by Anne Holt
‘I think you should stop now,’ said Rolf, swallowing audibly. ‘You look like a living corpse, Marcus. You ought to go and lie down, you ought to—’
‘I ought to finish telling my story!’
He banged the arm of the chair with his clenched fists. The dull thud made Rolf sink back in his own chair.
‘And you are going to listen!’ Marcus hissed.
Rolf nodded quickly.
‘Georg threw my mother out,’ said Marcus, taking a deep breath.
Keep calm, he thought. Tell your story and do what you have to do.
‘But he did manage to tell her that he had made a will in favour of … the bastard, as my mother refers to him. She had known about him all along. My father had no relationship with him either. He just wanted to punish us. Punish my mother, I assume.’
One of the setters stood up in its basket. The wicker creaked and the dog gave a long drawn-out yawn before padding over to Marcus and laying its head on his knee.
‘When I realized the man was telling the truth, I didn’t know which way to turn.’
He placed his hand on the soft head.
Rolf was breathing with his mouth open. A wheezing noise was coming from his throat, as if he were about to have an asthma attack.
‘I’ll cut a long story short,’ said Marcus, pushing the dog away.
Slowly, as if he were an old man, he got up from his chair. He took a step forward and stopped, half-facing away from Rolf. The dog sat down beside him, as if both of them were looking for the same thing out there in the darkness.
‘Three days later I was in the US,’ said Marcus. His voice had acquired a metallic quality. ‘It was business as usual, but I didn’t feel too good. I got drunk one night with one of the directors of Lehman Brothers, who had just lost his job. I’d intended to …’
The pause lasted for a long time.
‘Forget it. The point is that I told him the story. He had a solution.’
An even longer pause.
The dog whimpered, and the very tip of his tail swept across the floor.
To the south the flashing light of a plane moved slowly across the sky.
‘What kind of … ?’ Rolf had to clear his throat. ‘What kind of solution?’ he said.
‘A contract killer,’ said Marcus.
‘A contract killer.’
‘Yes. A contract killer. As I said, I was drunk.’
‘And the following day you laughed it off, of course.’
The dog looked up at his owner and whimpered again, before getting up and ambling back to his basket.
‘Marcus. Answer me. The next day you both had hangovers and laughed about it, the way you laugh at a joke. Didn’t you? Didn’t you, Marcus?’
Marcus didn’t answer. He just stood there, shoulders slumped, arms hanging by his side, in his suit and tie and a state of total apathy.
‘I set a monster free,’ he whispered tonelessly. ‘I couldn’t have known I was setting a monster free.’
Rolf finally made his leap and grabbed Marcus by the arm.
‘What are you telling me?’ he roared, squeezing hard.
Marcus ignored both the pain in his arm and Rolf’s violent outburst.
‘Tell me you didn’t order a fucking murder, Marcus!’
‘He was going to take everything away from me. Niclas Winter was going to steal everything I deserved. Everything. Anine’s money. And Mathias’s. Ours. Everything that will go to little Marcus one day.’
His voice was nothing more than a monotone now, as if every word were being recorded individually on tape, to be edited into sentences at a later stage. Rolf raised his other hand, clenching his fist until the knuckles turned white. He was taller than Marcus. Stronger. Considerably fitter.
‘If you’re standing here telling me that you paid a contract killer, then I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you Marcus, I swear it! Tell me you’re lying!’
‘Two. Million. Dollars. For two million dollars, my problem would disappear. I paid. The man from Lehman Brothers organized the rest. The whole thing was so … impersonal. A transfer to the Cayman Islands, and neither the money nor the … order had anything to do with me any longer.’
Suddenly Rolf let go of his arm.
‘That night,’ Marcus went on, not even noticing that the dogs had started circling around them, yelping and whimpering, ‘I got the confirmation I needed. A great deal is being written about The 25’ers at the moment, and doubtless quite a lot of it is unreliable. But the serious web pages gave me the confirmation I needed.’
‘Of what?’ Rolf sobbed, backing away slowly, as if he no longer wanted or dared to stand next to Marcus any longer. ‘Confirmation of what?’
‘The 25’ers commit murder for payment. Just like the Ku Klux Klan and The Order and …’
He gasped for breath.
‘They earn money by killing people they would like to eliminate anyway,’ he whispered. ‘I was the one who brought them here. My contact – or whoever he contacted – must have found out that the person I wanted killed was gay, and passed the job on to The 25’ers. So simple. So … clinical. I’m the one who has financed the murders of six Norwegians. I didn’t even know that Niclas Winter … my brother … was gay too. I set a monster free. I …’
He staggered backwards as the huge window exploded. A freezing cold wind rushed into the room. Shards of glass lay everywhere like fragments of ice. The dogs were howling. Rolf stood there with the heavy floor lamp in his hand, ready to strike again.
‘You killed someone for this?’ he yelled. ‘You decided to buy a murderer? For a fucking Nazi place in Holmenkollen? For expensive cars and a bloody wine cellar? You’ve turned into one of them, Marcus! You’ve turned into a fucking capitalist!’
