The Kingdom

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘And he sent you this?’ I looked at Erik Nerell’s customised selfie. Dick pic was putting it mildly. He was lying naked in front of an open fireplace on what looked like a reindeer hide and with some kind of lotion that gave his flexed muscles a dull sheen. And in the middle of the picture, an exemplary erection.

  No, the face wasn’t visible, but there was more than enough for a pregnant girlfriend to recognise.

  ‘He might claim to have misunderstood me,’ said Shannon. ‘But I find this incredibly offensive. And I think his father-in-law will too.’

  ‘His father-in-law?’ I said. ‘Not his girlfriend?’

  ‘I’ve given that some thought. Erik was a little too clever at knowing what to say. So I think he knows he can talk his way out of it with a pregnant girlfriend. Prostrate himself, beg for forgiveness, blah blah. A father-in-law, on the other hand...’

  I chuckled. ‘You really are wicked.’

  ‘No,’ she said seriously. ‘I’m good. I love the ones I love and do what I have to in order to protect them. Even if that means doing bad things.’

  I nodded. Something told me this wasn’t necessarily the first time. I was on the point of saying something when I heard the low rumble of an eight-cylinder American. Cones of light, and then the Cadillac rounding Geitesvingen. We saw it park and Carl get out. He stood by the car, lifted his phone to his ear. Spoke quietly as he headed towards the house. I leaned back in my chair and switched on the light on the wall behind us. I saw Carl give a start when he caught sight of us. As though he were the one caught red-handed at something. But I was the one who didn’t want to be caught red-handed hiding away in the dark with Shannon. I switched the light off again to show that we preferred it dark, that was all. And I knew as I did so that the decision I had made was the right one.

  ‘I’m going to be moving down to the workshop,’ I said in a low voice.

  ‘What?’ said Shannon, her voice also low. ‘Why?’

  ‘Give you two a bit more space.’

  ‘Space? Space is all we’ve got. A whole house and a whole mountain for just three people. Can’t you stay, Roy? For my sake?’

  I tried to see her face, but the moon had hidden herself again, and that was all she said.

  Carl came through the door of the living room and joined us.

  ‘And with that the deadline for being part of Os Spa and Mountain Hotel SL is closed,’ he said, and slumped down in one of the wickerwork chairs with an open beer in his hand. ‘Four hundred and twenty participants – in effect that’s everybody in the village who can afford it. The bank’s ready and I’ve talked to the contractors. In principle we could get the diggers in there after the company meeting tomorrow.’

  ‘To dig what?’ I asked. ‘It’ll have to be dynamited first.’

  ‘Sure, sure, it was just an image. I sort of look on the diggers as tanks that are going to move in and conquer this mountain.’

  ‘Do like the Americans do and bomb it first,’ I said. ‘Extinguish all life. And then advance and conquer.’

  I heard the scrape of his stubble against his collar as he turned his head towards me in the dark. He was probably wondering if I meant a little bit more than what I was actually saying. Whatever that might be.

  ‘Willum Willumsen and Jo Aas have agreed to sit on the board,’ said Carl. ‘On condition that the company votes for me as manager.’

  ‘Sounds like you’ll have complete control.’

  ‘You could say that,’ said Carl. ‘The advantage of SL is that, unlike a limited company, the law doesn’t require you to have a board, an accountant and all that kind of control stuff. We will have a board and an accountant because the bank demands it, but in practice it’s possible for the manager to run the company like an enlightened despot, and that makes everything that much fucking easier.’ There was a klunk from the beer bottle.

  ‘Roy says he’s moving,’ said Shannon. ‘To the workshop.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Carl.

  ‘He says we need more space.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Maybe I’m the one who needs space. Maybe all these years of living alone have turned me into a weirdo.’

  ‘Then it should be me and Shannon that move,’ said Carl.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m happy there’s more than one person living here. The house is happy too.’

  ‘In that case three has to be even better than two,’ said Carl, and I sensed he lay his hand in Shannon’s lap. ‘And who knows, one day we may even be four.’ For a couple of seconds there was complete silence, and then he sort of woke up again. ‘Or not. What made me think of it was I just saw Erik and Gro out for an evening stroll. She’s pretty big now.’ Still no response. More chugging from the bottle. Carl belched. ‘Why do the three of us spend so much time sitting in the dark when we talk?’

  So our faces don’t give anything away, I thought. ‘I’ll have that little chat with Erik tomorrow,’ I said. ‘And I’ll move out in the evening.’

  Carl sighed. ‘Roy...’

  I stood up. ‘I’m off to bed now. You’re fantastic people and I love you both, but I look forward to not having to see other people’s faces when I get up in the morning.’

  * * *

  —

  That night I slept like a stone.

  20

  ERIK NERELL LIVED OUT OF town. I had explained to Shannon that when we said ‘out of town’, we meant up along the shore of Lake Budal, towards where the water ran out into the Kjetterelva River. And since the lake was shaped like an upside-down V, with the village in the apex, so ‘in town’ and ‘out of town’ weren’t compass directions but just a way of telling you which way to head from your starting point, since the main road followed the lake regardless. Aas, Moe the roofer and Willumsen lived ‘in town’, which was reckoned to be a touch better, because the fields were flatter and got more sun, whereas Olsen’s cabin and the Nerell farm were out of town, on the shadowed side. The path up to Aas’s cabin where Carl, Mari and a gang of other youngsters used to sneak off to in our teenage years and party to the break of day was also ‘out of town’.

