by Jo Nesbo
The door opened. Slightly at first, then all the way.
‘Come in, I’m Will. Amy’s father.’
The man had blue eyes with laugh lines around them, a goatee beard and curly red hair that made him look younger than I guessed he was. Brad was probably right. The types that help people. He was barefoot but had pulled on a pair of worn jeans and a T-shirt with a name on it, probably the university where he was a student. I slipped inside so that I was behind him as he held the door open for Dumbo. Took out my gun and swung the barrel hard against the side of his head. Not to harm him or knock him out – because as tall as I am a kick from my heel to his head would have done the job – but to show him that the girl and the little guy were willing to use violence.
He shouted something and held his hand to the bleeding wound on his forehead. I pointed the gun at him.
‘Don’t harm my family,’ he said. ‘Take whatever you want, but don’t –’
‘If you do exactly as we say no one in the house will get hurt,’ I said. And thought I was telling the truth.
IV
Blood ran from the wound in my forehead and down onto my T-shirt as they took me out to the garage and tied me to a chair, which they then tied to the lathe. The girl who said she was a classmate of Amy’s – and for all I knew she might have been – examined the diesel generator. It’s on wheels, but it weighs 150 kilos, so she was probably trying to figure out how she could take it with them.
My own thoughts were of what Heidi would do now. She’d been woken by the doorbell too and must have realised what had happened. Had she managed to get Amy and Sam to safety in the basement? To what we called the panic room, but which was actually a windowless cellar with stone walls, a solid door that could be locked from the inside, and enough food and water for a week. If the tall girl with the dark hair was as rational as she seemed then they would take just what they needed and could carry and get out of here. The boy with her hadn’t said a word, just obeyed the slightest sign from her, and he seemed too harmless to be the type to enjoy hurting people.
It was when I heard Heidi’s scream from another part of the house that I realised there were more of them.
‘You said –’ I began.
‘Shut up,’ said the girl, and hit me again with the pistol.
The boy looked up at her but she said nothing, just looked at me. It was a look that seemed apologetic.
And then a guy in a white ice-hockey helmet was standing in the garage doorway. The Justitia logo was painted on the front of the helmet.
‘He wants you to come in,’ he said. There was a repressed laughter in his voice.
Who was he? The leader, presumably.
The kid and the girl disappeared and the guy stood in front of me. He was holding a Russian automatic weapon, the type suddenly everyone seems to have, said to be very reliable. A Kalashnikov. In some countries it’s part of the national flag, they see it as a symbol in the fight for freedom. But it just makes me shiver. That curved magazine, there’s something perverse about it.
‘I’ll pay you five thousand if you let me and my family go,’ I said.
‘Which I’ll spend where?’ asked the guy, laughing. ‘7-Eleven maybe?’
‘I can give you –’
‘You don’t need to give me anything, Gramps. I take what I want.’
He took down my old motorcycle helmet from a shelf. Took off the hockey helmet and tried it on. Raised and lowered the visor a couple of times. Seemed satisfied, took off the rucksack he was wearing on his back and pushed the helmet down into it.
I heard screams from inside the house again and couldn’t breathe. I was the idiot who had opened the door and let Leviathan in. I didn’t want to breathe, I wanted to die. But I couldn’t die, not now – they needed me. I had to free myself. I tugged on the plastic strips the girl had used to tie me to the chair, felt the skin break and the warm sticky blood running down into my palms.
Heidi screamed again, so loud that I could make out a word. Just the one word. ‘No.’ Like a desperate and hopeless protest against something she knew was going to happen.
The guy looked at me, put his hand around the barrel of the Kalashnikov and moved it up and down as though masturbating. He grinned at me.
And right there and then, I think, was where it started. When everything I had always thought would be me began to fall apart.
