Assassin

61

Hans and Gudrun List were ardent ramblers, still blessed with wiry physiques and tanned limbs despite being well into their sixties. Natives of Salzburg, Austria, they had grown up striding across the spectacular alpine landscape that surrounds their home town. Now they were walking across southern Scandinavia, from Stockholm to Oslo, enjoying the perfect weather of early summer and the rural scenery as they made good progress along the northern shore of Tvillingtjenn lake, just a couple of hours' walk from the Swedish border. Above all the Lists took pleasure in the peace and solitude; the cool, muffled calm soothed them as they walked between the trees along the water's edge.

And then the silence was shattered by a terrible howl of pain, a scream so primal that it might have come from an animal. 'What was that?' Hans asked. But the question was superfluous. The Lists both knew at once that this was the sound of a man in agony.

'It came from over there,' said Gudrun, pointing away from the lakeshore into the trees.

They took a few more tentative paces into the woods, torn between the desire to help a fellow-human and the fear of whoever, or whatever, had ripped that terrible sound from his body. Then another scream rang out, more raggedly this time, as though the man's vocal cords no longer had the power to communicate his suffering.

'Look,' said Hans, pointing ahead of them. 'Over there.'

Gudrun saw it now: a small wooden building, a barn perhaps, or a garage. It looked drab and nondescript, apart from an incongruously bright pair of green doors, whose colour was echoed on the gable-ends of the roof. The fact that they could see the barn made the Lists themselves feel exposed. They retreated back down the path as a third scream, weaker again, seemed to call them, wordlessly pleading for their help.

'We must do something,' Gudrun insisted, waving her husband forward as she crept back towards the building, leaving the path and moving from the cover of one tree to another. They came to a halt behind the trunk of an ancient spruce and peered ahead of them. When what sounded like a very loud TV set was switched on they looked at one another in confusion. Then, a minute or two later, both flinched as the green doors opened and a man appeared, his head topped with a shock of fiery red hair. He turned back to lock the doors, then walked away from the barn. As they watched him go, the Lists realized that there was another, bigger building behind the barn, more like a chalet or farmhouse. More men emerged from it and followed the red-headed man as he kept walking. Silence fell for a while and then the thunderous racket of a powerful engine started up. There was a rise in pitch as it got up to speed, followed by a clatter of rotor-blades and then a helicopter rose from the forest and roared away over the trees towards the east.

As the sound of the chopper disappeared in the distance, the Lists turned to one another.

'He's still in there; we must do something,' Gudrun insisted.

'But if he is there, then surely there will still be someone in the main house. They would not just leave him.'

'Unless he is dead. We should go and look, to make sure.'

'Why, what good could we do? My dearest, this is a matter for the police.'

'But that poor man…'

'Exactly. Think about what they did to him. They could do it to us, too. Come, we must hurry away… Come on!'

Neither of the Lists' phones could get a signal where they were. It took another half an hour of brisk walking, every so often breaking into an undignified jog, before they were able to get through to the Norwegian emergency number, 112, and report what they had heard and seen.

The case was assigned to the nearest police station at Bjorkelangen, seven miles away. The inspector on duty there was about to send a car to investigate when he recalled one of the alerts that had been sent from Oslo in the hours after that terrible hotel bombing: something about a helicopter that had been seen over the opera house. Maybe this was the same chopper? It was a long shot, but it never hurt to be over-careful. And if he did happen to have found it, well, that might help him get a big-city posting.

He got on the line to Oslo right away.