’ve still got the option of pulling out,’ she said, and laid her cheek against my back.

‘Is that what you want?’

‘No.’ She stroked my chest. We hadn’t touched each other, hardly even looked at each other since I arrived. I’d started work on the Cadillac straight away to be certain I had time to swap the working parts for the defective ones before Carl returned from the meeting, but that wasn’t the only reason we hadn’t touched. There was something else. Suddenly we had become strangers. Murderers as shocked by each other as by ourselves. But that would pass. DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE. And DO IT NOW. That was all that mattered.

‘Then we’ll stick to our plan,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘The dotterel is back,’ she said. ‘I saw it yesterday.’

‘Already?’ I said, turned and held her, framing that lovely face of hers with my rough hands and stubby fingers. ‘That’s good.’

‘No,’ she said, and shook her head with a sad smile. ‘It shouldn’t’ve come. It was lying in the snow outside the barn. It had frozen to death.’ A tear in that half-closed eye.

I pulled her close.

‘Tell me again why we’re doing this,’ she whispered.

‘We’re doing it because there are only two outcomes. Because I have taken what is his. Because we are both killers.’

She nodded. ‘But are we certain this is the only way?’

‘Everything else is too late for me and Carl now, I’ve explained that to you, Shannon.’

‘Yes,’ she snuffled into my shirtfront. ‘When this is over…’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘When this is over.’

‘I think it’s a boy.’

I held her for some time. But then I heard the seconds ticking and chewing again, like a countdown, a countdown to the world losing its meaning. But that’s not what was going to happen. It wouldn’t end now, it would begin. New life. Meaning my new life.

I let go of her and put the overalls and Carl’s brake hoses and throttle cable in the bag. Shannon watched me.

‘What if it doesn’t work?’ she said.

‘It’s not supposed to work,’ I said, though of course I knew what she meant, and maybe she heard the irritation in my voice and wondered what lay behind it. Probably understood what lay behind it. Stress. Nerves. Fear. Regret? Did she feel regret? Definitely. But in Kristiansand, when we’d made the plan, we had talked about that too. That doubt would come sneaking and whisper to us, the way it whispers in the ears of bridal couples on their wedding day. Doubt that is like water, that always finds the hole in your ceiling, and was now dripping down on my head like the Chinese water torture. What Grete had said about there being only one person who could have set fire to the hotel. That single brake light on the Subaru that didn’t work. The car noticed by the Latvian near the building site on New Year’s Eve.

‘The plan will work,’ I said. ‘There’s hardly any brake fluid left in the system, and the car weighs two tons. Colossal speed. There’s only one possible result.’

‘But what if he realises before the corner?’

‘I’ve never seen Carl testing brakes before he needs them,’ I said calmly, repeating something I had said many times before. ‘The car is on flat ground. He accelerates, reaches the slope, takes his foot off the pedal, and because it’s so steep he doesn’t notice that the acceleration is also due to the fact that the throttle cable is stuck and making the heavy car go even faster. Two seconds later he is on the bend and realises that his speed is much higher than it usually is here. In panic he stamps down on the brake pedal. But there’s no response. Maybe he manages to pump the pedal down one more time, manages to wrench the steering wheel round, but he’s got no chance.’ I licked my lips, I had made the point, could have stopped there. But I went on twisting the knife. In me, in her. ‘His speed’s too high, the car’s too heavy, the turn too sharp, even if the surface was asphalt and not gravel it wouldn’t help. And then the car is in the air and he’s weightless. Commander on a spaceship with a brain running at warp speed that has time to ask itself how. Who. And why. And maybe has time to answer before he—’

‘Enough!’ screamed Shannon. She put her hands over her ears and a shudder seemed to pass through her body.

‘What if… what if anyway he discovers there’s something wrong and doesn’t drive the car?’

‘Then he discovers something’s wrong. Naturally he’ll have the car checked and the mechanic will tell him the throttle cable is frayed, the brake hoses rotten, nothing more mysterious than that. And we have to make another plan, do it some other way. That’s all there is to it.’

‘And if the plan works, but the police are suspicious?’

‘They examine the wreck and discover the worn parts. We’ve been through this, Shannon. It’s a good plan, OK?’

With a sob Shannon threw herself at me.

I gently extricated myself from her embrace.

‘I’m going now,’ I said.

‘No!’ she sobbed. ‘Stay!’

‘I’ll be watching from the workshop,’ I said. ‘I can see Geitesvingen from there. Call me if anything goes wrong, OK?’

