Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Jo Nesbo
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Acknowledgements
Read on for an extract from The Thirst
Copyright
Jon is on the run. He has betrayed Oslo’s biggest crime lord: the Fisherman.
Fleeing to an isolated corner of Norway, to a mountain town so far north that the sun never sets, Jon hopes to find sanctuary among a local religious sect.
Hiding out in a shepherd’s cabin in the wilderness, all that stands between him and his fate are Lea, a bereaved mother and her young son, Knut.
But while Lea provides him with a rifle and Knut brings essential supplies, the midnight sun is slowly driving Jon to insanity.
And then he discovers that the Fisherman’s men are getting closer...
With thanks to Øyvind Eggen for allowing the quotation of his work.
Jo Nesbo played football for Norway’s premier league team Molde, but his dream of playing professionally for Spurs was dashed when he tore ligaments in his knee at the age of eighteen. After three years military service he attended business school and formed the band Di derre (‘Them There’). Their second album topped the charts in Norway, but he continued working as a financial analyst, crunching numbers during the day and gigging at night. When commissioned by a publisher to write a memoir about life on the road with his band, he instead came up with the plot for his first Harry Hole crime novel, The Bat. He is regarded as one of the world’s leading crime writers, with The Leopard, Phantom, Police and The Son all topping the UK bestseller charts, and his novels are published in 48 languages.
Visit www.jonesbo.co.uk for further information.
Neil Smith studied Scandinavian Studies at University College London, and lived in Stockholm for many years. He now lives in Norfolk. His translations include books by Liza Marklund, Mons Kallentoft, Leif G. W. Persson, Marie Hermanson and Anders de la Motte.
THE HARRY HOLE SERIES
The Bat
Cockroaches
The Redbreast
Nemesis
The Devil’s Star
The Redeemer
The Snowman
The Leopard
Phantom
Police
STANDALONE CRIME
Headhunters
The Son
Blood on Snow
HOW ARE WE to start this story? I wish I could say that we’ll start at the beginning. But I don’t know where it starts. Just like everyone else, I’m not truly aware of the real sequence of cause and effect in my life.
Does the story start when I realised that I was only the fourth-best football player in the class? When Basse, my grandfather, showed me the drawings – his own drawings – of La Sagrada Família? When I took my first drag on a cigarette and heard my first track by the Grateful Dead? When I read Kant at university and thought I understood it? When I sold my first lump of hash? Or did it start when I kissed Bobby – who’s actually a girl – or the first time I saw the tiny, wrinkled creature who would end up being called Anna screaming up at me? Perhaps it was when I was sitting in the Fisherman’s stinking back room and he was telling me what he wanted me to do. I don’t know. We store up all sorts of stories with fabricated logic, so that life can look as though it has some meaning.
So I may as well start here, in the midst of the confusion, at a time and a place where fate seemed to be taking a short break, holding its breath. When, just for a moment, I thought I was not only on my way, but had also already arrived.
I got off the bus in the middle of the night. Screwed my eyes up against the sun. It was scouring across an island out to sea, off to the north. Red and dull. Like me. Beyond it lay yet more sea. And, beyond that, the North Pole. Perhaps this was somewhere they wouldn’t find me.
I looked round. In the three other points of the compass low mountain ridges sloped down towards me. Red and green heather, rocks, a few clumps of stunted birch trees. To the east the land slid into the sea, stony and flat as a pancake, and to the south-west it was as if it had been cut with a knife at the point where the sea started. A hundred metres or so above the motionless sea a plateau of open landscape took over, stretching inland. The Finnmark plateau. The end of the line, as Grandfather used to say.
The hard-packed gravel road I stood on led to a cluster of low buildings. The only thing that stuck out was the church tower. I’d woken up in my seat on the bus just as we were passing a sign with the name ‘Kåsund’ on it, down by the shore, near a wooden jetty. And I thought, why not? and pulled the cord above the window to illuminate the stop sign above the bus driver.
I put on the jacket of my suit, grabbed my leather case and started walking. The pistol in the jacket pocket bounced against my hip. Right on the bone – I’d always been too thin. I stopped and tugged my money belt down under my shirt so that the notes would cushion the knocks.
