The Son

31

It was seven in the morning when Simon got to work. He had managed two and a half hours’ sleep, one and a half cups of coffee, and half a headache pill. Some people could survive on very little sleep. Simon wasn’t one of them.

Kari, however, might be. She certainly looked surprisingly alert as she strode towards him.

‘So?’ Simon said, slumping down in his office chair and tearing open the brown envelope which had been waiting for him in his pigeonhole.

‘Not one of the three people we arrested last night is saying anything,’ Kari said. ‘Not a single word, in fact. They even refused to state their names.’

‘What nice boys. Do we know them?’

‘Oh yes. Plain clothes recognised them. They have previous convictions, all three of them. Their lawyer turned up unannounced in the middle of night and interrupted our attempts to get anything out of them. A man called Einar Harnes. I managed to trace the mobile with the text message from this Son. The mobile belongs to a Fidel Lae. Owns a kennel. He’s not answering his phone, but the signals to the base stations indicate it’s at his farm. We’ve dispatched two patrol cars there.’

Simon realised why she — unlike him — didn’t look as if she had just got straight out of bed. It was because she had never made it that far, she had worked right through the night.

‘Then there’s this Hugo Nestor you asked me to find. .?’ she continued.

‘Yes?’

‘He’s not at his home address, doesn’t answer his phone, nor is he at his office address, but they could all be fake. All I have so far is a plain-clothes cop who says she saw Nestor at Vermont last night.’

‘Hm. Do you think I have bad breath, Officer Adel?’

‘Not that I’ve noticed, but then again we haven’t-’

‘So you wouldn’t regard this as a hint?’

Simon held up three toothbrushes.

‘They look used,’ Kari said. ‘How did you get them?’

‘Good question,’ Simon said, peering into the envelope. He pulled out a sheet of paper with the logo of the Plaza Hotel at the top. But there was no sender. Just a short handwritten message:

Check for DNA. S.

He handed the sheet to Kari and looked at the toothbrushes.

‘Probably some weirdo,’ Kari said. ‘Forensics have more than enough to do with the killings to-’

‘Take them straight up there,’ Simon said.

‘What?’

‘It’s him.’

‘Who?’

‘“S”. It’s Sonny.’

‘How do you know-’

‘Tell them it’s urgent.’

Kari looked at him. Simon’s phone started to ring.

‘OK,’ she said, and turned to leave.

She was standing outside the lift when Simon came over and stood next to her. He had put on his coat.

‘You’re coming with me first,’ he said.

‘Oh?’

‘That was Asmund Bjornstad. They’ve found another body.’

A woodland bird hooted hollowly from somewhere in the spruce forest.

Asmund Bjornstad had been stripped of all traces of arrogance. He was pale. He had come straight out with it on the phone: ‘We need help, Kefas.’

Simon was standing beside the Kripos inspector and Kari, staring through the mesh of a cage, at the remains of a body which they had temporarily identified on the basis of various credit cards as Hugo Nestor’s. Confirmation would have to wait until they had checked his dental records. Simon could deduce from where he was standing and looking at the fillings in the exposed teeth that the deceased had actually seen a dentist. The two police officers from the dog patrol who had taken away the Argentine mastiffs had provided a simple explanation for the state of the body: ‘The dogs were hungry. Somebody forgot to feed them.’

‘Nestor was Kalle Farrisen’s boss,’ Simon said.

‘I know,’ Bjornstad groaned. ‘All hell will break loose once the press finds out.’

‘How did you find Lae?’

‘Two patrol cars down at the farm were following a phone signal,’ Bjornstad said.

‘I sent them,’ Kari said. ‘We got an anonymous text message.’

‘First they discovered Lae’s phone,’ Bjornstad said. ‘It was on top of the gate as if someone had left it there to be traced and found. But they didn’t find Lae when they searched the house. They were about to leave when one of the police dogs reacted and wanted to go inside the forest. And that’s when they found. . this.’ He flung out his hands.

‘And Lae?’ Simon asked, nodding towards the shivering man huddling under a woollen blanket, sitting on a tree stump behind them.

