by Thomas Enger
‘Yeah, I…’
Blystad started to get out of bed.
‘I haven’t smoked for four years,’ she said.
He stopped and turned to her.
‘Then you’re not going to start again now.’
‘I want a cigarette, Roger. Now.’
‘Helene, I…’
It was her turn to sit up.
‘Please, Roger. Just do it. OK?’
He could see she was on the verge of tears, so he went out into the hall and got the cigarettes from his jacket pocket and the lighter from his trousers. He lit two cigarettes and handed one to her.
Blystad was still naked, but it didn’t feel awkward or embarrassing. She took the cigarette, put it between her lips and closed her eyes. She coughed a little before she took the first puff. And then another.
‘Aah,’ she said, blowing the smoke out slowly. ‘I’d forgotten how good it was.’
She tapped herself on the forehead.
‘Why use the past tense when it’s something I’m experiencing now.’
‘It is good,’ Blystad said, and took a drag himself.
‘But I think one’s enough,’ she said, and sucked in more nicotine. ‘I’m starting to get a head rush already.’
She let out a little laugh.
Blystad crept down under the duvet again, turned over onto his side and looked at her, and the long ash tip on the cigarette that would soon fall.
There was an empty Coke can on the bedside table. She reached out for it and used it as an ashtray.
‘I used to smoke in bed,’ she said, putting the can down between them. But it wasn’t the can that Blystad was looking at. Nor the cigarette, nor her eyes.
But her arm.
He hadn’t thought about the fact that she wanted to keep the tunic on, but at some point the button on the sleeve had become undone, revealing her lower arm. All the scars. A puckered spider’s web.
Helene noticed him looking at it, pulled down the sleeve and put her arm under the duvet.
‘We don’t need to talk about it,’ he said. ‘We don’t need to talk about anything you don’t want to.’
She lay down again and stared at the ceiling, motionless, as though she’d found what she was looking for up there. After a few seconds, she took another drag on the cigarette.
‘What else are you called, besides Helene?’
‘Don’t you remember?’ she said, with some indignation. Blystad wasn’t sure whether she was joking or not.
‘You just gave me your first name when you called about the job,’ he said.
‘Oh right,’ she said, and continued to stare blindly at the ceiling. ‘Næss, my surname is Næss.’
‘Helene Næss,’ Blystad said. ‘Well, do you know what, Helene Næss?’
He waited until she’d turned to look at him.
‘My name isn’t really Roger.’
39
Henning opened his eyes.
He blinked, but couldn’t get the room into focus. There was something familiar about it though. Something about the colours. The size.
He lifted his head, still heavy after such a long deep sleep, and then it dawned on him that he was back in hospital. If it wasn’t actually the same room as last time, it certainly looked remarkably similar. The table was the same caramel colour. The same strip lighting in the same rectangular box, which reminded him of an exceptionally long bread tin with two tubes in it. The walls were the same colour – eggshell. He saw a print of a pot plant on a round coffee table.
What the hell had happened?
How had he ended up here?
The most obvious answer would be that Ann-Mari Sara had driven him here or called the police. But she wouldn’t have done that. The police would want to know why Henning had gone to her house on the day that he’d been shot, and she was hardly likely to want to do anything that might identify her as his secret source over the years. But the fact that he was awake and alive did seem to indicate that all his assumptions were wrong.
But how then had Redzepi found him?
Had someone else at the police station told him?
All these thoughts made Henning dizzy again, and he wondered what the doctors had given him. So he closed his eyes, and felt a heaviness pressing down on him.
The next time Henning opened his eyes, Bjarne was sitting on a chair beside his bed.
‘Good morning,’ Bjarne said. ‘Or rather, good afternoon. It’s half past five. In the evening.’
Bjarne gave a fleeting smile.
Henning took a moment to focus his eyes. He tried to pull himself up into a sitting position, but he’d forgotten that one arm was still in a sling. There was a stabbing pain in his shoulder and he managed to bite back a scream. His efforts made him sweat.
‘How are you?’ Bjarne asked.
‘How long have I been here?’
Bjarne looked at his watch.
‘About seventeen or eighteen hours.’
Henning stared at him.
That was a long time.
‘I think they gave you some sleeping pills,’ Bjarne said. ‘They had to do something to stop you.’
He smiled again.
‘What were you thinking? Going out the same day you’d been shot. That’s asking for trouble.’
Henning blinked furiously. Was it the same day? He realised it was. Time had lost its importance. Only answers mattered to him now.
‘I had to check something out,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Doesn’t matter now. I got it sorted. Nothing important.’
Bjarne scowled at him for a few seconds.
‘Do you know how you got here?’
Henning stalled, before shaking his head.
‘You don’t know?’
Bjarne looked at him, astonished.
‘No,’ Henning said. ‘Do you?’
The policeman waited a moment before continuing.
‘You were found outside A&E sitting, or rather, half lying, in a wheelchair.’
Ann-Mari Sara, Henning thought, as he cast about for something to say. Luckily, Bjarne didn’t ask any more questions.
Henning wondered what he’d missed in the last eighteen hours, if Durim Redzepi and his mate had been arrested in the meantime.
