Fear Not

circle of aunts and uncles and cousins, his grandmother and friends who came and went and were almost always at the house in Asen; he was thinking about the dogs and the annual hunting trip in the autumn with friends, old friends, boys Marcus had grown up with and never lost contact with. Rolf always laughed so heartily at the happy, ordinary, trivial life they led.

Rolf was always so happy.

Everything had turned out the way Marcus had hoped.

He had even managed to use his father’s money for something good. His father had consigned him to oblivion and regarded him as a lost soul. By condemning his son’s future, Georg Koll had paradoxically given him a new one. The first, wild years lay behind him, and Marcus had managed to avoid the disease that had brutally taken so many of those he knew, in pain and embarrassment and often loneliness. He was deeply grateful for this, and when he burned the letter from his father he resolved that Georg Koll would be wrong. Utterly and emphatically wrong. Marcus would be what his father had never been: a man.

‘Dad!’

The boy came running into the room, his arms flung wide.

‘They’re all coming! Rolf said the bulldog had three puppies and everything was fine and he’s on his way home and he’s looking forward to-’

‘Good, good.’ Marcus laughed and got up to accompany the boy into the hallway. He could hear several cars in the courtyard; the guests were arriving.

He stopped in the doorway for a moment and looked around.

The doubt which had tormented and nagged him for several weeks had finally gone. He had a sharp instinct, and had made a fortune by following it. In the early summer of 2007 he had spent weeks fighting a strong urge to sell up and get out of the stock market. He had sat up night after night with analyses and reports, but the only sign he could see that something was wrong was the stagnation of the US property market. When the first downgrading of bonds linked to the unsafe sub-prime loans came later that summer, he made his decision overnight. Over a period of three months he cashed in more than a billion in US shares at a significant profit. A few months later he would wake in the middle of the night out of sheer relief. His fortune remained in the bank until interest rates began to fall.

Marcus Koll was now buying properties at a time when everything was cheap. When he sold them in a few years, the profit would be formidable.

He had to protect himself and his family. He had a right to do so. It was his duty.

Georg Koll had reached out from beyond the grave to try to destroy Marcus’s life once again, and he simply could not be allowed to do that.

***

‘May I?’

Adam Stubo nodded in the direction of a yellow armchair in front of the television. Erik Lysgaard showed no sign of reacting. He just sat there in a matching chair in a darker colour, staring straight ahead, his hands resting in his lap.

Only then did Adam notice the knitting and the long, almost invisible grey hairs stuck to the antimacassar on the back of the armchair. He pulled out a dining chair and sat on that instead.

He was breathing heavily. A slight hangover had been plaguing him since he got up at half past five, and he was thirsty. The flight from Gardermoen to Bergen had been anything but pleasant. True, the plane was almost empty, since there weren’t many people desperate to get from Oslo to Bergen at 7.25 on Christmas morning, but the turbulence had been a problem and he had had far too little sleep.

‘This is not a formal interview,’ he said, unable to come up with anything better. ‘We can do that later, down at the police station. When you’re…’

When you’re feeling better, he was about to say before he stopped himself.

The room was light and pleasant. It was neither modern nor old-fashioned. Some of the furniture was clearly well used, like the two wing-backed armchairs in front of the TV. The dining room also looked as if it had been furnished with items that had been inherited. The sofa, however, around the corner in the L-shaped living room, was deep and cream-coloured, with bright cushions. Adam had seen exactly the same one in a Bohus brochure that Kristiane absolutely insisted on reading in bed. Along one wall were bookshelves built around the window, full of titles indicating that the Lysgaards had a wide range of interests and a good knowledge of languages. A large volume with Cyrillic letters on the cover lay on the small table between the armchairs. The pictures hanging on the walls were so close together that it was difficult to get an impression of each individual work. The only one that immediately caught his attention was a copy of Henrik Sorensen’s Kristus, a blonde Messiah figure with his arms open wide. Actually, perhaps it wasn’t a copy. It looked genuine, and could be one of the artist’s many sketches for the original, which was in Lillestrom Church.

The most striking item was a large Nativity crib on the sideboard. It had to be more than a metre wide and perhaps half a metre deep and tall. It was contained in a box with a glass front, like a tableau. The baby Jesus lay on a bed of straw among angels and little shepherds, sheep and the three wise men. A bulb shone inside the simple stable, so cleverly hidden that it looked as if Jesus had a halo.

‘It’s from Salzburg,’ said Erik Lysgaard, so unexpectedly that Adam jumped.

Then he fell silent again.

‘I didn’t mean to stare,’ said Adam, venturing a smile. ‘But it really is quite… enchanting.’

The widower looked up for the first time.

‘That’s what Eva Karin says. Enchanting, that’s what she always says about that crib.’

He made a small snorting sound as if he were trying to stop himself from crying. Adam edged his chair a little closer.

‘During the next few days,’ he said quietly, pausing to think for a moment. ‘During the next few days many people will tell you they know how you’re feeling. But very few actually do. Even if most people of our age…’

Adam had to be ten years younger than Erik Lysgaard.

‘… have experienced the loss of someone close, it’s completely different when a crime is involved. Not only has the person been snatched away all of a sudden, but you’re left with so many questions. A crime of this kind…’

I have no idea what kind of crime this is, he thought as he kept talking. Strictly speaking, nothing had been established so far.

‘… is a violation of far more people than the victim. It can squeeze the strength out of anyone. It’s-’

‘Excuse me.’

Erik’s son Lukas Lysgaard opened his mouth for the first time since he had shown Adam into the living room. He seemed tired and looked as if he had been crying, but was quite composed. So far he had stood in silence by the far window looking out over the garden. Now he frowned and moved a little closer.

‘I don’t really think my father needs consolation. Not from you, anyway, with respect. We would prefer to be alone. When we agreed to this interview…’

He quickly corrected himself.

‘… to this conversation, which is not an interview, it was, of course, because we would like to help the police as much as we can. Given the circumstances. As you know I am willing to be interviewed by the police as soon as you wish, but when it comes to my father…’

Erik Lysgaard straightened up noticeably in his armchair. He stretched his back, blinked hard and raised his chin.

‘What is it you want to know?’ he asked, looking Adam straight in the eye.

Idiot, Adam thought about himself.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Of course I should have left you both in peace. It’s just that… For once we haven’t got the media hot on our heels. For once it’s possible to get a little ahead of the pack out there.’

He jerked his thumb over his shoulder as if there were already a horde of journalists on the front step.

‘But I should have known better. I’ll leave you alone today. Of course.’

He stood up and took his coat from the back of one of the dining chairs. Erik Lysgaard looked at him in surprise, his mouth half-open and a furrow in his forehead, just above the thick glasses with their heavy, black