The Kingdom

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘I have strange dreams,’ he said one evening, completely out of the blue, as we sat in the winter garden. ‘I dream that you’re a killer. That you’re dangerous. And I envy you for being dangerous.’

  I knew of course that in some sense or other Carl knew that I had fixed things so the Cadillac would go over the edge at Geitesvingen that evening, but he’d never said a word about it, and I saw no reason to tell him and make him an accomplice as someone who’d heard a confession but not reported it. So I didn’t respond, just said goodnight and left him there.

  It was the closest to a happy time I had ever had. I had a job I loved, a car to take me wherever I wanted, and I was living out the sex dreams of every teenage boy. Not that I could boast of it to anyone, not even Carl, because Rita had said ‘not a single soul’, and I had sworn it on my brother’s name.

  And then one evening the inevitable happened. As usual Rita had left the cabin before me to avoid us being seen together. As usual I gave her twenty minutes, but that evening we were late, I’d been working hard at the workshop the night before and the whole day, and lying there in bed I was relaxing totally. Because even though the cabin had been bought and rebuilt with herr Willumsen’s money, according to Rita he would never set foot there again, being too fat and sedate and the path there too long and steep. She’d told me he’d bought the place partly because it was bigger than Chairman Aas’s cabin and he could look down on it, and partly as pure investment in the countryside wilderness at a time when oil was in the process of turning Norway into a wealthy nation – even back then Willumsen could smell the boom in mountain cabins that would come along many years later. That it came further up the highway was down to chance and certain councils that were quicker on the buzzer than ours, but it was still smart thinking by Willumsen. Anyway, lying there and waiting until I could leave, I fell asleep. When I woke up it was four o’clock in the morning.

  Three-quarters of an hour later I was at Opgard.

  Neither Carl nor I wanted to sleep in Mum and Dad’s room, so I crept into the boys’ room, not wanting to wake Carl. But as I was about to sneak into the upper bunk he gave a start and I was looking down at a pair of wide-open eyes shining in the dark.

  ‘We’re going to jail,’ he whispered groggily.

  ‘Eh?’ I said.

  He blinked twice before he sort of shrugged it off, and I realised he had been dreaming.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he asked.

  ‘Fixing a car,’ I said, swinging my leg over the railing.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Uncle Bernard called by with some lapskaus. Asked where you were.’

  I took a breath. ‘I was with a woman.’

  ‘A woman? Not a girl?’

  ‘We’ll talk about it tomorrow, Carl. We’ve got to get up in two hours.’

  I lay there listening out to see if his breathing eased down. It didn’t.

  ‘What was that about jail?’ I finally asked.

  ‘I dreamed they were going to put us in jail for murder,’ he said.

  I took a breath. ‘For murdering who?’

  ‘That’s the crazy thing about it,’ he said. ‘Each other.’

  33

  IT WAS EARLY IN THE morning. I was looking forward to a day with cars and simple mechanical problems to solve. Little did I know, as people say.

  I was standing in the workshop as I’d done more or less every day for the past two years and was just about to start work on a car when Uncle Bernard came out and said there was a phone call for me. I followed him back into his office.

  It was Sigmund Olsen, the sheriff. He wanted to have a word with me, he said. Hear how things were. Take me on a short fishing trip up near his cabin, it was just a few kilometres down the main road. He could pick me up in a few hours. And even though his voice had been soft as butter on the phone I could hear it wasn’t an invitation but an order.

  Which naturally gave me pause for thought. Why the hurry if it was just a harmless little chat?

  I carried on working on the engine, and after lunch lay down on the car creeper and shoved myself under the car and away from this world. There is nothing more calming than working on an engine when you’ve got ants in your brain. I don’t know how long I’d been lying there when I heard someone cough. I had a nasty premonition, which was maybe why I waited a bit before shoving myself out on the creeper.

  ‘You’re Roy,’ said the man standing there looking down at me. ‘You’ve got something that belonged to me.’

  The man was Willum Willumsen. Belonged. Past tense.