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the air was so clear that I felt I could see a very long way. As far as the eye can see, as the expression goes. They say that the Finnmark plateau is beautiful. Fucked if I know. Isn’t that just the sort of thing people say about inhospitable places? Either to make themselves seem a bit tough, to lay claim to some sort of insight or superiority, the way people boast about liking incomprehensible music or unreadable literature? I’d done it myself. I used to think it might make up for at least a few of the things about me that weren’t good enough. Or else it was simply meant as a consolation to the few people who had to live there: ‘It’s so beautiful here’. Because what was so beautiful about this flat, monotonous, bleak landscape? It’s like Mars. A red desert. Uninhabitable and cruel. The perfect hiding place. Hopefully.
The branches of a clump of trees by the side of the road in front of me moved. A moment later a figure leaped across the ditch and onto the road. My hand went automatically for the pistol but I stopped it: it wasn’t one of them. This character looked like a joker who’d jumped straight out of a pack of cards.
‘Good evening!’ he called to me.
He walked towards me with a strange, rolling gait, so bandy-legged that I could see the road stretch out towards the village between his legs. As he came closer I saw he wasn’t wearing a court jester’s hat on his head but a Sámi cap. Blue, red and yellow – only the bells were missing. He was wearing pale leather boots, and his blue anorak, patched with black tape, had several tears revealing yellow-coloured padding that looked more like loft insulation than feathers.
‘Forgive me asking,’ he said. ‘But who are you?’
He was at least two heads shorter than me. His face was broad, his grin wide, and his eyes at something of a slant. If you piled up all the clichés people in Oslo have about what a Sámi or native Laplander looked like, you’d end up with this bloke.
‘I came on the bus,’ I said.
‘So I saw. I’m Mattis.’
‘Mattis,’ I repeated, to gain a few seconds to think about the answer to his next inevitable question.
‘Who are you, then?’
‘Ulf,’ I said. It seemed as good a name as any.
‘And what are you doing in Kåsund?’
‘I’m just visiting,’ I said, nodding towards the cluster of houses.
‘Who are you visiting?’
I shrugged. ‘No one special.’
‘Are you from the Countryside Commission, or are you a preacher?’
I didn’t know what people from the Countryside Commission looked like, so I shook my head and ran a hand through my long, hippy hair. Maybe I should cut it. Less eye-catching.
‘Forgive me asking,’ he said again, ‘but what are you, then?’
‘A hunter,’ I said. It might have been the mention of the Countryside Commission. And it was as much the truth as it was a lie.
‘Oh? Are you going to hunt here, Ulf?’
‘Looks like good hunting territory.’
‘Yes, but you’re a week early. Hunting season doesn’t start until the fifteenth of August.’
‘Is there a hotel here?’
The Sámi smiled broadly. He coughed and spat out a brown lump that I hoped was chewing tobacco or something similar. It hit the ground with an audible splat.
‘Lodging house?’ I asked.
He shook his head.
‘Camping cabin? Room to rent?’ On the telephone pole behind him someone had stuck up a poster about a dance band who were going to be playing in Alta. So the city couldn’t be too far away. Maybe I should have stayed on the bus until it got there.
‘How about you, Mattis?’ I said, slapping away a gnat that was biting my forehead. ‘You wouldn’t happen to have a bed I could borrow tonight?’
‘I burned my bed in the stove back in May. We had a cold May.’
‘Sofa? Mattress?’
‘Mattress?’ He spread his hands out towards the heather-covered plateau.
‘Thanks, but I like roofs and walls. I’ll have to try and find an empty dog kennel. Goodnight.’ I set off towards the houses.
‘The only kennel you’ll find in Kåsund is that one,’ he called out plaintively, his voice falling.
I turned round. He was pointing at the building in front of the cluster of houses.
‘The church?’
He nodded.
‘Is it open in the middle of the night?’
Mattis tilted his head. ‘Do you know why no one steals anything in Kåsund? Because there’s nothing worth stealing apart from reindeer.’
With a surprisingly graceful leap, the chubby little man jumped across the ditch and began to tramp through the heather in a westerly direction. My guides were the sun in the north, and the fact that churches – according to my grandfather – have their towers to the west no matter where in the world you go. I shaded my eyes and looked at the terrain ahead of him. Where the hell was he going?
Maybe it was because the sun was shining even though it was the middle of the night and everything was completely still, but there was something strangely desolate about the village. The houses looked as though they had been built in a hurry, without care or love. Not that they didn’t look solid, just that they gave the impression of being a roof over someone’s head rather than a home. Practical. Maintenance-free slabs to stand up to wind and weather. A few wrecked cars in gardens that weren’t gardens, more fenced-off areas of heather and birch trees. Prams, but no toys. Only a few of the houses had curtains or blinds in the windows. The other naked windowpanes reflected the sun, stopping anyone looking in. Like sunglasses on someone who doesn’t want to reveal too much soul.
