The Son Read online

  Westad leaned back in his chair. ‘Why are you confessing to this?’

  The man shrugged. ‘DNA at the crime scene.’

  ‘How do you know we found some?’

  The man touched his long, thick hair which the prison management could have ordered to be cut if they wanted to. ‘My hair falls out. It’s a side effect of long-term drug abuse. Can I go now?’

  Westad sighed. A confession. Technical evidence at the crime scene. So why did he still have doubts?

  He leaned towards the microphone standing between them. ‘Interview with suspect Sonny Lofthus stopped at 13.04.’

  He saw the red light go out and knew that the officer outside had switched off the recording device. He got up and opened the door so that the prison officers could enter, unlock Lofthus’s handcuffs and take him back to Staten.

  ‘What do you think?’ the officer asked as Westad came into the control room.

  ‘Think?’ Westad put on his jacket and zipped it up with a hard, irritated movement. ‘He doesn’t give me anything to think about.’

  ‘And what about the interview earlier today?’

  Westad shrugged. A friend of the victim had come forward. She had reported that the victim had told her that her husband, Yngve Morsand, had accused her of having an affair and threatened to kill her. That Kjersti Morsand had been scared. Not least because the husband had good grounds for his suspicion – she had met someone and was thinking of leaving him. It was hard to think of a more classic motive for murder. But what about the boy’s motive? The woman hadn’t been raped, nothing in the house had been stolen. The medicine cupboard in the bathroom had been broken into and the husband claimed that some sleeping tablets were missing. But why would a man who, judging from his needle marks, had easy access to hard drugs bother with a few measly sleeping pills?

  The next question presented itself immediately: Why would an investigator with a signed confession care about little things like that?

  Johannes Halden was pushing the mop across the floor by the cells in A Wing when he saw two prison officers approach with the boy between them.

  The boy smiled; he looked as if he was walking with two friends going somewhere nice, the handcuffs notwithstanding. Johannes stopped and raised his right arm. ‘Look, Sonny! My shoulder is better. Thanks to you.’

  The boy had to lift both hands to give the old man a thumbs up. The officers stopped in front of one of the cell doors and unlocked the handcuffs. They didn’t need to unlock the door as well since all cell doors were opened automatically every morning at eight o’clock and were left open until ten o’clock at night. The staff up in the control room had shown Johannes how they could lock and unlock all the doors with a single keystroke. He liked the control room. That was why he always took his time washing the floor in there. It was a bit like steering a supertanker. A little like being where he should have ended up.

  Before ‘the incident’ he had worked as an able seaman and studied nautical science. The plan had been to become a deck officer. Followed by mate, first mate and then captain. And eventually join his wife and daughter in the house outside Farsund and get himself a job as a pilot at the port. So why had he done it? Why had he ruined everything? What had made him agree to smuggle two big sacks out of the Port of Songkhla in Thailand? It wasn’t that he didn’t know they contained heroin. And it wasn’t that he didn’t know the penal code and the hysterical Norwegian legal system which at that time equated drug smuggling with murder. It wasn’t even that he needed the huge amount of money he had been offered to deliver the sacks to an address in Oslo. So what was it? The thrill? Or the hope of seeing her again; the beautiful Thai girl in her silk dress with her long, shiny black hair, of looking into her almond eyes, hearing her soft voice whisper the difficult English words with sweet cherry lips, telling him he had to do it for her, for her family in Chiang Rai, that it was the only way he could save them. He had never believed her story, but he had believed in her kiss. And that kiss took him across oceans, through customs, into the remand cell, into the courtroom, into the visitors’ room where his almost grown-up daughter had sat down and told him that the family wanted nothing more to do with him, through the divorce and into the cell in Ila Prison. That kiss was all he had wanted and the promise of that kiss was all he had left.