  I lay there beneath him, completely defenceless. ‘And what might that be, Willumsen?’

  ‘You know very well what it is.’

  I swallowed. I wouldn’t have time to do anything before he stamped the breath and the life out of me. I’d seen it done at Årtun, had some idea of how to do it, but not how to avoid it. I’d learned to hit first and hit hard, not how to keep up a guard. I shook my head.

  ‘A wetsuit,’ he said. ‘Flippers, mask, diving cylinder, valve and a snorkel. Eight thousand five hundred and sixty kroner.’

  He laughed loudly when he saw the look of relief on my face, which he obviously interpreted as astonishment. ‘I never forget a deal, Roy.’

  ‘Oh no?’ I said, getting to my feet and wiping my fingers with a long rag. ‘So not the one when my father bought the Cadillac either?’

  ‘Nope.’ Willumsen looked up into the air, chuckling, as though it were a fond memory. ‘He didn’t like haggling, your father. If I’d known how little he liked it I might even have started a little lower.’

  ‘Oh? You mean you’ve got a guilty conscience?’ Maybe I was hoping to get in before him if this was what he’d come to ask me. Attack is the best form of defence, people say. Not that I thought there was anything to defend, I wasn’t ashamed. Not about that. I was just a young lad that had got hit on by some married woman, so what? That was something they would have to sort out between themselves, I wasn’t going to get involved in a fight over territorial rights. All the same, I had twisted the rag around the knuckles of my right.

  ‘Always,’ he said, smiling. ‘But if there’s one talent I was born with, it’s how to deal with a bad conscience.’

  ‘Yeah?’ I said. ‘What do you do?’

  He grinned until his eyes vanished in his fleshy face and pointed to one of his shoulders. ‘When the devil on my right discusses things with the angel on my left, I let the devil put his arguments first. And then I put a stop to the discussion.’ Willumsen laughed again. The laughter was followed by a rasping sound, the sound of a car being thrown into reverse while it’s moving forward. The sound of a man who is going to die at some unknown point in the future.

  ‘I’ve come here because of Rita,’ he said.

  I weighed the situation up. Willumsen was bigger and heavier than me, but unless he pulled out a weapon he presented no physical threat. And what else could he threaten me with? I wasn’t dependent on him economically or in any other way, and nor could he threaten either Carl or Uncle Bernard, as far as I knew.

  But of course there was one person he could threaten. Rita.

  ‘She says she’s very pleased with you.’

  I didn’t respond. A car drove slowly by on the road outside, but we were alone in the workshop.

  ‘She says the Sonett has never run better. So I’ve brought along a car I want you to check over and fix whatever absolutely has to be fixed. But no more than that.’

  I glanced over his devil-shoulder and saw the blue Toyota Corolla parked outside. Tried not to look as relieved as I was feeling.

  ‘The problem is, it has to be done by tomorrow,’ said Willumsen. ‘I’ve got a customer coming from a long way off who’s more or less bought it over the phone. It’d be a pity for both of us if he ended up disappointe
d. Get my drift?’

  ‘I get it,’ I said. ‘Sounds like overtime.’

  ‘Ha, Bernard’s probably glad to take any job that comes his way at hourly rates.’

  ‘That’s something you’ll have to discuss with him.’

  Willumsen nodded. ‘Given Bernard’s state of health it’s probably just a question of time before it’s you and me discussing hourly rates, Roy, so I want you to know even at this early stage who this workshop’s most important customer is.’ He handed the car keys to me, said it didn’t look like rain today after all, and left.

  I drove the car inside, opened the bonnet and groaned. I would be working into the night. And I couldn’t even make a start on it now, as in another half-hour Sigmund Olsen would be picking me up. Suddenly I had a couple of things to think about. That was fine, this was still the happy time. But as things turned out, the last day of the happy time.

  34

  ‘WILLUMSEN WAS PISSED OFF HIS car wasn’t ready,’ said Uncle Bernard when I arrived late at the workshop the morning after the Fritz night.

  ‘There was more to do than I thought,’ I said.

