Deadly Zeal

by Jean Chapman

  ‘I’ll speak to Oslo,’ Betterson said briskly.

  Cannon let out his breath as turning a corner the road sank softly down towards a wooded fjord, but that relief was short-lived as he heard an engine noise coming closer and louder overhead. The white underbody of a white, blue and red helicopter with the huge letters POLITI came low in front of the car, for seconds filled his windscreen. It flew alongside him for a bit as if certifying his identity, then swept up and away following the road to Tromsø.

  He was reassured, it was a comfort to know the police knew exactly where he was. He was not alone.

  But what happened if they buzzed the taxi? If Bliss became alarmed, he was now so steeped in innocent blood one more victim would be quite inconsequential to him.

  Cannon had two courses of action. He was not armed but he could put his foot down and try to catch up with the taxi, and hope he could deal with Bliss – he was doing that anyway, he thought. The other thing was he could pass on his assessment of the situation to Liz, who could caution the police about the type of schizophrenic man they were dealing with.

  He pressed contact 1 on his phone and Liz answered at once.

  ‘What’s happening your end?’ he asked first.

  ‘We’ve sailed for Tromsø, we’ve a forensic officer on board, and Oslo are sending helicopters.’

  ‘One’s just had a look at me. I’m afraid for the driver if they buzz the taxi Bliss is in.’

  ‘Orders to …’ Liz’s voice broke up into crackly, unrecognizable static, coming back in with, ‘So they’ve thought of that. Will you …’ And she was gone; complete silence.

  Did his phone need charging? Was he out of signal range? He glanced quickly at the valley he was driving down into. The great snow-covered hills were probably cutting off all signals. Then he saw ahead and to his left a black shape, stark among the shining whiteness, clinging to every slope and tree. A car? The taxi?

  It was well down a kind of track, a footpath. Surely no one went down there intentionally in a vehicle? He braked and, in spite of the chains, slid on a layer of hard-packed snow into the side verge. He threw open the door, snatching the key from the ignition, and went running, slipping and sliding down the track.

  It was certainly the taxi but he approached it much quicker than he intended. The slope increased and it was all he could do to stop himself crashing into tree stumps and stumbling over fallen branches. He began to feel the slope must be almost vertical, and he finally stopped himself with both hands hard on the side of the Toyota.

  Anyone within a kilometre must have heard his approach, he thought, so there could not be anyone alive, or conscious, inside the vehicle, or anywhere near.

  Pushing himself upright, he saw the far back door and the driver’s door were both open – and there was blood on the driving seat. He prayed it was blood from an accidental crash.

  He pawed his way round to that side of the car. Here there was a confusion of disturbed snow and vegetation, and blood spots in the snow stood out like beacons. These led away from the car, and he followed the lead as quickly as he could. Did he call out? Not yet, he decided, for the blood spots were getting much closer together, and it seemed whoever was bleeding must be the driver.

  The side of this fjord looked precipitous right down to the water some hundred metres below, where there was a path or a road around the shoreline. If whoever was injured had gone down there, they were going to take some recovering.

  But the trail of blood told its own story. The man had tried to keep on the same level line going away from the taxi, then the spots began to go upwards, from branch to stump, stump to trunk, upwards half, a quarter of a metre at a time.

  Cannon was forced to pause and take breath, so how an injured man was faring he could not imagine. He looked around, listened. He had never seen such spectacular scenery in all his life – a manhunt in paradise – and, as he was still, he heard something between a stifled sob and a groan.

  ‘Hello,’ he called softly. ‘If you are the driver of the taxi I’ve come in your brother’s car to look for you.’

  The groan turned into a deep, heartfelt sob, sounding very close, intimate, in this dense patch of firs. Cannon moved cautiously across the slope from tree to tree. ‘I’ve come from your brother’s office in Harstad to help …’ he ventured. ‘Where are you? Speak to me.’

