Dahle was almost lost for words. He managed to mumble something about being late for an appointment, then closed the car door and drove off. He proceeded carefully out of the car park and along the straight road that led to the edge of town.
It was only when he had gone past the roundabout, and was on the country road that climbed up the Vinstra valley toward Espedalen, that he stamped down hard on the accelerator and made the engine scream.
Chapter 21
In the brain of Cally Douglas a sequence of flickering images was playing, in which a shower of rain was wetting a road. There were isolated spots at first, and then the spots joined together and formed trickles and little rivulets. Then the trickles and rivulets slowly merged with other trickles and rivulets to form channels. And then one of the channels found a way over the edge of the road and started to run slowly down the side of Cally’s head, gathering in a pool at the back of her neck. As it went past her ear the water made a loud, incongruous banging noise and then it called her name.
Cally, it’s time to get up. Cally, you’re going to be late. Cally! CALLY!
She opened her eyes. But she couldn’t see.
She was aware that she was lying on her back. She brought her right hand up to her eyes and realised that her hat was covering her face. She moved it away. But still she couldn’t see, not properly. Everything was grey.
She managed to lift her head. Clouds. A strong wind that picked up snow and hurled it in her face. A boulder. Skis - attached to her boots. She tried to move the skis out from under her. No good. Twisted. Stuck.
Her recollection was fuzzy. She had been with Neep on a hillside. Then she’d been trying to escape from a man with a gun. Then she was falling on the man and hurtling down the hillside out of control.
And now she was alone.
Alone and lost.
The panic attack was immediate and it was severe.
No warning, no negotiation, just Holy Mother of Christ and a hard, ambushing physical assault, a tearing, wrenching attack on her throat and her solar plexus and her lungs, constricting everything that might allow her to breathe. Her legs tried to writhe, wanted to writhe, wanted to break free from the dark-bringing assailant, but were held tight by the skis, the struggle using up oxygen that she didn’t have. And then no easy let-down, no chance to think of breaking her fall or protecting her face or getting into a hidden corner where no-one would see, just a deep engulfing blackness. Not the usual flat-line but a new blackness that brought pain and screaming. Screaming that wanted to grow louder but ran out of oxygen. Completely out of oxygen.
When she came to, this time, she was still lying on her back. Vomit was bubbling in her mouth, choking her. She managed to raise her head and turn it to the side, then coughed and spat and was able to breathe again. Then she retched once more, sending a flow of warm liquid down over her chin and neck. She raised a hand to her mouth and felt the searing pain once more. Her left elbow was injured and her left hand looked wrong. Pushing down on the snow with her right hand, she managed to sit up, and saw that there was vomit down the front of her jacket. Not even her jacket; she remembered now that it was Richard’s. Her legs felt warm, in a familiar way. She couldn’t see the urine soaking into the snow beneath her but she knew it was there.
It had been a bad one. The first bad one for a long time.
In the old days - unless she had been faking - she would have checked for bumps and bruises, looking for tell-tale signs to hide or disguise. But there wasn’t much point in doing that now. Any small wounds she might have picked up in the thrashing around would be nothing compared to the deep scratches on her face from sliding down the gully or the painful lump on the head that was making her feel dizzy and uncoordinated. Or the injury to her arm. She felt sure her elbow was dislocated.
As for hiding the signs – who would she hide them from? She had no idea how close the nearest people were. All she knew was that the closest one was probably dead. She hoped Neep was safe, hoped he had been able to find Richard in the fog.
Then she remembered the voices that had brought her back to consciousness, the voices calling her name.
She sat up straight and shouted: “Neep! Richard!” She waited a few seconds and shouted again. And again. But her calls seemed to lack the power to pass through the cloud and were instead muffled by it.
Her legs were getting cold. She had to move, to get up off the snow.
With difficulty she untangled her skis and made sure they were pointing horizontally across the slope. Then she managed to stand up. It was hard to do that with the rucksack on her back, but the prospect of taking it off and hurting her arm again was too horrible to face. The rucksack felt heavier than usual, and then she remembered swapping with Neep.
Which meant that he had her rucksack.
And all her benzos.
She had to find him.
She realised she would need to abandon one of her poles. She was examining them, stupidly trying to work out which one to take, when there was the faint sound of someone calling her name.
She craned her head, but the wind took the sound away. Then it came again!
She shouted back, calling at the top of her voice. Then she took a pole, any damn pole, and began to side-step down the hill, moving as quickly as she dared on the unreliable surface. Eventually she made it on to flatter ground and set off toward where the sound had come from, peering hopefully into the mirk.
She kept going for a long time, kept shouting as she moved. But there was no answer.
Then she heard the call again, this time coming from a different direction, further to her right. She shouted and set off again, moving fast, shouting as she went.
But she met no-one.
And there were no more calls.
Finally she came to a stop. She had no idea how long she had been moving, no idea where she was. She knew that she was tired and cold and that her head felt bad and her arm was sore. She knew that she wanted a benzo - wanted all the benzos, every one. But they were in her rucksack, and Neep had it and she couldn’t find him.
