The Kingdom

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘I’ve got to go home and sort something out,’ I called out.

  Uncle Bernard twisted the mouthpiece on the hose and cut off the stream.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Earthing problem.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Is it that urgent?’

  ‘Carl’s got to have power tonight,’ I said. ‘Some school stuff he has to finish. I’ll come back down afterwards.’

  ‘I see. Well, I’ll be off in half an hour, but you’ve got your own keys.’

  I got into the Volvo and drove. Kept to the speed limit, even though the chances of being stopped were low, considering that the village’s only lawman was lying at the bottom of a ravine.

  Carl was standing on Geitesvingen when I arrived. I parked in front of the house, turned off the engine, pulled on the handbrake.

  ‘Heard anything?’ I asked, nodding in the direction of Huken.

  Carl shook his head. He was quiet, and there was a wild look in his eyes. I’d never seen him like that before. His hair was sticking up all over the place, as though he’d been rubbing his head with his hands. His pupils were dilated, as though he were in shock. He probably was in shock, the poor bastard.

  ‘What happened?’

  Carl sat down in the middle of the bend, the way the goats often do. Bowed his head and hid his face in his hands. He cast a long, troll-like shadow across the gravel.

  ‘He came up here,’ he stammered. ‘He said you and him had been out fishing, and he started asking a lot of questions, and I...’ He clammed up.

  ‘Sigmund Olsen came here,’ I prompted, sitting down beside him. ‘He probably said I’d told him things and asked if you could confirm that I had messed about with you when you were underage.’

  ‘Yes!’ yelled Carl.

  ‘Shush!’ I said.

  ‘He said the best thing would be for us both to confess and get it over with as quickly as possible. The alternative was for him to use the evidence he had in a long, painful and very public court case. I said you’d never touched me, not like that, not...’ Carl spoke and gestured to the ground, as though I wasn’t even there. ‘He said it wasn’t uncommon for the victim to sympathise with the attacker in situations like this, that they took part of the responsibility themselves for what had taken place, especially if it had been going on for some time.’

  And I thought that, well, Sheriff Olsen had got that just about right.

  A sob broke from Carl’s lips. ‘Then he told me that Anna at the surgery had told Mum and Dad what we were doing just two days before they went over into Huken. Olsen said Dad knew it was bound to come out one day and that he, like the conservative Christian he was, couldn’t live with the shame.’

  And took Mum along with him, I thought. Instead of the two sodomites in the boys’ room.

  ‘I tried to tell him no, that wasn’t right, it was an accident. A pure accident, but he wouldn’t listen, on he went. Said Dad’s blood alcohol level was minimal and no one drives right off a corner like that when they’re sober. And then I got desperate, I realised he was really going to go ahead with it...’

  ‘Yep,’ I said, flicking away a sharp stone I was sitting on. ‘Olsen just wants to clear up his big fucking case.’

  ‘But what about us, Roy? Will we go to jail?’

  I grinned. Jail? Yeah, maybe so. I hadn’t even thought much about it. Because I knew that if the whole truth came out it was the shame I couldn’t live with, not the being in jail. Because if they, the others, the village found out, it wouldn’t just be the shame I had to deal with alone in the dark for so many years. The whole disgraceful, treacherous business would be exposed, condemned, ridiculed. The Opgard family would be humiliated. Maybe it’s an aberration of the personality, as people say, but Dad had understood the logic behind hara-kiri, and I did too. That death is the only way out for someone broken down by shame. On the other hand, you don’t want to die unless you have to.

  ‘We don’t have much time,’ I said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I was desperate,’ said Carl and glanced up at me the way he did when he was about to confess something. ‘So I said I knew it was an accident, that I could prove it.’

  ‘You said what?’

