by Jo Nesbo
When I arrived at the cabin I drove down to the boathouse and turned off the engine but left the keys in the ignition. Switched off the headlights, not because anyone else lived within view but because you never know. If someone who knew Sigmund Olsen drove by and saw lights they might decide to drop in to say hello. I wiped off the steering wheel, the gearstick, the door handles. Looked at my watch. Carl had been told to drive my Volvo to the workshop, park outside so that it was clearly visible, open the place with the keys I had given him and turn on the lights so that it looked as though I was at work. Leave Olsen’s body where it was, in the boot of the car. Wait twenty minutes or so, check first there was no one walking down the road when he pulled out from the workshop, and then join me at the cabin.
I unlocked the boathouse and dragged out the dinghy. It rumbled as it glided over the track of horizontal timbers until at last the lake received the boat with what sounded like a sigh of relief. I dried the snakeskin boots with a cloth, dropped Sigmund Olsen’s bunch of keys into the right boot, tossed both boots into the dinghy and pushed it out onto the water. Stood there and watched as it glided out towards the great unknown and felt almost proud of myself. The business with the boots was a touch of genius, as people say. I mean, when they find an empty boat with just keys and a pair of boots, what else can you say? And aren’t the boots in themselves a kind of suicide note, an announcement that your wanderings on this earth are over? Yours sincerely, the depressed sheriff. You might almost say it was beautiful if it wasn’t so fucking idiotic. Fall a hundred metres down a gulley right in front of someone you’re investigating. Completely fucking unbelievable. In fact, I was far from sure I believed it myself. And as I stood there thinking all this, the idiocy just got more idiotic as the boat started drifting back towards the shore. I shoved it again, harder this time, but the same thing happened again, and a minute later the keel was rubbing against the lakeside stones again. I couldn’t figure it out. From what I remembered our teacher saying about Budalvannet’s horizontal currents, the wind direction and outflow, the boat should have been drifting away from me. Maybe we were in a backwater where everything circled round and came back in an eternal recurrence. That must be it. The boat needed to be further from the shore before it met the outflow currents and the Kjetterelva River down in the south, so that the area where Olsen could potentially have jumped overboard was so big that it was no surprise his body was never found. I stepped on board, started the motor and chugged along for a bit, turning it off again while it was still gliding away from the shore. Wiped the rudder clean, but only that. If it occurred to them to check the boat for fingerprints, it would be more suspicious if they did not find some of mine – after all, I’d been on board earlier the same day. I glanced over at the shore. Two hundred metres. Should be able to manage that. I considered climbing over the side of the boat and into the water but then realised this would stop the boat’s forward motion so instead I stepped up onto the thwart and dived. The shock of the cold water felt surprisingly like a liberation as my overheated brain suddenly cooled down for a few moments. Then I started to swim. Swimming with clothes on was more difficult than I had expected and my movements awkward. I thought of my teacher’s vertical currents, and it seemed as though I could feel them, pulling me down, and I had to remind myself it was autumn, not spring, as I parted the water in a long, clumsy breaststroke. I had no landmarks to guide me, so perhaps I should have left the headlights on after all. I remembered being taught that the legs are stronger than the arms and kicked and kicked away for all I was worth.
And then, suddenly and without any warning, I was caught.
I went under, swallowed water, rose to the surface again, splashing out wildly to get free of whatever it was that had attacked me. It wasn’t the current, it was...something else. Something that wouldn’t let go of my hand, I could feel teeth or at least jaws clamped around my wrist. I went under again, but at least this time managed to keep my mouth closed. I pressed my fingertips together, narrowed my hand and jerked it towards me. I was free. Back up on the surface I gasped for air. There, a metre in front of me in the dark, I saw something light floating on the water. Cork. I had swum into a seine net.