  When he was released there had been no one waiting for him on the outside. His family had disowned him, his friends grown apart and he would never get work on a ship again. So he sought out the only people willing to accept him. Criminals. And resumed his old ways. Tramp shipping. Nestor, the Ukrainian, recruited him. Heroin from northern Thailand was smuggled in trucks using the old drug route via Turkey and the Balkans. In Germany the cargo was distributed to the Scandinavian countries and Johannes’s job was to drive the last stretch. Later he became a confidential informant.

  There hadn’t been a good reason for that, either. Only a police officer who appealed to something inside him, something he didn’t even know he had. And though that prospect – a clear conscience – had seemed worth less than the kiss of a beautiful woman, he had really believed in that police officer. There had been something about his eyes. Johannes might have gone straight, changed his ways, who knows? But then one autumn evening the police officer was killed. And for the first and only time Johannes heard the name, heard it whispered with a mixture of fear and awe. The Twin.

  From then on it was only a matter of time before Johannes was pulled back in again. He took bigger and bigger risks, moved bigger and bigger loads. Dammit, he wanted to get caught. Atone for what he had done. So he was relieved when customs officers pulled him over at the Swedish border. The furniture in the back of his lorry was stuffed full of heroin. The judge had reminded the jury both of the large quantity involved and that it wasn’t Johannes’s first offence. That was ten years ago. He had been at Staten for the last four years, since the prison opened. He had seen inmates come and go, seen prison officers come and go too, and he had treated them all with the respect they deserved. And, in return, he got the respect he deserved. That is to say, he enjoyed the respect the old-timer gets. The guy who is no longer a threat. Because none of them knew his secret. The betrayal he was guilty of. The reason he inflicted this punishment on himself. And he had given up all hope of finally getting the only things that mattered. The kiss he had been promised by a forgotten woman. The clear conscience he had been promised by a dead police officer. Until he had been transferred to A Wing and had met the boy they said could heal you. Johannes had been startled when he heard the surname, but he hadn’t said anything. He had just carried on mopping the floors, keeping his head down, smiling, doing and receiving the little favours that made life bearable in a place like this. The days, the weeks, the months and the years had flown by and turned into a life which would soon end. Cancer. Lung cancer. Small cell, the doctor had said. The aggressive kind which is the worst unless it is caught early.

  It hadn’t been caught early.

  There was nothing anyone could do. Certainly not Sonny. He hadn’t even come close to guessing what was wrong when Johannes had asked; the lad himself had suggested the groin, nudge nudge, wink wink. And his shoulder had got better of its own accord, if truth be told, not from Sonny’s hand which definitely didn’t have a higher temperature than the usual 37°C, was far colder in fact. But he was a good lad, he really was, and Johannes had no desire to disillusion him if he thought he had healing hands.

  So Johannes had kept it to himself, both his illness and his betrayal. But he knew that time was running out. That he couldn’t take this secret with him to the grave. Not if he wanted to rest in peace rather than the horror of waking up like a zombie, worm-eaten and trapped, doomed to eternal torment. He had no religious beliefs about who would be condemned to everlasting suffering or why, but he had been wrong about so many things in his life.

  ‘So many things . . .’ Johannes Halden muttered to himself.

  Then he put the mop aside, walked over to Sonny’
s cell and knocked on the door. No reply. He knocked again.

  Waited.

  Then he opened the door.

  Sonny sat with a rubber strap tied around his forearm below the elbow, the end of the strap between his teeth. He held a syringe just above a bulging vein. The angle was the prescribed thirty degrees for optimum insertion.

  Sonny calmly looked up and smiled. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sorry, I . . . it can wait.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, it’s . . . there’s no hurry.’ Johannes laughed. ‘It can wait another hour.’

  ‘Can it wait four hours?’

  ‘Four hours is fine.’

  The old man saw the needle sink into the vein. The boy pressed the plunger. Silence and darkness seemed to fill the room like black water. Johannes withdrew quietly and closed the door.

  6

  SIMON HAD HIS mobile pressed to his ear and his feet on the desk while he rocked back on the chair. It was an act the troika had perfected to such an extent that when they had challenged each other, the winner was whoever could be bothered to balance the longest.