‘Roy!’ She shouted it as though this was the last time she would see me alive, as though I was drifting away from her on an open sea, like a couple of newly-weds on a sailing boat who had drunk themselves into a lovely champagne high but were now abruptly sober.

‘We’ll see each other later,’ I said. ‘Remember to call the emergency services immediately. Remember how it happened, how the car behaved, and describe it to the police exactly as it happened.’

She nodded, pulled herself together, straightened her dress. ‘What… what d’you think they’ll do?’

‘After that,’ I said. ‘I think they’ll put up that crash barrier.’

68

THE TIME WAS 18.02 and it was just starting to get dark.

I sat by the window in the office with my binoculars trained on Geitesvingen. I had worked out in my head that when the Cadillac went over the edge it would be visible for almost exactly three-tenths of a second, so I’d need to blink quickly.

I had thought I would be less nervous once I was finished with my own bit and the rest was in Shannon’s hands, but it was the other way round. Sitting here idly now I had far too much time to think through everything that could go wrong. And I kept thinking of new things. Each one of them was more unlikely than the one before, but that didn’t greatly help my peace of mind.

The plan was that when it was time to leave for the building site and the cutting of the ribbon Shannon was to complain that she wasn’t feeling well and had to go upstairs and lie down, that Carl would have to go alone. That if he took the Cadillac and drove to the opening ceremony, she could take the Subaru to the party at Årtun if she felt better.

I looked at my watch again. 18.03. Three-tenths of a second. Raised the binoculars again. Swept over the Smitts’ window where the curtains remained in the same position as earlier in the day, found the mountain behind, then Geitesvingen. It might have already happened. It might already be over.

I heard the sound of a car pulling up in front of the workshop and turned the binoculars on it, but they were out of focus. I took the binoculars away from my eyes and saw that it was Kurt Olsen’s Land Rover.

The engine died and he climbed out. He couldn’t see me, because I had turned off the light in the room, and yet he looked directly at me, as though he knew I was sitting there. He just stood there, bow-legged, his thumbs hooked in his belt, like a cowboy calling me out to a duel. Then he walked towards the workshop door, disappeared from sight. A few moments later I heard the bell.

I sighed, stood up and opened the door.

‘Good evening, sheriff. What is it this time?’

‘Hello, Roy. Can I come in?’

‘Right now it’s—’

He pushed me to one side and walked into the workshop. Looked around as though he’d never been there before. Walked over to the shelves on which several things were standing. Fritz heavy-duty cleaner, for example.

‘I’m wondering what’s been going on in here, Roy.’

I froze. Had he finally worked it out? That it was here his father’s body had ended up? Vanished – quite literally – in Fritz’s heavy-duty cleaner?

But then I noticed that he was tapping his index finger on his temple and realised he meant what was going on inside my head.

‘…when you set fire to Grete Smitt.’

‘Is that what Grete says?’ I asked.

‘Not Grete, no. Her father. He saw you leaving the place while Grete was still smouldering, as he put it.’

‘And what does Grete say?’

‘What d’you think, Roy? That something went wrong with the hairdryer. An overload or something. That you helped her. But I don’t believe it, not for one fucking moment, because the flex was almost cut in half. So my question to you now is – and give this a good fucking think before you answer – what the hell did you threaten her with that’s made her lie?’

Kurt Olsen awaited a reply, alternately sucking on his moustache and puffing his cheeks out like a bullfrog.

‘Are you refusing to answer, Roy?’

‘No.’

‘Then what do you call this?’

‘Doing what you said. Having a bloody good think.’

I saw something click behind Kurt Olsen’s eyes and I knew he’d lost it. He took two steps towards me, pulled his right arm back and was about to hit out. I know it because I know what people who are about to hit out look like, like sharks whose eyes roll backwards as they bite. But he stopped, something stopped him. The thought of Roy Opgard at Årtun on a Saturday night. No broken jaws or noses, just nosebleeds and teeth knocked out, so nothing to bother Sigmund Olsen with. Roy Opgard, a man who never lost his head in a fight but in a cold and calculating way humiliated those who did. So instead of striking out, a warning forefinger poked up from Kurt Olsen’s clenched fist.

‘I know that Grete knows things. She knows things about you, Roy Opgard. What does she know?’ He took another step closer and I felt the spray of spittle on my face. ‘What does she know about Willum Willumsen?’

The phone rang in my pocket, but Kurt Olsen drowned it out.