  I was thinking about this a bit as I drove along.

  I parked behind a Ford Cortina sleeper in front of the barn. Gro, Erik’s partner, opened the door and as I asked for Erik I couldn’t help wondering how those short arms had managed to extend out beyond that bulging stomach to reach the doorknob, that maybe she tackled the problem by approaching it from the side. Which was the way I had planned to approach this.

  ‘He’s working out,’ she said, pointing towards the barn.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Not long to go now?’

  She smiled. ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you and Erik still take your evening walk, I gather?’

  ‘Got to exercise the old lady and the dog.’ Gro laughed. ‘But never more than three hundred metres from the house now.’

  Erik neither saw nor heard me when I entered. He was lying on a bench and pumping iron, wheezing and panting with the bar across his chest and giving a roar when it was time to lift it. I waited until the bar was once more back on its rack before entering his field of vision. He pinched the buds out of his ears and I heard the descant from ‘Start Me Up’.

  ‘Roy,’ he said. ‘You’re up early.’

  ‘You’re looking in good shape,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks.’ He got up and pulled a fleece jacket over the sweaty T-shirt with a picture of the Hollywood Brats. His cousin, Casino Steel, had played keyboards in the band, and Erik always insisted that if the timing had been a bit better the Hollywood Brats would have been bigger than the Sex Pistols and the New York Dolls. He’d played us a couple of their songs and I remember thinking the problem wasn’t just the timing. But I liked him for caring. In general, I actually quite liked Erik Nerell. But that wasn’t the point.

  ‘There’s something we
need to sort out,’ I said. ‘The picture you sent Shannon did not go down all that fucking well.’

  Erik turned pale. He blinked three times.

  ‘She came to me, didn’t want to show it to Carl because she said he’d go ballistic. But that she was going to go to the sheriff. In legal terms, this here is actually flashing.’

  ‘No no, wait a minute, she said—’

  ‘She said something about pictures of nature. Whatever, I persuaded her not to report it, explained it would mean a whole lot of bother for all of us and be bloody traumatic for Gro.’

  I saw the muscles of his jaw tighten at the mention of his partner’s name.

  ‘When Shannon learned that you were expecting a kid she said she’d show the picture to your father-in-law and let him be the one to decide what to do. And I’m afraid I have to tell you that Shannon is a very determined lady.’

  Erik’s mouth was still open, but nothing came out of it now.

  ‘I came here because I want to help you. See if I can stop her. I really don’t like a lot of fussing and fighting, you know that.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Erik, with an almost inaudible question mark at the end.

  ‘For example I don’t like it when people go rooting about on our property where Mum and Dad died. If they do then I really need to know what’s going on.’

  Erik blinked again. Like he was trying to signal with his eye that he understood. That I was looking to do a trade.

  ‘Olsen’s going to send people down into Huken anyway, isn’t he?’

  Erik nodded. ‘He’s ordered a safety suit from Germany. Like what bomb squads use. It means you’re safe unless actual boulders fall on you. Plus you can move about in them.’

  ‘What’s he looking for?’

  ‘All I know is that Olsen wants to get down there, Roy.’

  ‘No. He’s not the one going down there, you are. And that being so, he must have told you what to look for.’

  ‘If I knew I wouldn’t be allowed to tell anyone, Roy, you must understand that.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘And you must understand that I don’t feel I’m allowed to stop a lady who has been so outrageously offended as Shannon.’

  Erik Nerell sat there on the bench and gave me a doleful dog-eyed stare. Shoulders sloping, hands in his lap. ‘Start Me Up’ was still buzzing from the earbuds lying on the bench between his thighs.

  ‘You tricked me,’ he said. ‘You and that cunt. It’s down there, isn’t it?’

  ‘What’s down there?’

  ‘The old sheriff’s mobile phone.’

  * * *

  —

  I steered the Volvo with one hand while holding the phone in the other. ‘Sigmund Olsen’s mobile was still giving out signals until ten o’clock on the night he disappeared.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Carl grunted. He sounded like he had a hangover.

  ‘A mobile phone that’s turned on sends out a signal every half-hour, which is registered at the base stations that provide the phone with coverage. In other words, the base stations’ records are a logbook of where the phone was and when.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Kurt Olsen was in town not long ago and spoke to the phone company. He got hold of the records for the day his father disappeared.’

  ‘They still have records from that far back?’

  ‘Apparently. Sigmund Olsen’s phone is registered at two base stations, indicating that he can’t – or at least his phone can’t – have been out at his cabin at the time when a witness says he heard a car stop there and a motorboat engine starting up. Because that was after dark. What the base stations show is that his phone was actually in an area that only covers our farm, Huken, Simon Nergard’s farm and the woods between there and the village. And that doesn’t square with what you told the police about Sigmund Olsen driving away from our farm at 6.30 p.m.’