  ‘I had to say something, Roy! So I said one of the tyres had punctured, that that’s why they went over the edge. I mean, no one had checked anything at all on the car, they’d just winched up the bodies, that climber got hit by a loose boulder and after that no one dared go down there again. I said it wasn’t so surprising they never noticed the puncture, you can’t tell if a tyre’s got a puncture when the car’s on its back with the wheels sticking up in the air, but I said a couple of weeks ago I’d got a pair of binoculars and climbed down over the edge where there’s a couple of solid rocks you can hold on to and lean out so you can see the car. I said I saw how the left front tyre was noticeably a bit shrivelled, and that the puncture must have happened before the car went over the edge, because the undercarriage is completely undamaged, the car did a half somersault through thin air and landed on its roof, full stop.’

  ‘And Olsen bought that?’

  ‘No. He wanted to see for himself.’

  I could see where this was going. ‘So you fetched the binoculars, and...’

  ‘He climbed right out to the very edge, and...’ Carl let the breath burst from his lungs and continued, his eyes closed. ‘I heard the sound of stones loosening, a scream. Then he was gone.’

  Gone, I thought, but not completely gone.

  ‘Don’t you believe me?’

  I looked down into the abyss. A memory from when I was twelve, from my uncle Bernard’s fiftieth birthday gathering at the Grand Hotel, flickered through my mind. ‘You realise what this is going to look like?’ I said. ‘The sheriff comes up here to interview you in connection with a serious criminal investigation, and he ends up dead down there. If he is dead.’

  Carl nodded slowly. Of course he realised. That was why he had called me instead of the mountain rescue team, or the doctor.

  I stood up and dusted myself off. ‘Fetch the rope from the barn,’ I said. ‘The long one.’

  * * *

  —

  I fastened one end of the rope to the tow hitch of the car up by the house and the other round my waist. Then I began to walk down towards Geitesvingen with the rope uncoiling. I counted a hundred paces before it was taut. I was ten metres from the edge of the drop.

  ‘Now!’ I shouted. ‘And remember: slowly!’

  Carl gave me a thumbs up through the window of the Volvo and began to reverse.

  The trick was to keep the rope taut, I’d explained to him, and now there was no way back. I lay into the rope and headed towards the drop as though I was in a hurry to get us both down there. The edge was the worst. My body protested, it wasn’t as sure as my mind was that this would be OK and made me hesitant. The rope slackened because Carl didn’t notice that I’d stopped at the edge. I shouted to him to drive forward a bit, but he didn’t hear me. So I turned my back to Huken, took a step backwards and fell. It can’t have been more than a metre, but when the rope tightened round my waist it squeezed the breath out of me and I forgot to straighten my legs so that I hit the rock face with my knees and forehead as I was thrown inwards. I swore, managed to brace the soles of my shoes against the wall, and started to climb down the vertical stone wall. Looked up at the sky above me which was now pale blue and translucent and breaking up, already I could see a couple of stars. I could no longer hear the car, in fact there was complete silence. Maybe it was the silence, the stars and dangling weightless like that attached to a car that made me feel like an astronaut, floating in space and connected to a space capsule. I thought of Major Tom in Bowie’s song. For a moment I wished it could go on like that, and even end like that, that I could just float away.

  And then the wall came to an end, I touched
solid ground and watched the rope coiling like a cobra on the ground in front of me. Two, three coils and then the rope stopped. I followed it with my eyes to the top. Saw a tiny cloud of exhaust smoke. Carl must have stopped at the very edge. The rope had just been long enough and no more.

  I turned. I was standing on a scree of large and small stones that time had chewed loose from the walls surrounding me on all sides and deposited at the bottom. The drop down from Geitesvingen was vertical, but the walls of the sharp, lower pillars sloped slightly, so that the square of evening sky above me was larger than the roughly hundred square metres of rocky ground I was standing on. Nothing grew down here in this place that never saw so much as a glint of sunlight and had no smell either. Just rock. Space and rock.

  The spaceship, Dad’s black Cadillac DeVille, lay the way I had imagined it would that time the mountain rescue guys described the scene down here.

