My voice sounds like it belongs to somebody else completely. Nothing here feels real.
‘Wait here. When I say, you go there.’ He points, off the track, to a boulder partway down the slope. ‘Don’t run. Just walk. Gun please. Safety off. If you have to fire, aim with both hand and shoot slow.’
I nod, like I’ve understood anything, but Lev is already off. Down the hill. Dancing really. Rock to rock. Tree to tree. A shadow dancing through the half-light.
After a while, he stops against a tree. I’m about to follow him, when I realise he hasn’t yet given the instruction to move. So I stay put. Lev checks his binoculars again, then his scope, then the binoculars.
Somewhere around us the colours shift a millionth of a shade as dawn strengthens its grip.
Then Lev signals and I walk down the hill. The house we’re approaching has only a single window facing us. Lev has his rifle fixed on that window. He doesn’t acknowledge me as I walk past not ten yards from him. We are within the range of the surveillance devices now. I can see the nearest one, a small black box on a rickety fencepost. Wires too, presumably, but I don’t see them.
Then I’m behind my rock and Lev moves again.
He points me at a new rock. I walk fast toward it. Smear myself into its shadow.
Then Lev’s turn. As he passes me, there’s a sound from the house. I hear the detonation and it takes me half a second to realise the shot comes from Olaf. I don’t see where the bullet strikes, but Lev hasn’t stopped moving. He gets to a thin rise of ground, now just 150 metres from the house. Settles into a firing position. Lying on his belly, legs slightly spread and to the side. Fires.
I can’t see where the bullet goes. Don’t know what Lev is trying to do. He turns, beckons me toward him, makes a gesture to indicate I need to come slowly, then rolls back onto his belly and fires another shot. He fires three more times as I descend.
When I get next to Lev, the house feels very close indeed. I can see Olaf’s gun now, a thin metal line against the angle of the open casement.
Without taking his eye off his rifle scope, Lev fills me in.
‘Okay, Fjerstad has rifle, not just shotgun. From this range, very good shot can hit us, so be careful. But this rifle’ – Lev indicates his own – ‘is for snipers, not just for hitting big stupid animal. Also, bullet can go through wall, no problem. Fjerstad maybe knows this. Anyway, is worried.’ His voice adjusts and turns posh and English. ‘Right now Mr Fjerstad is shitting himself.’
I nod, as though this is all normal.
Nod, and see as I do that there is smoke beginning to rise from the house’s only chimney. That’s either because Olaf is starting to prepare himself a nice grilled breakfast, or because he’s in the business of destroying evidence.
I say, ‘He’s burning evidence.’
‘Naughty man. Is not allowed. I think we ask him to leave the house.’
Lev swings his rifle through ten degrees. Aims at the big green oil tank up against the wall of the house. He puts two bullets into the tank, waits for a spill of oil, then shoots another round onto the tank’s concrete base.
Bullet. Concrete. Spark. Flame.
The oil tank disappears in a fireball. Intense orange and black. Oily clouds circling down around the updraught. You can feel the heat from here. The house starts to blaze.
While I’m admiring the flame, Lev puts five bullets through the timber walls. A kind of hurry-up to Olaf, as though having an oil tank explode outside wasn’t enough.
Then Lev is moving again. Running for the corner of the house. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, so I follow him. I still have my gun in my hand. Still haven’t fired it. The ground is rocky and sloping, but I run the way Lev does. By instinct. Letting my feet find their own placement.
Lev is twenty yards ahead of me. He’s fixed, I think, on gaining access to the front of the house, to get a clear sweep of the terrain there. If he can get to the front corner of the house, his superior weaponry and his vastly superior fighting skills will give him command of the battlefield. But there’s a stand of trees and low bushes between the house and the track leading back up the hill. The trees block Lev’s view. Because I’m farther back, they don’t block mine. The upper branches of the trees are already starting to singe and crackle with the flame.
Olaf isn’t in the house anymore. He’s not trying to defend his turf. He’s trying to get the hell away. He’s at the door of his Land Rover Defender. Gunning his engine. Heading up the hill.
