The Son (13 page)

‘He’s escaped from Staten Prison and is considered dangerous.’ Another ambulance approached and he leaned over her, shouting into her face: ‘So if he’s a resident here and you fail to tell us, it’s on your head if anything happens. Do you understand?’

So not the Drug Squad; at least that explained why she hadn’t seen them before. She nodded while she studied the photograph. Looked up at them again. Opened her mouth to say something when a gust of wind blew her dark fringe into her face. She was about to try again when she heard shouting behind her. It was Toy on the stairs.

‘Oi, Martha, Burre has gone and cut himself. I dunno what to do. He’s back in the cafe.’

‘People come and go in the summer,’ she said. ‘It’s a time when many of our residents prefer to sleep rough in the parks, and this in turn makes room for new arrivals. It’s hard to remember every single face—’

‘Like I said, his name is Sonny Lofthus.’

‘—and not everybody wants to register under their real name. We don’t expect our clients to have a passport or other forms of ID so we accept whatever name they give us.’

‘But don’t Social Services need to know who they are?’ the blond one asked.

Martha bit her lower lip.

‘Hey, Martha, Burre is, like, literally bleeding all over the place!’

The man with the curly halo placed a large, hairy hand on Martha’s bare upper arm. ‘Why don’t you just let us have a look around and we’ll see if we can find him?’ He noticed the look in her eyes and withdrew his hand.

‘Talking about ID,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I should ask to see yours?’

She saw something darken in the eyes of the blond man. And there was the hand of the curly-haired man again. Not on her upper arm this time, but around it.

‘Burre is almost out of blood.’ Toy had come over to where they were; he swayed and fixed the two men with his swimming eyes. ‘What’s going on here?’

Martha wriggled to free herself and put her hand on Toy’s shoulder. ‘Then we had better go and save his life. Gentleman, if you would care to wait.’

Martha and Toy walked across to the cafe. Another ambulance rushed past. Three ambulances. She shuddered involuntarily.

When she reached the door to the cafe, she turned round.

The two men were gone.

‘So you and Harnes
saw
Sonny close up?’ Simon asked as Franck escorted him and Kari back down to the ground floor.

Franck glanced at his watch. ‘What we saw was a young, clean-shaven man with short hair in a uniform. The Sonny we knew wore a filthy shirt, had matted long hair and a beard.’

‘So you’re saying it’ll be difficult to find him given how he now looks?’ Kari asked.

‘The pictures from the surveillance cameras are of poor quality, as you’d expect.’ Arild Franck turned round and fixed her with his eyes. ‘But we’ll find him.’

‘It’s a shame it wasn’t possible for us to talk to this Halden,’ Simon remarked.

‘Yes, as I said his illness has taken a turn for the worse,’ Franck replied as he led them back to reception. ‘I’ll let you know when he’s well enough for visitors.’

‘And you’ve no idea what Lofthus might have been talking to Per Vollan about?’

Franck shook his head. ‘The usual unburdening and spiritual guidance, I presume. Though Sonny Lofthus was himself a confidant.’

‘Was he?’

‘Lofthus kept himself apart from the other inmates. He was neutral, didn’t belong to any of the factions you find in every prison. And he never talked. That’s the definition of a good listener, isn’t it? He had become a kind of confessor to the other inmates, someone they could trust with anything. Who would he tell? He had no allies and he was going to stay in prison for the foreseeable future.’

‘What kind of murders was he in for?’ Kari asked.

‘Human murders,’ Franck remarked drily.

‘I mean—’

‘Murders of the most brutal kind. He shot an Asian girl and strangled a Kosovo Albanian.’ Franck held the exit door open for them.

‘And to think that such a dangerous criminal is now at large,’ Simon said, knowing he was twisting the knife now. Not that he was a sadist, but he was prepared to make an exception when it came to Arild Franck. Not because Franck was someone who was hard to like, in fact his personality was a mitigating circumstance. Nor because the man didn’t do his job – everyone at Police HQ knew that Franck was the real boss at Staten, rather than the man who held the title of prison governor. No, it was the other matter, these apparent coincidences which combined to create a suspicion that had been gnawing away at Simon and was approaching the most frustrating kind of knowledge, the one you can’t prove. That Arild Franck was on the take.