I calmed my breathing, and when a car with headlights on full beam drove past along the main highway I saw the outline of Olsen’s boathouse. The rest of the swim was uneventful, as people say. Apart from the fact that when I crawled ashore I realised it wasn’t Olsen’s boathouse I had seen, but possibly the owner of the seine net. I hadn’t gone far out, but it just shows how easy it is to lose your way completely. My shoes squelching, I made my way through a stand of trees towards the highway, and from there back to Olsen’s cabin.
I sat hiding behind a tree when Carl eventually arrived in the Volvo.
‘You’re soaking wet!’ he exclaimed, as though this was the most surprising thing he’d experienced all evening.
‘I’ve got dry clothes at the workshop,’ I tried to say, but my teeth were chattering like a two-stroke East German Wartburg 353. ‘Drive.’
Fifteen minutes later I was dry and wearing two pairs of overalls, one on top of the other, and my body was still shivering. We backed the Volvo into the workshop, closed the door and got the body out of the boot and onto the floor, where we sat him on his back in an X position. I looked at him. Something seemed to be missing from him, something he had had during our fishing trip. Maybe it was that mop of hair. Or the boots. Or was it something else? I don’t believe in souls, but there was definitely something, something that had made Olsen Olsen.
I drove the Volvo out again and parked it in a clearly visible spot outside the workshop. The task that lay ahead of us was a purely practical, technical business, something for which we needed neither luck nor inspiration but only the correct tools. And if there was something we had here, it was tools. There’s no need for me to go into detail about what we used where, only to say that we first removed Olsen’s belt and then cut off his clothes, and after that all his bodily parts. Or rather, I did. Carl was carsick again. I went through Olsen’s pockets and removed everything metal; coins, belt and buckle, and the Zippo lighter. I’d chuck them into the lake when I got the chance. Then I loaded all the body parts and the mane of hair in the scoop of the tractor Uncle Bernard used for clearing snow in winter. When I was done I fetched six metal drums of Fritz heavy-duty workshop cleaner.
‘What’s that?’ asked Carl.
‘Something we use when we clean out the car wash,’ I said. ‘It gets rid of everything, diesel, asphalt, it even dissolves plaster. We dilute it, five litres of water per decilitre of this. Which is to say, if you don’t dilute it then it will get rid of absolutely everything.’
‘You know that?’
‘Uncle Bernard told me. Or in his exact words: “Get it on your finger and if you don’t wash it off immediately, you can say goodbye to that finger.” ’
I told him that to lighten the atmosphere a bit, but Carl couldn’t even raise a smile. As though all of this was my fault. I didn’t pursue the thought, because I knew that it would end up with me thinking that it really was my fault, that it always had been.
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I guess that’s the reason it comes in metal drums and not plastic.’
We taped rags over our mouths and noses, removed the stoppers from the drums and emptied them into the scoop, one after another, until the grey-white liquid had completely covered Sigmund Olsen’s dismembered body.
Then we waited.
Nothing happened.
‘Shouldn’t we turn off the light?’ Carl asked from behind his cleaning cloth. ‘Someone might come in to say hello.’
‘Nope,’ I said. ‘They can see that’s my car outside, not Uncle Bernard’s. And I’m not exactly—’
‘Yeah yeah,’ Carl interrupted, so there was no need for me to go on. Not exactly the kind of guy people stop by to have a chat with.
Another few minutes passed. I tried to keep still so the overalls were in minimal contact with my crown jewels, as people say. I don’t really know what I had imagined would happen in the scoop, but whatever it was it didn’t. Was the Fritz overhyped?
‘Maybe we should bury him instead?’ said Carl, coughing.
I shook my head. ‘Too many dogs, badgers and foxes round here, they’d dig him up.’
It was true, foxes in the cemetery had dug holes all the way into the Bonaker family grave.
‘Hey, Roy?’
‘Mmm?’
‘If Olsen had still been alive when you got down there in Huken...’
I knew he was going to ask me that, and I wished he wouldn’t.
‘...what would you have done?’
‘That depends,’ I said, trying to resist the temptation to scratch my balls, because I’d realised I was wearing Uncle Bernard’s overalls on the inside.
