The Son

36

Iver Iversen bounced on his heels and twirled the stem of his empty Martini glass. He watched the guests gathered in clusters on the whitewashed terrace and in the living room inside. It was the size of a ballroom and furnished with the taste of someone who didn’t have to live in it. ‘Interior designers with unlimited budgets and limited talent,’ as Agnete would have said. The men were wearing dinner jackets as the invitation had requested. The women were clearly outnumbered, but those who were there stood out even more. Blindingly beautiful, tantalisingly young and representing an interesting ethnic mix. High-slit dresses, naked backs and deep cleavages. Elegant, exotic and imported. True beauty is always rare. Iver Iversen wouldn’t have batted an eyelid if someone had led a snow leopard through the room.

‘It looks like every single financier in Oslo is here.’

‘Only those who aren’t particularly fastidious,’ Fredrik Ansgar said, adjusting his bow tie and sipping his gin and tonic. ‘Or are away at their holiday homes.’

Wrong, Iver Iversen thought. If they do business with the Twin, they’ll have made the trip into town. They wouldn’t dare do otherwise. The Twin. He looked at the huge man standing by the piano. He could have been the model for the ideal worker on Soviet propaganda posters or the sculptures in Vigeland Park. Everything about him was solid, solid and chiselled: his head, arms, hands, calves. High forehead, solid chin, full lips. The person talking to him was heavily built and over 1.8 metres tall, but looked like a dwarf next to the Twin. Iver thought he vaguely recognised him. He had a patch over one eye. Probably some mogul he’d seen in the newspapers.

Iversen grabbed himself another Martini from the tray being carried by one of the waiters who orbited the room. He knew that he shouldn’t, that he was already drunk. But he didn’t give a toss, after all he was a grieving widower. Still, he knew drinking was exactly what he shouldn’t be doing. He might end up saying something he would later regret.

‘Do you know how the Twin got his name?’

‘I’ve heard the story, yes,’ Fredrik Ansgar said.

‘I heard that his brother drowned, but that it was an accident.’

‘An accident? In a bucket of water?’

Fredrik laughed and his gaze followed a dark-skinned beauty who glided past.

‘Look,’ Iver said. ‘There’s even a bishop here. I wonder how he got caught in the Twin’s net.’

‘Yes, it’s an impressive gathering. Is it true he also has a prison governor in his pocket?’

‘Let me put it like this, it doesn’t stop there.’

‘The police?’

Iver said nothing.

‘How high up?’

‘You’re young, Fredrik, and even though you’re on the inside, you’re not yet in so deep that you don’t have the option of retreat. But the more you know, the more trapped you are, believe me. If I had the chance to do things differently. .’

‘And what about Sonny Lofthus? And Simon Kefas? Will they be taken care of?’

‘Oh yes,’ Iver said, staring at a small, nimble girl sitting alone at the bar. Thai? Vietnamese? So young, pretty and dolled up. So instructed. So terrified and unprotected. Just like Mai. He almost felt sorry for Simon Kefas. He, too, was trapped. He had sold his soul for his love of a younger woman and, like Iver, he would come to know humiliation. At least Iver hoped that Simon would have time to feel it before the Twin did what was necessary and beat Simon Kefas to it. A lake in Ostmarka? Perhaps Kefas and Lofthus would get a lake each.

Iver Iversen closed his eyes and thought about Agnete. He felt like hurling the Martini glass at the wall, but instead he drained it in one gulp.

‘Telenor’s operations centre, police assistance.’

‘Good evening, this is Chief Inspector Simon Kefas.’

‘I can tell from the number you’re calling from. And that you’re somewhere in Ulleval Hospital.’

‘Impressive. However, I want you to trace a different number.’

‘Have you got a warrant?’

‘This is an urgent matter.’

‘Fine. I’ll report it tomorrow and you’ll have to take it up with the public prosecutor then. Name and number?’

‘All I have is the number.’

‘And what would you like?’

‘The location where the mobile is now.’

‘We can only give you an approximate location. And if the mobile isn’t in use, it can take time before our base stations pick up its signal. It happens automatically once every hour.’

‘I’ll call the number now so you get a signal.’

‘So this isn’t about someone who can’t know that their phone is being traced?’

‘I’ve been calling the number several times in the last hour and there’s been no response so far.’

‘Fine. Give me the number, ring it, and I’ll tell you what we find out.’