‘I give him forty-eight hours, Chief Inspector,’ Franck said. ‘He has no money, no relatives or friends. He’s a loner who has been in prison since he was eighteen years old. That’s twelve years ago. He knows nothing about the world outside, he has nowhere to go, no places to hide.’

While Kari hurried to keep up with Simon on their way to the car, Simon thought about the forty-eight hours and was tempted by the bet. Because he had recognised something about the boy. He didn’t know quite what it was; perhaps it was just the way he moved. Or perhaps he had inherited more than that.

14

JOHNNY PUMA TURNED
over in his bed and sized up his new room-mate. He didn’t know who had invented the term room-mate, only that at the Ila Centre it was about as much of a misnomer as you could get. Room enemy would have been more appropriate. He had yet to share a room with anyone who didn’t try to rob him blind. Or someone he hadn’t tried to rob blind himself. So he kept all his valuables, which comprised a waterproof wallet containing three thousand kroner and a double plastic bag with three grams of amphetamine, taped to a thigh so hairy that any attempt to remove it would rouse him even from the deepest sleep.

This was what Johnny Puma’s life had been about these last twenty years: amphetamines and sleep. He had been given most of the diagnoses they handed out in the seventies and onwards to explain why a young man would rather party than work, would rather fight and screw around than buy a house and start a family, get high rather than get clean and live a deadly boring life. But the last diagnosis had stuck. ME. Myalgic encephalomyelitis. Chronic exhaustion. Johnny Puma exhausted? Anyone who heard it simply laughed. Johnny Puma, the weightlifter, the life and soul of the party, Lillesand’s most popular removal man who could shift a piano single-handed. It had started with a painful hip, painkillers that didn’t work, followed by painkillers that worked only too well, and he was hooked. Now his life consisted of long days resting in bed, interspersed by intense periods of activity where he had to channel all his energy into getting drugs. Or find money to pay off his already alarmingly large debt to the centre’s drug baron, a Lithuanian transsexual halfway through a sex change who called herself Coco.

Johnny could tell at a glance that the young man standing by the window needed to score. The constant, frantic search. The compulsion. The struggle.

‘Please would you close the curtains, mate?’

The other obeyed and the room became pleasantly dark once more.

‘What are you using, mate?’

‘Heroin.’

Heroin? Here at the centre people said dope when they meant heroin. Shit, scag, horse or dust. Or boy. Or Superboy when it came to the new wonder drug you could buy down at Nybrua from a guy who looked like Sleepy from
Snow White
. Heroin was what people called it in prison. Or if they were rookies, of course. Though if you were a proper rookie, you could use expressions such as China White, Mexican Mud or any of the other nonsense terms you picked up from the movies.

‘I can get you good, cheap heroin. You don’t need to go out.’

Johnny saw something happen to the figure in the darkness. He had seen how junkies who were really desperate could get high at the mere promise of drugs; he believed tests had registered changes in the brain’s pleasure centre in the several seconds before the fix. With a forty per cent gross margin on the drugs he could buy from Høvdingen in room 36, Johnny could buy three or four bags of speed for himself. It was preferable to robbing the neighbourhood again.

‘No thanks. I can leave if you want to sleep.’

The voice coming from the window was so soft and low that Johnny couldn’t understand how it managed to cut through Ila’s constant noise of partying, screaming, music, arguing and traffic. So the guy wanted to know if Johnny was about to go to sleep, eh? So he could search him. Maybe find the wrap that Johnny had taped to his thigh.

‘I never sleep, I just shut my eyes. You get me, mate?’

The young man nodded. ‘I’m going out now.’

When the door had closed behind his new room enemy, Johnny Puma got out of bed. It took him only two minutes to search the guy’s wardrobe and the top bunk. Nothing. De nada. His room enemy couldn’t be as green as he looked; he carried everything with him.

Markus Engseth was frightened.

‘Are you scared now?’ said the bigger of the two boys blocking his path.

Markus shook his head and gulped.

‘Yes, you’re so scared you’re sweating, you fat pig. Hey, can you smell that?’