‘Like with Dog?’ Carl asked.
I thought about it.
‘If he’d survived then at least he’d have been able to tell people it was an accident,’ I said.
Carl nodded. Moved his weight from one foot to the other. ‘But when I said that Olsen just, that’s not quite—’
‘Shh,’ I said.
There was a low, sizzling sound, like an egg in a frying pan. We peered into the scoop. The grey-white was now whiter, you could no longer see the body parts, and bubbles were floating on the surface.
‘Check it out,’ I said. ‘Fritz is playing.’
* * *
—
‘So what happened after that?’ asked Shannon. ‘Did the whole body dissolve?’
‘Yep,’ I said.
‘But not that night,’ said Carl. ‘Not the bones.’
‘So then what did you do?’
I took a deep breath. The moon had risen over the mountain ridge and peered down on the three of us sitting on the bonnet of the Cadillac on Geitesvingen. An unusually warm breeze was blowing in from the south-east, a foehn wind that I liked to imagine had come all the way from Thailand and those other countries down there I’ve never been to and never will.
‘We waited until just before daylight,’ I said. ‘Then we drove the tractor over to the car wash and emptied the scoop. A few bones and fleshy fibres got caught on the grate so we chucked them back into the scoop and doused them with more Fritz. Then we parked the tractor at the back of the workshop and raised the scoop to its top position.’ I illustrated this by raising both hands over my head. ‘In case any passers-by might be tempted to take a look inside. Two days later I emptied it into the car wash too.’
‘What about Uncle Bernard?’ asked Shannon. ‘Didn’t he ask questions?’
I shrugged. ‘He wondered why I’d moved the tractor and I told him I’d had three calls from people who wanted their cars repaired at the same time, so we needed the room. That none of the three showed up was weird, of course, but it does happen. He was more bothered that I hadn’t managed to finish work on Willumsen’s Toyota.’
‘Well, you’d been too busy,’ said Carl. ‘Anyway, like everyone else, he was more concerned by the fact that the sheriff had drowned himself. They’d found his boat with the boots in and were searching for the body – but I told you all this already.’
‘Yes, but not in such detail,’ said Shannon.
‘I guess Roy remembers it better than me.’
‘And that was it?’ asked Shannon. ‘You were the last people to see him alive; weren’t you questioned?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘A short conversation with the sheriff from the neighbouring district. We told him the truth, which was that Olsen asked us how we were doing after the accident, because he was such a considerate man. Although, actually, I said he is a considerate man, acting as though I was presuming he was still alive, even though everyone realised he must have drowned himself. A witness who owned a cabin out that way thought he’d heard Olsen’s car arrive after dark, the boat starting, and shortly afterwards something that might have been a splash. He had a quick look himself, in the lake in front of the boathouse. But without...finding anything.’
‘They weren’t surprised they never found the body?’ said Shannon.
I shook my head. ‘People seem to think that bodies in the sea always turn up sooner or later. Float to the surface, wash ashore, get spotted by someone. Those are the exceptions. As a rule they’re gone forever.’
‘So what might his son know that we don’t know he knows?’ Shannon – who was sitting on the bonnet between us – turned, first to me, then to Carl.
‘Probably nothing,’ said Carl. ‘There are no loose ends. At least nothing that hasn’t been washed away by the rain and the frost and the passage of time. I think it’s just that he’s the same as his father, he’s got this one unsolved case in particular he can’t let go of. For his father it was the Cadillac down there, and for Kurt it’s his own father disappearing without leaving any message. So he starts looking for answers that don’t exist. Am I right, Roy?’
‘Maybe, although I haven’t noticed him sniffing around this case before, so why start now?’