‘You think I’m stupid? That I think the guy who killed Willumsen accidentally skidded on the ice right outside your doorway? That Willumsen, without a word to anyone, wrote off millions of kroner in debt? Because he thought he ought to?’

Was that Shannon? I had to see who had rung, I had to.

‘Come off it, Roy. As though Willum Willumsen ever wrote off a single krone anyone owed him.’

I fished out my phone. Looked at the display. Shit.

‘Yes, I know you and your brother were involved. Just like when my father disappeared. Because you’re a murderer, Roy Opgard. Are and always have been!’

I nodded to Kurt, and for a moment the torrent of words halted and he opened his eyes wide as though I’d just confirmed his accusations before realising it was a signal that I was going to take the call. Then he started up again.

‘If you hadn’t heard witnesses coming you would have killed Grete Smitt today. You would have…’

I half turned my back to Kurt Olsen, stuck a finger into one ear and pressed the phone against the other. ‘Yes, Carl.’

‘Roy? I need help!’

It was as though the lights went out and I was hurled back sixteen years in time.

Same place.

Same despair in my little brother’s voice.

Same crime about to be committed, only this time it was him who was going to be the victim.

But he was alive. And he needed help.

‘What is it?’ I managed to say as the sheriff stood bellowing his refrain behind me.

Carl hesitated. ‘Is that Kurt Olsen I can hear?’

‘Yes. What is it?’

‘The cutting of the ribbon is about to take place and it’s sort of the point to arrive in the Cadillac,’ he said. ‘But there’s something wrong with it. Bound to be some minor thing, but can you get up here and see if you can fix the problem?’

‘I’ll be there directly,’ I said, ended the call and turned to Kurt Olsen.

‘Nice talking to you, but unless you’ve got a warrant for my arrest then I’m off.’

His jaw was still hanging open as I left.

A minute later I was driving along the highway in the Volvo. I had the bag of tools on the seat beside me, the lights from Olsen’s Land Rover in the mirror, and his departing promise to get both me and my brother still ringing in my ears. For a moment I wondered if he intended to pursue me all the way up to the farm, but when I took the turning for Nergard and Opgard he drove straight on.

Anyway, it wasn’t Olsen that worried me most.

Something wrong with the Cadillac? What the hell could that be? Could Carl have got into the car and noticed the brakes and steering wheel weren’t working properly before he started to drive? No, because in that case he must have had his suspicions about it. Or else someone had told him. Was that what had happened? Had Shannon been unable to go through with the plan? Had she cracked up and confessed the whole thing? Or even worse: had she changed sides and told Carl the truth? Or her version of the truth. Yes, that was it. She’d told him the murder plan was mine and mine alone, told him I knew that Carl had forged my signature on the deeds, told him I’d raped her, got her pregnant and threatened to kill her, the child and Carl if she said anything. Because I was no timid, frightened ring ouzel, I was Dad, a mountain lark, a bird of prey with a black bandit’s mask across his eyes. And then Shannon had told him what the two of them needed to do now. Lure me up to the farm and get rid of me the way me and Carl had got rid of Dad. Because of course she knew, she already knew the Opgard brothers were capable of murder, knew that she’d get what she wanted one way or the other.

I gasped for breath and managed to push these sick, unwelcome thoughts aside. I rounded a corner and a black tunnel opened up in front of me where no tunnel should have been. An impenetrable, dark stone wall it would have been hopeless to try to breach. And yet that was where the road led. Was this depression, the thing the old sheriff had talked to me about? Dad’s dark mind finally rising up in me, not falling like the night but rising from the valley depths? Maybe. And the remarkable thing was that with each hairpin bend I rounded, climbing ever higher and higher, my breathing grew easier.

Because it was OK. If it ended here, if I was not to live for one more day, then that was OK. With any luck killing me would bring Carl and Shannon together. Carl was a pragmatist. He could live with raising a child that wasn’t completely his and yet was still a member of his family. Yes, maybe my demise was the only chance of a happy ending in all this.

I rounded Geitesvingen and speeded up slightly, the gravel flying up behind the rear wheels. Below me lay the village, swathed in evening dark, and in what remained of the daylight I saw Carl standing in front of the Cadillac with arms folded, waiting for me.

And another thought struck me. Not another, but the first.

That that’s all it was: something wrong with the car.

Something trivial that had nothing to do with the brake hoses or the throttle cable and could be easily fixed. That somewhere in the kitchen light, behind the curtains, Shannon was waiting for me to sort this out and after that the plan would be back on the rails.