  ‘So the American doctor didn’t want to give you his opinion?’ he said in a low voice, partly because he saw no reason to involve other members of the Homicide Squad in his personal life, and partly because this was how he and his wife always spoke on the phone. Softly, intimately. As if they were in bed, holding each other.

  ‘Oh, he does,’ Else said. ‘But not yet. He wants to look at the test results and the scans first. I’ll know more tomorrow.’

  ‘OK. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘How fine?’

  She laughed. ‘Don’t worry so much, darling. I’ll see you at dinner.’

  ‘All right. Your sister, is she . . .?’

  ‘Yes, she’s still here and she’ll give me a lift home. Now stop fussing and hang up, you’re at work!’

  He ended the call reluctantly. Thought about his dream in which he gave her his sight.

  ‘Chief Inspector Kefas?’

  He looked up. And up. The woman standing in front of his desk was tall. Very tall. And skinny. Legs as thin of those of a daddy-long-legs stuck out from under a smart skirt.

  ‘I’m Kari Adel. I’ve been told to assist you. I tried to find you at the crime scene, but you disappeared.’

  And she was young. Very young. She looked more like an ambitious bank clerk than a police officer. Simon rocked the chair even further back. ‘What crime scene?’

  ‘Kuba.’

  ‘And how do you know it’s a crime scene?’

  He saw her shift her weight. Look for a way out. But there wasn’t one.

  ‘Possible crime scene,’ she then said.

  ‘And who says I need help?’

  She jerked her thumb behind her to indicate where the order had come from. ‘But I think I’m the one in need of help. I’m new here.’

  ‘Fresh out of training?’

  ‘Eighteen months with the Drug Squad.’

  ‘Fresh, then. And you’ve already made it to Homicide? Congratulations, Adel. You’re either really lucky, well connected or . . .’ He leaned back horizontally in the chair and wiggled out a tin of snus from his jeans pocket.

  ‘A woman?’ she suggested.

  ‘I was going to say clever.’

  She blushed and he could see the discomfort in her eyes.

  ‘Are you clever?’ Simon asked, pushing a piece of snus under his upper lip.

  ‘I came second in my year.’

  ‘And how long are you planning on staying with Homicide?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If drugs didn’t appeal to you, why would murder?’

  She shifted her weight again. Simon saw that he had been right. She was one of those people who would make a brief guest appearance before disappearing up the building to the higher floors and up the ranks. Clever. Probably leave the police force altogether. Like the smart buggers at the Serious Fraud Office had done. Taken all their skills with them and left Simon in the lurch. The police force wasn’t a place you stayed if you were bright, talented, ambitious and wanted a life.

  ‘I left the crime scene because there was nothing to be found there,’ Simon said. ‘So tell me, where would you start?’

  ‘I would talk to his next of kin,’ Kari Adel said, looking around for a chair. ‘Map his movements before he ended up in the river.’

  Her accent suggested she was from the eastern part of west Oslo where people were terrified that the wrong accent might stigmatise them.

  ‘Good, Adel. And his next of kin—’

  ‘—is his wife. His soon-to-be ex-wife. She threw him out recently. I’ve spoken to her. He was staying at the Ila Centre for drug addicts. Is it OK if I sit down . . .?’

  Clever. Definitely clever.

  ‘You won’t need to now,’ Simon said, getting up. He estimated her to be at least fifteen centimetres taller than him. Even so, she had to take two steps to one of his. Tight skirt. That was all good, but he suspected she would soon be wearing something else. Crimes were solved in jeans.

  ‘You know you’re not allowed in here.’

  Martha blocked the access to the Ila Centre’s front door as she looked at the two people. She thought she had seen the woman before. Her height and thinness made her hard to forget. Drug Squad? She had blonde, lifeless hair, wore hardly any make-up and had a slightly pained facial expression that made her look like the cowed daughter of a rich man.