Pelle stopped the taxi on the deserted gravel track. To his left the landscape sloped down towards the river that shimmered in the moonlight. A narrow bridge led from the gravel track back to the main road by which they had come. To his right a field of wheat whispered and swayed below the black clouds that raced across the sky which looked like a photographic negative in the light summer night.

Further down the road, within the forest in front of them, lay their destination: a large house surrounded by a white picket fence.

‘I should be taking you to casualty instead so they could patch you up,’ Pelle said.

‘I’ll be fine,’ the boy said and placed a large-denomination banknote on the armrest between the front seats. ‘And thank you for the handkerchief.’

Pelle looked up at him the rear-view mirror. The boy had tied the handkerchief around his forehead. It was soaked in blood.

‘Come on. I won’t charge you. There’s bound to be a casualty department somewhere in Drammen.’

‘I might go tomorrow,’ the boy said, clutching the red sports bag. ‘I need to pay this man a visit first.’

‘Is that safe? I thought you said he’d killed someone?’ Pelle looked in the direction of the garage which was built into the house. So much space and yet no separate garage. The owner was probably a fan of American architecture. Pelle’s grandmother had lived in a village of Norwegians who had once lived in America or had families living there now, where the most fundamentalist converts to their adopted country hadn’t just had a house with a porch, a Stars and Stripes on the flagpole and an American automobile in the garage, but also 110 volt electrical installations so they could plug in their jukeboxes, toasters and fridges which they had bought in Texas or inherited from a grandfather in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

‘He’s not going to kill anyone tonight,’ the boy said.

‘Even so,’ Pelle said. ‘Sure you don’t want me to wait? It’s half an hour back to Oslo and another taxi will cost you shedloads because it’ll have to make the journey out here first. I’ll stop the meter-’

‘I really appreciate that, Pelle, but it’s probably best for both of us if you’re not a witness to anything. Do you understand?’

‘No.’

‘Good.’

The boy got out of the car. He looked at Pelle. Pelle shrugged and drove off; he heard the gravel crunch under the tyres while he followed the boy in his mirror. Saw him standing there. Then suddenly he was gone, swallowed up by the darkness in the woods.

Pelle stopped the car. He continued to stare at the mirror. The boy was gone. Just like his wife.

It was so difficult to grasp. That people who had been around, furnished your life, could simply evaporate and you never saw them again. Except in dreams. The good dreams. Because he never saw her in his nightmare. In the nightmare he saw only the road and the headlights of the oncoming car. In the nightmare he, Pelle Granerud, once a promising rally driver, didn’t have time to react, didn’t manage to carry out the simple manoeuvre needed to avoid a drunk driver on the wrong side of the road. Instead of doing the things he did every single day in training on the motor-racing circuit, he froze. Because he knew that he might lose the only thing he couldn’t bear to lose. Not his own life, but that of his family: the two people who were his life. The two people he had just picked up from the hospital, they were his new life. Which started now. He was a father. He got to be a father for just three days. And when he woke up, he was back in the same hospital. First they told him about the injuries to his legs. It was a misunderstanding, there had been a change of shift and the incoming staff didn’t know that his wife and child had been killed in the accident. It was two hours before he found out. He was allergic to morphine, an inherited condition probably, and he had lain in unbearable agony screaming her name day after day. But she didn’t come. And hour by hour, day by day, little by little he began to understand, that he would never, ever see her again. So he carried on screaming her name. Just to hear it. They hadn’t had time to decide on a name for the baby. And it suddenly dawned on Pelle that it wasn’t until tonight, when the boy had put his hand on his shoulder, that the pain disappeared completely.

Pelle could see the outline of a man in the white house. He was sitting behind a large, curtainless panorama window. The living room was lit up as if the man was on show. As if he was waiting for someone.

Iver could see that the big man was bringing the guest he had been talking to by the piano over to him and Fredrik.

‘It’s you he wants to talk to, not me,’ Fredrik whispered and slipped away, having set his sights on something Russian over by the bar.

Iver gulped. How many years had he and the big man done business together, been in the same boat, shared upturns and the very occasional downturn, such as when the shock waves of the global financial crisis sloshed gently against the Norwegian coast? And yet he still tensed up, almost petrified, when the big man approached. People said that he could lift his own body weight on the bench press. And not just once, but ten reps in a row. But it was one thing for his physical presence to be so intimidating, another for you to know that absolutely everything you said, every word, the slightest change in pitch, also — or indeed, especially — anything you didn’t intend, he would catch. In addition to what your body language, facial colour and the movement of your pupils revealed, of course.