I climbed out of the car, and Carl walked over and put his arms around me. He held me in such a way that I felt his whole body from head to toe, could feel he was trembling the way he used to after Dad had been to our room and I climbed down into his bed to comfort him.

He whispered a few words in my ear, and I understood.

Understood that the plan was not back on the rails.

69

WE SAT IN THE CADILLAC. Carl behind the wheel, me in the passenger seat.

Staring out past Geitesvingen, at the mountain peaks in the south framed in orange and pale blue.

‘I said on the phone there was something wrong with the car because I knew Olsen was there,’ Carl said tearfully.

‘I understand,’ I said, and tried to move my foot, which had fallen asleep. No, not asleep, but gone lame, as lame as the rest of me. ‘Tell me in more detail what happened.’ My voice felt and sounded as though it was someone else talking.

‘Right,’ said Carl. ‘We were about to leave for the building site, were getting changed. Shannon’s ready, she looks like a million dollars. I’m in the kitchen ironing my shirt. And then suddenly she says she’s not feeling well. I tell her we’ve got paracetamol, but she says she has to go upstairs and lie down, I should go to the opening on my own and she’ll take the Subaru to the party if she feels any better. I’m shocked, tell her to pull herself together, this is important. But she refuses, says her health comes first and so on. And yeah, I’m really pissed off, it’s all just bullshit, Shannon never gets so ill she can’t manage to stay on her feet for a couple of hours, right? And this is, you know, it’s her big moment every bit as much as mine. For a moment I lose control, and I just blurt it out…’

‘You just blurt it out,’ I said, and could feel the paralysis advancing into my tongue.

‘I just blurt out that if she’s feeling so ill it’s probably because of that bastard kid she’s got in the oven.’

‘Bastard kid,’ I repeated. It was so cold in the car. So fucking cold.

‘Yeah, she asked about that too, like she didn’t understand what I was talking about. Then I tell her that I know about her and that American actor. Dennis Quarry. And she repeats the name, and I can’t even stand hearing the way she says it: Denn-is Qu-arry. And then she starts to laugh. To laugh. And I’m standing there with the iron in my hand, and something inside me just snaps.’

‘Snaps.’ Expressionless.

‘I hit her,’ he said.

‘Hit her.’ I’d turned into a fucking echo chamber.

‘The iron hits her on the side of the head, she falls backwards and into the stovepipe so it breaks. There’s a cloud of soot.’

I say nothing.

‘So I’m leaning over her and holding that scalding hot iron right in front of her face and saying if she doesn’t confess then I’ll iron her as flat as my shirt. But she still goes on laughing. And lying there laughing away with the blood running down into her mouth so her teeth are red with blood she looks like a fucking witch and not all that fucking beautiful any more, see what I mean? And she confesses. Not just what I’m asking her about but she sticks the knife right in and confesses everything. She confesses the worst thing of all.’

I tried to swallow, but there was no saliva left.

‘And what was the worst thing of all?’

‘What do you think, Roy?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘The hotel,’ he said. ‘It was Shannon who set fire to the hotel.’

‘Shannon? How…?’

‘As we were leaving Willumsen’s party to go to the square to see the rockets Shannon said she was tired and wanted to go home and she took the car. I was still in the square when we heard the fire truck.’ Carl closed his eyes. ‘Shannon’s sitting there by the stove and she says how she drove up to the building site and started the fire at a place where she knew it would spread, and left behind a dead rocket so it would look like that was the cause of the fire.’

I know what to ask. That I have to ask, even though I know the answer. Must ask in order not to reveal that I already know, that I know Shannon probably just as well as he does. So I do it. ‘Why?’

‘Because…’ Carl swallows. ‘Because she’s God, creating in her own image. She couldn’t live with that hotel, it had to be the way she had drawn it. That or nothing. She didn’t know it wasn’t insured and figured it wouldn’t be a problem to start again from scratch and then, at the second attempt, she’d be able to insist we use her original drawings.’

‘Is that what she said?’

‘Yes. And when I asked if she didn’t consider the rest of us, you, and me, and the people in the village who had worked and invested in it, she said no.’

‘No?’

‘Fuck no, was what she said. And laughed. And then I hit her again.’

‘With the iron?’

‘With the back of it. The cold side.’

‘Hard?’

‘Hard. I saw the light go out in her eyes.’

I had to concentrate in order to breathe. ‘Was she…’

‘I took her pulse, but I couldn’t feel shit.’

‘And then?’

‘I carried her out here.’

‘She’s lying in the boot?’

‘Yes.’