  The man was her direct opposite. Roughly 1.70 metres tall, somewhere in his sixties. Wrinkles in his face. But also laughter lines. Thinning grey hair above a pair of eyes in which she read ‘kind’, ‘humorous’ and ‘stubborn’. Reading people was something she did automatically when she held the obligatory introduction interview with new residents to establish what kind of behaviour and trouble the staff could expect. Sometimes she was wrong. But not often.

  ‘We don’t need to come inside,’ said the man who had introduced himself as Chief Inspector Kefas. ‘We’re from Homicide. It’s about Per Vollan. He lived here—’

  ‘Lived?’

  ‘Yes, he’s dead.’

  Martha gasped. It was her initial reaction when she was told that yet another man had died. She wondered if it was to reassure herself that she was still alive. Surprise came next. Or rather, the fact that she wasn’t surprised. But Per hadn’t been a drug addict, he hadn’t sat in death’s waiting room with the rest of them. Or had he? And had she seen it, known it subconsciously? Was that why the usual gasp was followed by the equally routine mental reaction: of course. No, it wasn’t that. It was the other thing.

  ‘He was found in the Aker River.’ The man did the talking. The woman had TRAINEE written on her forehead.

  ‘Right,’ Martha said.

  ‘You don’t sound surprised?’

  ‘No. No, perhaps not. It’s always a shock, of course, but . . .’

  ‘. . . but it’s par for the course in our line of work, yes?’ The man gestured at the windows in the building next door. ‘I didn’t know Tranen had shut.’

  ‘It’s going to be an upmarket patisserie,’ Martha said, hugging herself as if she were cold. ‘For the latte-drinking yummy mummies.’

  ‘So they’ve arrived here, too. How about that.’ He nodded to one of the old-timers who shuffled past on trembling junkie knees and got a measured nod in return. ‘There are many familiar faces here. Vollan, however, was a prison chaplain. The post-mortem report isn’t ready yet, but we found no needle marks on him.’

  ‘He wasn’t staying here because he was using. He helped us out when we had trouble with ex-offenders who were living here. They trusted him. So when he had to move out of his home, we offered him temporary accommodation.’

  ‘We know. What I’m asking is why you’re not surprised he’s dead when you know he wasn’t using. His death could have been an accident.’

  ‘Was it?’

  Simon looked at the tall, thi
n woman. She hesitated until he gave her a nod. Then she finally opened her mouth. ‘We haven’t found any signs of violence, but the area around the river is a notorious criminal hot spot.’

  Martha noticed her accent and concluded a strict mother had corrected her daughter’s language at the dinner table. A mother who had told her she would never find a decent husband if she spoke like a shop girl.

  The Chief Inspector tilted his head. ‘What do you think, Martha?’

  She liked him. He looked like someone who cared.

  ‘I think he knew he was going to die.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he wrote me a letter.’

  Martha walked around the table in the meeting room which lay opposite the reception area on the first floor. They had managed to retain the Gothic style and it was easily the most beautiful room in the building. Not that there was much competition. She poured a cup of coffee for the Chief Inspector who sat down while he read the letter that Per Vollan had left for her at reception. His partner perched on the edge of a chair next to him, texting on her mobile. She had politely declined Martha’s offer of coffee, tea and water as if she suspected even the tap water here to be contaminated with undesirable microbes. Kefas pushed the letter across to her. ‘It says here he leaves everything he owns to the hostel.’

  His colleague sent her text message and cleared her throat. The Chief Inspector turned to her. ‘Yes, Adel?’

  ‘You’re not allowed to say a hostel any more; it’s called a residential centre.’

  Kefas looked genuinely surprised. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we have social workers and a sickbay here,’ Martha explained. ‘That makes it more than just a hostel. Of course the real reason is that the word “hostel” now has unfortunate connotations. Drinking, brawling and squalid living conditions. So they slap some paint on the rust by renaming it.’