by Jo Nesbo
‘We’ve got to get him to hospital,’ said Chung, meaning the man who had been wounded by the shots through the door.
‘No way. That was the agreement,’ said Fatman, who seemed to be suffering discomfort in his groin.
‘But –’ said Chung.
‘Forget it. We don’t want the police breathing down our necks,’ said Fatman with finality.
‘Drive him to hospital,’ I said.
Fatman turned towards me, his face flushed with anger. ‘Says you, yeah, who let one of the bastards escape.’
‘There was no reason to kill her, she was running away.’
‘We’re here to exact punishment, Adams. You’re just here to find your daughter, and you’re using us to help you do it. Fair enough, but don’t go playing the Good Samaritan at our expense. Try telling Simon here that that girl didn’t deserve a bullet.’
I looked at Simon. A chubby, softly spoken chef with kind eyes and an infectious laugh. Yes, we’d had laughs together too. Simon and his family had been visited by a gang with dead Justitia on their helmets. They’d launched grenades from a bazooka and within seconds the house had turned into a blazing inferno. His wife and son were still in hospital, so badly burned no one could tell him whether or not they would survive.
‘What d’you think, Simon?’ I said. ‘Should I have let him kill her?’
Simon looked at me for a long time. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last.
‘Will you help Chung get Ruben to the hospital?’ I asked.
He nodded.
Downing and Larsen came in.
‘Find anything?’ asked Fatman.
They didn’t answer. They couldn’t look me in the eye, and whatever slender hope I might still have been clinging to vanished.
* * *
—
Amy was in the basement, lying on a filthy mattress in a locked room. Not to stop her running away, but to hide the body. I stared at her. My heart was switched off. My brain simply registered what I saw. Unless something else had killed her first, the cause of death was obvious. Her forehead had been smashed in.
I went down the basement corridor where Larsen and Downing stood waiting.
‘We’ll interrogate them,’ I said, nodding up at the ceiling and the next floor above where the gang members were, sitting on the floor of the room, their hands strip-tied.
‘You don’t think first we should –’ Larsen began to say.
‘No,’ I interrupted. ‘Let’s get started.’
The question of guilt was soon established. We used an old trick, simple but effective. In my professional capacity as a lawyer I had often criticised the police for using it.
We placed the gang members in separate rooms, left them there for a while before two of us went in and pretended we had already spoken to the others. I did the talking, and my opening was the same every time:
‘I’m not saying who, but one of your gang has just identified you as the person who killed my daughter Amy. I’m sure you can guess who that is. I will shoot you, personally and with great pleasure, unless you can persuade me within the next five minutes that it was someone else.’
The bluff is so obvious that some of them will see through it immediately. But they can never be completely certain. And they definitely can’t be certain that the others will see through it too. So the maths goes like this: why should I keep quiet and take the chance of this being a bluff when someone else is bound to snitch anyway?
After four interrogations two had identified Brad. After six we knew it had happened with a golf club in the bedroom. I went to one of the two offices where Brad was sitting and confronted him with what we had found out.
He leaned back in the leather chair, hands behind his back in the plastic cable ties, and yawned. ‘Well then, I guess you’d better shoot me.’
I swallowed and waited. And waited. Then came the tears. Not mine, his. They dripped down on the aged grey teak of the desk. I saw them soak into the wood.
‘I didn’t mean it, Mr Adams,’ he snuffled. ‘I loved Amy. Always have done. But she…’ He took a deep, quivering breath. ‘She despised me, she didn’t think I was good enough for her.’ He gave a quick laugh. ‘Me, son and heir of the second-richest man in the city. What do you think of that?’
I said nothing. He raised his gaze and looked at me.
‘She said she hated me, Mr Adams. And you know what, that’s one feeling we do share. I hated me too.’
‘Is this your idea of a confession, Brad?’
He looked at me. Nodded. I looked at Larsen who nodded briefly to indicate that he’d seen it the same way as me. We stood up and went outside to where Downing was waiting.
‘Confession,’ I said.
‘What are you going to do?’ asked Larsen.
I took a deep breath. ‘Put him in jail.’
‘Jail?’ snorted Downing. ‘He’s gotta hang!’
‘Have you thought this through, Will?’ asked Larsen. ‘You know as well as I do that if you hand him over to the police he’ll be out on the street again by tomorrow morning.’
‘Yes, but I’m going to imprison him in his own jail.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Lock him up in the same place where he locked up Amy. He can sit there in custody until I’ve prepared the case and had him convicted.’
‘You’re going to…put Colin Lowe’s son in front of a judge and jury?’
‘Of course. Everyone’s equal in the eyes of the law. That’s the foundation our nation is built on.’
‘There I am afraid to say you are mistaken, Adams,’ said Downing.
‘Oh?’
‘Our nation is built on the principle that might is right. That’s the way it is now, and that’s the way it always has been. The rest is just playing to the gallery.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘Maybe it’s possible for might to be really in the right for once.’