  Uncle Bernard put his large, square head on one side. It sat atop a small and equally square body. When we wanted to tease him Carl and I called him our Lego man. We really loved him. ‘Like what for example?’ he asked.

  ‘Shagging,’ I said as I opened the bonnet of the Corolla.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘There was a bit of a double booking. I’d arranged to do some shagging yesterday too.’

  Uncle Bernard gave a short, involuntary laugh. Struggled to resume his serious face. ‘Work comes before shagging, Roy. Understood?’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘What’s the tractor doing outside?’

  ‘No room for it in here, got three cars coming in later today. Cabin people.’

  ‘OK. And why is the scoop up in the air?’

  ‘Takes less room.’

  ‘You think there’s a shortage of space out there in the car park?’

  ‘OK then, it’s a celebration of the job I was working on last night. The one that wasn’t the Corolla, that is.’

  Uncle Bernard looked out at the tractor with its proudly raised elevating arms. Shook his head and left. But I could hear him laughing again inside his office.

  I carried on working on the Corolla. It wasn’t until late in the evening that rumours that Sheriff Sigmund Olsen was missing began to circulate, as people say.

  * * *

  —

  When they found the boat with Sigmund Olsen’s boots no one doubted that he had drowned himself, there wasn’t even anything to discuss. Quite the opposite, people tried to outdo one another in saying how clearly they had seen the writing on the wall.

  ‘Of course, Sigmund always had that dark edge behind the smile and the jokes, but people didn’t notice it, they’re blind to things like that.’

  ‘Just the day before he said to me that it looked as though it was clouding over, but of course I thought he was talking about the weather.’

  ‘Of course they have confidentiality at the surgery, but I heard they were prescribing those happy pills for Sigmund. Oh yes, a few years ago, when his cheeks were so firm and round, remember that? But just lately he was so hollow-cheeked. Stopped taking his pills.’

  ‘You could see it on him. He had something on his mind. Something was bothering him and he couldn’t work it out. And when we don’t find the answer, when we can’t find a meaning, can’t find Jesus, well, that’s the kind of thing that can happen.’

  A woman sheriff came over from the neighbouring county and probably heard all this, but she still wanted to speak to those who had met Sigmund on the day he disappeared. Carl and I had discussed what Carl should say. I suggested it would be best to stay as close to the truth as possible and only leave out what was absolutely necessary. Say when Sigmund Olsen had visited him at the farm, roughly what time he left, that Carl hadn’t noticed anything special about him. Carl had protested that he probably ought to say that Olsen had seemed down, but I’d explained that in the first place she would be talking to others who would say Olsen seemed his usual self that day. And in the second place, given that she suspected that someone else might be involved, what was it someone was trying to make her think?

  ‘If you’re too keen to convince them that Olsen has killed himself, it’ll seem suspicious.’

  Carl had nodded. ‘Of course. Thanks, Roy.’

  * * *

  —

  Two weeks later, and for the first time after the Fritz night, I was lying in bed in the cabin again.

  I hadn’t actually done anything different, but Rita Willumsen seemed to appreciate more than usual what had become our regular sessions of lovemaking.

  Now she lay with her head resting in her hand, smoking a menthol cigarette as she studied me.

  ‘You’ve changed,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’ I said, a wedge of Berry’s under my upper lip.

  ‘You’re more grown up.’

  ‘Is that so surprising? It’s been a while since you took my virtue, you know.’

  She gave a slight start, I didn’t usually speak to her like that.

  ‘I mean since the last time we met,’ she said. ‘You’re someone else.’

  ‘Better or worse than the previous me?’ I asked, fishing out the wad of tobacco with my index finger and laying it in the ashtray beside the bed. I turned towards her. Lay a hand on her thigh. She looked at it in a demonstrative way. One of the unwritten rules was that she was the one who decided when we made love and when we rested, not me.

  ‘You know, Roy,’ she said, and took a drag on her cigarette, ‘I’d actually made up my mind to tell you today that it’s time we rounded off this affair of ours.’