I scream something to Lev, but my feet are travelling faster than my brain. I burst out onto the track. Olaf is forty yards away, thirty.
He’d happily run me down. I’d happily shoot him dead.
The car is accelerating towards me as fast as it can, given the adverse slope and the uneven terrain. I see Olaf’s face, tense and white at the wheel.
Him against me.
I find a shooting stance.
Fire.
Feet planted. Hands out. Squeeze the trigger.
Fire, fire, fire, fire.
The windscreen ahead of me is shattered glass. The vehicle hits a pothole and instead of adjusting course, slews up the bank and almost overturns.
Fuck you, Olaf.
The front right tyre is exposed now and, aiming as carefully as I can, I empty the rest of my magazine into it.
The Land Rover doesn’t move. Then Lev is next to me.
‘Are you okay?’
He doesn’t wait for my answer, just pats me down, checking me. It turns out I am okay. I only know that when Lev tells me so.
I don’t know where Olaf is. I keep thinking that Lev is being an idiot, standing here in the open. I’m fumbling for a spare magazine, trying to alert Lev to the danger.
He changes the magazine for me. ‘You hit him in shoulder. He’s going other way now.’
Lev takes me to the front of the house, from where we can see Olaf heading down to the frozen lake. He’s moving purposefully, but not running. He has a small backpack, slung over one shoulder only. A ski pole in one hand, his rifle in the other. He’s good on skis, I remember, but he’s not looking too mobile now. There’s something about the way he moves which confirms that he’s wounded.
‘He’s getting away,’ I say, stating the obvious. My head is ringing with the gunfire. I feel slow, shocked, and stupid.
‘No, I don’t think.’
Lev lays himself out on the ground. His rifle has a stand made of two little folding legs. Lev opens those out, takes a moment to sight himself, then fires a single shot.
Olaf falls instantly.
I stare at Lev, amazed and furious. I know the whole idea of a clean capture has turned to shit, but since when did Lev think it was okay to kill the guy without even asking me? I shot at the man too, but in that case it was him or me. I was acting in something approaching self-defence.
Lev disregards my look. Simply folds his gun stand and says, ‘Ankle.’
Sure enough, we see Olaf righting himself, flinging us a furious look, and staggering on. But not far and not fast. He’s on the rocks by the lake shore now. He moves clumsily. Stones glazed with ice and an ankle shot to hell. If we want to pick him up later, we’ll be able to do it at a stroll.
But we’ve things to do before that. The house is ablaze. Any evidence we might want is rapidly disappearing, if it hasn’t already gone.
Lev runs to the house. I’m just a yard or two behind.
The front door is open. Scorching air pours out, as from an oven door. The interior is strangely lit. Nordic dawn and fireball heat. Like some carefully constructed palette of beige and grey and violet has been ram-raided with tinfuls of orange, red, and black. That, plus incredible heat.
I go inside.
A strip of dirty cotton curtain hangs over the door window. I rip it off. Lev knifes it into two. We hold the material over our mouths, keep our heads low. The house is small. Just one large living space, then presumably bedroom and bathroom leading off from doors at the e
nd.
We make for the stove.
The door’s open and there’s stuff burning inside. Olaf was probably still feeding the fire when the corner of his house blew up and bullets poured in through his walls.
A small ash shovel stands by the stove. I use it to shovel everything out. There are some papers, a phone, a laptop. A load of crumpled-up newspapers and handfuls of firelighters. Fire and smoke everywhere.
I burn my hand on the laptop, trying to get it free of the firelighters.
The wooden building is burning fast now. We need to get out. I hurt my hand a second time trying to pick up the laptop, but Lev is ahead of me. He brings a cushion from the sofa. Knifes open the top and rips out the pad. We use the cushion pad like an oven glove to bundle all the items from the stove into the cushion cover. Laptop, phone. Whatever papers we could rescue.
We run out of the house, lungs screaming.
We’ve probably wasted our time. I doubt if Olaf wrote much on paper, and the electronics look knackered.
The valley suddenly seems amazingly clear and cold and bright.