‘So, Iver.’ The low-frequency, rumbling voice. ‘How are you doing? Agnete. Terrible business, yes?’

‘It certainly is,’ Iver said, looking around for a waiter.

‘I want you to meet a friend of mine — the two of you have something in common. You have both been widowed recently. .’

The man with the eyepatch extended his hand.

‘. . by the same killer,’ said the big man.

‘Yngve Morsand,’ the man introduced himself and squeezed Iver’s hand. ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

‘Likewise,’ Iver Iversen said. So that was why he thought the man looked familiar. It was the shipping owner, the husband of the woman who had been practically decapitated. Yngve Morsand had been the police’s prime suspect for a while until they had found DNA at the crime scene. From Sonny Lofthus.

‘Yngve lives just outside Drammen,’ the big man said. ‘And tonight we’ve borrowed his house.’

‘Oh?’

‘We’re using it as a trap. We’re going to catch the guy who killed Agnete, Iver.’

‘The Twin says there’s a good chance Sonny Lofthus will make an attempt on my life there tonight,’ Yngve Morsand laughed and looked around for something. ‘I’ve put money on it that he won’t. Would you tell your waiters to get me something stronger than a Martini, Twin?’

‘It’s Sonny Lofthus’s next obvious move,’ the big man said. ‘Luckily he’s sufficiently systematic and predictable, so I think I’ll be taking your money.’ The big man grinned broadly. White teeth below his moustache, eyes like two slits in the fleshy face. He placed a gigantic hand on the shipowner’s back. ‘And I’d prefer it if you didn’t call me that, Yngve.’

The shipowner looked up at him jokingly. ‘You mean Twi- Aaah.’ His mouth opened and his face contorted into a baffled, frozen grimace. Iver saw the big man’s fingers release their grip around Morsand’s neck and the shipowner bent forward to cough.

‘So I think we’re agreed on that, yes?’ The big man raised his hand towards the bar and snapped his fingers. ‘Drinks.’

Martha stuck her spoon diffidently into the cloudberry cream pudding while she ignored the words being hurled at her from every angle of the table. Has this person assaulted you before? Is he dangerous? If he’s a resident, surely you’ll have to see him again, good God! What if the guy reports Anders to the police for his defence of her? Everyone knows how unpredictable these drug addicts are. But then again, he was probably high and won’t be able to remember a thing. An uncle thought he had looked like the man on TV who was wanted for murder.What’s his name — is he foreign? What is it, Martha, why don’t you say anything? Surely you can guess why, she has a duty of confidentiality.

‘I’m eating my pudding,’ Martha said. ‘It’s good, you should try some. I think I’ll get some more.’

Anders came up behind her in the kitchen.

‘I heard him,’ he hissed. ‘I love you? That was the guy from the corridor at Ila. The one you were talking to. What’s going on between the two of you?’

‘Anders, don’t. .’

‘Have you slept with him?’

‘Stop it!’

‘He definitely has a guilty conscience. If he didn’t, he would have pulled his gun on me. What was he doing here — had he come to shoot me? I’m calling the police-’

‘To tell them how you attacked and kicked a man in the head without provocation?’

‘And who would tell them I wasn’t being provoked? You?’

‘Or the taxi driver.’

‘You?’ He grabbed her arm and laughed. ‘Yes, you would, wouldn’t you? You would take his side against your own fiance. You fucking wh-’

She tore herself loose. A dessert plate hit the floor and smashed. The dining room fell completely silent.

Martha marched out into the hall, grabbed her coat and headed for the door. Stopped. Paused for a second. Then she turned round and marched into the dining room. She grabbed a spoon, white from cloudberry cream pudding, and tapped it against a greasy glass. She looked up and realised that last action had been superfluous, she already had everyone’s attention.

‘Dear friends and family,’ she said. ‘I wanted to add that Anders was right. We just can’t wait until summer. .’

Simon swore. He had parked in the middle of Kvadraturen and was studying a map of the area. Telenor’s police assistance service had told him that the phone was here. The mobile Sonny Lofthus had used to text him. And which Simon now knew was a pay-as-you-go phone registered to a Helge Sorensen. It made sense, he had used the ID card of the same prison officer earlier.

But where could he be?