* * *
—
Me and Dumbo stood in the doorway and looked at the dining table. It was made of thick, rough brown planking. Sort of rustic style but you can bet it cost a fortune. Like the one Maria had shown me in some Country Living kind of magazine and said she wanted a table like that herself. But there was no way I could get that thing on the bike with me. My gaze moved on to the woman. She was lying tied up on the table. They must have found the rope somewhere and tied it round the tabletop and across her neck, chest and stomach. Her legs were tied to the legs of the table and her nightshirt pulled up above her stomach and down below her breasts.
In front of her I saw the back of a red leather jacket with the embroidered motif of a gaping dragon rearing up out of the sea. Ragnar’s jacket. He turned to us.
‘There you are.’
Below the smooth brown mane of hair that he would lose before he was thirty Ragnar had these predator’s eyes that glowed with something evil and dangerous, even when he smiled. Especially when he smiled. Maybe it wasn’t just by chance he referred to the city as ‘the savannah’ and kept a long metal chain with a hook attached to his bike that he used when he was busy ‘separating out the weakest animal in the herd’ as he liked to call it.
‘Really?’ I said.
‘Really,’ he said, and his smile widened. ‘Objections?’
I saw that he saw how I swallowed them down. That’s the price you pay for being in a gang. There are rules you must follow. Among other things. But what came next wasn’t in the rule book.
‘The hour has come, Dumbo,’ said Ragnar. ‘It’s your turn.’
‘Eh?’
‘Come on. It’s nothing to be afraid of.’
Dumbo looked up at me, wide-eyed.
‘He doesn’t have to,’ I said, and I could hear the tightness in my voice.
‘Yes, he does.’ Ragnar gave me that hostile, challenging look of his, the one that said he should have been Brad’s second-in-command, not me. He waited for me to protest so that he could play his ace, but I already knew what it was.
‘Brad’s orders,’ he finally added.
‘And where is Brad?’ I asked, looking round. Everyone, including Dumbo, was standing with their eyes riveted on the woman on the table. For the first time now I saw the little boy with the large round eyes in an armchair facing the table. He couldn’t have been more than three or four years old and he sat there looking at his mother.
‘Brad’s upstairs,’ said Ragnar, and turned to Dumbo. ‘You ready, Shorty?’
One of the O’Leary twins sneaked up behind Dumbo and jerked his trousers down. Everyone laughed. Dumbo too, but then he always laughs when the others do so that no one will suspect he hasn’t got the joke.
‘Hey, hey,’ said Ragnar. ‘Hey, look at that, the dwarf really is ready!’
More laughter, Dumbo’s louder than anyone’s.
‘Tell Yvonne you’re ready, Dumbo!’ Ragnar said, looking at me.
‘I’m ready!’ Dumbo laughed, thrilled to be the centre of attention, his glassy gaze fixed on the woman on the table.
‘Jesus, Dumbo,’ I said. ‘Don’t –’
‘Insubordination, Yvonne?’ Ragnar taunted, laughter in his voice. ‘Is this incitement to insubordination we hear?’
‘I’m ready!’ shouted Dumbo. He liked to repeat sentences he thought he’d got the hang of. And now the others hoisted him onto a chair, turned the music up loud and cheered him on.
I f
elt my blood boil. But that’s when you lose a boxing match, when you let the temperature of your blood decide. So I just said it, quietly, but loudly enough for him to hear me very clearly:
‘You will fucking well pay for this, Ragnar.’
There was a scraping of chair legs. The woman was lying with her head turned and looking at the little boy. Tears ran down her face and she was whispering something. And I couldn’t help myself, I went closer so I could hear. In spite of the effort she was making to control it her voice was trembling:
‘Everything will be fine, Sam. Everything will be fine. Close your eyes now. Think of something nice. Something you’d like us to do tomorrow.’
I stepped forward, took hold of Sam under the arms and lifted him up.
‘Let go of him!’ the woman shrieked. ‘Let go of my son!’ I caught her eye.
‘He doesn’t need to see this,’ I said.