Sure enough, the church was open, although the door was swollen, so it didn’t open as readily as those of other churches I had been inside. The nave was fairly small, soberly furnished, but attractive in its simplicity. The midnight sun lit up the stained-glass windows, and above the altar Jesus hung from the customary cross in front of a triptych with the Virgin Mary in the middle and David and Goliath and the baby Jesus on either side.
I found the door to the sacristy off to one side behind the altar. I searched through the cupboards and found vestments, cleaning equipment and buckets, but no altar wine, just a couple of boxes of wafers from Olsen’s bakery. I chewed my way through four or five of them, but it was like eating blotting paper; they dried out my mouth so much that in the end I had to spit them out onto the newspaper on the table. Which told me – if it was that day’s edition of the Finnmark Dagblad – that it was 8 August 1978 and that the protests against the exploitation of the Alta river were growing, and showed me what local council leader Arnulf Olsen looked like, and said that Finnmark, as the only Norwegian district that shared a border with the Soviet Union, felt a little safer now that the spy Gunvor Galtung Haavik was dead, and that at long last the weather here was better than in Oslo.
The stone floor of the sacristy was too hard to sleep on, and the pews were too narrow, so I took the vestments inside the altar rail with me, hung my jacket over the rail and lay down on the floor with my leather case under my head. I felt something wet hit my face. I wiped it away with my hand and looked at my fingertips. They were rust red.
I looked up at the crucified man hanging directly above me. Then I realised that it must have come from the pitched roof. Leaky, damp, coloured by clay or iron. I turned over so I wasn’t lying on my bad shoulder and pulled the cassock over my head to shut out the sun. I closed my eyes.
There. Don’t think. Shut everything out.
Shut in.
I tugged the cassock aside, gasping for breath.
Fuck.
I lay there staring at the ceiling. When I couldn’t sleep after the funeral, I started taking Valium. I don’t know if I got addicted to it, but it had become difficult to sleep without it. Now the only thing that worked was being sufficiently exhausted.
I pulled the cassock over me again and closed my eyes. Seventy hours on the run. One thousand, eight hundred kilometres. A couple of hours’ sleep on trains and buses. I ought to be exhausted enough.
Now – happy thoughts.
I tried thinking about the way everything was before. Before before. It didn’t work. Everything else popped up instead. The man dressed in white. The smell of fish. The black barrel of a pistol. Glass shattering, the fall. I thrust it aside and held out my hand, whispering her name.
And then she came at last.
I woke up. Lay perfectly still.
Something had nudged me. Someone. Gently, not so as to wake me, just to confirm that there was someone lying under the cassock.
I concentrated on breathing evenly. Maybe there was still a chance, maybe they hadn’t worked out that I had woken up.
I slid my hand down to my side before remembering that I’d hung the jacket with my pistol in it on the altar rail.
Very amateurish for a professional.
I CARRIED ON taking slow, even breaths, and felt my pulse calm down. My body had realised what my head still hadn’t worked out: that if it had been them, they wouldn’t have poked me, they’d just have pulled off the vestments, checked it was the right person, then peppered me worse than over-spiced mutton stew.
I carefully pulled the cassock away from my face.
The one looking down at me had freckles, a snub nose, a plaster on its forehead and pale eyelashes surrounding a pair of unusually blue eyes. Topping this was a thick fringe of red hair. How old could he be? Nine? Thirteen? I had no idea, I’m hopeless at anything to do with kids.
‘You can’t sleep here.’
I looked round. He seemed to be alone.
‘Why not?’ I said in a hoarse voice.
‘Because Mum’s got to clean there.’
I got to my feet, rolled up the cassock, took my jacket from the altar rail and checked that the pistol was still in the pocket. Pain stabbed through my left shoulder as I forced it into the jacket.
‘Are you from the south?’ the boy asked.
‘That depends what you mean by “south”.’
‘That you’re from south of here, of course.’
‘Everyone’s from south of here.’
The boy tilted his head. ‘My name’s Knut, I’m ten. What’s your name?’
I was on the verge of saying something else before I remembered what I’d said the day before. ‘Ulf.’
‘How old are you, Ulf?’
‘Old,’ I said, stretching my neck.
‘More than thirty?’