She stood for a long time, growing cold, watching the spindrift blow in waves over the surface of the snow, accumulating on the tops of her skis. She was aware that she could die here, now, if she wanted. She just needed to stand still for a while longer, an hour maybe. Gradually grow even colder. Then sit down.
A man in the ski club had once told her that dying of hypothermia wasn’t so bad. After a while you stopped feeling cold, and just went pleasantly to sleep.
Even at the time she had wondered how he could possibly claim to know that. Unless he himself had died once on a wintry mountain, and had been sent back to let everybody know how it had gone. Which seemed unlikely.
How could he be sure that you wouldn’t lie on the cold snow, shivering painfully until your last agonised breath, mentally reliving your sorry life and concluding that you had messed the whole damn thing up so badly that it was better ended?
She looked down at her skis. The spindrift had completely covered them.
She scraped at it with her pole. Then stamped her skis down on the snow, one after the other, again and again, banging them clean, gradually making the warmth return to her body.
She forced herself to think of the things she still wanted to do in Scotland. The things she had started, and had been so close to finishing.
She had to find a way of getting off these mountains. Even though there wasn’t much for her to go on. No landmark peak. No rustic wooden signpost. No visibility.
The only thing she could possibly use was the direction of the wind. Early in the morning, when the three of them had been skiing away from the cabin, away from the man with the gun, the wind had been in their backs. She could remember that. She couldn’t have said what the wind had done later on, because when they reached the higher ground they had changed direction so many times.
But she knew she had to assume the wind direction had stayed constant. Otherwise she would have nothing
at all to follow.
And she wanted something to follow.
So she stepped her skis round until the wind was in her face, then forced herself to move.
She reminded herself that she had skied in bad visibility before. She knew it was just a matter of putting her head down and getting through it. All she had to do was slide one ski forward and then slide the other. And then repeat. She could count a hundred strides if it helped. And then repeat. And then keep repeating. Eventually she would get to a safe place where she could congratulate herself on making it through an epic day.
And then throw her fucking skis in a skip, and never venture on to a mountain again. Not ever.
Chapter 22
The big Norwegian was in Oslo when the call came through to his mobile phone.
He had spent the day despatching the packages that contained the fake Breivik masks, sending five from each location. Keeping to the plan, he had missed out Lillehammer and had started further south, in Gjøvik, getting there just after its post office opened at seven-thirty. Then he had followed the road down to Kapp and Minnesund and Eidsvoll, and a dozen other dreary towns, and had finally reached Oslo, where he found a parking space on Fred Olsens gate. He paid for two hours then made the short walk to the post office in Oslo Sentral Station.
A small and noisy group of black whores, Nigerian by the look of them, had collected on the steps outside the station and one of them had looked hopefully at him as he went past. He had shaken his head. He missed Africa, but not to that extent. He missed its raw edginess and its opportunities for making money – not its sexually-transmitted diseases.
When he left the Norwegian army, after a peace-keeping stint in the country then known as Zaïre, he had gone home to Norway. But he couldn’t settle; so he went back to Zaïre and based himself in the mining city of Lubumbashi - until the civil wars made it just too tricky. He went back a third time when things calmed down, by when the country had been reincarnated as the Democratic Republic of Congo, the same name that it had used before changing to Zaïre. The bare-faced cheek of that name still made him smile. In any election the most powerful politicians could rely on receiving 100 percent of the popular vote, even though tens of thousands of legitimate ballot papers would be reported missing in transit to the counting stations.
It was a shit-hole of a country even by African standards, but it was full of possibilities. The new cohort of politicians initially took a back seat, and the big man made a very good living as a result, working in a role that blurred the distinction between security specialist and mercenary. But then the government banned all mineral extraction in the east of the country, ostensibly intending to put an end to the unregulated artisan mines that had provided lucrative business for security firms like his. The mines continued to operate, of course, but the bribes got bigger, to the point that there was no longer any profit.
Then in 2013, Lubumbashi was invaded by Mai Mai rebels and the expats had to get out in a hurry, bundling suitcases full of dollars into whatever form of air transport they could scramble. The big man and Olav, his colleague then and now, had been among the lucky ones. They had seen the invasion coming and had escaped with their wealth intact.
But then the big man had fallen for Olav’s glossy description of a job that was coming up in Norway, a job that one of his associates had received a sure-fire tip about and had already been preparing for a while. Olav himself had gone over a few times to check things out. It would be like a profitable holiday, he said, a nice chance to re-visit the old country. It would just be a matter of keeping things secure, influencing some people, using a bit of muscle if necessary, and of course making a few bangs. And it had turned out to be crock of shit. In the African context Olav had always been highly focussed and utterly ruthless - he wouldn’t have survived so long otherwise. But here in Norway he was forced to play second fiddle to the so-called boss, and the boss was just a joke.