With a roar he braced himself, lifted the two-metre tall lamp with six kilos of lead in its base and smashed it into the next window with all his strength.
‘We would have managed without all this! I’m a vet, for fuck’s sake! You’re well educated! Things could have been just as good without …’
He was on the way to the next window when the doorbell rang.
He stood there, frozen to the spot.
It rang again.
Marcus heard nothing. He had sunk down into the armchair, among pieces of glass and broken lampshade. The dogs were running around barking. One of them had a badly cut paw, leaving a trail of blood across the floor as the terrified animal disappeared into the hallway.
‘I set a monster free,’ Marcus whispered, closing his eyes.
He registered voices from the hallway, but he didn’t hear what they were saying.
‘A monster,’ he whispered again, then stood up and walked across the room.
‘It’s the police,’ Rolf sobbed from the doorway. ‘Marcus! The police are here.’
But Marcus was no longer there. He had gone into his study and sat down on his calfskin-covered desk chair behind the desk made of polished silver birch. The door was closed but not locked. When he heard Rolf call out again, he opened the top drawer, where he had placed the pistol from the gun cupboard in readiness.
He removed the safety catch and placed the barrel to his temple.
‘Tell them the whole story,’ he said, even though no one could hear him. ‘And take good care of our son.’
The last thing Marcus Koll Junior heard was Rolf’s scream and just a fraction of the short, sharp report.
*
A short man accompanied by a fat African-American came towards Richard Forrester as he approached passport control at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The queue looked endless, and for a brief moment it occurred to him that they were perhaps going to offer him special privileges as a first-class passenger, allowing him to go ahead of all the other travellers. He smiled encouragingly as the smaller of the two men looked at him and asked: ‘Richard Forrester?’
‘Yes?’
The man took out an ID card, which was very easy to recognize. He began to speak. Richard’
s voice disappeared. There was a rushing sound in his ears, and he felt so hot. Too hot. He tugged at his tie, he couldn’t get his breath.
‘… the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in …’
Richard Forrester closed his eyes and listened to the drone of the Miranda warning that seemed to be coming from somewhere far, far away. Something had gone wrong, and for the life of him he couldn’t work out what it was. There wasn’t a trace of him anywhere. No prints. No photos. He had only been in England, on a business trip relating to his small but well-run travel company.
‘Do you understand?’
He opened his eyes. It was the fat man who had asked. His voice was rough and deep, and he glared at Richard as he repeated: ‘Do you understand?’
‘No,’ said Richard Forrester, holding out his hands as the smaller man requested. ‘I don’t understand a thing.’
*
‘Adam,’ Johanne said quietly, moving close to his sleeping body. ‘Wasn’t there anything we could have done to prevent that suicide?’
‘No,’ he mumbled, turning over. ‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know.’
The time was 2.35 in the morning on Sunday 18 January 2009. Adam licked his lips and half sat up to have a drink of water.
‘I can’t sleep,’ Johanne whispered.
‘I’ve noticed,’ he smiled. ‘But it has been rather an eventful day, after all.’
‘I’m so glad you caught the last flight home.’
‘Me too.’
She kissed him on the cheek and wriggled into the crook of his arm. The worn old leather-bound diary was still lying on Adam’s bedside table. He had shown it to her, but hadn’t let her read any of it. No one else knew of its existence. The highly personal contents had affected him deeply. Religious musings, philosophical observations. Accounts of everyday life. The story of how a homosexual man had created a child with a lesbian woman, about the happiness and the pain of it, the shame. All in small, ornate handwriting that seemed almost feminine. As soon as Adam had landed at Gardermoen he had decided to write a report on the key elements relating to the murder of Eva Karin Lysgaard, and to make it look as if Erik had told him everything. No one else would ever see the diary.
‘I’m sure he’s not going to convert after this,’ Adam said quietly.
As early as their second meeting, Lukas had mentioned Erik’s fascination with Catholicism. The young man had actually smiled when he talked about his parents’ trip to Boston the previous autumn. Eva Karin was a delegate attending a world ecumenical congress, and Erik had visited the city’s Catholic churches. What neither Eva Karin nor Lukas knew was that he had gone to confession. He had a theological background, and could pass for a Catholic if he so wished. His conversation with the priest in the confessional was reproduced in detail in the brown leather-bound diary. It had been Erik’s very first confidential discussion about the great lie of his life that was so difficult to bear.
‘Do you think it’s the priest? Is he something to do with The 25’ers?’
Johanne was whispering, even though she had let the children stay over with her parents. They had looked after them while she was with Silje Sørensen, and both children had flatly refused to come home when she eventually turned up to collect them, puffing and panting.
‘Who knows? The priest or someone connected with him. Catholics have a certain … tradition when it comes to taking the law into their own hands, you could say. At any rate, it’s clear Erik never spoke to anyone else about this, and I think it’s out of the question that Eva Karin would have had another confidante apart from Martine. I’ve met Martine. Eva Karin didn’t need anyone else, believe me. A really lovely woman. Very wise. Warm.’
He smiled in the darkness.