‘Show me.’

We climbed out. As Carl opened the boot I raised my eyes and looked into the west. Above the mountain tops the orange was eating into the pale blue. And I thought that this was maybe the last time I would be able to think that something was beautiful. But for a fraction of a second, before looking down into the boot, I thought it had all been just a joke, that there wouldn’t be anybody there.

But there she lay. A snow-white Sleeping Beauty. She slept the way she had done the two nights we had spent together in Kristiansand. On her side, with eyes closed. And I couldn’t help thinking: in the same foetal position as the child inside her.

The wounds to her head left no room for doubt that she was dead. I laid my fingertips against that smashed forehead.

‘This isn’t just from one blow with the back of an iron,’ I said.

‘I…’ Carl swallowed. ‘She moved when I laid her beside the car to open the boot, and I… I panicked.’

Automatically I looked down at the ground, and there, in the interior light from the boot, I saw a flash from one of the big stones Dad had made us carry up to the wall of the house, to improve the drainage one autumn when it rained more than usual. There was blood on it.

Carl’s sobbing whisper beside me sounded like porridge simmering. ‘Can you help me out, Roy?’

My gaze went back to Shannon. Wanted to look away but couldn’t look away. He had killed her. No, he had murdered her. In cold blood. And now he was asking for help. I hated him. Hated, hated, and now I felt my heart start to pump again, and with the blood came pain, finally the pain came, and I bit down so hard it felt as though I would crush my own jaws. I drew a breath and freed up my jaw enough to say three words:

‘Help you how?’

‘We can drive her out to the woods. Leave her somewhere where they’re bound to find her and leave the Cadillac next to her. Then I’ll say she took the Cadillac and went out for a spin earlier in the day and still hadn’t come back by the time I left for the opening ceremony. If we go now and leave her somewhere, then I’ll still have time to make it, and then I can report her missing when she doesn’t show up at the party as arranged. Sound good?’

I punched him in the stomach.

He folded in the middle and stood there like a fucking L, gasping for breath. I easily pushed him over onto the gravel, then sat on top of him so that his arms were trapped. He was going to die; he was going to die the same way she did. My right hand found the big stone, but it was sticky and slippery with blood and slipped out of my grasp. I was about to dry my hand on my shirt, but finally managed to think clearly enough to instead run my hand twice through the gravel and then picked up the stone again. Raised it above my head. Carl was still not breathing and lay with his eyes tight shut. I wanted him to see this, so I squeezed his nose with my left hand.

He opened his eyes.

He cried.

His eyes were on me, maybe he still hadn’t seen the stone I was holding up above my head, or maybe he didn’t understand what it meant. Or else he’d reached the same place as me and didn’t give a fuck any more. I felt the pull of gravity on the stone, it wanted to fall, it wanted to crush, I wouldn’t even have to use force, it was when I stopped using force, when I no longer kept it at arm’s length from my brother that it would do the job for which it was intended. He had stopped crying, and already I could feel the burn of the lactic acid in my right arm. I gave up. Let it happen. But then I saw it. Like some fucking echo from childhood. That look in his eyes. That fucking humiliated, helpless little-brother look. And the lump in my throat. I was the one who was going to start crying. Again. I let the stone come, added speed to it, smashed it down so hard I could feel it all the way up my shoulder. Sat there panting like a fucking hound dog.

And after I’d got my breath back, I rolled off Carl who lay there, motionless. Silent at last. Eyes wide open, as though finally he had seen and understood everything. I sat there next to him and looked at Ottertind Mountain. Our silent witness.

‘That was pretty damn close to my head,’ Carl groaned.

‘Not close enough,’ I said.

‘OK, so I fucked up,’ he said. ‘Have you got that out of your system now?’

I took the snuffbox from my trouser pocket.

‘Speaking of stones to the head,’ I said, and didn’t care a shit if he could hear the shaking in my voice. ‘When they find her in the woods, how do you think they’re going to explain her head wounds? Eh?’

‘Someone murdered her, I guess.’

‘And who’s the first person they’re going to suspect?’

‘The husband?’

‘Who is the guilty party in eighty per cent of all cases, according to True Crime magazine? Particularly when he’s got no alibi for the time of the murder.’

Carl raised himself up onto his elbows. ‘OK then, big brother, so what do we do?’

We. Naturally.

‘Give me a few seconds,’ I said.

I looked around. What did I see?