‘Look, he’s going to cry,’ the other boy laughed.

They were fifteen years old, possibly sixteen. Or even seventeen. Markus didn’t know, he knew only that they were much bigger and older than him.

‘We just want to borrow it,’ said the bigger boy and grabbed hold of the handlebars of Markus’s bicycle. ‘We’ll give it back to you.’

‘Eventually,’ the other laughed again.

Markus looked up at the windows of the houses in the quiet street. Black, blind, glass surfaces. Normally he didn’t like people watching him. He liked being invisible so that he could sneak past the garden gate and up to the abandoned yellow house. But right now he hoped that a window would open up somewhere, that a grown-up voice would shout at the big boys to clear off. Back to Tåsen or Nydalen, or some other neighbourhood where thugs like them belonged. But it remained completely silent. Summer silence. It was the holidays and the other children in the street had gone off to cabins, beaches or foreign cities. It made no difference as far as playing was concerned, Markus always played on his own. But being small was riskier when you weren’t one in a crowd.

The big boy yanked the bicycle out of Markus’s hands and he realised that he didn’t have the strength to blink away the tears any more. The bicycle his mum had bought him with money they could otherwise have spent going away somewhere this summer.

‘My dad is home,’ he said, pointing across the street towards their red house that lay opposite the empty yellow one he had just been inside.

‘So why haven’t you called for him?’ The boy sat on Markus’s bicycle to try it out; it wobbled and he seemed cross that there wasn’t enough air in the tyres.

‘Dad!’ Markus called out, but could instantly hear how half-hearted and false it sounded.

The older boys howled with laughter. The other one had sat down on the parcel rack and Markus saw how the rubber tyres began twisting off the rim.

‘I don’t think you have a dad,’ said the boy and spat on the ground. ‘Come on, Herman, ride!’

‘I’m trying, but you’re stopping me.’

‘No, I’m not.’

The three boys turned round.

A man was standing behind the bicycle holding onto the rack. He lifted the back of the bicycle so it started freewheeling and both boys fell forward. They stumbled off and glared at the man.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ the older boy snarled.

The man made no reply, he just looked at him. Markus noticed his strange haircut, the Salvation Army logo on his T-shirt and the scars on his forearms. It was so quiet that Markus thought he could hear every bird in Berg singing. And now it looked like the two older boys had also noticed the man’s scars.

‘We were only going to borrow it.’ The bigger boy’s voice had taken on a different tone; it was croaky and small.

‘But you can have it if you want,’ the other one added quickly.

The man just carried on staring at them. He gestured to Markus to take the bicycle. The two boys started to back away.

‘Where do you live?’

‘Tåsen. Are . . . are you his dad?’

‘Might be. Next stop Tåsen, OK?’

The boys nodded in unison. They turned round as if on command and marched off.

Markus looked up at the man who was smiling down at him. Behind them he heard one of the boys say to the other: ‘His dad’s a druggy – did you see his arms?’

‘What’s your name?’ the man said.

‘Markus,’ he replied.

‘Have a nice summer, Markus,’ the man said, gave him back his bicycle and walked across to the gate to the yellow house. Markus held his breath. It was a house like every other house in the street; square like a box, not particularly large and surrounded by a small garden. But this house and its garden were in need of a lick of paint and a session with the lawnmower. Still, it was
The House
. The man headed straight for the basement stairs. Not the front door like Markus had seen salesmen or Jehovah’s Witnesses do. Did he know about the key which was hidden on the beam above the basement door and which Markus was careful always to put back?

He got his answer when he heard the basement door open and close again.

Markus’s jaw dropped. No one had been inside that house for as long as he could remember. Admittedly, he could only remember back as far as when he was five, which was seven years ago, but somehow it seemed right that the house was empty. Who would want to live in a house where someone had killed themselves?

Well, there was one person who turned up at least twice a year. Markus had only seen him once and guessed that he must be the one who turned the heating on low before the winter and turned it off again in the spring. He must be paying the bills. His mum had said that without power the house would have been so damaged by now that it would have been uninhabitable, but she didn’t know who the man was, either. But he had looked nothing like the man who was inside the house now, Markus was convinced of it.