Just then we heard shouting. It was coming from behind the house.
We ran outside in time to see that we were too late.
‘The Black guy confessed,’ said Fatman. He was holding a flaming torch in his hand and the light made the sweat on his forehead glisten. Like us he was staring in the direction of the tall oak tree. The rest of the men stood around us, all of them silent now.
A boy was dangling from the lowest of the branches. There was a noose around his neck. He was tall, thin, maybe sixteen years old and he wearing a T-shirt with ‘Chaos’ written on it.
‘Herbert,’ a hoarse voice shouted from a window in the house. I turned but saw no one.
‘We’ve got a confession,’ I said. ‘You’ve hanged the wrong person.’
‘Not that confession,’ said Fatman. ‘He confessed to starting that fire. And it wasn’t me that hung that guy, it was him.’
He pointed to a man standing directly beneath the hanged boy. Simon, the cook. His hands were pressed together as he looked up at the corpse and he was muttering something. A prayer, maybe. For his family. For the dead. For himself. For all of us.
* * *
—
As a group we had never discussed what we were going to do with the members of Chaos. All our attention had been focused on freeing Amy, and it was pretty obvious that the gang members couldn’t expect any mercy if they tried to resist. They would get hurt or be killed. For most of us that would probably be revenge enough. But we hadn’t talked about what to do if they surrendered, as they had done now.
Essentially there were only three options. Execute them. Maim them. Or let them go.
Fatman was the only one to vote for execution.
A few thought that some kind of amputation, such as severing the right hand, was in order, but there were no volunteers to perform the amputations. I suspect that the thought of nine mutilated but still fully functional young
men wandering about the city with revenge on their minds was not particularly attractive.
Downing’s suggestion that they be lashed with a rope seemed to have the most support. It would probably be seen as some kind of let-off and not a motivation for revenge at a later date.
I argued that we shouldn’t hand out any punishment at all unless we could give the ‘accused’ a fair trial. That, I said, was what distinguished us from them. In rejecting revenge we would not only be true to the principles of justice our forefathers had built this land on, we would also be providing a good example for these young people, showing them that it was possible to behave in a civilised fashion in the midst of these chaotic times, that there was a way back to decency. I promised I would personally make sure that, as far as possible, Brad Lowe would be treated in accordance with our most fundamental principles of justice.
I don’t know whether it was my words that convinced them. Whether it was the fact that Larsen – the only one of us besides me with a close relative murdered – offered a few short words in support of me. Or whether it was the wind that had made the young Black man in the tree swing back and forth, and the branches to give off a moaning sound that constantly turned our attention in his direction.
Without further discussion we released all of them except Brad.
‘We’re gonna regret this,’ said Fatman as we watched the rear lights of the motorbikes disappear into the deepening darkness of the city night.
VIII
Amy was buried after a ceremony in a church in Downtown. It was sparsely furnished and austerely equipped, yet everything seemed strangely untouched, as though God’s house was still holy even to the looters. We didn’t advertise the service or invite anyone, and besides Heidi, Sam and me the only others present were Downing, Larsen and Chung.
I spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to persuade Heidi to move to Colin’s hillside villa along with Chung, Larsen and Downing’s families. I reminded her how easy it had been for Chaos to enter our house, that the same thing not only could but would happen again. And that there was safety in numbers. Heidi said we couldn’t, it was someone else’s house, someone else’s property, even if it was standing empty at the moment. I said that while I had the greatest respect for property rights, at the moment those rights were taking a short break. And we needed somewhere to hold Brad in private custody until the court case against him started.
The following day we moved the few things we needed up the hill and started work on turning the place into a fortress.
* * *
—
The attorney general’s large white office building in Downtown had just the right balance of the architectonic pathos that encourages respect, and the dull pedantry that does not provoke when the taxpayer is the one funding it.
Adele Matheson, the attorney general, had the kind of office that’s used for working in, not for giving off signals about authority and status to visitors and colleagues. A simple writing desk piled high with documents, a slightly out-of-date computer with cables in all directions, shelves of legal literature and a window that offered light but not a distracting view. And absolutely no family photos that might remind her of things more important in life than work and urge her to stop working and get on home.
Matheson sat in a high-backed leather chair behind the piles of documents and peered at me over the top of her glasses. Though she didn’t have the high profile of some of her colleagues the respect she enjoyed from her peers was all the greater. If she was known at all it was for her integrity and her tenacity in hunting down the powerful and those with an aversion to finding themselves exposed in the media. A journalist once wrote that any interview or press conference involving Matheson was confined to a repertoire of four responses: ‘Yes’, ‘No’, the slightly longer ‘We don’t know that’, and the really long ‘We can’t comment on that’.
‘You are a lawyer, Mr Adams,’ she said when she had listened to me. ‘If you believe you have proof that this person killed your daughter, why come here, why not take the case to the police?’