Opgard. A small house, a barn, a few outlying fields. And what, actually, was that? A name in six letters, a family with two surviving members. Because, when you take away all the rest, what was a family? A story we told each other because family was a necessity. Because, over thousands of years, it had worked as a unit of cooperation? Yeah, why not? Or was there something beyond the merely practical, something in the blood that bound parents, brothers and sisters together? They say you can’t live on just fresh air and love. But you can’t fucking well live without them either. And if there’s something we want, then it’s to live. I felt that now, perhaps even more strongly because death lay in the boot directly in front of us. That I wanted to live. And, for that reason, that we had to do what had to be done. That everything depended on me. That it had to be done now.

‘First,’ I said, ‘when I checked the Cadillac last autumn I told Shannon you should replace the brake hoses and the throttle cable. Have you done that?’

‘What?’ Carl coughed and held a hand to his stomach. ‘Shannon never said a word about that.’

‘Good, then we’re in luck,’ I said. ‘We move her into the driver’s seat. Before you wash the kitchen and the boot, take what blood there is and smear it on the steering wheel, the seat and the dashboard. Got that?’

‘Er, yes. But…’

‘Shannon is going to be found in the Cadillac down in Huken and that will explain her head wounds.’

‘But… that’s the third car down in Huken. The police are bound to wonder what the fuck is going on.’

‘Definitely. But once they find those worn parts I’m talking about, then they’ll understand that this really was an accident.’

‘You think so?’

‘Certain of it,’ I said.

A thin glow of orange light still lay around Ottertind as Carl and I started the heavy black beast moving. Shannon looked so tiny behind that big wheel. We let go of the car and it trundled slowly, almost reluctantly forward as the gravel crunched beneath its tyres. Uppermost on the fins sticking out at the back the two vertically mounted lights glowed red. It was a Cadillac DeVille. From the days when the Americans made cars like spaceships that could take you to the sky.

I followed the car with my eyes, the throttle cable must have got stuck because it just kept on accelerating and I thought this time it will happen, it’ll take off for the sky.

She’d said she thought it was a boy. I had said nothing, but of course I couldn’t help thinking about names. Not that I think she would have accepted Bernard, but that was the only one I could think of.

Carl put his arm around my shoulder. ‘You’re all I have, Roy,’ he said.

And you’re all I have, I thought. Two brothers in a desert.

70

‘FOR A LOT OF US, we’re back now where we started out,’ said Carl.

He was on the stage at Årtun, in front of one of the microphone stands which would shortly be taken over by Rod and his band.

‘And I’m not thinking about the first investors’ meeting we had here, but when I, my brother and many of you who are here tonight used to meet at the local dances. And it was usually after a few drinks we would get up enough front to start boasting about all the great things we swore we were going to achieve. Or else we asked the one who had had the loudest mouth how things were coming along with that great plan of his, had he made a start yet? And then there would be mocking grins one way and curses the other and – if he happened to be the touchy type – a butt.’

Laughter from the audience standing in the hall.

‘But when anyone asks us next year how things are going with that hotel us people from Os boast about so much, then we can tell them oh yes, we built that all right. Twice.’

Wild enthusiasm. I shifted from one foot to the other. Nausea gripped around my throat, a headache pounded rhythmically behind my eyes, the pain in my chest was excruciating, almost like I would imagine a heart attack feels. But I tried not to think, tried not to feel. For the moment it looked as though Carl was dealing with it better than me. As I should have known. He was the cold one of us. He was like Mum. A passive accessory. Cold.

He held his arms out wide, like a circus ringmaster, or an actor.

‘Those of you who were present at the launch earlier this evening were able to see the drawings exhibited there, and you know how fantastic this is going to be. And actually our master builder, my wife Shannon Alleyne Opgard, should have been up here on the stage with me. She may be along later, but at the moment she’s at home in bed because sometimes that’s the way it is when a hotel isn’t the only thing you’re pregnant with…’

There was silence for a moment. Then the cheering started all over again, presently turning into foot-stamping applause.

I couldn’t take any more, I hurried for the exit.

‘And now, everyone, please give a warm welcome to…’

I elbowed my way out of the door and just managed to get round the corner of the building before my throat filled and the puke splashed down onto the ground in front of me. It came in contractions, something that had to come out, like a bloody birth. When at last it was over I sank to my knees, empty, done. From inside I heard the cowbell tap out the rhythm to the fast number Rod and his gang always opened with, ‘Honky Tonk Women’. I pressed my forehead against the wall and started to cry. Snot, tears and puke-stinking slime poured out of me.

‘Jesus,’ I heard a voice say behind me. ‘Did someone finally beat up Roy Opgard?’

