by Jo Nesbo
‘That’s what she said ten minutes ago,’ Kari whispered.
‘In heaven God decides what time it is,’ Simon said and slipped a piece of snus under his upper lip. ‘What do you think a painting like that costs? And why pick that one?’
‘The acquisition of public art, as it’s known, is nothing but a hidden subsidy for our country’s mediocre artists,’ Kari said. ‘The buyers couldn’t care less about what’s on their walls as long as it matches the furniture and their budget.’
Simon glanced at her sideways. ‘Has anyone ever told you that you sometimes sound as if you’re reeling off quotes you’ve learned by rote?’
Kari smiled wryly. ‘And snus is a poor substitute for smoking. Bad for your health. I presume your wife made you switch because the smell of cigarettes lingered on her clothes?’
Simon chuckled and shook his head. It must be what passed for humour among the young these days. ‘Nice try, but you’re wrong. She asked me to stop because she wants me around for as long as possible. And she doesn’t know I suck tobacco. I keep it at the office.’
‘Let them in, Anne,’ a voice bellowed.
Simon looked at the lock where a man in uniform and a cap that would have found favour with a Belarus president drummed his fingers on the metal bars.
Simon rose.
‘We’ll decide if we’re going to let them out again later,’ Arild Franck said.
Simon could tell from the receptionist’s almost imperceptible rolling of the eyes that the joke was a very old one.
‘So, what’s it like to be back in the gutter?’ Franck asked as he escorted them through the lock and over to the staircase. ‘You’re in the Serious Fraud Office now, I believe. Oh, I’m so sorry, I’m going senile, I completely forgot that they kicked you out.’
Simon made no attempt to laugh at the deliberate insult.
‘We’re here because of Per Vollan,’
‘I heard. I thought the case had been closed?’
‘We don’t close a case until it’s solved.’
‘Is that a new thing?’
Simon mimed a smile by pressing his lips against his teeth. ‘Per Vollan came here to visit inmates on the day he died, is that right?’
Franck opened the door to his office. ‘Vollan was a prison chaplain so I assume he was doing his job. I can check the visitors’ log, if you like.’
‘Yes, please. And if you could give us a list of anyone he spoke to as well?’
‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t know the names of everybody he came into contact with while he was here.’
‘We know of at least one person he saw that day,’ Kari said.
‘Oh?’ Franck said, taking a seat behind the desk which had followed him his entire career. ‘Young lady, if you’re planning on staying, please fetch the coffee cups from the cupboard over there while I check the visitors’ log.’
‘Thanks, but I don’t drink caffeine,’ Kari said. ‘His name is Sonny Lofthus.’
Franck looked at her with a blank expression.
‘We were wondering if it might be possible to visit him?’ Simon said. He had taken a seat without being offered one. He looked up at Franck’s already reddening face. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, I’m going senile. He’s just escaped.’
Simon could see Franck composing an answer, but beat him to it.
‘We’re interested in him because the coincidence between Vollan’s visit and Lofthus’s escape makes Vollan’s death even more suspicious.’
Franck tugged at his shirt collar. ‘How do you know that they met?’
‘All police interviews are stored in a shared database,’ said Kari who had remained standing. ‘When I looked up Per Vollan, I saw that his name was mentioned in an interview in connection with Lofthus’s escape. By an inmate named Gustav Rover.’
‘Rover has just been released. He was interviewed because he spoke to Sonny Lofthus shortly before he absconded. We wanted to know if Lofthus had said anything which might give us an idea of what he was up to.’
‘We? Us?’ Simon raised a grey eyebrow. ‘Strictly speaking it’s the police’s job – and only ours – to catch escaped prisoners, not yours.’
‘Lofthus is my prisoner, Kefas.’
‘Rover doesn’t appear to have been able to help you,’ Simon said. ‘But he mentioned when questioned that just as he was leaving the cell, Per Vollan arrived to talk to Lofthus.’
Franck shrugged his shoulders. ‘What about it?’