  A hoarse whisper came. ‘To your left, I can see you. I’m here, here. Please come …’

  Hanging on to a low branch of one fir, Cannon half swung his way across to the next. Sitting with his back to the butt, he found a man whose dark distinct eyebrows and deep-set eyes echoed those of his elder brother.

  Blood had soaked his blue shirt collar and dripped from the sleeve of his black leather jacket – and he looked terrified.

  ‘OK, so my name’s John Cannon and I’m going to look after you,’ Cannon reassured him as he gingerly eased the slashed jacket collar from the young man’s neck to begin to assess the wound. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Name’s Albin. I didn’t think anyone would find me. I’m not bleeding to death, am I? My back feels …’

  ‘Not going to let that happen, Albin,’ Cannon stated. ‘but we must ease you out of this jacket. I was taught first aid when I was a young policeman,’ he said, very evenly, very calmly, ‘and while we do that can you tell me where your passenger went? It’s important.’

  ‘He tried to murder me,’ Albin began, and relief at being found released a flood of information. ‘A helicopter came low over the car. I glanced up and caught a glimpse of a knife near the back of my neck. I swerved, came off the road, hit a kind of track, plunged down – but he still tried to stab me with the knife, I saw the blade flash. The second time I—’ He broke off, swallowed hard before going on. ‘When the car came to a stop, I’d undone my seatbelt and I fell out – I just lay still – I think he thought he’d done for me.’

  Cannon, seeing the extent of bleeding and the depth of the slash down the boy’s back, thought but for the crash, the leather jacket and the grace of God, Albin might well have done for. He gritted his teeth and summoned up the skills he had learned as a rookie cop for such emergencies. He peeled off Albin’s shirt and made a pad, then his own, and tore that into strips to secure the pad.

  ‘There’s no arterial bleeding,’ he reassured the young driver, but he reached for his mobile again. Still no signal.

  ‘He intended to kill me, I saw it in his eyes.’

  ‘So did you see where he went?’

  ‘I’ve seen eyes like that before, a dog who turned killer … evil.’

  ‘Did you see where he went?’ Cannon repeated the question.

  ‘We had to shoot it,’ Albin said, then returning from that horror to the present he refocused on Cannon.

  ‘Down,’ he answered at last, ‘down towards the roadway at the edge of the fjord. I heard the helicopter again, thought it was coming back, and I saw him looking up. That was when he plunged down towards the water. He’s on the run, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ Cannon answered unreservedly, draping Albin’s jacket back around his shoulders. ‘Do you think you could walk as far as your brother’s car if I help you?’

  Albin nodded, and as Cannon assisted him to his feet, he asked, ‘So is this man a murderer?’

  ‘A multi-murderer,’ Cannon said.

  ‘A serial killer,’ Albin said.

  Cannon opened his mouth to deny this – and yet this was just what Bliss, the mild professor who had been the star of his pub quiz team, was – and this young man would have been his latest victim but for the grace of God.

  ‘You knew him?’ Albin asked as they paused before beginning the climb.

  ‘I’m beginning to,’ Cannon replied, ‘and I have to catch up with him before—’

  ‘He murders someone else,’ Albin supplied.

  ‘Before he murders one man in particular,’ he said, adding silently, One who’s supposed to be in my charge, as he propped Albin on his uninjured si
de.

  Albin was young and strong but the pad on his back had not completely stopped the bleeding. He needed urgent medical attention. The bleeding was not improved when to get him to the roadway Cannon was forced to give him a fireman’s lift for the last gruelling fifty metres. Draped over his shoulder, the blood began to drip again from Albin’s fingertips.

  They were in sight of the road and the hire car when a motorist drove by. Cannon raised a hand urgently but although he thought the driver glanced his way, he did not stop. Then a timber lorry thundered past – again he lifted a hand. It screeched to a halt.

  ‘Going to put you down,’ he told Albin.

  The young man’s knees gave way and as Cannon supported him in a sitting position, a short, burly man with powerful shoulders climbed down from his cab and ran towards them.

  ‘What’s happened?

  ‘We need an ambulance. I’ve no signal on my phone,’ Cannon said, ‘his back’s badly gashed.’

