Inborn

by Thomas Enger

  Maybe our mother’s years of neglect and blatant drinking had had more of an impact on him than on me. He was, after all, two years younger. And maybe, just maybe, the apple indeed doesn’t fall too far from the tree. Maybe he became a murderer because my mother was one. And maybe his rages, like our mother’s, were impossible to control because they were just a part of who he was.

  I would never be able to forgive him, though. And I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with him ever again. He’d killed Mari. Our half-sister. If he hadn’t done that, Imo wouldn’t have killed Johannes. And Børre. Imo himself would not have been dead right now.

  Before I gave the signal to Mork, who’d been listening to everything Tobias and I had said via a microphone that was taped to my chest, I wanted to give my brother a few more minutes of normality, a moment or two of youth before his life would change forever.

  I picked up my controller. With a nod to the screen I asked him if we should play another game. He looked at me for a long time. As his eyes started to flood with tears, he nodded.

  88

  NOW

  Tobias stares at the surface of the table in front of him. He seems far too small for his suit. He has lost a lot of weight since Yngve Mork arrested him last autumn. He hasn’t bothered to shave his stubble. Even in a suit he manages to look unkempt.

  Tobias never said he was sorry. Not to me, or anyone else. He never tried to express remorse to Mari’s parents, either, and he’s made no effort to catch my eye when the judge excused me and told me I could leave the courtroom. My brother has never even confessed formally, which was why all of us were called as witnesses.

  But I am done with him now. I am done with the case.

  I am ready to move on, although I’m sure the events in Fredheim last October will stay with me till the day I die. Everybody knows who I am now. Whenever people hear my name, whenever the people of Fredheim see me, they think of the crazy members of my family and what happened in our small community during the course of a few wet and cold autumn days.

  I wonder if Mum, too, will become a pariah after all this. I’ve told all of Norway how she slapped me, how I’d suspected her of killing my father. Maybe she will hate me for the rest of her life, disown me and drink herself to death, like Imo suggested she would. Or maybe she will want us to move again, perhaps to a bigger city where it’s easier to disappear and forget. I don’t know. I don’t even want to think about that right now.

  Maybe the good people of Norway will think that I have it in me, too – the ability and the natural instinct to kill someone if my buttons are pushed hard enough. That it somehow runs in the family, and that you really can’t escape it, no matter how hard you try. I don’t know about that either. Right now I don’t even care. I just want to leave the courtroom and go home.

  EPILOGUE

  A few weeks after the trial was over, Yngve had another talk with God. It was during one of the many nights when sleep was hard to find.

  He didn’t ask Him if Åse was fine now, because he knew she was at peace, that she wasn’t angry with him anymore for not assisting her when she had desperately wanted it all to end. He didn’t have to ask if he could see her again, either, because he still did, on and off, at random hours and in random places.

  Instead Yngve asked whether God put any stock in Manchester United’s new manager. If He couldn’t provide them all with a mild winter for a change. He wanted the Big Man to keep a watchful eye over Fredheim the next few years, too, so Yngve could retire and not be alerted too often by the sound of sirens, the sound of misery and heartache.

  He hadn’t got any answers this time around, either.

  It was Sunday, and he was enjoying his newspaper. He was having a cup of coffee as well, his third one of the day. The radio was on. He was listening to a geography quiz, ’Around the World in Eighty Seconds’, and he rejoiced whenever he managed to answer before the contestants.

  He took another sip and turned the page.

  Could you put the kettle on, please, Yngve?

  He got up and went to the cupboard above the stove. He opened it and stopped. Looked at the yellow package, still in its plastic wrapping.

  He took it out and gave it a gentle squeeze, lifted it to his nose, astonished that he could still smell the tea through the plastic.

  The phone rang.

  It was Therese Kyrkjebø.

  Yngve put the tea down. He was on call again, and he always feared the worst when one of his co-workers rang. He answered and heard a quiet sob at the other end. For a brief moment he was afraid that something terrible had struck the lovely town of Fredheim once again.

  ‘He’s here,’ Therese said with a sniff. ‘He came last night. It’s a boy!’

  Yngve exhaled with a smile. At first he couldn’t get a word out, because he was thinking about God again.

  ‘How wonderful,’ Yngve said as the tears emerged from his eyes. ‘I’m so happy for you, Therese. My warmest congratulations.’

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  God, I don’t even know where to begin.

  But I guess Even Tollefsen’s story, for me, began back in 2015 when lightning struck me – in the form of my wife. Yes, she can do that from time to time, and no, it’s not a euphemism. We were in the kitchen, preparing dinner for the pack of wolves in the house, when I decided to run an idea by her. I probably had a glass of wine in my hand when I said, ‘So basically I have a story in mind about a teenage boy whose girlfriend is found dead inside his school early one morning. She broke up with him two days before, and she’s been murdered before he’s had a chance to ask her why. Everyone in the small town thinks he did it, because he was angry and potentially jealous. I don’t know yet if this is a young-adult book, where we just follow the main character’s trials and tribulations, or if it’s a normal crime novel for a normal crimefiction reading audience, where you focus on the investigative part and hunt down the killer.’