‘Don’t, Simon!’ said a woman’s voice, and I felt a hand on my shoulder. ‘Is everything all right, Roy?’

I half turned. Grete Smitt had a red headscarf wrapped around her head. And she actually looked quite good in it.

‘Just some bad moonshine,’ I said. ‘But thanks anyway.’

The two of them walked on towards the car park, arms around each other.

I got to my feet and headed off in the direction of the birch wood, feet squelching on soft ground that swayed, heavy with meltwater. I cleared my nostrils one after the other, spat and breathed in. The evening air was still cold, but it tasted different, like a promise that things would change, into something new, and better. I couldn’t comprehend what that might be.

I stood beneath a bare tree. The moon had risen and bathed Lake Budal in an eerie light. In a few days’ time the ice would be gone. The current would take hold of the ice floes. Once things start to crack here, it doesn’t take long for everything to go.

A figure appeared beside me.

‘What does the ptarmigan do when the fox takes its eggs?’ It was Carl.

‘Lays new ones,’ I said.

‘Isn’t it funny? When your parents say stuff like that when you’re a kid you think it’s just drivel. And then one day you suddenly understand what they meant.’

I shrugged.

‘It’s lovely, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘When the spring finally reaches us too.’

‘It is.’

‘When are you coming back?’

‘Back?’

‘To Os.’

‘For the funeral, I suppose.’

‘There won’t be any funeral here, I’m sending her in a coffin to Barbados. I mean, when are you moving back?’

‘Never.’

Carl laughed as though I’d just made a joke. ‘You maybe don’t know it yourself yet, but you’ll be back before the year is out, Roy Opgard.’ And then he left.

I stood there for a long time. Finally I looked up at the moon. It should have been something bigger, like a planet, something that could really have set me and everybody else and our tragic and hurried lives in a proper perspective. I needed that now. Something that could tell me that all of us – Shannon, Carl and me, Mum and Dad, Uncle Bernard, Sigmund Olsen, Willumsen and the Danish enforcer – were here, gone and forgotten in the same instant, hardly more than a flash in the universe’s vast ocean of time and space. That was the only comfort we had, that absolutely nothing had meaning. Not looking out across your own land. Not running your own service station. Not waking up beside the one you love. Not seeing your own child grow up.

That’s what it was: unimportant.

But of course, the moon was too small to provide comfort for that.

71

‘THANKS,’ SAID MARTINSEN AS SHE took the cup of coffee I handed to her. She leaned against the kitchen worktop and looked out of the window. The KRIPOS car and Olsen’s Land Rover were still down on Geitesvingen.

‘So you didn’t find anything?’ I asked.

‘Obviously not,’ she said.

‘Does it seem so obvious to you?’

Martinsen sighed and glanced round, as though to assure herself we were still alone in the kitchen. ‘To be quite honest, under normal circumstances we would have rejected the request for assistance in a case which was so obviously an accident. When your sheriff contacted us, the faults on the car – which were obviously what caused it – had already been discovered. The extensive damages sustained by the dead person are what you would expect from such a long fall. The local doctor obviously couldn’t say exactly when she died, given that it took a day and a half before he was able to get down to the car; but his estimate suggests she went off the road sometime between six o’clock and midnight.’

‘So then why have you made the trip out here anyway?’

‘Well, one reason is that your sheriff insisted on it. He was almost aggressive about it. He is convinced that your brother’s wife was murdered, and he’s read in what he calls a technical journal that in eighty per cent of cases the guilty party is the husband. And in KRIPOS we like to keep a good relationship with the sheriffs’ offices round about.’ She smiled. ‘Good coffee, by the way.’

‘Thanks. And what was the other reason?’

‘The other?’

‘You said Sheriff Olsen was one reason, so what was the other?’

Martinsen turned her blue eyes on me, and it was a look that was hard to judge. And I didn’t meet her gaze. Didn’t want to. I was quite simply not there. Moreover I knew that if I let her look me too directly and too long in the eye she might discover the wound.

‘I appreciate your openness with me, Martinsen.’

‘Vera.’

‘But aren’t you at least slightly sceptical when you know that, in all, three cars have driven off the road and fallen down the same precipice, and that you are now talking to the brother of someone who was closely connected to all of those who have lost their lives here?’

Vera Martinsen nodded. ‘I haven’t forgotten that for one moment, Roy. And Olsen has reminded me of those road accidents over and over again. Now he has a theory that the first fatal accident might also have been murder and wants us to check whether the brake hoses on the Cadillac at the bottom were possibly sabotaged.’

