The Son

5

The interview room was decorated in pale colours; the furniture was pine. Red curtains covered the window which faced the control room. Inspector Henrik Westad from Buskerud Police thought it was a nice room. He had made the trip from Drammen into Oslo before and sat in this very room. They had interviewed children in a sexual assault case and there had been anatomical dolls here. This time it was a murder inquiry. He studied the long-haired man with the beard sitting across the table. Sonny Lofthus. He looked younger than the age stated in the file. He didn’t look as if he was drugged up, either; his pupils were normal-sized. But then people with a high drug tolerance rarely did. Westad cleared his throat.

‘So you tied her up, used an ordinary hacksaw on her and then you left?’

‘Yes,’ the man said. He had declined his right to a lawyer, but answered practically every question with monosyllables. In the end Westad had resorted to asking him yes and no questions. Which seemed to work. Of course it bloody worked; they were getting a confession out of it. But it felt wrong. Westad looked at the photos in front of him. The top of the woman’s head and her skull had nearly been sawn off and flipped aside so that they were attached only by the skin. The surface of the brain was left exposed. He had long since abandoned the idea that one could tell from looking at people what evil they were capable of. But this man, he. . he didn’t exude any of the iciness, the aggression or simply the imbecility Westad thought he had detected in other cold-blooded killers.

Westad leaned back in his chair. ‘Why are you confessing to this?’

The man shrugged. ‘DNA at the crime scene.’

‘How do you know we found some?’

The man touched his long, thick hair which the prison management could have ordered to be cut if they wanted to. ‘My hair falls out. It’s a side effect of long-term drug abuse. Can I go now?’

Westad sighed. A confession. Technical evidence at the crime scene. So why did he still have doubts?

He leaned towards the microphone standing between them. ‘Interview with suspect Sonny Lofthus stopped at 13.04.’

He saw the red light go out and knew that the officer outside had switched off the recording device. He got up and opened the door so that the prison officers could enter, unlock Lofthus’s handcuffs and take him back to Staten.

‘What do you think?’ the officer asked as Westad came into the control room.

‘Think?’ Westad put on his jacket and zipped it up with a hard, irritated movement. ‘He doesn’t give me anything to think about.’

‘And what about the interview earlier today?’

Westad shrugged. A friend of the victim had come forward. She had reported that the victim had told her that her husband, Yngve Morsand, had accused her of having an affair and threatened to kill her. That Kjersti Morsand had been scared. Not least because the husband had good grounds for his suspicion — she had met someone and was thinking of leaving him. It was hard to think of a more classic motive for murder. But what about the boy’s motive? The woman hadn’t been raped, nothing in the house had been stolen. The medicine cupboard in the bathroom had been broken into and the husband claimed that some sleeping tablets were missing. But why would a man who, judging from his needle marks, had easy access to hard drugs bother with a few measly sleeping pills?

The next question presented itself immediately: Why would an investigator with a signed confession care about little things like that?

Johannes Halden was pushing the mop across the floor by the cells in A Wing when he saw two prison officers approach with the boy between them.

The boy smiled; he looked as if he was walking with two friends going somewhere nice, the handcuffs notwithstanding. Johannes stopped and raised his right arm. ‘Look, Sonny! My shoulder is better. Thanks to you.’

The boy had to lift both hands to give the old man a thumbs up. The officers stopped in front of one of the cell doors and unlocked the handcuffs. They didn’t need to unlock the door as well since all cell doors were opened automatically every morning at eight o’clock and were left open until ten o’clock at night. The staff up in the control room had shown Johannes how they could lock and unlock all the doors with a single keystroke. He liked the control room. That was why he always took his time washing the floor in there. It was a bit like steering a supertanker. A little like being where he should have ended up.

Before ‘the incident’ he had worked as an able seaman and studied nautical science. The plan had been to become a deck officer. Followed by mate, first mate and then captain. And eventually join his wife and daughter in the house outside Farsund and get himself a job as a pilot at the port. So why had he done it? Why had he ruined everything? What had made him agree to smuggle two big sacks out of the Port of Songkhla in Thailand? It wasn’t that he didn’t know they contained heroin. And it wasn’t that he didn’t know the penal code and the hysterical Norwegian legal system which at that time equated drug smuggling with murder. It wasn’t even that he needed the huge amount of money he had been offered to deliver the sacks to an address in Oslo. So what was it? The thrill? Or the hope of seeing her again; the beautiful Thai girl in her silk dress with her long, shiny black hair, of looking into her almond eyes, hearing her soft voice whisper the difficult English words with sweet cherry lips, telling him he had to do it for her, for her family in Chiang Rai, that it was the only way he could save them. He had never believed her story, but he had believed in her kiss. And that kiss took him across oceans, through customs, into the remand cell, into the courtroom, into the visitors’ room where his almost grown-up daughter had sat down and told him that the family wanted nothing more to do with him, through the divorce and into the cell in Ila Prison. That kiss was all he had wanted and the promise of that kiss was all he had left.