  The car was lying on its roof with its wheels in the air. The rear part of the coupé was squashed flat, with the front so little damaged you might even have supposed it possible for the passengers sitting there to have survived. Mum and Dad had been found outside the car; they’d been thrown through the windscreen when the front end hit the ground. The fact that they hadn’t been wearing seat belts strengthened the suicide theory, even though I had explained that Dad was against seat belts on principle. Not because he didn’t see the point, but because it was a mandatory requirement made by what he called the ‘nanny state’. The only reason Sheriff Olsen thought he’d seen Dad using the belt several times when driving in the village was that Dad would wear one when he thought the law was around, because he hated getting fined even more than he hated the nanny state.

  A raven stood on Sheriff Olsen’s stomach watching me cautiously, claws clutched around the big belt buckle with the buffalo skull. Olsen had landed in such a way that the lower half of his body lay across the back end of the chassis, with the rest of him hanging over the side and out of view from where I was standing. The raven’s head swivelled, following me as I made my way round the car. Broken glass crunched beneath my feet, and I had to use my hands to get past a couple of enormous loose boulders. The upper part of Olsen’s body hung down in front of the licence plate and the boot. The unusual ninety-degree angle at which his back was broken made him look like a scarecrow, a figure with no joints, straw stuffed inside clothes, with a mop hanging from its head, dripping with blood onto the stones below with a low, soft smacking sound. Hanging there with his hands in the air – that’s to say, towards the ground – as though trying to signal that he was giving up. Because as Dad always said: ‘If you’re dead then you’ve lost.’ Olsen was as dead as a dodo. And he smelled.

  I took a step closer, and the raven screeched at me without moving. It probably saw me as a kind of Arctic skua, that’s a sneaky type of seabird that lives by stealing food from other birds. I picked up a stone and threw it at the raven and it flew off with two shrieks, the one hate-filled and aimed at me, the other an expression of his own regret.

  Darkness was already swelling out from the mountainside and I had to work fast.

  Had to think through how we were going to get Olsen’s body up the rock face using just one rope and with a minimum risk of the body getting caught on something or sliding out of the rope. Because the human body is like a bloody Houdini. If you tie the rope around the chest, the arms and shoulders squeeze themselves together and the body slips out that way. Tie it to the belt buckle or round the waist and drag the body up like a trussed shrimp and at some point the centre of gravity will move and the body tip upside down and slip out of the rope or out of his trousers. I decided that the simplest thing would be to make a slip knot and tie it round his neck. The centre of gravity would be so low that he couldn’t tip in any direction and with the head and shoulders clearing the way there was less chance of him getting caught on something. And of course you might well ask yourself how come I knew how to tie a knot that’s usually only learned by people who intend to hang themselves.

  I worked systematically, concentrating entirely on the practical aspects. I’m good at that. I knew that these were images that would come back again – Olsen as a gaping figurehead mounted on the stern of a black spaceship – but that would be another time, another place.

  It was dark by the time I called up to Carl that the package was ready. I had to call him three times, he had Whitney Houston on the car’s CD player and the sound of her singing ‘I will always love you’ was echoing across the mountains. He started the engine and I heard him riding the clutch to keep it going slowly enough. The rope tightened and I held round the body, helped it over to the rock face where I let go. Stood below and watched as it rose to the heavens like an angel with neck outstretched. Slowly it was swallowed up by the dark until all I could hear was the scraping sound of the body against the rock. Then a brief swishing noise through the dark and the crack of something hard hitting the ground just a few metres away from me. Shit, the body must have dislodged some rocks, and there could be more. I took shelter in the only place there was shelter. Crawled in through the windscreen of the Cadillac. Sat there and looked at the dials on the instrument panel, tried to read them upside down. Thought of what came next. How to deal with the next part of the plan. The practical details, everything that had to be done right, other options if something went wrong with plan A. It must have been this simple act of thinking that made me feel calmer. The situation was crazy, of course. I was trying to cover up the fact that a man was dead, and that settled me down. Or maybe it wasn’t these practical thoughts but the smell. The smell of the leather seats, impregnated with Dad’s sweat, Mum’s cigarettes and perfume, and Carl’s vomit from the time we drove to the city in the newly purchased Cadillac and he got carsick and puked over the seats even before we’d navigated all the hairpin bends on the way down to the village. Mum put out her cigarette, wound down the window and took a wad of tobacco from Dad’s silvery snuffbox. But Carl carried on puking as we drove out of the village, so suddenly and without any warning that he never had time to open the sick bag and the coupé stank like a fucking gas chamber even with all the windows open. Carl had lain down in the back seat with his head in my lap, closed his eyes and everything had calmed down. After Mum had wiped up the sick she’d handed us the bag of biscuits, and Dad had sung ‘Love Me Tender’ at half speed and with double vibrato. Looking back on it I recalled it as the best trip we ever had.