Then I hoisted the boy up onto my shoulders, keeping a tight hold of him because he was struggling and squealing like a stuck pig. I headed for the kitchen door but then Ragnar appeared in front of me and blocked the way. Our eyes met. I don’t know what he saw in mine but after a couple of seconds he stepped aside.
I heard the mother scream ‘No!’ as I ducked down through the doorway, walked through the kitchen and out through another door into a corridor. I kept on walking until I found a bathroom. I put the little boy down on the floor and told him his mother would come and fetch him if he kept completely quiet and put his hands over his ears. Then I took the key from the door and locked it from the outside.
I climbed a staircase, passed a couple of open doors and then one that was closed. I opened it carefully.
Light from the corridor entered the room. Brad was sitting beside a bed in which a blonde girl of about my own age lay sleeping. She was still wearing a pair of headphones. I recognised the type, with noise-cancelling so good you could even sleep through the sounds of hand grenades exploding in the streets outside.
Or of your own family being tortured a few metres away.
Brad looked as though he’d been sitting there and looking at her for quite a while. And the girl was nice-looking, in a sort of old-fashioned romantic way, not exactly my type. But obviously Brad’s – I’d never seen him like that before, soft and dreamy-eyed, with a small smile on his lips. It struck me that it was the first time I’d ever seen him happy.
The girl in the bed turned away from the light without waking.
‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ I whispered. ‘We heard the screams even out on the garage – the neighbours might have called the police.’
‘We’ve got time,’ said Brad. ‘And she’s coming with us.’
‘Eh?’
‘She’s mine.’
‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’
I don’t know if it was because I spoke so loudly, but suddenly the girl in the bed opened her eyes. Brad took the headphones off her head.
‘Hi, Amy,’ he whispered in a velvety smooth and completely unfamiliar voice.
‘Brad?’ the girl said, her eyes wide open as she sort of scooted up the bed and away from him.
‘Shh,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to save you. There’s a gang down on the floor below us, they’ve got your parents and Sam. Stuff a few clothes into a bag and come with me, I’ve got a ladder outside the window.’
But the girl, Amy, had seen me. ‘What are you doing, Brad?’
‘Rescuing you,’ he repeated in a whisper. ‘The others are in the living room.’
Amy blinked and blinked. Got the picture. Got it quick, the way we all had to learn to.
‘I’m not leaving Sam,’ she said loudly. ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but you can either help me or go.’ She looked at me. ‘And who are you?’
‘Do as he says,’ I said, and showed her my gun.
I don’t know if that was the right or wrong thing to do – Brad hadn’t given any instructions about kidnapping – but as she was about to sit up in the bed he grabbed hold of her hair, jerked her head backwards and pressed a cloth against her mouth and nose. She struggled for just a couple of seconds before her body shuddered and then collapsed into his arms. Chloroform. And there was me thinking we’d run out of it.
‘Help me carry her,’ he said as he stuck the cloth into his pocket.
‘But what are you going to do with her?’
‘Marry her and have children,’ said Brad.
Straight away of course I reckoned he’d lost it completely.
‘Come on,’ he said as he took hold of the limp body under the arms. Looked at me, eyebrows raised.
I hadn’t moved. Didn’t know if I was going to be able to either. I looked at the poster pinned above her bed. Same band as the one I liked listening to.
‘That’s an order,’ said Brad. ‘So make up your mind.’
Make up your mind. I knew what that meant, of course. Make up your mind whether you still want to be a member of the only family you’ve got. With the only protection you’re ever going to get. Make up your mind now.
So I did manage to move after all. I bent forward. Took hold of her legs.
* * *
—
I heard the sound of several motorcycles fading into the distance as Heidi staggered into the garage with one of my coats wrapped round her. She found a knife on the workbench and cut me loose. I put my arms around her. She was trembling and shivering as she buried her face in my neck, sobbing as though the tears were choking her.