After finishing in the station post office, the big man had taken a ten-minute walk and was now in the city’s Grønland district, the area that many white Oslo residents called Karachi West, a place where the women wore veils and Asian kids swarmed like rats. On his way to the district’s post office he had passed through a makeshift souk that a bunch of bearded old guys wearing robes and cheap trainers had assembled under the concrete flyover of a busy through-road, piling their stalls with a tatty jumble of clothes and books and kitchen appliances.
The big man was in the post office when his phone rang, the cheap pay-as-you go Nokia that he’d bought with cash.
It was the boss, sounding stressed - as usual. “Where are you?”
“In the city formerly known as Oslo. Waiting in a queue to get my passport stamped.”
“You can stop waiting. We need you back here. Our good friend is out of contact on the mountain. He radioed in to say he was trying to speak to some people who spent the night in our cabin and who met its resident. Now he’s not responding to our calls. I don’t want to say any more on the phone. I’ll fill you in when you get here.”
The big man shrugged. He knew he had no choice. He found himself looking forward to Friday, when all this bollocks would be over and he could say goodbye to this crackpot employer - who had allowed it to become personal and whose frenzied beating of Hawkeye Skaugen had caused all the complication in the first place.
The big man decided to take the riverside walk-way back to his car. Anything was better than pushing through the souk again, and the fresh air would clear his head before the long drive north. By the river there was always a risk from the muggers who hung around with the Moroccan drug dealers, but he wasn’t worried about that. Usually people gave him respect, realised he could take care of himself.
Even so, when he reached the river he bent to check that his knife was secure in its ankle sheath. Just in case anyone was feeling disrespectful.
Chapter 23
Cally had been skiing for a long time before she chanced upon the tracks. By then her head was feeling strange again, as if the mist that swirled around the mountains had somehow found a way into her skull and fluttered like wispy ribbons in the space behind her eyes.
Everything seemed unreal.
Except her relief in finding the tracks.
Her wind-in-the-face navigational system had been fine for a while. But then the wind began to gust from all directions, and soon afterwards it died down altogether. She hadn’t been sure what to do, but had decided to keep moving through the fog. It had seemed a better idea than just standing still.
The ski-tracks were the ones that she and Neep and Richard had made earlier in the day. She was certain of that, because of Neep’s lop-sided pole plants. Only now there were also the pole plants of the man who had chased them; they were deeper and further apart, as if he’d been skiing hard. Cally had forgotten about him again. She hoped he was dead. Or maimed. Or both.
Whatever the gunman’s condition, he was now far away. She was convinced of that. Since starting into the wind she had covered a lot of ground, not just gone round in circles. The terrain had changed, and in the occasional thinning of the mist she could no longer see high mountains, but only flat ground. The surface had changed, too - there was less ice and the snow was better. So, even if she had no idea where she had gone, she had definitely gone somewhere.
And she had definitely lost altitude. Now, after two long days on snow she found herself moving on auto-pilot, trusting her skis to find their own way, reflexively sliding them out into a wedge when the ground tended gently down, as it often had, or turning them across the slope and side-stepping when it fell more steeply.
When the visibility was really bad, she had closed her eyes and had somehow felt the shape of the terrain under her skis. She got the idea after remembering one of Richard’s stories, the one about a blind skier, a British Paralympian who did all his training at a place in western Norway. To begin with he went around with a sighted guide, but after a while he knew the tracks so well he could go out o
n his own. Every now and then he would whistle, and from the direction of the echo he would know where he was.
Richard had lots of stories like that, as if they were sermon fodder that he was collecting in case he ever decided to leave the university and get a job as a church minister. The other day I went out skiing and it reminded me of Life.
Still, she liked Richard. This trip had changed her mind about him, had shown her that he was one of the good guys. She hoped he was alright. And Neep. She was worried about Neep.
She forced herself to concentrate. There was a decision to make, and she had to get it right.
She stood beside the ski-tracks and looked along them in one direction and then the other, like a child crossing a road. She was pretty sure, from the imprint of the planted poles, that this morning they had been travelling in that direction, from right to left.
But she had to be more than just pretty sure.
So she took a few strides over the unbroken snow, pushing down with her single pole, and then turned to examine the track she had just left.
She spoke aloud. “So that’s it – the basket first makes a circle and then there’s a drag at the front of the circle. So I need to follow the tracks in this direction. From left to right.”
And she thought, but didn’t say it out loud, And they’ll take me all the way down to the Horror Hut, where I can have Hawkeye for a neighbour again.
She still had the padlock key in a pocket, though she’d no idea which pocket. She had so many pockets. So many jackets. It wasn’t a complaint. The jackets were probably saving her life. But even if the storm hadn’t been so severe, she would still have been glad of Richard’s duvet, even if it did have sick all down the front. With the zip lowered part-way, it made a good sling for her injured arm.
Her elbow still hurt, but it was a manageable sort of pain, as long as she didn’t move it.
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