  * * *

  —

  The rest happened quickly.

  Carl tossed the rope down, I tied myself in, called up that I was ready and I made my way up the rock face the same way I had come down, like a film shown backwards. I couldn’t see what I was standing on, but nothing came loose. If I hadn’t just nearly been hit on the head I would have said the mountain was quite safe.

  Olsen was laid out on Geitesvingen, in the light from the Volvo’s headlamps. There weren’t many visible signs of external damage to the body. His mane of hair was soaked in blood, one hand looked as though it had been crushed, and he had livid markings on his neck from the slip knot. I don’t know whether it was discolouring from the rope, or if a fresh corpse can haemorrhage. But of course, there was a broken spine in there, and enough internal injuries for a pathologist to be able to determine that the cause of death was not exactly hanging. And not drowning either.

  I stuck my hand into one of Olsen’s wet back pockets, fished out his car keys, and in the other found the bunch of keys he had used when he locked the boathouse.

  ‘Go and fetch Dad’s hunting knife,’ I said.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘It’s hanging in the entrance hall, next to the shotgun. Get a move on.’

  While Carl ran back to the house I took out the snow shovel any mountain dweller has in the back of the car all year round, scooped up the gravel where Olsen had been dragged and tossed it down into Huken, vanishing without a sound.

>   ‘Here,’ said Carl, panting.

  He handed me the knife, the one with the grooves in the blade that I had used to finish off Dog.

  And now, as then, Carl was standing behind me and looking away as I used the knife. I grabbed hold of Olsen’s mop of hair, holding his head the same way I had held Dog, put the point of the blade in his forehead, forced it through the skin until it hit bone, then cut an angled circle down and around the head, directly above the ear and the knotty clump of bone at the top of the neck, the point of the blade all the time following the line of the cranium. Dad had shown me how you flay a fox, but this was different. This was scalping.

  ‘Move, Carl, you’re blocking the light.’

  I heard Carl turn towards me, yawn and walk round to the other side of the car.

  As I worked away at loosening the bottom of the head from the scalp I heard Whitney Houston start singing again, about how she would never, absolutely bloody never, stop loving you.

  * * *

  —

  We spread rubbish bags along the floor of my Volvo, pulled off Sigmund Olsen’s snakeskin boots and loaded the mangled corpse into the boot. Then I sat behind the wheel of Olsen’s Peugeot, glanced in the mirror and adjusted the scalp. Even with that mop of fair hair on my head I didn’t look like Sigmund Olsen, but when I put on his sunglasses the illusion was good enough to fool anyone seeing me from outside, in the dark, who would be hardly likely to suppose that it wasn’t the sheriff driving his own car.

  I drove slowly, but not too slowly, through the village. No need to blow the horn or attract attention in some other way. A couple of people out walking and I saw their heads automatically turn and knew their brains would register the sheriff’s car and half consciously wonder where he was off to, at any rate he was heading out along the lakeside. Maybe in their half-asleep farmers’ brains they figured he was off to his cabin, if they knew where that was.