Wherever I woke up tomorrow morning, it would be with murder on my conscience.
19 PREMEDITATED MURDER
YOU WALK ALONG your own street. You stand in the evening gloom under a cluster of trees looking up at your own house, at the lights in the window, at a movement by the curtains which might be your wife. A neighbour out walking his English setter passes by and sees you, sees a stranger in a street where most people know each other. The man is suspicious, and the setter lets out a low growl; they can both smell that you hate dogs. Animals, like humans, stick together against intruders and trespassers up here on the mountainside where they have entrenched themselves, raised high above the confusion of the town and the chaotic jumble of interests and agendas. Up here they just want things to continue as they are, for things are good, everything’s fine, the cards should not be re- dealt. No, let the aces and kings remain in the hands they are in now: uncertainty damages investor confidence, stable economic conditions ensure productivity, which in turn serves the community. You have to create something before you can distribute it.
It is odd to think that the most conservative person I have ever met was a chauffeur who drove people earning four times as much as he did and addressed him with the condescension that only the most painfully correct politeness can express.
Dad once said that if I became a socialist I would no longer be welcome in his house, and the same applied to my mother. He was, it is true, not sober when he made that threat, but that was all the more reason to assume that he meant quite literally what he said. He thought that the caste system in India had a lot to recommend it, that we were born into our station in life in accordance with God’s will and it was our damned duty to spend our wretched lives there. Or as the sexton says in Johan Falkberget’s
My rebellion, a chauffeur’s son’s rebellion, had therefore been: education, a rich man’s daughter, Ferner Jacobsen-branded suits and a house on Voksenkollen. It had gone wrong. Dad had had the impudence to forgive me; he had even been so crafty as to act proud. And I knew, when I sobbed like a baby at their funeral, that I was not grieving over my mother; I was furious at my father.
The setter and the neighbour (strange that I could no longer remember what his name was) were swallowed up by the darkness and I crossed the road. There had been no unfamiliar cars in the street, and, pressing my face against the garage window, I could see that it too was empty.
I sneaked quickly into the raw, almost palpably black night of the garden and took up position under the apple trees where I knew it was impossible to see anyone from the living room.
But I could see her.
Diana was pacing the floor. The impatient movements combined with the Prada phone pressed to her ear led me to infer that she was trying to ring someone who was not answering. She was wearing jeans. No one could wear jeans the way Diana did. Despite the white woollen jumper, she walked with her free arm across her chest as though she were freezing. A big house built in the 1930s takes time to warm up after a plunge in temperature, however many radiators you turn on.
I waited until I was quite sure she was alone. Felt for my gun lodged in my waistband. Took a deep breath. This would be the most difficult thing I had ever done. But I knew I would succeed. The new man would succeed. That was perhaps why the tears flowed, because the outcome was already a given. I did nothing to restrain the tears. They ran like hot caresses down my cheeks while I concentrated on being still, not losing control of my breathing, and not sobbing. After five minutes I was empty and dried my cheeks. Then I walked to the door with rapid strides and let myself in as quietly as I could. Inside, in the corridor, I stood listening. It was as though the house was holding its breath: the silence was broken only by the click of her footsteps on the parquet floor upstairs in the living room. And soon they would stop, too.
It was ten o’clock in the evening, and behind the barely open door I glimpsed a pale face and a pair of brown eyes.
‘Could I sleep here?’ I asked.
Lotte didn’t answer. She didn’t usually. But she was staring as if I were a ghost. She didn’t usually stare or look frightened, either.
I smirked and ran a hand across my smooth scalp.
‘I’ve shaved off…’ I searched for the word. ‘… the lot.’
She blinked twice. Then she pulled back the door and I slipped in.
20 RESURRECTION
I AWOKE AND glanced at my watch. Eight. It was time to begin. I had what they call a big day in front of me. Lotte lay on her side with her back to me, swathed in the sheets that she preferred to a duvet. I slid out on my side of the bed and dressed at top speed. It was bitterly cold, and I was frozen to the marrow. I crept into the hall, put on my jacket, hat and gloves and went into the kitchen. In one of the drawers I found a plastic bag which I shoved into my trouser pocket. Then I opened the fridge, thinking it was the first day I had woken up as a murderer. A man who had shot a woman. It sounded like something from the newspaper, the kind of case I ignored because criminal cases were always so painful and banal. I grabbed a carton of grapefruit juice and was about to put it to my mouth. But changed my mind and fetched a glass from the overhead cabinet. You don’t need to let all your standards decline just because you have become a murderer. After finishing the juice, rinsing the glass and putting the carton back, I went into the living room and sat down on the sofa. The small black gun in my jacket pocket poked me in the stomach, and I took it out. It still smelt, and I knew the smell would come to remind me of the murder for ever. The execution. One shot had been sufficient. At point-blank range, as she was about to embrace me. I had shot during the embrace and hit her in the left eye. Was it intentional? Maybe. Maybe I had wanted to take something from her in the same way that she had tried to take everything from me. And the lying traitor had embraced the lead, the phallic bullet had penetrated her as I had once done. Never again. Now she was dead. Thoughts came like that, in short sentences confirming facts. Good. I would have to continue thinking like that, maintaining the chill, not letting my emotions have a chance. I still had something to lose.
I raised the remote control and switched on the TV. There was nothing new on teletext; the editors weren’t in the office that early, I supposed. It still said the four bodies would be identified in the course of the following day, today in other words, and that one person was still missing.
One person. They had changed that from ‘one policeman’, hadn’t they? Did that mean then that they now knew that the missing person was the detainee? Maybe, maybe not; there was no mention of them searching for anyone.
I leaned over the armrest and picked up the receiver from her yellow landline phone, the one I always visualised by Lotte’s red lips when I rang. The tip of her tongue was next to my ear as she was wetting them. I dialled 1881, asked for two numbers and interrupted her when she said an automated voice would give them to me.
‘I would like to hear them from you personally in case the speech is unclear and I have any problems understanding,’ I said.
I was given the two numbers, memorised them and asked her to put me through to the first. The central switchboard at Kripos answered on the second ring.
I introduced myself as Runar Bratli and said I was a relative of Endride and Eskild Monsen and that I had been asked by the family to collect their clothes. But no one had told me where to go or who to see.
‘Just a moment,’ said the switchboard lady, putting me on hold.
I listened to a surprisingly good pan-pipe version of ‘Wonderwall’ and thought about Runar Bratli. He was a candidate I had once decided not to recommend for a top management job even though he had been the best qualified by far. And tall. So tall that during the final interview he had complained that he had to sit doubled up in