‘The killer threatened him with a gun, he says. Locked him in the adjacent cage, took his mobile and his wallet. Lae was locked up for thirty-six hours. He saw everything.’

‘And what’s he saying?’

‘He’s broken, poor man, he can’t stop talking. Lae sold dogs illegally and Nestor was his client. But he’s unable to give a proper description of the killer. Still, it’s common for witnesses not to remember the faces of people who threatened their lives.’

‘Oh, they remember them,’ Simon said. ‘They remember those faces for the rest of their lives. They just don’t recall them the way we see them, that’s why their descriptions are wrong. Wait here.’

Simon went over to the man. Sat down on another tree stump next to him.

‘How did he look?’ Simon asked.

‘I’ve already given a description-’

‘Like this?’ Simon said, producing a photograph from his inside pocket and showing it to him. ‘Try to imagine him without the beard and the long hair.’

The man stared at the picture for a long time. Then he nodded slowly. ‘That look. He had that look in his eyes. As if he was innocent.’

‘Sure?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Thank you.’

‘He kept saying that the whole time. Thank you. And he cried when the dogs killed Nestor.’

Simon put the picture back in his pocket. ‘One last thing. You told the police that he threatened you with a gun. In which hand did he hold the gun?’

The man blinked a couple of times as if he hadn’t thought about it until now. ‘Left. He was left-handed.’

Simon got up and walked back to Bjornstad and Kari. ‘It’s Sonny Lofthus.’

‘Who?’ Asmund Bjornstad asked.

Simon looked at the inspector for a long time. ‘I thought it was you who turned up with Delta, trying to catch him at the Ila Centre?’

Bjornstad shook his head.

‘Anyway,’ Simon said, taking out the picture again. ‘We need to issue a description and a wanted person notice so that the public can help us. We need to get this photo to the news desks at NRK and TV2.’

‘I doubt if anyone will recognise him on the strength of that picture.’

‘How soon can we get them to broadcast it?’

‘They’ll make room for this story immediately, trust me,’ Bjornstad said.

‘For the morning news bulletins in fifteen minutes, then,’ Kari said, taking out her mobile and turning on the camera function. ‘Hold the picture up and keep it still. Who do you know in NRK that we can send it to?’

Morgan Askoy was carefully picking at a small scab on the back of his hand when the bus driver suddenly slammed on the brakes and Morgan inadvertently ripped off the scab. A drop of blood appeared. Morgan quickly averted his eyes, he couldn’t stand the sight of blood.

Morgan got off the bus at Staten Maximum Security Prison where he had been working for two months. He was walking at the back of a group of other prison officers when a guy in a prison officer uniform came up alongside him.

‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning,’ Morgan replied automatically and looked over, but couldn’t place him. Even so, the guy continued walking alongside him as if they knew each other. Or as if he wanted to get to know him.

‘You don’t work in A Wing,’ the guy remarked. ‘Or are you new?’

‘B Wing,’ Morgan said. ‘Two months.’

‘Ah, right.’

The guy was younger than the other uniform fetishists. Mostly it was the older officers who travelled to and from work in their uniform, as if they were somehow proud of it. As did Franck, the assistant governor, himself. Morgan would have felt like an idiot if he had to sit on the bus and have people staring at him and perhaps asking questions about where he worked. At Staten. In a prison. No way.

He looked at the ID card on the young man’s uniform. Sorensen.

They passed the security booth side by side and Morgan nodded to the security guard inside.

When they approached the entrance, the guy took out his mobile and lagged slightly behind; perhaps he was sending a text.

The door had slammed shut behind the staff in front of them, so Morgan had to pull out his own key. He unlocked the door. ‘Thank you so much,’ said the Sorensen guy as he slipped in in front of him. Morgan followed, but turned off towards the lockers. He saw the guy join the rest of the staff as they poured into the lock towards the wings.