‘Maybe because I’ve come home,’ said Carl. ‘The last person to see his dad. The guy he was once in the same class with, a nobody from Opgard farm but it says in the local paper that he’s done well in Canada and now he thinks he’s going to come back and rescue the village. Put it this way, I’m big game, and he’s the hunter. But he’s got no ammunition, just a gut feeling that there’s something that doesn’t add up about his father driving away after a meeting with me and vanishing straight away. So when I come back home it starts him thinking again. The years have passed, he’s got a distance on things now, his head is cool, he can think more clearly. He starts guessing. If his father didn’t end up in the lake, then where did he end up? In Huken, he thinks.’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But he’s on to something. There’s a reason he’s so determined to get down there. And sooner or later he will.’
‘Didn’t you say Erik Nerell would be telling him not to, because of the risk from loose rocks?’ asked Carl.
‘Yes, but when I asked Olsen about that he said we’ll see in a cocky sort of way. I think he’s thought of another way to do it, but what’s even more important is: what the fuck is he looking for?’
‘He thinks the body is in the perfect hiding place,’ said Shannon, her eyes closed, her face turned to the moon as though she were sunbathing. ‘He thinks we’ve put it in the boot of the wreck down there.’
I studied her from the side. Something about the moonlight on her face made it impossible to take your eyes off her. Did something like that happen to Erik Nerell when he was ogling her at the party? No, all he saw was a woman he wouldn’t mind having it away with. What I saw was...well, what did I see? A bird unlike any other I had ever seen in the mountains. Shannon Alleyne Opgard belonged to the Sylviidae family. Like Shannon, they are small, some smaller even than the hummingbird, and they’re quick to pick up the songs of other species which they immediately imitate. They’re highly adaptable, some even change their feathers and colouring to merge better with their surroundings when the dangers of winter approach. When Shannon included herself, when she said in that very natural way that we had put the body there, it seemed so completely right. She had adapted to the new territory she found herself in without feeling that she had had to renounce anything. She had called me brother without even hesitating or trying the word out first. Because now we were her family.
‘Exactly!’ said Carl. It was a word he had picked up and obviously fallen in love with while he’d been away. ‘And if Kurt believes that, then we ought to make it easy for him to get down there and see for himself how wrong he is, so that gets that out the way. We’ve got a business proposal that needs financing, we need the whole village behind us. We can’t afford to have any kind
of suspicion hanging over us.’
‘Maybe,’ I said, and scratched my cheek. Not because it was itching, but now and then that kind of distraction can make you think something you haven’t thought before, and that was the feeling I got then. That there was something here that hadn’t occurred to me. ‘But I really wish I knew exactly what he was going to be looking for down there.’
‘Ask him?’ suggested Carl.
I shook my head. ‘When Kurt Olsen and Erik Nerell were here, Kurt lied and made out it was about the accident, not about his father. So there’s no way Kurt Olsen’s going to show us his hand.’
We sat in silence. The bonnet beneath had gone cold.
‘Maybe this Erik has seen his cards,’ said Shannon. ‘Maybe he could tell us.’
We looked at her. Her eyes were still closed.
‘Why would he do that?’ I asked.
‘Because it’ll be better for him than if he doesn’t tell us.’
‘Oh yeah?’
She turned to me, opened her eyes and smiled. Her moist teeth shone in the moonlight. Of course I didn’t know what she had in mind, but I did know that she was like my father and followed the law of nature that says family comes first. Before right and wrong. Before the rest of all mankind. That it’s always us against the rest.
16
NEXT DAY THE WIND HAD shifted.
When I got up and went downstairs to the kitchen, Shannon was standing beside the wood stove with her arms folded and wearing one of my old woollen sweaters. It looked comically oversized on her, and it occurred to me she must have run out of her own polo-neck ‘artist’s’ pullovers.
‘Good morning,’ she said. Her lips were pale.
‘You’re up early.’ I nodded towards the sheets of paper on the kitchen table. ‘How’s the drawing going?’
‘So-so,’ she said, took two paces forward and picked them up before I could take a look. ‘But doing mediocre work is better than lying in bed and not being able to sleep.’ She put the paper into a folder and went back to the stove again. ‘Tell me, is this normal?’