‘Anyway, the Americans will clear things up now. It turns out the FBI had quite a lot of information already. They just needed this … key. We’ve given them so much information they think they’ll probably be able to blow the entire organization apart. Back here the investigation is firing on all cylinders. We’ll be mapping the movements of all American citizens over the past few months. We can combine and compare information from all six murders now we know they’re linked. We’ll be—’
‘The picture,’ Johanne interrupted him. ‘The artist’s sketch, that was what led to the breakthrough. For the Americans and for us. Silje told me it took the FBI only nine hours to establish the identity of one of the perpetrators. The driving licence register combined with information about travel between Europe and the States over the past few months was enough to identify the man. That drawing solved the entire case.’
‘True. It’s quite frightening to think how surveillance actually works. This will be grist to the mill for those who want to see more of that kind of thing.’
Adam kissed the top of her head.
‘The picture was important,’ he went on. ‘You’re right there. But it was mostly down to you, sweetheart.’
They both fell silent.
‘Adam … ?’
‘Yes.’
‘If they do destroy The 25’ers, sooner or later a new organization will emerge that stands for the same thing. Thinks the same way. Does the same kind of thing.’
‘Yes. I’m sure you’re right.’
‘Here in Norway, too?’
‘In some ways that’s in our hands, I suppose.’
The silence went on for so long that Adam’s breathing fell into a slower, deeper rhythm.
‘Adam … ?’
‘I think we should get some sleep now, sweetheart.’
‘Have you never believed in God?’
She could hear that he was smiling.
‘No.’
‘Why not? Not even when Elisabeth and Trine died and—’
He carefully moved his arm and gently pushed her away.
‘I really would like to go to sleep now. And you should do the same.’
The bed bounced as he turned on to his side with his back to her. She shuffled after him, feeling his body like a big, warm wall against her own nakedness. It took him less than a minute to get back to sleep.
‘Adam,’ she whispered, as quietly as she could. ‘Sometimes I believe in God. A little bit, anyway.’
He laughed, but in his sleep.
EPILOGUE / PROLOGUE
May 1962
The Encounter
Eva Karin has just turned sixteen, and she has a dress made of pale blue polyester.
Her mother made it, just as she has made every single dress Eva Karin has ever owned. This is the best one of all, and the first with an adult cut – a Jackie Kennedy dress she didn’t even get around to wishing for. She didn’t get around to wishing for anything at all. She didn’t give her birthday a thought.
There has been no room for anything apart from this one huge thing, this terrible thing that has to go away.
When she opened her present she had to pretend she was happy. As if it were possible for her to be happy. Her mother was so overjoyed with the beautiful material and her fine stitching that she didn’t notice how Eva Karin was feeling.
No one can see how Eva Karin is feeling. Except God, if He exists.
She put on the dress when she got up this morning. Her mother was annoyed; she was supposed to save it until 17 May, Norway’s National Day. Eva Karin said she didn’t want to be late for school, and hadn’t got time to change. Her mother gave in. She was also a little proud, Eva Karin could see that. Dark-eyed, black-haired Eva Karin with the ice-blue dress that made her look American.
She had hidden the ballerina pumps in her bag. She changed out of her sensible walking shoes as soon as she was out of sight.
Eva Karin has dressed up to die.
She doesn’t want anyone she knows to find her body. She is heading up to Løvstakken, all the way up; her younger siblings are too little to go up there, and her mother and father never set foot there either.
The air is sharp and clear. It’s chilly, an
d she pulls the golf jacket more tightly around her. She has to look where she’s going. There are roots and stones on the track, and she doesn’t want her ballerina pumps to get dirty.
Her father doesn’t believe in God.
Eva Karin wants to believe in God.
She has prayed so hard.
She has read His book, which she has to hide in her underwear drawer so that her father won’t find it. Religion is the opium of the people, he frequently growls, and Eva Karin and her siblings are the only children she knows who have not been baptized and confirmed. She has read and searched in the forbidden Bible, but all she finds is condemnation.
God and her father are in agreement on just one thing: people like her have no right to live.
People like her must be spoken about using a particular language. A particular language consisting of looks, gestures and words which actually mean something else, but when they are used about people like her, they acquire a dark meaning that she cannot live with.
She always thought it was only men who were like that.
They exist, she knows they exist, because they are the ones who become the object of those ambiguous words, those looks, those obscene gestures the boys make behind Mr Berstad’s back, making the girls snigger. All except Eva Karin, who blushes.
She stops for a moment. The sun is shining down through the fresh new leaves. The ground looks as if it is covered with shimmering liquid gold. Dense carpets of wood anemones surround the trees, protecting the roots. The birds are singing, and high above the treetops, white fluffy clouds drift by.
She has been going out with Erik for six months now.
Erik is nice. He never touches her. Doesn’t want to kiss and cuddle, doesn’t grope her the way her friends tell her the other boys do. Erik reads books and works hard in school. They drink tea together, and Erik sometimes shows her a few of the poems he has written, which are not particularly good. Eva Karin enjoys Erik’s company. She feels safe. She feels calm when she is with Erik. Not like when she sees Martine.