When he was released there had been no one waiting for him on the outside. His family had disowned him, his friends grown apart and he would never get work on a ship again. So he sought out the only people willing to accept him. Criminals. And resumed his old ways. Tramp shipping. Nestor, the Ukrainian, recruited him. Heroin from northern Thailand was smuggled in trucks using the old drug route via Turkey and the Balkans. In Germany the cargo was distributed to the Scandinavian countries and Johannes’s job was to drive the last stretch. Later he became a confidential informant.

There hadn’t been a good reason for that, either. Only a police officer who appealed to something inside him, something he didn’t even know he had. And though that prospect — a clear conscience — had seemed worth less than the kiss of a beautiful woman, he had really believed in that police officer. There had been something about his eyes. Johannes might have gone straight, changed his ways, who knows? But then one autumn evening the police officer was killed. And for the first and only time Johannes heard the name, heard it whispered with a mixture of fear and awe. The Twin.

From then on it was only a matter of time before Johannes was pulled back in again. He took bigger and bigger risks, moved bigger and bigger loads. Dammit, he wanted to get caught. Atone for what he had done. So he was relieved when customs officers pulled him over at the Swedish border. The furniture in the back of his lorry was stuffed full of heroin. The judge had reminded the jury both of the large quantity involved and that it wasn’t Johannes’s first offence. That was ten years ago. He had been at Staten for the last four years, since the prison opened. He had seen inmates come and go, seen prison officers come and go too, and he had treated them all with the respect they deserved. And, in return, he got the respect he deserved. That is to say, he enjoyed the respect the old-timer gets. The guy who is no longer a threat. Because none of them knew his secret. The betrayal he was guilty of. The reason he inflicted this punishment on himself. And he had given up all hope of finally getting the only things that mattered. The kiss he had been promised by a forgotten woman. The clear conscience he had been promised by a dead police officer. Until he had been transferred to A Wing and had met the boy they said could heal you. Johannes had been startled when he heard the surname, but he hadn’t said anything. He had just carried on mopping the floors, keeping his head down, smiling, doing and receiving the little favours that made life bearable in a place like this. The days, the weeks, the months and the years had flown by and turned into a life which would soon end. Cancer. Lung cancer. Small cell, the doctor had said. The aggressive kind which is the worst unless it is caught early.

It hadn’t been caught early.

There was nothing anyone could do. Certainly not Sonny. He hadn’t even come close to guessing what was wrong when Johannes had asked; the lad himself had suggested the groin, nudge nudge, wink wink. And his shoulder had got better of its own accord, if truth be told, not from Sonny’s hand which definitely didn’t have a higher temperature than the usual 37 °C, was far colder in fact. But he was a good lad, he really was, and Johannes had no desire to disillusion him if he thought he had healing hands.

So Johannes had kept it to himself, both his illness and his betrayal. But he knew that time was running out. That he couldn’t take this secret with him to the grave. Not if he wanted to rest in peace rather than the horror of waking up like a zombie, worm-eaten and trapped, doomed to eternal torment. He had no religious beliefs about who would be condemned to everlasting suffering or why, but he had been wrong about so many things in his life.

‘So many things. .’ Johannes Halden muttered to himself.

Then he put the mop aside, walked over to Sonny’s cell and knocked on the door. No reply. He knocked again.

Waited.

Then he opened the door.

Sonny sat with a rubber strap tied around his forearm below the elbow, the end of the strap between his teeth. He held a syringe just above a bulging vein. The angle was the prescribed thirty degrees for optimum insertion.

Sonny calmly looked up and smiled. ‘Yes?’

‘Sorry, I. . it can wait.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, it’s. . there’s no hurry.’ Johannes laughed. ‘It can wait another hour.’

‘Can it wait four hours?’

‘Four hours is fine.’

The old man saw the needle sink into the vein. The boy pressed the plunger. Silence and darkness seemed to fill the room like black water. Johannes withdrew quietly and closed the door.