of twenty-five years of public service commitment, trying to make him a different and better person, or at least trying to secure him a place in society that both he and we could tolerate? Was this the best we could achieve, the sum of our success?
‘What the hell are you mixed up in, Johnny boy?’
‘Don’t call me that!’
‘Sorry, but… is it me or you they’re after?’
Suddenly one of the men by the black car shouted. ‘Didn’t we tell you to keep your mouths shut over there?’
I swivelled round. ‘What the hell’s wrong with you? Are you feeling left out? You’re warmly invited to take part in the conversation, if you like!’
He hoisted the gun to his face and pointed it at me. ‘Shut up, I said!’
‘Shut your mouth yourself!’ Jan Egil snapped. ‘I’ve got you in my sights! Move one centimetre this way and you’re a dead man!’
For a moment the whole picture seemed to freeze. I prepared myself for the worst, then the situation suddenly changed. We heard the sound of a car before we saw it. Round the bend from the gate it came, a large black Mercedes which soon slowed down when the driver caught sight of us. As quietly as a panther, it drew up at an angle beside the two armed men and the other black car.
The door slid open, and in the gleam from the tall pylons I glimpsed a silhouette as he got out. He was a tall, powerful man, and even before the light from the distant headlamp hit his face, I knew who it was. Now I could see the pattern that I should have seen eleven years ago.
54
‘Nice to see you again, Hansie!’ I shouted.
‘I think I’m the one who should say that, Varg,’ he replied with a tight-lipped smile. He kept a wary eye on Jan Egil and his gun. He whispered something to the two others.
‘So it was you they rang!’
‘Who else?’
I moved to the side, around the open car door and a few steps forward. From the corner of my eye I saw Jan Egil twitch.
‘Varg! What are you doin’?’ he said.
‘Take it easy, Jan Egil. We’re out in open countryside now.’
‘Open countryside! What the hell d’you mean by that?’
A gun belonging to one of the men twitched, too, but Hans raised an authoritative hand and gave a brief command.
‘Stay where you are!’ he shouted to me.
‘OK,’ I said and stopped. ‘Does that mean we can talk?’
‘What about?’
‘You know every well. About everything.’
He eyed me with a stony face, mute.
‘I should have known in Forde, eleven years ago, when you were telling me about your childhood with such passion, about poverty and how you never wanted to experience the same again.’
‘Should have known what, Varg?’
‘How ruthless you’d been to avoid winding up in a similar situation again.’
‘I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about! This is a local score we have to settle, between Jan Egil and us.’
‘Between…?’
‘Between two groups. It was foolish of you to get involved in this. Now we’ll have to — ’
‘Gang warfare, is that what you’re trying to make me believe? Don’t give me that bollocks! You’re petrified you’re on his blacklist, and you should be higher up on the bloody list than I am.’
‘You talk too much, Varg. But you’ve always been like that. Waffling on about all those brainless ideas of yours.’
‘Oh, shut up, Hans! Do you want me to extract all your lies from you, one by one? I suppose that was what Hammersten threatened to do as well, being the born-again Christian he was. He wanted to do penance and renounce all his sins. Especially with regard to Jan Egil, who had to pay for them. The snag was that it wasn’t only his sins he would have to do penance for. He had an accomplice. No, wrong. Not even an accomplice. You were the Mr Big, Hans, right from the very outset.’
He took a couple of steps closer. I did the same. Our eyes were locked; we were like two cowboys in the final scene of a western.
‘You talk too much, Varg! This is rubbish. You must be able to hear that yourself.’
‘Listen to my reasoning then!’
‘I don’t have the bloody time to — ’
‘We can start from a few days ago. Hammersten told you he could no longer keep all he knew to himself. And, worst of all, he wanted to tell Jan Egil. You beat him to death with a baseball bat, and when Jan Egil legged it, you took the opportunity to put the bat in his room. Yet again, damning evidence.’
‘Yet again?’
‘I’m thinking of the rifle in Angedalen.’
‘For Christ’s sake, I had nothing to do with the murder of Kari and Klaus.’
‘No?’
‘I think the turnip on your shoulders is beginning to go rotten, Varg. You might recall that I was in Bergen when it all happened.’
‘We-ell. In theory, on your way to Bergen perhaps, but…’
‘Which Terje Hammersten was able to corroborate, unless you’ve forgotten.’
‘Not any more, and besides… very convenient that was. You and Hammersten giving each other an alibi in a kind of mutual alliance, since you were both in Angedalen that night.’
‘You can prove that, can you?’ The sarcasm lay thick on his vocal cords.
‘A little detail that has always buzzed around my head is the key to the Libakk farmhouse. The spare key hanging in the hallway cupboard. No one broke in that night the murders took place, and that was part of the circumstantial evidence that pointed to Jan Egil. But you… you’d left the house, according to your statement, a few hours earlier and could have taken the key with you. Later that night you went back, either alone or most probably with Hammersten, you unlocked the door and committed the atrocity.’
‘Oh yes!’ he jeered. ‘And what on earth would my motive have been?’
‘You would inherit the farm afterwards.’
‘Right, and what benefit was that to me?’
‘Enough money to establish yourself here in Oslo! But that was not the whole reason. The keyword here is booze — and the much talked about seventies smuggling racket, with Klaus Libakk as one of the central distributors. Klaus owed you money. Big money. And you knew where he kept it, hidden somewhere on the farm. Ultimately, there was only one way to get at it, and it meant killing both of them, Klaus as the main victim, Kari because she was unlucky enough to be married to him.’
‘Really? You can see yourself how thin your arguments are, Varg. To be frank, I…’
I interrupted him. ‘You couldn’t foresee that Jan Egil with his lack of self-control would end up in such a mess, but you certainly knew how to fan the flames with even greater zeal. You had used Hammersten before, to kill Ansgar Tveiten in 1973, and he must have been your and Svein Skarnes’s well-remunerated henchman since the mid sixties, I would guess, when you hatched up the scheme.’
‘The scheme?’
‘You and Svein Skarnes, one of you desperate never to be poor again, the other desperate to earn quick money. It started with hash. Later it was booze. The only problem you had was that a woman stood between you.