Betty kicked off her shoes and flopped down on her bed. What a night shift. She was exhausted and knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep for a while, but she had to give it a try at least. And in order to do that, she first had to rid herself of the feeling that she should have reported the incident in Suite 4 to the police. After she and the security guard had searched the room to see if anything was damaged or missing, Betty had tidied up and was about to throw away the half lemon when she discovered a used, disposable syringe in the bin. Without any prompting her brain had put two and two together: the discoloured citrus flesh and the syringe. She had traced her fingers over the lemon peel and found several tiny holes. Squeezed a drop of lemon juice into her hand and saw that the juice was cloudy, as if it contained chalk. She touched the drop carefully with her tongue to taste it; besides the almost overpowering acidity, there was another bitter, medicinal note. She had to make a decision. Was there a law against guests having strangely tasting lemons in their possession? Or a disposable syringe? What if they happened to be diabetic or suffer from some other condition? Or play bizarre games with visitors in their room? So she had carried the contents of the bin down to reception and disposed of it. Written a brief entry in the log about the noise coming from Suite 4 and the man they found tied to the lavatory. A man who had himself dismissed the whole incident. What else could she do?

She turned on the wall-mounted TV while she undressed, went to the bathroom, took off her make-up and cleaned her teeth. She could hear the steady hum of voices from TV2’s news channel. She tended to leave it on at low volume because it helped her fall asleep. Possibly because the news anchor’s reassuring voice reminded her of her father’s, a voice which could report on the downfall of continents, and yet she would still feel safe. But the TV alone was not enough any more. She had started taking sleeping pills. Not very strong ones, admittedly, but even so. Her doctor said she should consider asking to be let off night shifts to see if that might help. But no one got to the top by shirking, you had to pull your weight. Over the noise of the tap and her own foaming toothbrush she heard the voice say that police were looking for a person in connection with the killing of a man in a dog kennel last night, and that they linked this person to the murder of Agnete Iversen and the triple homicide in Gamlebyen.

Betty rinsed her mouth, turned off the tap and went back to the bedroom. Stopped in her tracks on the threshold. Stared at the photo of the wanted man on the TV.

It was him.

He had a beard and long hair, but Betty was trained to strip a face of disguises and masks, comparing faces with the photographs the Plaza and other international hotels kept on file of notorious hotel con men who were bound to show up at their reception sooner or later. And it was him. The man she had checked in, only without glasses, but with eyebrows.

She stared at her mobile which she had left on her bedside table.

Attentive, but discreet. Puts the hotel’s interests first. Could go far.

She pressed her eyes shut again.

Her mother had been right. That damn curiosity of hers.

From his office window, Arild Franck watched the officers from the night shift leave through the gate. He made a mental note of anyone who turned up late for the morning shift. It irritated him. People who couldn’t do their job irritated him. Like Kripos and the Homicide Squad. The police had been given a tip-off to raid the Ila Centre and even so Lofthus had eluded them. It just wasn’t good enough. And now they were having to pay the price for the police’s ineptitude. Hugo Nestor had been killed last night. In a kennel. It was unbelievable that one man, a junkie, could cause so much mayhem. The law-abiding citizen in Franck was equally outraged by this repeated example of police incompetence; at times he even felt frustrated that the police had never managed to catch him, a corrupt assistant prison governor. He had seen the suspicion in Simon Kefas’s eyes, but Kefas didn’t have the guts to go after him, the big coward, he had too much to lose. Simon Kefas was only brave when there was money at stake. That bloody money. What had Franck expected? That it would buy him a bust, a reputation as a pillar of the community? And once he had become hooked on money, it was like heroin and the numbers in the bank account became the end rather than the means because there was no longer any meaningful goal. And just like the junkie, he knew and understood it, and yet he was incapable of doing anything about it.

‘An officer called Sorensen is on his way to see you,’ said his secretary in the front room.

‘Don’t let him-’

‘He walked right past me, said it would only take a minute.’

‘Really?’ Franck frowned. Was Sorensen reporting fit for duty before his sick leave had ended? Out of character for a Norwegian worker. He heard the door behind him open.

‘So, Sorensen,’ Arild Franck said without turning round. ‘Did you forget to knock?’

‘Sit down.’