  The driver noted the blood down Albin’s arm. ‘I’ll call my base on my radio, I’ll be able to get through to them – tell them to call the air ambulance.’

  He ran back to his lorry. It seemed an age before he returned, though it was only minutes, and he brought a first aid box with him. His base had contacted the emergency services and confirmed that the ambulance was on its way.

  ‘There’s an area some two kilometres or so further on where there’s a fork down to the fjord and also a big enough clearing for a helicopter to put down. I’ve told them we’ll be there but I think we should perhaps try to stop the bleeding before we move him further.’

  They mutually decided to apply another firmer pad over the makeshift dressing. This done, Cannon asked for the use of the radio to contact the police.

  ‘So this is not a road accident,’ the lorry driver said when Cannon had finished giving details to the police, and Albin, very pale but calmer, had filled in a few details.

  ‘No,’ Cannon said, ‘and if you’ll help me get Albin into the car, as soon as I’ve seen him safely on his way to hospital I’m—’ Cannon broke off to ask, ‘You say where we’re to wait, a side track goes down to the waterside?’

  Chapter 22

  Cannon had realized that instead of plunging immediately down to the fjord, the track marked ‘Unsuitable for vehicles in wintry weather’ actually gained height before descending the far side of the hill in a series of hairpin bends.

  He reached the summit in time to see the air ambulance disappear over the next peaks to the north. He guessed he was not only above the tree line but almost directly above the road where the timber lorry would be again on its way. He had made a mental note of the lorry’s number and the firm. He would ensure that driver would receive proper thanks.

  Cannon estimated that the road snaking down, disappearing into the trees then glimpsed only briefly as a white straight line between the firs, must be ten, twelve times the distance a funicular would have to travel.

  He was still above the tree line when his mobile came back to life. It startled him, and he fumbled and dropped it into the floor of the passenger seat. He pulled over with the rueful thought that, after the wait to see Albin away, a few more minutes would hardly matter. But as he scooped up the phone he acknowledged he had known times when a few minutes, a few seconds even, had made the difference between life and death. Now it could mean the difference between catching or losing Bliss – between life and death for Higham or some other poor innocent.

  ‘Cannon,’ he answered.

  ‘It’s Toby.’ There was some excitement in his voice. ‘I thought you should know straightaway I’ve seen Bliss’s, or to be correct, Michael Evan’s father.’

  ‘And?’ Cannon said, ready to put the car into gear and move off again.

  ‘My old Professor Heaven is undoubtedly his son.’

  ‘And Bliss is Heaven,’ Cannon added.

  ‘Yes, and I don’t think there’s anything random about Bliss being in Norway. It was the professor who pointed me in the direction of my first appointment in Oslo, but what I did not know was that his grandmother was Norwegian and she had family interests in a big fish-canning business years ago. She left her grandson her house there. He apparently spent many holidays there with her. The father said his other son needed too much care and nursing to allow anyone else to go. The interesting thing is this property is practically on the route of the Hurtigruten ferries. It’s apparently near a place called Harstad. I’ve never heard of it but—’

  ‘I have,’ Cannon interrupted. ‘Bliss jumped ship there, I’m driving near there now trying to find him.’ He slipped the car into gear. ‘Have you an address for this property?’

  There was a moment’s silence as Toby absorbed this information, then he went on, ‘The old man thought it was called Villa Christofferson, or something like that, definitely had the name Christofferson in it, that’s all he could remember. He said neither his wife, nor he, had ever done anything about it.’

  ‘And his son Michael?’ Cannon asked.

  ‘He just said what he did was nothing to do with him. He could not even bring himself to speak his name. He talked of his younger son who died, and his wife. Eventually said the last time he had seen “the other one” was at his son’s funeral, and he had told him never to bother to come back.’