He asked. Bjarne shook his head.
Neither of them said anything for a few moments.
‘We found Iver Gundersen’s car keys, Henning. In your trouser pocket.’
Henning lowered his eyes. He was still a bit groggy. Any movement took time.
‘That wasn’t very smart. I could arrest you for obstructing an investigation. There’d be no problem getting support for that at the station, let me tell you.’
Henning didn’t say anything.
‘Why did you take them?’
He thought about what he should say.
‘I needed transport,’ was his simple reply.
‘And your own car wasn’t working?’
Henning shook his head, uncertain whether the lie was visible in his face or not.
The door opened, and Ella Sandland – one of Bjarne’s colleagues – came in. Her smile was terse when she said hello. Sandland was thin and sinewy in a masculine way, and her movements were also quite macho. She hooked her thumbs into her uniform belt.
Henning knew that Sandland was one of Bjarne’s allies down at the headquarters, and that she was aware of his suspicions regarding Preben Mørck. So he told them about the meeting he’d had with the lawyer, the parking ticket he’d found in Iver’s car, and the business card.
‘It’s undeniably odd that he should lie about Iver having been there,’ Henning continued, spurred on by the fact that his head seemed to be working again. ‘And another thing: of course Tore Pulli knew who gave him the contract to murder Ellen Hellberg in the nineties. That might be why they had to kill him – Mørck needed to make sure that Tore wouldn’t snitch on him.’
Bjarne and Sandland looked at each other. Bjarne nodded to her.
‘I got Ørjan Mjønes in for questioning a few days ago,’ she said. ‘As expected, he denied that Mørck had paid him to killed Pulli, but there was a reaction, albeit small, when I mentioned Mørck’s name and held up a photograph.’
Daddy Longlegs and Mørck have to be the same person, Henning thought. But was it Mørck who was in the car beside Tore, the evening his flat went up in flames? Who had ensured his name was deleted from Indicia?
The probability was high, given that Mørck would certainly not want to be associated with Tore after Tore was killed. And yet Henning was unsure if Mørck could be anything other than a middleman, or if he had enough financial muscle to pay for a contract killing on his own.
Whatever the case, the question remained: how could Durim Redzepi know that Henning was going to be outside the police headquarters at four o’clock in the afternoon.
‘William Hellberg described Mørck as solid,’ Henning said. ‘But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. If Mørck helped Hellberg’s mother with the murder in the early nineties, he may have been leading a double life for years.’
‘But we can’t just call Mørck in for questioning,’ Bjarne said. ‘We have to have something on him first. Proof, something concrete, like Gundersen perhaps had. Mørck has been in the game a long time, he knows how to counter our questions if we’re just fumbling in the dark.’
Henning moved slightly, and was racked again by pain.
‘Sounds like you’ve got enough to do over the next few days,’ Henning said and winced. ‘What about me?’
‘The doctor thought it would be best for you to stay here tonight,’ Bjarne said. ‘And I think that sounds sensible. We’ve got a man in here keeping watch, and another outside.’
Henning lay down again. He was, truth be told, utterly exhausted, but he knew that his mind would not be able to switch off. Not now, not when they were so close.
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.
Sandland and Bjarne looked at each other.
‘We’re going to dig a bit deeper into Preben Mørck’s life,’ Bjarne said. ‘See what we can find. But I wouldn’t set your hopes too high, Henning; we’ve done some pretty thorough investigating already. He doesn’t have a single blemish on his CV. People talk about him in glowing terms.’
‘But there must be something,’ Henning said. ‘Iver found something. And we have to find it as well.’
Bjarne took a step closer to the bed and put a hand on his shoulder: ‘We’ll do all that we can.’
40
Later, after Roger Blystad had driven home, he regretted it. Not the few hours he’d spent in Helene’s bed – that had been pure pleasure – but the fact that he’d exposed himself. He’d been quick to cover his tracks – hadn’t said anything about Tore or Charlie, only that someone was after him and he didn’t know if he was out of danger yet – which was why he’d taken on another identity and was lying low.
It was perhaps wrong, he thought, to have left so soon after, but he’d felt restless and uneasy, like a fire was burning under his feet, and he had to get away, go home so he could think about what he was going to do with the past, with the future.
With the present.
Perhaps it was time to forget the past. To stop running away from it.
‘But if you’d like to meet again,’ he’d said to Helene before he left, ‘you’ll have to carry on calling me Roger. So I don’t get confused.’
She’d looked at him for a long time.
Maybe she just needed a shoulder to lean on as well, someone to give her a cigarette. She was glad, she said, that he’d been so open with her. And now Blystad wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing.
For the first time in ages, he felt like food, so he went by the shop on the way home and bought bread, cheese, fruit and vegetables. When he got home, he ate two slices of bread before sitting down in front of the TV and channel hopping a bit before settling on an athletics programme, and as he watched the people running, it dawned on him that he hadn’t done any exercise for a few days.
So he changed into his running gear, went down into the basement and started the 45-minute treadmill programme, found the album he’d downloaded onto his phone that he liked listening to when he was training – the soundtrack to Rocky IV.