‘So we’re wondering what the two of them talked about. And why one of them is killed shortly afterwards and the other one breaks out.’
‘Might be a coincidence.’
‘Of course. Do you know a man called Hugo Nestor, Franck? Also known as the Ukrainian?’
‘I’ve heard the name.’
‘So that’s a yes. Is there anything to suggest that Nestor might be involved with the breakout?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Did he help Lofthus escape or did he threaten Lofthus in prison, thus precipitating the escape?’
Franck drummed a pen against the desk. He looked as if he was deep in thought.
Out of the corner of his eye Simon saw Kari check her text messages.
‘I know how badly you need a result, but you’re not going to catch any big fish here,’ Franck said. ‘Sonny Lofthus absconded entirely on his own initiative.’
‘Wow,’ Simon said, leaning back in his chair and pressing his fingertips together. ‘A young drug addict, a mere amateur, absconds from Staten, of all prisons, entirely unaided?’
Franck smiled. ‘Do you want to bet on the amateur bit, Kefas?’ And his grin spread when Simon failed to respond. ‘So senile of me, you’re no longer a betting man. So let me show you your amateur.’
‘These are the recordings from the surveillance cameras,’ Franck said, gesturing towards the twenty-four-inch computer screen. ‘At this point all the officers in the control room are lying face down on the floor and Johannes has unlocked all the doors in the prison.’
The screen was split into sixteen windows, one for each camera, showing various sections of the prison. At the bottom of the screen was a clock.
‘There he comes,’ Franck said, pointing to a window showing one of the prison corridors.
Simon and Kari saw a young man coming out of a cell and running stiffly towards the camera. He was dressed in a white shirt that reached almost to his knees and Simon concluded that the man’s barber must be even worse than his own; his hair looked as if it had been kicked off his head.
The young man disappeared out of the picture. And reappeared in one of the others.
‘This is Lofthus going through the lock,’ Franck said. ‘And while he’s there, Johannes is busy giving a speech about what he’s going to do to the officers’ families if anyone tries to stop him. The interesting part is what happens in the staff changing room.’
They saw Lofthus run into a room with lockers, but instead of continuing straight to the exit, he turned left and disappeared out of the picture behind the last row of lockers. Franck hit one of the keys angrily with his index finger and the clock at the bottom of the screen stopped running.
Franck moved the cursor over the clock and entered the time 07:20. Then he started playing the recording at four times the normal speed. Uniformed men appeared in a window on the screen. They walked in and out of the changing room and the door was constantly opening and closing. It was impossible to tell them apart until Franck froze the screen with another keystroke.
‘There he is,’ Kari said. ‘He’s wearing a uniform and a coat now.’
‘Sørensen’s uniform and coat,’ Franck said. ‘He must have switched clothes and waited in the changing room. Sat on the bench, kept his head down, pretending to be tying his shoelaces or something while the others came and went. We have such a high staff turnover here that no one would look twice at a new guy who was a bit slow getting changed. He waited until the morning rush peaked and left with the others. No one reco
gnised Sonny without his beard and long hair, which he had cut off in his cell and stuffed into his pillow. Not even me . . .’
With another keystroke he restarted playback, this time at normal speed. The screen showed a young man in a coat and uniform leaving through the back entrance while Arild Franck and a man with swept-back hair and a grey suit were on their way in.
‘And the guards outside never stopped him?’
Franck pointed to the image in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.
‘This is taken from the security booth. As you can see, we let cars and people leave without checking their ID. It would create a bottleneck if we had to go through full security procedures at every shift change. But from now on we will also check them out at shift changes.’
‘Yes, I don’t suppose anyone is queuing up to get in,’ Simon joked.
In the silence that followed they could hear Kari suppress a yawn at Simon’s spin on Franck’s welcoming joke.
‘So there’s your amateur,’ Franck said.
Simon Kefas made no reply, he just studied the back of the figure strolling past the security guards. For some reason he started to smile. He realised it was the way Lofthus walked. He recognised that walk.