Franck heard the door being locked and he turned towards the voice in surprise. He stopped moving when he saw the gun.

‘If you make a single sound, I’ll shoot you right through your forehead.’

When you point a gun at someone, that person will usually focus all their attention on the gun and it will take time before they look at the person behind the gun. But when the boy lifted his foot and nudged the chair so that it rolled across the floor to the assistant prison governor, Franck saw who it was. The Son had returned.

‘You’ve changed,’ Franck said. He meant to say it with greater authority, but his throat was dry and no particular sound came out of it.

The gun rose slightly higher and Franck immediately dropped down on the chair.

‘Put your arms on the armrests,’ the boy said. ‘I’m going to press the button on your intercom and you’re going to tell Ina to go to the baker’s to get some pastries. Now.’

The boy pressed the button.

‘Yes?’ They heard Ina’s obliging voice.

‘Ina. .’ Franck’s brain searched desperately for alternatives.

‘Yes?’

‘Go. .’ Franck’s search ended abruptly when he saw the boy’s finger tighten on the trigger. ‘. . down to the baker’s and get me some fresh pastries, would you? Now.’

‘OK.’

‘Thank you, Ina.’

The boy released the trigger, put the gun down, took a roll of duct tape from his jacket pocket, walked round to Franck’s chair and started taping his forearms to the armrests. Then he wound the tape around his chest and the backrest of the chair, and around his feet, the seat post and the castor. Then he picked up the gun again. A strange thought crossed Franck’s mind: that he ought to be more frightened than he was. The boy had killed Agnete Iversen, Kalle, Sylvester, Hugo Nestor. Didn’t he realise that he was going to die? Perhaps the difference was that he was here in his safe office at Staten and it was the middle of the day. That he had seen this boy grow up in his own prison and — except for that one incident with Halden — he’d never shown any propensity or ability to use violence.

The boy went through Franck’s pockets and took out his wallet and car key.

‘Porsche Cayenne,’ the boy read aloud from the car key. ‘That’s an expensive car for a civil servant, isn’t it?’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want answers to three simple questions. If you tell me the truth, I’ll let you live. If you don’t, I’m afraid I’m going to have to kill you.’ He said it in an almost regretful tone of voice.

‘The first question is, what’s the name and number of the account Nestor sent money to when he paid you?’

Franck thought about it. No one knew about the account, he could say anything he liked, invent an account because no one could contradict it. Franck opened his mouth, but the boy interrupted him.

‘If I were you I would think before speaking.’

Franck stared at the muzzle of the gun. What did he mean? No one could confirm or deny the account’s existence. No one except Nestor had ever transferred money into it. Franck blinked. Had the boy forced the information out of Nestor before he killed him? Was this a test?

‘The account is in the name of a company,’ Franck said. ‘Dennis Limited, registered in the Cayman Islands.’

‘And the account number?’ The boy held up something that looked like a yellowing business card. Had he noted down the number that Nestor had given him on it? But if the boy was bluffing, so what? He wouldn’t be able to withdraw the money even if Franck did give him the account number. Franck started reeling off the digits.

‘Slow down,’ the boy said, looking at the business card. ‘And speak more clearly.’

Franck did as he was told.

‘Then only two questions remain,’ the boy said when he had finished. ‘Who killed my father? And who was the mole who helped the Twin?’

Arild Franck blinked. His body knew it. It knew it now and was pouring sweat out of every pore. It understood it was time to be scared. The boy had put the gun down again, but he had produced a knife instead. Hugo Nestor’s revolting, curved, deadly weapon.

Franck screamed.

‘Now I understand,’ Simon said as he slipped his phone into his jacket pocket and steered out of the tunnel and into the light over Bjorvika and the Oslo Fjord.

‘Understand what?’ Kari said.

‘One of the night receptionists at the Plaza just called the police to say that the man who’s wanted for questioning spent a night in one of their suites. Under the name Fidel Lae. And that another man was found chained to the lavatory in the suite after some guests made a complaint about noise. This other man simply left as soon as they freed him. The hotel has also checked cameras at the entrance and they show Lofthus entering with Hugo Nestor and the man who was later found in the suite.’