  My wife thought about this for about four and a half seconds, then looked at me with a slight shrug and said: ‘Why can’t you do both?’

  First, I didn’t know what to say. Write two novels about the same story? Who the hell does that? The quick answer was, no one. No one had published two novels at the same time, one for the YA audience and one for adults. And thus my mind started to contemplate and process the idea of doing exactly that. And the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of writing two books that ended the same way, but where the roads travelled would differ considerably. Uncharted territory, right? I was picturing Oprah Winfrey’s book club going crazy about giving one book to the parents and the other to the kids in the household, and then they could all talk about it afterwards.

  I wrote the YA novel first. Had a lot of fun with it, too. But for some reason, I just couldn’t find the perfect way to do the adult one. I got pretty close, but my Norwegian publisher thought I should move on and write something else. Which I did. You listen to your publisher, right? I had spent two years on the project, the dots and commas and endless rewrites making my hair evermore grey. In the meantime, the YA book, in Norwegian called Killer Instinct, had already been published.

  Almost a year and a half later, my brilliant English publisher, Karen Sullivan, read Kari Dickson’s translation of Killer Instinct and said, ‘There is some untapped potential here. This story could really work as an adult/YA crossover. Would you mind adding some elements to this story, Thomas?’

  My initial thought was: God, no. No way. I can’t do that. Really, I can’t. I was finished with that story. I had moved on. But Karen, being Karen, managed to persuade me. Whoever said that ‘writing is rewriting’ was one hundred percent right. So, I rolled up my sleeves and got cracking at it once again. A lot of the work had already been done, so it was just a matter of constructing the story slightly differently and basically rewriting the whole bloody thing. And because we were up against it timewise, I had to do it all in English as well. But hey, you listen to your publisher, right?

&
nbsp; I guess sometimes things just happen for a reason. In this case, I think the story just wasn’t supposed to be told to a wider audience until Karen got her hands on it. So thank you, Karen, for being so wonderfully brilliant in so many ways. You truly are an amazing woman, editor, publisher and friend.

  A huge thank-you also to West Camel, who gave me invaluable advice and the thumbs-ups as I went ahead with the rewrite. You also took a great deal of care over the edited version and made my English sound a lot better than it normally does. I could not have done this without you.

  And of course, the Team. With a capital T. Team Orenda. You know who you are. I love all of you. Even you, Antti.

  The biggest thank-you, as always, goes to my wonderful family, who continue to support and to baffle me in all kinds of ways. To my wife: Thank you for the lightning strikes. (You listen to your wife, right?) You’re brilliant.

  —Thomas Enger, Oslo, 8th January 2019

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Thomas Enger is a former journalist. He made his debut with the crime novel Burned in 2010, which became an international sensation before publication and marked the first in the bestselling Henning Juul series. Rights to the series have been sold to 31 countries to date. In 2013 Enger published his first book for young adults, a dark fantasy thriller called The Evil Legacy, for which he won the U-prize (best book, Young Adult). Killer Instinct, upon which Inborn is based and which is another Young Adult suspense novel, was published in Norway in 2017 and won the same prestigious prize. Most recently, Thomas has cowritten a thriller with Jørn Lier Horst. Enger also composes music, and he lives in Oslo.

  Follow him on Twitter @EngerThomas on Facebook: www.facebook.com/thomas.enger.77 or visit: www.thomasenger.com

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Kari Dickson grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland, but spent most of her summers in Norway with grandparents who couldn’t speak English, so spoke Norwegian from an early age. She went on to read Scandinavian Studies at UCL. While working in theatre in London, she was asked to do literal translations of two Ibsen plays, which fuelled her interest in Norwegian literature and led to an MA in Translation at the University of Surrey. Having worked initially as a commercial translator, including some years at the central bank of Norway, she now concentrates solely on literature. Her portfolio includes literary fiction, crime, non-fiction and plays. Her translation of Roslund & Hellström’s Three Seconds won the CWA International Dagger in 2011. Kari currently teaches Norwegian language, literature and translation in the Scandinavian Studies department at the University of Edinburgh.

  Copyright

  Orenda Books

  16 Carson Road

  West Dulwich

  London SE21 8HU

  www.orendabooks.co.uk

  First published in Norwegian as Killerinstinkt, 2017

  Copyright © Thomas Enger, 2019

  English translation copyright © Kari Dickson, 2019

  Thomas Enger has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978–1–912374–47–2

  eISBN 978–1–912374–48–9

  This book has been translated with financial support from NORLA