  ‘And it was coming back from his brother’s funeral that Bliss had the disastrous road crash. Seems to me,’ Cannon added as he negotiated the next hairpin bend, ‘it’s Bliss’s father who …’ He left the rest unsaid as he added, ‘Bliss has tried to kill a local taxi driver. Can you …’

  The bend negotiated in a one-handed, slithering, ungainly skid, Cannon thought he should ring off and concentrate. He didn’t need to; it seemed the lower altitude had already cut out the signal.

  He drove on as fast as he dare, shaking his head as he realized that none of this was haphazard, nothing was being left to chance. Bliss had planned all this – had planned to put the fear of God into Higham before jumping ship at Harstad, an area he had known since his childhood. He even had a ready-made bolt hole in the property his grandmother had left him.

  Cannon’s one break was that he now had a focus. To find this Christofferson villa had to be less of a shot in the dark than just driving around the side of the fjord in the hope of sighting Bliss, or of actually coming across another person he could ask. He’d seen no one since beginning this downward drive.

  He reached the bottom road without mishap, but now had the choice of a right or left turn along the waterfront. He decided that as none of Bliss’s previous actions had been random, it was possible the man had climbed down from the main road at a point which would bring him within reach of his inherited property.

  Calculating more or less where Bliss’s descent had been by the shape of the hilltop he had seen the air ambulance fly over, Cannon turned towards the open sea.

  There were certainly no houses or buildings of any kind at first, but then he came to a stretch where there were small wooden houses that looked like holiday homes, or summer cottages. Was Villa Christofferson something like this? It sounded grander. There was a shallow bay where wooden quays had been built, one or two had boats moored alongside, with shacks, or boathouses, nearby – and from the back of one of these huts smoke curled up into the blue sky.

  Cannon stopped and had just closed the car door when a tall grey-haired man in fishing smock and waterproof trousers came from behind the hut, wiping his hands on a cloth. He greeted Cannon in Norwegian, but quickly switched to the country’s second language.

  ‘You like a fish breakfast,’ the man asked, ‘caught this morning, just frying?’

  ‘If only I had the time,’ Cannon answered with a smile, ‘but I am looking for the Villa Christofferson.’

  ‘Christofferson Huset I know,’ the man replied, ‘but no one lives there.’

  ‘That’s the place,’ Cannon said.

  ‘You’re going to buy it?’

  ‘I am looking for the ma
n who owns it, and who I believe is in the area today.’

  ‘Ah!’ The fisherman beamed as if he had been given an unexpected gift. ‘That will be young Michael then – not so young now, of course – tell him Tomas, Tomas Midvinter, sends him greeting.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘As a boy, yes. We had many good adventures.’ He laughed expansively and looked about to reminisce at length. ‘We planned to sail around the world together.’

  ‘I would love to hear but my time is very short,’ Cannon said. ‘If you could direct me …’

  The directions given, Tomas Midvinter called after him, ‘Tell Michael I am here in the cabin.’

  Cannon raised a hand in acknowledgement of the message – a true answer would have taken some time.

  Even with directions, Cannon found it difficult to locate what Tomas had described as the back entrance to the property, a mere half a kilometre away from his fishing hut.

  It was only when he slowed to a walking pace that he finally spotted a break in the grass verge. He pulled in, got out, stooped beneath low growing trees and parted high dead grasses, finding stout wrought-iron gates between two green and moss-covered twisted brick pillars. ‘They match the chimney pots and greater front gates,’ Tomas had said. ‘It used to be a grand old place.’

  Cannon climbed over the immovable gates. The driveway was just as overgrown and he found he had strayed from the path on to what must originally have been lawns, but he could glimpse a building through the remaining copse of trees.

  This was more like it, he thought as he drew nearer, noting that although the snow cover was not thick and the unkempt grass poked through the whiteness everywhere, he could see no signs of footmarks. Christofferson Huset loomed larger and larger, until it was like coming across a fairy-tale palace in a wilderness. It was huge, three storeys, four where there were turrets at either end, yet its second-storey and heavily decorative roof facia gave it a homely, almost Hansel and Gretel feel. Cannon had to stop himself just wandering up to it and staring. It invited attention; it cried out for renovation.