‘You still haven’t told me what it is you understand.’

‘Oh, right. How the three men in Enerhauggata knew we were coming for them. According to the night log at the hotel, the handcuffed man left the Plaza just as we were in place outside the trafficking address. He called and warned everyone that Nestor had been kidnapped and they started evacuating every exposed position in case Nestor gave them up. They knew what had happened to Kalle, didn’t they? But just as they were about to drive off with the girls in the van, they realised we were already there. So they decided to wait for us to leave. Or for us to enter the house, so they could drive away unnoticed.’

‘You’ve given this quite a lot of thought, haven’t you?’ Kari said. ‘How they could have known that we were coming.’

‘Possibly,’ Simon said, turning off towards Police HQ. ‘But now I’ve worked it out.’

‘You know how it could have happened,’ Kari corrected him. ‘Are you going to tell me what you’re thinking about now?’

Simon shrugged. ‘That we have to get Lofthus before he wreaks more havoc.’

‘Funny sort of guy,’ Morgan Askoy said to his older colleague as they walked down the broad corridor. The cell doors were wide open, ready for morning inspection. ‘Sorensen, his name was. He just came up to me.’

‘Can’t have been him,’ his colleague said. ‘There’s only one Sorensen in A Wing and he’s on sick leave.’

‘Oh, it was him. I saw his ID card on his uniform.’

‘But I spoke to Sorensen a couple of days ago — he’d just been readmitted to hospital.’

‘So he made a quick recovery.’

‘How odd. He was in uniform, you say? Can’t have been Sorensen, he hates the uniform; he always gets changed here and keeps it in his locker. That’s how Lofthus managed to steal it.’

‘The inmate who escaped?’

‘Yes. Are you enjoying your job, Askoy?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Make sure you take time off in lieu, don’t be tempted to do too much overtime.’

They walked another six steps before they both stopped in their tracks and stared at each other. Saw each other’s wide-open eyes.

‘What did that guy look like?’ his colleague exclaimed.

‘What did Lofthus look like?’ Morgan exclaimed.

Franck exhaled through his nose. His scream was muffled by the boy’s hand pressing against his mouth. The boy kicked off his shoe, pulled off his sock and stuffed it into Franck’s mouth and covered it with duct tape.

The boy cut away enough of the tape on the right armrest so that Franck’s fingers could hold the pen he handed him and raise it to the sheet lying at the very edge of the desk.

‘Answer me.’

Franck wrote.

Don’t know.

Then he let go of the pen.

He heard the rasping sound of duct tape being torn in half, smelled the glue on the adhesive side before it was placed over his nostrils and cut off the air. Franck’s body was out of his control, jerking and arching in the chair. Twisting and squirming. Dancing for that bloody boy! The pressure inside his head rose, soon it would explode. He had prepared to die when he saw the boy press the tip of the pen against the taut tape across his nostril.

He pierced it and Arild Franck’s left nostril inhaled air while the first warm tears rolled down his cheek.

The boy gave him back the pen. Franck concentrated.

Have mercy. I would give you the mole’s name if I knew it.

The boy read it. Closed his eyes and pulled a face as if in agony. He tore off another piece of tape.

The telephone on the desk started ringing. Franck stared at it hopefully. The office extension lit up on the display. It was Goldsrud, the shift supervisor. But the boy ignored it and focused entirely on reattaching the tape over Franck’s nostrils. And Franck felt the shaking that accompanied his own panic. It almost made him wonder whether he was crying or laughing.

‘There’s no reply from the governor,’ Geir Goldsrud said and hung up. ‘And Ina isn’t there, either — she picks up if he doesn’t. But before we disturb the governor, let’s run through this one more time. You’re saying that the man you saw called himself Sorensen and that he looked like him. .’ Goldsrud pointed to the TV monitor where he had brought up a picture of Sonny Lofthus.

‘It doesn’t look like him!’ Morgan insisted. ‘It is him, I keep telling you.’

‘Relax,’ his older colleague said.