Martha was standing with her arms folded across her chest, sizing up the two men in front of her. They couldn’t be Drug Squad; she thought she knew most of the officers on the Drug Squad and she had never seen these two before.
‘We’re looking for . . .’ one of them began, but the rest of his sentence was drowned out by the howling siren of an ambulance passing behind them in Waldemar Thranes gate.
‘What?’ Martha shouted. She wondered where she had seen black suits like that. In an advert?
‘Sonny Lofthus?’ the smaller of them repeated. He had blond hair and looked as if his nose had been broken several times. Martha saw noses like that every day, but she thought this one was the result of contact sport.
‘We never give out the names of our residents,’ she informed them.
The other, a tall yet compact man with black curls arranged in a strange semicircle around his head, showed her a photograph.
‘He’s escaped from Staten Prison and is considered dangerous.’ Another ambulance approached and he leaned over her, shouting into her face: ‘So if he’s a resident here and you fail to tell us, it’s on your head if anything happens. Do you understand?’
So not the Drug Squad; at least that explained why she hadn’t seen them before. She nodded while she studied the photograph. Looked up at them again. Opened her mouth to say something when a gust of wind blew her dark fringe into her face. She was about to try again when she heard shouting behind her. It was Toy on the stairs.
‘Oi, Martha, Burre has gone and cut himself. I dunno what to do. He’s back in the cafe.’
‘People come and go in the summer,’ she said. ‘It’s a time when many of our residents prefer to sleep rough in the parks, and this in turn makes room for new arrivals. It’s hard to remember every single face—’
‘Like I said, his name is Sonny Lofthus.’
‘—and not everybody wants to register under their real name. We don’t expect our clients to have a passport or other forms of ID so we accept whatever name they give us.’
‘But don’t Social Services need to know who they are?’ the blond one asked.
Martha bit her lower lip.
‘Hey, Martha, Burre is, like, literally bleeding all over the place!’
The man with the curly halo placed a large, hairy hand on Martha’s bare upper arm. ‘Why don’t you just let us have a look around and we’ll see if we can find him?’ He noticed the look in her eyes and withdrew his hand.
‘Talking about ID,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I should ask to see yours?’
She saw something darken in the eyes of the blond man. And there was the hand of the curly-haired man again. Not on her upper arm this time, but around it.
‘Burre is almost out of blood.’ Toy had come over to where they were; he swayed and fixed the two men with his swimming eyes. ‘What’s going on here?’
Martha wriggled to free herself and put her hand on Toy’s shoulder. ‘Then we had better go and save his life. Gentleman, if you would care to wait.’
Martha and Toy walked across to the cafe. Another ambulance rushed past. Three ambulances. She shuddered involuntarily.
When she reached the door to the cafe, she turned round.
The two men were gone.
‘So you and Harnes saw Sonny close up?’ Simon asked as Franck escorted him and Kari back down to the ground floor.
Franck glanced at his watch. ‘What we saw was a young, clean-shaven man with short hair in a uniform. The Sonny we knew wore a filthy shirt, had matted long hair and a beard.’
‘So you’re saying it’ll be difficult to find him given how he now looks?’ Kari asked.
‘The pictures from the surveillance cameras are of poor quality, as you’d expect.’ Arild Franck turned round and fixed her with his eyes. ‘But we’ll find him.’
‘It’s a shame it wasn’t possible for us to talk to this Halden,’ Simon remarked.
‘Yes, as I said his illness has taken a turn for the worse,’ Franck replied as he led them back to reception. ‘I’ll let you know when he’s well enough for visitors.’
‘And you’ve no idea what Lofthus might have been talking to Per Vollan about?’
Franck shook his head. ‘The usual unburdening and spiritual guidance, I presume. Though Sonny Lofthus was himself a confidant.’
‘Was he?’
‘Lofthus kept himself apart from the other inmates. He was neutral, didn’t belong to any of the factions you find in every prison. And he never talked. That’s the definition of a good listener, isn’t it? He had become a kind of confessor to the other inmates, someone they could trust with anything. Who would he tell? He had no allies and he was going to stay in prison for the foreseeable future.’