Above the lake, a rocky hummock rises from the fields. Lev gets there before I do. He lies out on the ground, sets up his rifle. Olaf is four hundred yards from us now. Crossing the frozen water. Moving slowly.
Lev sights up just for the sake of it. But there’s no hurry now. No hurry at all.
I pull the laptop out of the cushion-bag. The surface is hot, but no longer scorching. I try to open the screen, but the whole machine is buckled. There’s a mess where the battery leaked.
Lev looks at it solemnly. ‘Is fucked,’ he says.
‘Yes.’
The phone is in worse shape.
‘Is also fucked,’ says my electronics guru.
‘Yes.’
I look through the papers, but they look like trash to me. Literally. Stuff that Olaf pulled from the dustbin so he could get a fire burning more quickly. If we can’t salvage data from the electronics, I doubt if we’ll have anything useful at all.
The smoke which was leaking from the house is billowing now. A dirty grey mostly, but tongued with orange. There are gaps in the roof now. A latticework of rafters outlined in black.
Lev has his sights fixed on Olaf’s back. He adjusts his posture by infinitesimal amounts. Either to keep pace with Olaf’s movements or to move his aim onto different targets. Head. Chest. Leg.
Olaf, as though feeling that invisible pressure, turns and looks at us. Motionless. A black figure against the white.
I don’t know what we look like to him. Don’t know what his thoughts are as he sees his house ablaze, his possessions gone, his cover blown.
What do you think when you’re in that position? What do you think as you turn back to your direction of travel and see your future? A frozen lake. A facing slope of rock, snow, and pines. On the run for ever, uphill and alone, shoulder wounded and ankle smashed. And a rifle bead tightening on your back.
I don’t know. I don’t know what he thinks.
I do know that when I was alone in the snow, I didn’t feel on my own. I felt myself part of the police family. Felt Buzz. Felt Mam and Dad and Ant and Kay.
I say to Lev, ‘Leave him.’
‘Leave? Really?’
‘Yes.’
If there’s salvageable data from the electronics, we’ve got it. If not, it’s gone for ever.
And we’ve done enough to debar Fjerstad from his current career. A shoulder can be fixed, perhaps. The ankle, possibly not. But the physical side of things is only half of it. We’ve made a thorough-going mess of Fjerstad’s home. His car is riddled with bullets. There are bullet casings everywhere. The Norwegian police will have to investigate hard. As they do, I’ll find a way to allege, anonymously, on the Internet that Fjerstad is a contract killer. I’ll link him to Khalifi, to McCormack. Publish photos, his army résumé, his address details, everything.
Contract killers need darkness to operate in. By the time we’ve finished, Fjerstad’s face will be on every newspaper in Norway. On the radar of every police service in the world. He won’t do to others what he did to Khalifi. What he tried to do to me.
I start explaining this to Lev, but he doesn’t care. He lays down the gun and rummages in his pocket. Gets out a joint. Lights it. Takes a puff and offers it to me.
I shake my head. My attention is all with Olaf, who is moving differently now. Slowly and with a sudden terrible vigilance.
I turn to Lev, not sure what’s going on.
Lev says, ‘Is not lake. Is river.’ He traces the line of the river’s flow with his finger. I see it now that he shows me. A bluishness in the ice. A difference in the way it carries the snow.
Olaf is moving with acute care now.
With fear, I think you would say. With fear.
I see him jolt. His boot has gone through the ice. He recovers but proceeds.
And I don’t want him to. All of a sudden, I don’t want this anymore. I want him to retrace his steps. We’ll share a smoke, shake hands, forget about all this. If he can give me anything on Prothero or Saadawi, I’ll take it. And if not – well, we’ll shake hands anyway. I don’t want this.
But Olaf doesn’t know what I think. Doesn’t know, doesn’t care.
He goes on. Stumbles once more and recovers. Then another stumble – and he’s gone. The grey ice field suddenly darkens as water blackens it. Olaf’s head and hat are visible above the ice. His arms. He’s trying to roll his weight out of the water and back onto the ice. But each time he tries it, the ice shelf crumbles beneath him. He’s too far now for us to see his movements in any detail. He’s a fly struggling against glass.