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  ‘A friend of mine said that that hairdresser girl, Grete Smitt, has been spreading rumours about me having secret meetings with a young man.’

  I nodded, but didn’t tell her that I’d been thinking it might be time to stop too. I was simply getting tired of how repetitive it was getting. Drive over to the cabin, fuck, eat the home-made food she brought along, fuck, go home. But when I said the sentence aloud to myself, of course I didn’t really know what it was I was getting tired of. And it wasn’t as if I had some other fru Willumsen waiting for me.

  ‘But after what you did to me today I’m thinking we can wait a while before we stop,’ she said. She put her cigarette out in the ashtray and turned to me.

  ‘Why is that?’ I asked.

  ‘Why?’ She gave me a long, thoughtful look, as though she didn’t have the answer. ‘Maybe it’s Sigmund Olsen’s drowning. The thought that you can wake up dead one day. Because we sure can’t postpone living, now can we?’

  She caressed my chest and stomach.

  ‘Olsen took his own life,’ I said. ‘He wanted to die.’

  ‘Exactly.’ She looked at her own hand with the red-painted fingernails as it continued on its way downward. ‘And that can happen to any of us.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, picking up my watch from the bedside table. ‘But I have to go now. Hope you don’t mind me leaving first for once.’

  At first she looked a bit surprised, but then she composed herself, gave a thin smile and asked teasingly if I had a date with another girl.

  In reply I gave an equally teasing smile, got up and began to dress.

  ‘He’s away this weekend,’ she said, watching me from the bed with a slightly sulky expression on her face.

  The name Willum Willumsen was never mentioned.

  ‘You can come and visit me.’

  I stopped dressing. ‘Visit you at home?’

  She leaned out over the side of the bed, dipped her hand into her bag, fished out a bunch of keys and began to work one of them
loose.

  ‘Come after dark, use the garden on the blind side of the house, where no neighbours can see you. This is to the basement door.’

  She dangled the freed key in front of me. I was so surprised all I could do was stare at it.

  ‘Take it, you idiot!’ she hissed.

  And I took it. Stuck it in my pocket and knew I wouldn’t be using it. I’d taken it because for the first time I’d seen what looked like vulnerability in Rita Willumsen’s expression. And with that anger in her voice she was trying to hide something I hadn’t even thought about; that she might be afraid of rejection.

  And walking down the path away from the cabin, I knew the balance between Rita Willumsen and me had changed.

  * * *

  —

  Carl had changed too.

  In some way he held himself more erect. And no longer kept himself to himself but had started going out and seeing people. It had happened almost overnight. The Fritz night. Maybe he felt – like me – that the experience of the Fritz night was something that lifted us above the crowd. When Mum and Dad went over the edge into Huken, Carl had been a passive spectator, the victim who was being saved. But this time he’d been a participant, done what had to be done, things the people around us couldn’t have imagined. We had crossed a line and crossed back over again, and you can’t have been to the place we had been to without it changing you. Or to put it this way: maybe it was only now that Carl could be the person he had really been all along; maybe the Fritz night just tapped a hole in the cocoon that let this butterfly out. He had already grown taller than me, but in the course of the winter he had gone from being a fragile, shy young lad into a youth who understood he had nothing to be ashamed of. He’d always been well liked, now he became popular too. I began to notice that when he was hanging out with his friends it was him who was the leader, his comments people listened to, his jokes people laughed at, he was the one they looked at first when they were trying to impress or make the gang laugh. He was the one they imitated. And the girls noticed it too. It wasn’t just that Carl’s sweet, girlish prettiness had matured into strapping good looks, the way he acted had changed too. I noticed it when we were at the gatherings at Årtun, that he had acquired a natural self-assurance both in the way he spoke and the way he moved. He could be uninhibitedly playful, as though nothing was really serious, and then sit down with a mate who was having girl trouble, or a female friend with a broken heart, listen sympathetically to what they had to say and give them advice, as though he possessed experience and wisdom they hadn’t yet acquired.