‘What kind of murders was he in for?’ Kari asked.
‘Human murders,’ Franck remarked drily.
‘I mean—’
‘Murders of the most brutal kind. He shot an Asian girl and strangled a Kosovo Albanian.’ Franck held the exit door open for them.
‘And to think that such a dangerous criminal is now at large,’ Simon said, knowing he was twisting the knife now. Not that he was a sadist, but he was prepared to make an exception when it came to Arild Franck. Not because Franck was someone who was hard to like, in fact his personality was a mitigating circumstance. Nor because the man didn’t do his job – everyone at Police HQ knew that Franck was the real boss at Staten, rather than the man who held the title of prison governor. No, it was the other matter, these apparent coincidences which combined to create a suspicion that had been gnawing away at Simon and was approaching the most frustrating kind of knowledge, the one you can’t prove. That Arild Franck was on the take.
‘I give him forty-eight hours, Chief Inspector,’ Franck said. ‘He has no money, no relatives or friends. He’s a loner who has been in prison since he was eighteen years old. That’s twelve years ago. He knows nothing about the world outside, he has nowhere to go, no places to hide.’
While Kari hurried to keep up with Simon on their way to the car, Simon thought about the forty-eight hours and was tempted by the bet. Because he had recognised something about the boy. He didn’t know quite what it was; perhaps it was just the way he moved. Or perhaps he had inherited more than that.
14
JOHNNY PUMA TURNED over in his bed and sized up his new room-mate. He didn’t know who had invented the term room-mate, only that at the Ila Centre it was about as much of a misnomer as you could get. Room enemy would have been more appropriate. He had yet to share a room with anyone who didn’t try to rob him blind. Or someone he hadn’t tried to rob blind himself. So he kept all his valuables, which comprised a waterproof wallet containing three thousand kroner and a double plastic bag with three grams of amphetamine, taped t
o a thigh so hairy that any attempt to remove it would rouse him even from the deepest sleep.
This was what Johnny Puma’s life had been about these last twenty years: amphetamines and sleep. He had been given most of the diagnoses they handed out in the seventies and onwards to explain why a young man would rather party than work, would rather fight and screw around than buy a house and start a family, get high rather than get clean and live a deadly boring life. But the last diagnosis had stuck. ME. Myalgic encephalomyelitis. Chronic exhaustion. Johnny Puma exhausted? Anyone who heard it simply laughed. Johnny Puma, the weightlifter, the life and soul of the party, Lillesand’s most popular removal man who could shift a piano single-handed. It had started with a painful hip, painkillers that didn’t work, followed by painkillers that worked only too well, and he was hooked. Now his life consisted of long days resting in bed, interspersed by intense periods of activity where he had to channel all his energy into getting drugs. Or find money to pay off his already alarmingly large debt to the centre’s drug baron, a Lithuanian transsexual halfway through a sex change who called herself Coco.
Johnny could tell at a glance that the young man standing by the window needed to score. The constant, frantic search. The compulsion. The struggle.
‘Please would you close the curtains, mate?’
The other obeyed and the room became pleasantly dark once more.
‘What are you using, mate?’
‘Heroin.’
Heroin? Here at the centre people said dope when they meant heroin. Shit, scag, horse or dust. Or boy. Or Superboy when it came to the new wonder drug you could buy down at Nybrua from a guy who looked like Sleepy from Snow White. Heroin was what people called it in prison. Or if they were rookies, of course. Though if you were a proper rookie, you could use expressions such as China White, Mexican Mud or any of the other nonsense terms you picked up from the movies.
‘I can get you good, cheap heroin. You don’t need to go out.’
Johnny saw something happen to the figure in the darkness. He had seen how junkies who were really desperate could get high at the mere promise of drugs; he believed tests had registered changes in the brain’s pleasure centre in the several seconds before the fix. With a forty per cent gross margin on the drugs he could buy from Høvdingen in room 36, Johnny could buy three or four bags of speed for himself. It was preferable to robbing the neighbourhood again.