‘They took her,’ she said as the tears ran warm against my T-shirt. ‘He’s taken Amy.’
‘He?’
‘Brad.’
‘Brad?’
‘He didn’t show his face, but it was Brad Lowe.’
‘Are you certain?’
‘He was the only one wearing a balaclava and he didn’t speak. But he was in charge and he went upstairs to Amy. And when the girl and the boy came into the living room one of them said it’s Brad’s orders.’
‘Said what was Brad’s orders?’
Heidi didn’t reply.
I held Heidi tight. I didn’t need to know. Not yet.
The brown-skinned girl had known that our daughter’s name was Amy and that she was the same age as her. Brad was a gang leader, that added up. For him to have hidden his face so he couldn’t be recognised, that was logical. But the fact that he was still not quite sharp enough to get away with it, that he’d been recognised after all, that was typical of Brad Lowe too.
It was him all right, Brad Lowe. Gone wrong. But lovesick.
So there was a faint hope at least.
V
‘So that’s nine minutes until the helicopter gets here!’ shouts the lieutenant. The halyard is slapping quicker, the wind has got up.
Colin signals to a man who then disappears into a penthouse apartment and re-emerges carrying a champagne cooler with the neck of a green bottle sticking up.
‘We might as well say goodbye in style,’ smiles Colin. ‘The decadents used to say après moi, le déluge, but in our case – since the deluge is already upon us – vintage champagne should be popped and drunk by those with the palates – and the throats – to appreciate it. Before their throats get cut.’
‘Well,’ I say as I accept a glass from the man holding the cooler, ‘I’m probably a little more optimistic than that, Colin.’
‘You always have been, Will. After all that’s happened I can only admire the fact that your faith in the human race remains intact. I wish I had even a fraction of your trust. And your heart. At least you’ve got that to keep you warm. But all I have is this cold, rational brain. It’s like living alone in an enormous stone castle in the dead of winter.’
‘Like your prison on Rat Island.’
‘Yes,’ says Colin. ‘And by the way, I’ve heard a new explanation of wh
y there are so many rats there. In the 1800s before they built the prison, there was an isolation hospital there for people with typhoid fever. They knew that they were going to die, and no one in the city wanted anything to do with a corpse with typhoid fever, not even relatives. And the rats knew it too. After dark they sat would sit squeaking and hissing and chattering and waiting for the fresh corpses to be tossed out of the hospital’s back door. If someone died on that island the body would be consumed before sunrise. It was a satisfactory arrangement for all concerned.’
‘Do you believe that story? Or do you still think they fled there, the same way you did?’
Colin nods. ‘Typhoid from humans can’t infect rats but even rats can be infected by our fear. And frightened rats are aggressive, so we’re afraid of them and slaughter them indiscriminately. It’s not the virus that’s going to do for us, Will, but our fear of each other.’
I think of fear. The fear on the night Chaos came to our home. The fear I tried in vain to communicate on the night Heidi and I reported the case, and the following day, when we spoke to detectives at the police station.
* * *
—
The two investigators seated behind the desk no longer looked in my eyes nor in Heidi’s but instead down at the notebooks in front of them. I assumed the reason was the horrendous story we had just told them: that our daughter had been kidnapped and my wife raped while I sat tied up in the garage. Not until later did I realise it was because we had just told them we were convinced the gang leader was Brad Lowe, son of the IT entrepreneur Colin Lowe.
‘We’ll look into it,’ said the female investigator who had introduced herself as Chief Inspector Gardell. ‘But don’t hold your breath.’
‘Don’t hold your breath? How the hell do you expect us to breathe?’ I wasn’t aware I was shouting until I felt Heidi’s hand on my arm.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘But our daughter is out there and we’re sitting here and…and…’
‘We understand,’ said Gardell. ‘I expressed myself badly. What I was trying to say was that it might take time. In the current situation the police simply don’t have the resources to investigate all crimes of violence.’