At his heaviest, Blystad had weighed 112 kilos, then one day he’d got out of the bath and been horrified by what the full-length mirror had so mercilessly shown him. He got himself a treadmill, started to record each session, kept a note of how many calories he ate and burned. His project was to lose weight. The target was 80 kilos, the same as he’d weighed when he started high school. He was only five kilos short of that now.
The cellar was spartan and dirty, with uneven walls, and plaster dust constantly falling everywhere. The floor was uneven too – it was amazing that he’d managed to find an area that was flat enough for the treadmill. But he liked it down there: it reminded him of Rocky when he was training for the Ivan Drago fight, with ‘Training Montage’ by Vince DiCola and Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’ playing in the background. The rough, masculine cellar was inspiration in itself and always made him want to watch the film again.
He’d got to Robert Tepper’s ‘No Easy Way Out’, when a shadow passed the cellar window. He looked up, alarmed, and saw another shadow stop by the front door. Blystad pressed the emergency stop button and jumped down from the treadmill.
Through the window he could see the men outside huddled together and talking, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying. They were both dressed in black, one had a hoodie on, the other a denim jacket.
The man closest to the window put his hand inside his jacket and took out something that he then fiddled with; it looked like he might be turning it round and round.
Then he lowered his arm.
Blystad gasped.
From where he was standing in the basement, it was easy to see the gun and silencer, and he knew immediately that they had found him and what would happen.
What the hell was he going to do?
You have to get out and run for it, he told himself, somehow get the rucksack you’ve got ready for emergencies. The problem was that it was in one of the cupboards in the bedroom. Upstairs. There was no way out of the house other than through the door where the two men were now standing. They didn’t ring the bell; instead Blystad heard the glass pane being smashed.
He looked around the room. Weights, too heavy to swing as fast and hard as he needed. Mats, medicine ball – nothing he could use as a weapon. He didn’t even have the keys to the box room.
He tried to control his breathing, but it wasn’t easy, his heart was hammering in his chest – as though it would jump out.
He couldn’t remember if he’d turned the TV off or not, but it wouldn’t be more than a few minutes, maybe even seconds, before they came down into the cellar. And what would he do then? He couldn’t just stand there and wait for them to kill him.
The cellar window, he thought. He could climb up and slip out.
No.
It was too small and too narrow, it wouldn’t work.
Blystad dialled the emergency services, and put his phone down on the treadmill. He didn’t want to talk, it would give away his whereabouts to the men upstairs. They would see where he was calling from at the control centre, and then, when he didn’t answer, they would send a patrol round to check. Wouldn’t they?
But it would still take some time before they got there; Blystad didn’t know where the nearest police station was, and how much time he had was questionable.
He put down the headset and looked around the room again. He had some rope he could use if necessary, but the others had a pistol. He needed something he could surprise them with, something that would quickly put them out of action.
Footsteps on the floor above. They were in the bedroom. Soon they’d find the door that led down to the basement.
Blystad left the room and went into another. He moved as light
ly and silently as he could. Passed an ice pick, tested it. Far too heavy. Garden hose. Too unwieldy. Tyres, buckets, piles of wood. Paint brushes. Paint tins.
How strong were they?
If he could only rid them of their guns, how good would they be at fighting?
Blystad hadn’t fought with anyone since high school. To a certain extent, his stature had meant that people generally avoided confrontation. But he was fitter now than ever, so he might have an advantage.
He couldn’t go up the stairs to turn off the light, because then they would hear him. There was no switch at the bottom of the stairs. But he had turned the light off in the room with the treadmill, so only the stairs were lit up.
A foot on the top step.
He tried to draw the air deep into his lungs, hold it for a while, and then exhale slowly, but couldn’t do it. His heart was thumping too hard.
More footsteps. Just one set. For now.
He heard a sound.
Knew what it meant.
Blystad lifted the spade, ready to strike. Wiped the sweat from his face on his shoulder, making sure not to hit the wall with the spade.
Footsteps on the concrete.
Something loose crunched on the floor. More feet at the top of the stairs. Blystad knew he only had a couple of seconds, then there would be two men instead of one and when the gun appeared in front of him, like a long finger, he whacked the hand holding the gun with the spade with all his might.
The gun fell to the floor.
The man was surprised by the sudden attack and screamed with pain. Blystad didn’t think about hitting him again, he threw the spade down and picked up the gun, pointing it blindly at the stairs, from where a short bald man came running towards him at full speed. Blystad didn’t think, he just pulled the trigger, three shots in quick succession, and judging by the sudden splash of colour on the wall, he’d hit his mark. The man fell forwards and landed at Blystad’s feet.
All of sudden, he felt something heavy bang his head, hard enough to make him see stars for a few seconds. He’d completely forgotten the first man in the chaos – but he saw him straight ahead through the fog and pointed the gun in his general direction, waving it around. He was about pull the trigger when he felt a hand clamp over his, which forced the muzzle of the gun upward, so when the shot was fired, plaster dust immediately sprinkled down from the ceiling. Some fell into his eyes. He blinked frantically to clear it at the same time as he tried to gauge the strength of the man who had hit him.