The sacristy door opened. I spun round. A woman emerged, then stopped and stared at me. The first thing that struck me was that she was very young to be a cleaner. And that she looked strong. You could see the veins in her lower arm, and on the hand holding the bucket, which was overflowing with water. She had broad shoulders but a narrow waist. Her legs were hidden under an old-fashioned, black pleated skirt. The other thing that struck me was her hair. It was long, and so dark that the light from the high windows made it glisten. It was held back by a simple hairclip.
She started moving again and came towards me, her shoes clattering on the floor. When she got close enough I could see that she had a fine mouth, but with a scar, perhaps from an operation to correct a harelip, on her top lip. It seemed almost unnatural, considering her dark complexion and hair, that she should have such blue eyes.
‘Good morning,’ she said.
‘Good morning. I arrived on the bus last night. And there was nowhere to . . .’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘The door here is high, and the gate is wide.’ She said this without warmth in her voice, put down the bucket and broom and held out her hand.
‘Ulf,’ I said, holding out my hand to shake hers.
‘The cassock,’ she said, waving my hand away. I looked down at the bundle in my other hand.
‘I couldn’t find a blanket,’ I said, handing her the vestments.
‘And nothing to eat apart from our communion wafers,’ she said, unrolling and inspecting the heavy white garment.
‘Sorry, of course I’ll pay for—’
‘You’re welcome to it, with or without a blessing. But please don’t spit on our council leader next time, if you don’t mind.’
I wasn’t sure if that was a smile I could see, but the scar on her top lip seemed to twitch. Without saying anything else she turned and disappeared back into the sacristy.
I picked up my case and stepped over the altar rail.
‘Where are you going?’ the boy asked.
‘Outside.’
‘What for?’
‘What for? Because I don’t live here.’
‘Mum’s not as cross as she seems.’
‘Say goodbye from me.’
‘From whom?’ her voice called. She was walking back towards the altar rail.
‘Ulf.’ I was starting to get used to the name.
‘And what are you doing here in Kåsund, Ulf?’ She wrung out a cloth above the bucket.
‘Hunting.’ I thought it was best to stick to one and the same story in such a small community.
She fixed the cloth to the end of the broom. ‘What for?’
‘Grouse,’ I chanced. Did they have grouse this far north? ‘Or anything with a pulse, really,’ I added.
‘It’s been a bad year for mice and lemmings this year,’ she said.
I hummed. ‘Well, I was thinking something a bit bigger than that.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘I just meant that there aren’t many grouse.’
There was a pause.
In the end Knut broke it. ‘When predators can’t get enough mice and lemmings, they take grouse eggs.’
‘Of course,’ I said with a nod, and realised my back was sweating. I could do with a wash. My shirt and money belt could do with a wash. My suit jacket could do with a wash. ‘I daresay I’ll find something to shoot. It’s more of a problem that I’m a week early. After all, hunting season doesn’t start until next week. I’ll just have to practise until then.’ I hoped the Sámi had given me accurate information.
‘I don’t know about a season,’ the woman said, pushing the broom across the floor where I had slept so hard that the broom head squeaked. ‘You southerners are the ones who came up with that idea. Here we go hunting when we have to. And don’t bother when there’s no need.’
‘Speaking of needs,’ I said. ‘You don’t know of anywhere in the village where I could stay?’
She stopped cleaning and leaned on the broom. ‘You just have to knock on a door and they’ll give you a bed.’
‘Anywhere?’
‘Yes, I’d say so. But of course there aren’t that many people at home right now.’
‘Of course.’ I nodded towards Knut. ‘Summer holidays?’
She smiled and tilted her head. ‘Summer work. Anyone who’s got reindeer is sleeping in tents and caravans at the pastures down by the coast. A few have gone fishing for pollock. And a lot of people have gone off to the fair in Kautokeino.’
‘I see. Any chance I could rent a bed from you?’ When she hesitated I quickly added: ‘I’ll pay well. Very well.’
‘No one here would let you pay much. But my husband isn’t at home, so it’s really not befitting.’
Befitting? I looked at her skirt. Her long hair.
‘I see. Is there anywhere that isn’t so . . . er, central? Where you can get some peace and quiet. With a view.’ By which I meant, where you can see if anyone’s coming.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Seeing as you’re going to be hunting, I suppose you could always stay in the hunting cabin. Everyone uses it. It’s fairly remote, and a bit cramped and ramshackle, but you’d certainly get your peace and quiet. And a fine view in all directions, that much is certain.’
‘Sounds perfect.’
‘Knut can show you the way.’