‘My father’s,’ I said, hoping my poker face was still in place. ‘Did your people check?’

Martinsen laughed. ‘In the first place the wreck lies squashed under two other cars down there. And if we did find something, the case is now eighteen years old and subject to the statute of limitations. Moreover I’m a great believer in what people call common sense and logic. Do you know how many cars go off the road in Norway each year? Around three thousand. And in how many different places? Less than two thousand. Almost half of all cars that go off the road do so in places where the same thing has happened earlier in the same year. For three cars to go off the road over a period of eighteen years at a place that should obviously have been better protected seems to me not merely reasonable, I think in fact it’s strange there haven’t been more accidents.’

I nodded. ‘Perhaps you’d be kind enough to mention that about better safety measures to the local authorities here?’

Martinsen smiled and put down her cup.

I followed her out into the hall.

‘How is your brother doing?’ she said as she buttoned up her jacket.

‘Well, he’s taking it hard. He’s accompanied the coffin to Barbados. He’s going to meet her relatives there. After that he says he’s going to drown himself completely in work on the hotel.’

‘And what about you?’

‘It gets better,’ I lied. ‘Of course, it was a shock, but life goes on. For the eighteen months Shannon lived here I was mostly other places, so we never really knew each other well enough to… well, you know what I mean. It’s not like losing someone from your own family.’

‘I understand.’

‘Hm, well,’ I said, and opened the front door for her, since she hadn’t done so herself. But she didn’t move.

‘Hear that?’ she whispered. ‘Wasn’t that a plover?’

I nodded. Slowly. ‘Are you interested in birds?’

‘Very. I get it from my father. And you?’

‘Yeah, pretty much.’

‘You’ve got a lot of interesting specimens up in these parts, I expect?’

‘Yes we do.’

‘Maybe I can come up one day and you can show me?’

‘That would’ve been nice,’ I said. ‘But I don’t live here.’

And then I met her gaze anyway and let her see it. How damaged I was.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Let me know if you move back then. You’ll find my number on the card I left under the coffee cup.’

I nodded.

Once she’d gone I went up to the bedroom, lay down on the double bed, pulled the pillow over my face and breathed in the last remnants of Shannon. A faint, spicy smell that in a few days’ time would be gone. I opened the wardrobe on her side of the bed. It was empty. Carl had taken most of her things to Barbados with him and thrown away the rest. But in the dark recesses of the cupboard I saw something. Shannon must have found them somewhere in the house and stored them there. It was a pair of crocheted baby shoes, so comically small you had to smile. Grandma had crocheted them, and according to Mum they were mine first, and then later Carl’s.

I went down into the kitchen.

From the window I could see the barn door was wide open. The glow of a cigarette. Kurt Olsen squatting on his haunches inside and examining something on the floor.

I took out the binoculars.

He ran his fingers over something. And I knew what it was. The marks from the jack on the soft planking. Kurt walked over to the punchbag, stared at the face painted on it. Gave it a tentative punch. Vera Martinsen had probably told him by now that KRIPOS were getting ready to pack up and leave. But Olsen wouldn’t be giving up. I read somewhere that it takes the body seven years to change all its cells, including brain cells, and that after seven years we are in principle a new person. But our DNA, the programme the cells are based on, does not change. That if we cut our hair, our nails or a fingertip, what grows out again will be the same, a repetition. And that new brain cells are no different from old ones and take over many of the same memories and experiences. We don’t change, we make the same choices, repeat the same mistakes. Like father like son. A hunter like Kurt Olsen will go on hunting, a killer will – if the circumstances are an exact repetition – again choose to kill. There’s an eternal circle, like the predictable orbits of planets, and the regular progression of the seasons.

Kurt Olsen was on his way out of the barn when he stopped to look at something else. And now he lifted it up, held it up to the light. It was one of the zinc buckets. I focused the binoculars. He was studying the bullet holes. First on one side of the bucket, then on the other. After a while he put the bucket down, walked down to his car and drove off.

The house was empty. I was alone. More alone than I’d ever been before. Was this what it was like for Dad, even with all of us around him?

From the west came a low, threatening rumbling sound and I turned the binoculars to look.

It was an avalanche on the north face of Ottertind. Heavy, wet ‘sugary’ snow that couldn’t stay up there any more, it had to get down and now thundered through the ice, making the water cascade high into the air on the far shore of Lake Budal.

Yes, merciless spring was on its way again.