‘Because I no longer trust the police.’
‘We’re living in strange times, no doubt about that. And yet you seem to trust the public prosecutor’s office?’
‘Going through the attorney general means at least one step less in the process before the case gets to court.’
‘You’re worried about corruption. Is that it?’
‘The boy’s father is Colin Lowe.’
‘The Colin Lowe?’
‘Yes.’
She rested a finger on her upper lip then made a note. ‘Do you know where the boy is now?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that is?’
‘If I told you he was being held in private custody you would have to prosecute me and that would put the case against the boy in jeopardy, don’t you think?’
‘Private detention is of course a serious matter and if the confession came as a result of it then the court can simply throw the case out.’
‘Fruits of a poisoned tree.’
‘Yes, you are of course familiar with the legal principles involved. But if things are as you say, and you have witnesses who can confirm that there was a confession and that it was not coerced, then we have a stronger case.’
I noted that she was now saying ‘we’ instead of ‘you’. Was that because of the name Colin Lowe?
‘You will also need to get hold of at least one of the gang members who identified Brad as the killer,’ she said.
‘That could be difficult. But several of us heard them say that it was Brad.’
‘That is indirect information and as a lawyer you are aware that would not be sufficient in a court of law. If I’m going to bring this to court I need to feel at least as sure of getting a conviction as the jury does if they’re going to reach a verdict of guilty beyond reasonable doubt.’
I nodded. ‘I’ll find one of them who identified Brad.’
‘Good.’ Adele Matheson clapped her hands together. ‘I’ll get going, so let’s stay in touch. This might be a good opportunity to show the world that the rule of law has not broken down completely.’
‘I hope so too,’ I said, looking at the only picture in the room. It was small and hung slightly sideways. It showed Justitia. Blind, impartial. With no bullet-hole in her forehead.
From the attorney general’s office I made my way to the police station in Downtown where I asked to see Chief Inspector Gardell. She accompanied me out to the car park by the shopping mall where I told her I could get Brad Lowe in front of a jury if I could get hold of one of the gang members who had identified him as the killer.
‘You had the bastard but you’re going to give him his day in court?’ she asked, with the same sense of astonishment an atheist might use when asking a Christian if they really believed that business about walking on water.
‘I need to find one of the gang,’ I said. ‘Can you help me?’
She shook her head. I thought it was a no until she said: ‘I can certainly keep my ears and eyes open, but don’t –’ and I knew what was coming next – ‘hold your breath.’
I thanked her, and as I walked away it was with a feeling that she was watching me and still shaking her head.
* * *
—
Chung, the structural engineer, was in charge of making the villa impregnable.
The wall surrounding the property was raised, the two gates reinforced, and everything between the house and the wall that could be used as cover or shelter was removed. The windows were fitted with bulletproof metal plates with gun slits, and the walls, doors and roof reinforced to resist grenades. Mines and booby traps with motion sensors were sown across the outer approaches. A control room was established in the basement from where the property could be kept under surveillance, with facilities to operate remotely controlled machine guns a
nd grenade throwers mounted up on the first floor. We also had two drones with cameras that could be remotely controlled from the basement, or the War Room as Downing insisted on calling it.
In essence: anyone wanting to capture the villa would need artillery and bombs.
And if, in spite of all, someone managed to get inside the place, Downing had night-vision goggles. He said that he and his brother soldiers had made an ally of the nights in Iraq by cutting the power before starting the nightly hunt for terrorists in the hostile neighbourhoods of Basra. Once our families had gone to bed and all the lights were off Larsen, Chung and I practised working with these, but in truth the trials just left me feeling giddy and nauseous. And once, when Chung turned on the light without any warning, it was like staring straight into the sun and I was left half blind for several hours afterwards.
Chung also suggested we dig a tunnel in case we needed to retreat. I thought about it for a long time before saying it would cost too much. I was lying.
Through former colleagues in the Marines Downing had heard about an ammunition depot where we could barter weapons for food and medicine, and this we did. Larsen and I stored the ammunition in an unused washroom with thick stone walls in the basement. When Chung joined us he showed us the hole in the wall where the private sewage pipe he had made ran. If we were under siege and had our water and sewage disposal cut off then we now had a sewage pipe that opened onto a steep, overgrown slope below the property, as well as a water pipe Chung had attached to the mains supply further down the valley. In the unlikely event the besieging force should come across the sewage pipe and identify it as leading to our house there was of course the possibility they could fire a grenade up through it and into the house, but according to Chung it wouldn’t do much damage – the walls of the room were just too thick. Unless, of course, high explosives were being stored in there.
He said it in his usual dry, practical way, with no facial expression to indicate whether he was being ironic or humorous. And that’s why we laughed, Larsen and I, as Chung looked at us with his sorrowful gaze, which made us laugh all the more.