It doesn’t take long. We’re too distant to witness the final choreography in any detail. We just see that, one moment, there is a head above the water, and the next moment, only a level silence. Black, silver, white. And moving water. A glimpse of moving water.
Half a minute passes without sign of further movement.
Lev offers me the joint again and I take it.
‘This is first time for you, I think.’
‘No. The second,’ I say that automatically, because it happens to be the truth. But there are different possible truths and I’ve chosen the wrong one. So I correct myself, ‘The second time I’ve killed someone, but it feels like the first. The one before went very fast. I didn’t have time to notice anything.’
‘You are okay?’
‘Yes.’
Lev laughs at that. Takes the joint from me and draws hard on it. ‘Stupid question, this one. Everybody always ask it, including me. Are you okay? Everybody says yes. Always this: yes. And –’ He waves his hand at the lake of ice. ‘Is still a person. Boof!’
‘Yes.’
Olaf’s house is pouring with flame now. The roof is mostly gone. You can see the roof joists still, spiderlike through the fire. They won’t last. The walls are still largely intact, but they’ll be completely gone too.
I don’t know how much information there might have been there. But we won’t find out. Olaf’s property is rapidly reuniting with its owner. Entering the same dark house by different routes.
Fire and ice.
Hamish was a thug. Unprincipled and brutal. Olaf too, I assume. But he wasn’t only that. In another world, another life, I could imagine sharing a drink with him. Enjoying an evening in his company. As it was, I’ve spent one evening with him and one morning. The latter resulted in his death. The former, almost, in mine.
Lev and I are still smoking, but slowly. A rose-gold light tints the mountaintop above us. I don’t know which of us starts it, but one of us begins laughing, then the other joins in. We lie on our backs in the snow, passing the joint to and fro, laughing for no reason at all, except that we are alive and we might not have been, and the light is golden and it might not have been.
I say, ‘I think I knew. I was just pretending I didn’t.’
Lev, not surprisingly, doesn’t know what I mean, so I explain.
�
��I had this picture in my head, that we would stroll into Olaf’s house at dawn, catch him unawares, locate all the evidence we could possibly need. But in truth, I think I knew that was always an outside bet. I think I knew we might have to use force.’
‘Always better to have gun.’ Lev shrugs.
‘Tomato. Chicken. Minestrone. I guess I knew I’d be eating chicken.’
Lev looks at me with those eternal brown eyes of his. He doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Doesn’t care. He finishes the joint and flicks it away into the snow. I pick it up.
‘DNA on the saliva,’ I explain.
We walk back up the hill and down the other side to the car.
Start driving back to Oslo.
Lev at the wheel, because he doesn’t trust me to drive this short of sleep. It’s twenty minutes before we pass anyone at all and seventy minutes before I see a CCTV camera.
The Norwegian cops will find the evidence of our shootout, all right, but they won’t be able to place our car at the scene and have no reason to guess that a kooky Welsh cop and her screwed-up Spetsnaz buddy are the ones they need to interview.
Somewhere along the way, we stop for food. Lev fills his plate with cheese and sausage. I can’t face any of that. I take a bowl of muesli, but don’t make much of a dent in it.
Olaf was alive and now he is dead.
That’s a pencil mark of a kind. One more impressive if you witness the transition than if you don’t. It’s not that I feel myself so separate from the world of the dead. I don’t. I feel no more distant from Olaf than I did before. The opposite, if anything. But there was a transition. One state changing to another. Something indelible.
When we get back to Oslo, I go straight to bed. When I wake up, Lev is still around, but the car has no weapons in it.
And last night never happened.
55
Three days later, back in England, I take the laptop and phone to a commercial data-recovery outfit that has done work for the Ministry of Defence, among others. I show Olaf’s phone and laptop to a technician, but even before I have them properly out of my bag, he says, ‘You are joking, right?’ Three minutes later, I’m leaving the premises, with Lev’s diagnosis amply confirmed. Is fucked.
Love Story, With Murders Page 39