‘There’s no need for him to do that. I’m sure I can—’
‘No!’ Knut said. ‘Please!’
I looked down at him again. Summer holidays. Everyone away. Bored having to follow his mum to do her cleaning. Finally, something happening.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Shall we go, then?’
‘Yes!’
‘What’s bothering me,’ the dark-haired woman said, dipping the broom in the bucket, ‘is what you’re going to shoot with. You’ve hardly got a shotgun in that case.’
I stared down at my case. As if I were measuring it to see if I agreed with her.
‘I left it on the train,’ I said. ‘I called them, they’ve promised to send it on the bus in a couple of days.’
‘But you’ll be wanting something to practise with,’ she said, then smiled. ‘Before the season starts.’
‘I . . .’
‘You can borrow my husband’s shotgun. The two of you can wait outside until I’m done, this won’t take long.’
A shotgun? Hell, why not? And because none of her questions was phrased as a question, I simply nodded and walked towards the door. I heard quick breathing behind me and slowed down slightly. The young lad tripped over my heels.
‘Ulf?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know any jokes?’
I sat on the south side of the church and smoked a cigarette. I don’t know why I smoke. Because I’m not addicted. I mean, my blood doesn’t thirst for nicotine. It’s not that. It’s something else. Something to do with the act itself. It calms me down. I might as well smoke bits of straw. Am I addicted to nicotine? No, I’m sure I’m not. I might possibly be an alcoholic, but I’m really not sure about that either. But I like being high, wired, drunk, that much is obvious. I liked Valium a lot. Or rather, I really didn’t like not taking Valium. That’s why it was the only drug I’ve ever felt I had to actively cut out.
When I started dealing hash it was mainly to finance my own use. It was simple and logical: you buy enough grammes so you can haggle about the price, sell two thirds of it in small quantities at a higher price, and hey presto, you get free dope. The path from there to turning it into a full-time occupation isn’t a long one. It was the path to my first sale that was long. Long, complicated, and with a couple of twists and turns I could have done without. But there I stood, in Slottsparken, muttering my concise sales pitch (‘Dope?’) to passers-by I thought had long enough hair or freaky enough clothes. And like most things in life, the first time is always the worst. So when a bloke with a crew cut and a blue shirt stopped and asked for two grammes, I freaked out and ran.
I knew he wasn’t an undercover cop – they were the ones with the longest hair and the freakiest clothes. I was scared he was one of the Fisherman’s men. But gradually I realised that the Fisherman didn’t care about small fry like me. You just had to make sure you didn’t get too big. And didn’t venture into his amphetamine and heroin market. Unlike Hoffmann. Things had ended badly for Hoffmann. There no longer was a Hoffmann.
I flicked the cigarette butt in amongst the gravestones in front of me.
You have an allotted time, you burn down to the filter, and then it’s over, for good. But the point is to burn down to the filter, and not go out before that. Well, maybe that isn’t the whole point, but just then it was my goal. I don’t really give a shit about the point of it. And there’d been plenty of days since the funeral when I hadn’t been very sure of the goal either.
I shut my eyes and concentrated on the sun, and on feeling it warm my skin. On pleasure. Hedon. The Greek god. Or idol, as he should probably be called seeing as I was on hallowed ground. It’s pretty arrogant, calling all other gods, apart from the one you’ve come up with, idols. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Every dictator’s command to his subjects, of course. The funny thing was that Christians couldn’t see it themselves, they didn’t see the mechanism, the regenerative, self-fulfilling, self-aggrandising aspect which meant that a superstition like this could survive for two thousand years, and in which the key – salvation – was restricted to those who were fortunate enough to have been born in a space of time which was a merest blink of the eye in human history, and who also happened to live on the only little bit of the planet that ever got to hear the commandment and were able to formulate an opinion about the concise sales pitch (‘paradise?’).
The heat disappeared. A cloud was passing in front of the sun.
‘That’s Grandma.’
I opened my eyes. It wasn’t a cloud. The sun was forming a halo around the young boy’s red hair. Was the woman in there really his grandmother?
‘Sorry?’
He pointed. ‘The grave you just threw your cigarette at.’
I looked past him. I could see a plume of smoke rise from the flower bed in front of a black stone. ‘I’m sorry. I was aiming at the path.’
He folded his arms. ‘Really? So how are you going to hit grouse when you can’t even hit a path?’
‘Good question.’
‘Have you thought of any jokes, then?’
‘No, I said it was going to take me a while.’
‘It’s been –’ he looked at the watch he didn’t have – ‘twenty-five minutes.’