The coordinates covered only a few streets, but those streets were Oslo’s most densely populated. Shops, offices, hotels, flats. Simon jumped when there was a knock on the side window. He looked up and saw a harshly made-up, chubby girl in hot pants whose breasts were squeezed into some kind of corset. He shook his head, she pulled an ugly face at him and walked off. Simon had forgotten that this was the city’s busiest red-light district and that a single man in a parked car in these streets was inevitably regarded as a punter. A blow job in the car, ten minutes at the Bismarck Hotel or possibly up against the wall of Akershus Fortress. He had once been that man. It wasn’t something he was proud of, but once upon a time he had been willing to pay for a crumb of human contact and a voice saying ‘I love you’. The latter had fallen under the category of ‘special services’ and cost two hundred kroner extra.

He called the number again and watched the people walking up and down the pavements, hoping that one of them would reach for their phone and thus give themselves away. He sighed and ended the call. Looked at his watch. At least he knew that the phone was in the area, and that ought to indicate that Sonny was staying put and wasn’t up to anything devilish tonight.

So why did Simon have the feeling that something wasn’t right?

Bo sat in the unfamiliar living room, looking out of the large panorama window. He sat in front of a bright light which was aimed at the window so that anyone watching him from the outside would see only his silhouette and not his features. Hopefully Sonny Lofthus didn’t have too clear an idea of Yngve Morsand’s build. Bo was thinking that this was exactly how Sylvester had been sitting when he had left him in Lofthus’s house. Good, stupid, loyal, loud Sylvester. And that that fucker had killed him. How he had done that, they would probably never know. Because there would never be an interrogation, a torture session where Bo could exact his revenge, savour it like he would a glass of retsina with its taste of resin. Some people couldn’t stand it, but to Bo it represented the taste of his childhood, the island of Telendos, friends, a gently rocking boat in the bottom of which he would lie and look at the always blue Greek sky and hear the waves and the wind sing a duet together. He heard a click in his right ear.

‘A car stopped down the road and then turned round.’

‘Did anyone get out?’ Bo asked. The earpiece, the cable and the microphone were so discreet that they wouldn’t show up in the backlight from the outside.

‘We didn’t have time to see, but the car is driving away now. Perhaps it was lost.’

‘OK. Everyone get ready.’

Bo adjusted his bulletproof vest. Lofthus wouldn’t have time to fire any shots, but he preferred to take precautions. He had placed two men in the garden to grab Lofthus when he came through the gate or over the fence, and one in the corridor behind the unlocked front door. All other means of access to the house were closed and locked. They had been here since five o’clock in the afternoon, they were tired and the night had barely begun, but thoughts about Sylvester would keep him awake. The thought of getting that bastard. Lure him out here. If not tonight, then tomorrow, or the next night. From time to time Bo considered how strange it was that the big man — who possessed so little humanity himself — had such an insight into people. Their urges, weaknesses and motivations, how they reacted to pressure and fear and how he, with enough information about their temperament, proclivities and intelligence, could predict their next move with astonishing — or as the big man himself used to say: disappointing — accuracy. Sadly the big man had given orders that the boy must be killed immediately and not taken prisoner so his death would be swift and far too free from pain.

Bo shifted in the chair when he heard a sound. And even before he had turned round, a thought crossed his mind. That he didn’t have the big man’s ability to predict what this guy would do next. Not when he left Sylvester in the yellow house, and not now.

The boy had a bloody handkerchief tied around his head and was standing in a side doorway, the one that led from the living room and straight into the garage.

How the hell had he got in that way, when they had locked the garage? He must have come from behind, from the forest. Picking a locked garage door was surely one of the first things a clever junkie would have learned. But this wasn’t Bo’s most pressing problem. His most pressing problem was that the boy was holding something which had an unfortunate resemblance to an Uzi, the Israeli machine gun that spits out nine x 19mm bullets faster than your average execution squad.

‘You’re not Yngve Morsand,’ Sonny Lofthus said. ‘Where is he?’

‘He’s here,’ Bo said, turning his head to the microphone.

‘Where?’

‘He’s here,’ Bo repeated, a little louder this time. ‘In the living room.’

Sonny Lofthus looked around as he walked towards Bo with the machine gun raised and his finger on the trigger. The clip appear to hold thirty-six bullets. He stopped. Had he spotted the earpiece and the cable from the microphone?

‘You’re talking to someone,’ the boy said and had time to take a step backwards before the door to the hallway was flung open and Stan burst in with a pistol. Bo reached for his own Ruger as he heard the dry, crackling cough from the Uzi and a cascade of glass when the window behind him shattered. White stuffing spilled from the upholstered furniture and splinters flew from the parquet flooring. The guy splattered bullets generously with no particular target in mind. But it didn’t matter, an Uzi will always outgun two pistols. Bo and Stan took shelter behind the nearest sofa. It fell silent. Bo was lying on his back clutching his pistol with both hands in case the guy’s face appeared above the edge of the sofa.