  ‘I didn’t say where the sheriff drove to, only that he drove away from the farm.’ Carl sounded wide awake and clear now. ‘For all I know he might have stopped somewhere between our place and the village. And maybe that car and that boat the witness heard sometime after dark belonged to somebody else, after all there are other people besides Olsen who have cabins out there. Or maybe the witness is mistaken about the time – it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing to stick in the memory.’

  ‘Agreed,’ I said as I saw I was approaching a tractor. ‘But questions cropping up about the timeline aren’t what worry me most. It’s if Kurt finds the phone down there in Huken. Because according to Erik Nerell that is what Kurt wants to go down and look for there.’

  ‘Ah shit. But can it be down there? Didn’t you tidy up after him?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And none of his stuff got left behind. But you remember how it was getting dark when we dragged the body up, and I heard loose rocks falling and took cover inside the wreck?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  I crossed into the other lane. Saw the tractor was much too close to the corner but did it anyway. Put my foot down and slipped in front of the tractor at the start of the corner, just in time to see the driver shaking his head in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘It wasn’t rocks falling, it was his phone. He had it in one of those holders that just clips onto the belt. And when he was dragged up the rock face it was pulled off and fell down, but of course in the dark I couldn’t see that.’

  ‘How can you be so sure about that?’

  ‘Because when we were at the workshop dismembering the body, I pulled off his belt and cut off his clothes. Went through his pockets to remove anything metal before leaving the rest to Fritz. There were coins, the belt buckle and a lighter. But no mobile phone. It didn’t even fucking occur to me, and I knew he had that stupid leather holder.’

  Silence for a few moments at Carl’s end. ‘So what do we do?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ve got to go down into Huken again,’ I said. ‘Before Kurt does.’

  ‘And when is that?’

  ‘Kurt’s safety suit arrived yesterday. Erik’s meeting him to try it on at ten o’clock and then they’re going straight to Huken.’

  Carl’s breathing crackled through the phone. ‘Oh shit,’ he said.

  21

  IT WAS AS THOUGH THE repeat, this second descent, was slower but at the same time quicker. Quicker, because we had solved the practical problems and actually remembered our solutions. Slower, because it had to happen fast because we didn’t know when Kurt and his climbing crew would be here, and that gave me the same feeling as you get in those nightmares where someone’s after you and you’re trying to run fast but it’s like you’re running in water. Shannon was posted at the outer edge of Geitesvingen, from where she could see cars turning up off the highway.

  Carl and I used the same rope as previously, meaning that Carl knew exactly how close to the edge he had to reverse the Volvo before I was down.

  When at last I touched ground, my face to the rock face, I freed myself from the rope before turning round slowly. Seventeen years. But it was as though time had stood still down here. On account of the lower but partly overhanging wall on the south side the rain didn’t fall straight down here, it came trickling down the higher, vertical wall from Geitesvingen and drained away through the rocks. That was probably why there was so remarkably little rust on the wrecked car and the tyres were still intact, though the rubber looked slightly rotten. Nor had any animal made its home in Dad’s Cadillac and the seat coverings and panelling all seemed intact.

  I looked at my watch. Ten thirty. Shit. Closed my eyes and tried to recall where I had heard that sound of something hitting the ground back then. No, it was too long ago. But, exposed only to the force of gravity, the phone should have fallen in a vertical line from the body. The plumb line. The simple law of physics that says anything that doesn’t have a horizontal speed will fal
l straight down. I had consciously dismissed the thought back then, and I might just as well do the same thing now. I had a torch with me and started to search among the boulders close to the rock face where the rope was dangling. Since we had done everything in exact repetition, reversing the car along the same narrow track up there, I knew the phone must have fallen somewhere there. But there were hundreds of different places between the rocks where it could have slipped down and hidden itself. And naturally it might also have ricocheted off the rocks and landed somewhere else entirely. One good thing was that, being in a leather case, bits of it were unlikely to be scattered all over the place. If, that is, I found the fucking thing.

  I knew I had to be more systematic, not let myself get carried away by hunches about where it might have landed and start running round like those chickens Mum couldn’t bear to keep hold of once Dad had chopped their heads off. I defined a square within which it was reasonable to assume the phone had to be and started in the upper left corner. On my knees I began the search, lifting the stones that weren’t too heavy, and shining my torch into the spaces between those that were. In the spaces where I could neither see nor feel with my hand I used Carl’s smartphone and selfie stick. Put the camera on video and turned on the flash.

  After fifteen minutes I was in the middle of my square and had just poked the stick between two rocks the size of fridges when I heard Carl’s voice from above.

  ‘Roy...’

  I knew of course what it was.

  ‘Shannon’s seen them coming!’

  ‘Where?’ I called back.

  ‘They’re starting up the mountain now.’

  At the most we had three minutes. I withdrew the stick and played back the video. Jumped when I saw a pair of eyes in the dark. A fucking mouse. It turned away from the light and with a flick of the tail it was gone. And that was when I saw it. There were holes chewed in the black leather holder, but there was no doubting it, I had found Sheriff Olsen’s phone.