It hadn’t. It was beginning to dawn on me that the walk to the hunting cabin was going to be a long one.
‘Knut! Leave the man alone.’ It was his mother. She came out through the church door and walked towards the gate.
I stood up and followed her. She had a quick stride and a way of moving that reminded me of a swan. The gravel road that went past the church led down into the cluster of houses that made up Kåsund. The stillness was almost unsettling. As yet I hadn’t seen anyone else apart from these two and the Sámi last night.
‘Why don’t most of the houses have curtains?’ I asked.
‘Because Læstadius taught us to let the light of God in,’ she said.
‘Læstadius?’
‘Lars Levi Læstadius. You don’t know of his teachings?’
I shook my head. I guess I’d read about the Swedish priest from the last century, who’d had to clean up the licentious ways of the locals, but I couldn’t claim to know of his teachings, and I suppose I’d imagined that old-fashioned stuff like that had died out.
‘Aren’t you a Læstadian?’ the boy asked. ‘You’ll burn in hell, then.’
‘Knut!’
‘But that’s what Grandpa says! And he knows, because he’s a travelling preacher all over Finnmark and Nord-Troms, so there!’
‘Grandpa also says that you shouldn’t shout your faith from the street corner.’ She looked at me with a pained expression. ‘Knut sometimes gets a bit overzealous. Are you from Oslo?’
‘Born and raised.’
‘Family?’
I shook my head.
‘Sure?’
‘What?’
She smiled. ‘You hesitated. Divorced, perhaps?’
‘Then you’ll definitely burn!’ Knut cried, wiggling his fingers in a way I assumed was supposed to represent flames.
‘Not divorced,’ I said.
I noticed her giving me a sideways look. ‘A lonely hunter far from home, then. What do you do otherwise?’
‘Fixer,’ I said. A movement made me look up, and I caught a glimpse of a face behind a window before the curtain was closed again. ‘But I’ve just resigned. I’m going to try to find something new.’
‘Something new,’ she repeated. It sounded like a sigh.
‘And you’re a cleaner?’ I asked, mostly for the sake of saying something.
‘Mum’s the sexton too, and the verger,’ Knut said. ‘Grandpa says she could have taken over as vicar as well. If she was a man, I mean.’
‘I thought they’d passed legislation about female vicars?’
She laughed. ‘A female vicar in Kåsund?’
The boy waggled his fingers again.
‘Here we are.’ She turned off towards a small, curtainless house. In the drive, perched on breeze blocks, was a Volvo with no wheels, and next to it stood a wheelbarrow containing two rusty wheel rims.
‘That’s Dad’s car,’ Knut said. ‘That one’s Mum’s.’ He pointed to a Volkswagen Beetle parked in the shade inside the garage.
We went in the unlocked house, and she showed me into the living room and said she’d fetch the shotgun, leaving me standing there with Knut. The room was sparsely furnished, neat, clean and tidy. Sturdy furniture, but no television or stereo. No pot plants. And the only pictures on the wall were Jesus carrying a sheep, and a wedding photograph.
I went closer. It was her, no doubt about that. She looked sweet, almost beautiful in her bridal gown. The man next to her was tall and broad-shouldered. For some reason, his smiling yet impassive face made me think of the face I had just caught a glimpse of in the window.
‘Come here, Ulf!’
I followed the voice, through a passageway and in through the open door of what looked as like a workroom. His workroom. A carpenter’s bench with rusty car parts, broken children’s toys that looked as though they’d been there for a while, plus several other half-finished projects.
She had pulled out a box of cartridges and pointed at a shotgun that was hanging next to a rifle balanced on two nails on the wall, too high for her to reach. I suspected she had asked me to wait in the living room so she could clear some things away in there first. I looked round for bottles, and I couldn’t miss the smell of home brew, alcohol and cigarettes.
‘Have you got bullets for that rifle?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘But weren’t you going to be hunting grouse?’
‘It’s more of a challenge with a rifle,’ I said, as I reached up and took it down. I aimed it out of the window. The curtains in the next house twitched. ‘And then you don’t have the job of getting all the shot out. How do you load it?’
She looked at me intently, evidently not sure if I was joking, before she showed me. Given my job, you’d think I’d know a lot about guns, but all I know is a bit about pistols. She inserted a magazine, demonstrated the loading action, and explained that the rifle was semi-automatic, but that the hunting laws said it was illegal to have more than three bullets in the magazine and one in the chamber.