‘Easy for you to say,’ Morgan snorted. ‘The guy is only wanted for six murders.’

‘I’ll call Ina on her mobile and if she doesn’t know where her boss is, we’ll start our own search. But I don’t want any panic, understood?’

Morgan looked at his colleague and back at the shift supervisor. It looked as if there was a shorter route to panic there than in Morgan himself. Personally, he just felt excited. Really excited. A prisoner, breaking into Staten, how was that even possible?

‘Ina?’ Goldsrud practically screamed into the phone and Morgan could see the relief in his face. It was tempting to accuse the shift supervisor of trying to avoid responsibility, but it must surely be hell to be middle management, reporting to the assistant prison governor. ‘We need to get hold of Franck at once! Where is he?’

Morgan saw relief give way to bewilderment and then horror. Goldsrud ended the call.

‘What. .?’ the older colleague began.

‘She says he has a visitor in his office,’ Goldsrud said, getting up and going over to the gun cabinets at the far end of the room. ‘A man called Sorensen.’

‘So what do we do now?’ Morgan asked.

Goldsrud stuck the key in the lock, turned it and opened the gun cabinet. ‘This,’ he said.

Morgan counted twelve rifles.

‘Dan and Harald, you’re coming with me!’ Goldsrud shouted and Morgan could no longer detect any trace of bewilderment, horror or fear of responsibility in his voice. ‘Now!’

Simon and Kari were standing by the lift in the atrium at Police HQ when his mobile rang.

It was the Institute of Forensic Medicine.

‘We have the preliminary DNA results from your toothbrushes.’

‘Great,’ Simon said. ‘And the score at half-time is?’

‘I’d rather call it thirty seconds before the whistle goes. Probability is over ninety-five per cent.’

‘For what?’ Simon said and saw the lift doors open.

‘That we’ve found a partial match in our DNA database to the saliva from two of the toothbrushes. What’s interesting about the match is that it isn’t to a known criminal or a police officer, it’s to a murder victim. More specifically, it proves that whoever used the toothbrushes is closely related to the victim.’

‘I was expecting that,’ Simon said, getting into the lift. ‘The toothbrushes come from the Iversen family. I noticed they were missing in the Iversen bathroom after the murder. It’s a partial DNA match to Agnete Iversen, isn’t it?’

Kari looked quickly at Simon, who held up a hand in triumph.

‘No,’ replied the voice from the Institute of Forensic Medicine. ‘We haven’t actually got Agnete Iversen’s DNA uploaded to our system yet.’

‘Oh? Then how-’

‘This is an unidentified murder victim.’

‘You can prove a relationship between two of the toothbrushes and an unidentified murder victim? Unidentified as in?’

‘As in unidentified. A very young and very dead female.’

‘How young?’ Simon asked and stared at the lift doors which were starting to close.

‘Younger than we usually get them.’

‘Come again?’

‘A four-month-old foetus.’

Simon’s brain tried to process the information to the best of its ability. ‘Agnete Iversen had a late abortion, is that it?’

‘No.’

‘It isn’t? Then who is- Damn!’ Simon closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the lift wall.

‘You got cut off?’ Kari asked.

Simon nodded.

‘We’ll be out of this lift in a second,’ she said.

The boy punctured the tape twice. Once under each nostril. And Arild Franck sucked new seconds of life into his lungs. All he wanted to do was to live. And it was the only instinct his body obeyed.

‘So, do you want to give me a name?’ the boy asked in a low voice.

Franck breathed hard; he wished he had broader nostrils, wider nasal passages for this sweet, delicious air. He listened out for sounds that would tell him help was on its way, his rescue, while he shook his head, trying to indicate with his dry tongue behind the sock, the lips behind the tape, that he didn’t have a name, didn’t know who the mole was, that he was pleading for mercy. To go free. To be forgiven.

And he froze when he saw the boy stop in front of him and raise the knife. Franck couldn’t move, every limb was taped down. Everything. . The knife came down. Nestor’s hideous, curved knife. Franck’s head strained against the headrest, every muscle tensed up and he screamed silently when he saw the blood spurt from his body.