‘Stan!’ he shouted. ‘Take him out!’

No reply.

‘Stan!’

‘You do it!’ Stan screamed from behind the sofa by the other wall. ‘He’s got a fucking Uzi, for fuck’s sake!’

There was a click in Bo’s earpiece: ‘What’s going on, boss?’

At the same moment Bo heard the sound of a car starting up and revving the engine loudly. Morsand had taken his stately Mercedes 28 °CE Coupe 1982 model to the Twin’s party in Oslo, but his wife’s run-around car — a cute little Honda Civic — was still there. Now that Morsand had killed her, he no longer had a wife who could run around in it, but the key must have been left in the ignition. It was probably what they did with wives and cars out here in the countryside, share them. He heard voices from his men outside.

‘He’s trying to get away!’

‘Someone is opening the garage door.’

Bo heard a grating sound when the Honda was put into gear. And a groan when the engine choked. Was the guy a total amateur? He couldn’t shoot and he couldn’t drive.

‘Get him!’

The car was started a second time.

‘We heard something about an Uzi. .’

‘It’s the Uzi or the Twin, your choice!’

Bo scrambled to his feet and ran to the shattered window in time to see the car jump out of the garage. Nubbe and Evgeni had positioned themselves in front of the gate. Nubbe was firing away with his Beretta, bullet after bullet. Evgeni had a Remington 870 with the barrel sawn off at the clip raised to his cheek. He jerked as he pulled the trigger. Bo saw the windscreen explode, but the car continued to accelerate, the front bumper hitting Evgeni right above the knees, flipping him up, and Bo saw him somersault in the air before the windscreen-less Civic swallowed him like a killer whale gulps down a seal. The Civic took out the gate and a section of the fence, drove straight across the narrow gravel path and into the wheat field on the other side. And, without slowing down, it ploughed on, screeching in first gear, as it carved a path through the golden sheaves bathed in moonlight, turned in a wide curve before returning to the gravel path further down. The engine howled even louder — the driver was obviously pushing down the clutch without taking his foot off the accelerator. Then he got the car into second gear, the engine came close to cutting out again, but it recovered and the car continued down the gravel path where, because the driver hadn’t managed to switch on the headlights, it soon disappeared in the darkness.

‘To the car!’ Bo shouted. ‘We have to catch him before he gets to town!’

Pelle stared after the Honda in disbelief. He had heard the shots and seen in his rear-view mirror how the car had burst out through the gate, sending pieces of white picket fence flying. Seen the car plough its way across the field planted with heavily subsidised agricultural produce before it had rejoined the track and continued its dubious journey. The boy was no experienced driver, that was for sure, but Pelle had breathed a sigh of relief when in the moonlight he could make out the bloodstained handkerchief above the wheel behind the shattered windscreen. At least the boy was still alive.

He heard shouting coming from the house.

The sound of guns being loaded in the quiet summer night.

A car starting.

Pelle had no idea who they were. The boy had told him — whether it was true or false — that the man inside the house was a killer. A man, perhaps a drunk driver who had killed, and was now out of prison again. Pelle didn’t know. All he knew was that after months and years where he had made sure to spend most hours of the day and night behind the wheel of his cab, he was back there again. The place where he could react or freeze. Change the orbit of the stars — or not. A young man who couldn’t get the girl he wanted. He ran a finger over the photo beside the steering wheel. Then he put the car in gear and drove after the Honda. Drove down the hills and out onto the narrow bridge. Up on the ridge he could see a pair of headlights cut through the darkness. He accelerated, gained speed, turned the steering wheel slightly to the right, grabbed the handbrake, pressing and releasing the pedals quickly and musically like a church organist as he forced the steering wheel hard to the left. The rear of the car moved as expected as he executed the handbrake turn. And when the car stopped it was perfectly positioned diagonally across the bridge. Pelle nodded contentedly to himself; he hadn’t lost his touch. Then he turned off the ignition, put the car into first gear, shuffled across to the passenger side and got out of the car. Checked that there was a gap of a maximum twenty centimetres between the side wall of the bridge and the car on both sides. Locked all the doors with a simple key click and started walking towards the main road. He thought about her, all the time he thought about her. If only she could see him now. See that he was walking. He felt almost no pain in his foot, he was barely limping. Perhaps the doctors had been right. Perhaps it was time to ditch the crutches.