Headhunters (16 page)

‘Can’t? I have to! I’m dying, you idiot! Dying!’

‘Listen to me. When they discover you’ve got Curacit in you, they’ll ring the police
tout de suite
. Curacit is not a medicine you get on prescription. We’re talking about the most deadly poison in the world here, on a level with prussic acid and anthrax. You’ll end up being interrogated by Kripos.’

‘So what? I’ll keep my mouth shut.’

‘And how will you explain this, eh?’

‘I’ll find something.’

I shook my head. ‘You don’t have a chance, Ove. Not when they get going on Inbau, Reid and Buckley.’

‘Eh?’

‘You’ll break down. You’ve got to stay here, do you understand? You’re better already, anyway.’

‘What the fuck do you know about that, Brown? You’re a doctor, are you? No, you’re a bloody headhunter and
my
lungs are burning up right now. My spleen is ruptured and in an hour my kidneys will give up the ghost. I have to get to a fucking hospital NOW!’

He had half sat up in bed, but I jumped up and pushed him back down.

‘Listen, I’ll go and find some milk in the fridge. Milk neutralises poison. They wouldn’t be able to do anything different for you at the hospital.’

‘Apart from pouring milk down me?’

He tried to sit up again, but I shoved him back roughly, and suddenly the breath seemed to go out of him. His pupils slid up into his skull, his mouth hung half open and his head lay on the pillow. I bent over his face and confirmed that he was exhaling stinking tobacco breath over me. Then I went round the house looking for whatever might help him with the pain.

All I could find was ammunition. And lots of it. The medicine cupboard, adorned with the officially prescribed red cross, was full of boxes that according to the label contained cartridges with bullets of nine-millimetre calibre. In the kitchen drawers there were more ammo boxes, some marked ‘blanks’, what we on the sergeants’ course called red farts: bulletless shells. These must have been the ones Ove used to fire at the TV programmes he didn’t like. Sick man. I opened the fridge and there – on the same shelf as a carton of Tine semi-skimmed milk – was a shiny silver pistol. I took it out. The stock was freezing cold. The make – Glock 17 – was engraved in the steel. I weighed the weapon in my hand. There was clearly no safety catch, nonetheless there was a bullet in the chamber. In other words the gun could be grabbed and fired in one movement, for example if you were in the kitchen and received an unexpected, unwanted visitor. I peered up at the CCTV cameras on the ceiling. I realised that Ove Kjikerud
was
a lot more paranoid than I had imagined, that perhaps we were talking about a diagnosis here.

I took the pistol along with the carton of milk. If nothing else, I could use the weapon to keep him in check if he became unruly again.

I rounded the corner into the sitting room and found him perched up in bed. The faint had just been an act. In his hand he was holding a plastic woman, bent over and licking.

‘You have to send an ambulance,’ he said into the receiver loud and clear, staring at me with defiance in his eyes. He seemed to think he could allow himself that since in the other hand he was holding a weapon I recognised from films. I thought the hood, gang warfare, black-on-black crime. In short: an Uzi. A machine gun that is so small and handy, so ugly and deadly that it isn’t even funny. And it was pointing at me.

‘No!’ I yelled. ‘Don’t do it, Ove! They’ll just ring the pol—’

He fired.

It sounded like popcorn in a saucepan. I had time to think that, time to think that this was the music I would die to. I felt something against my stomach and looked down. Saw the jet of blood spurting from my side hit the milk carton I was holding in my hand. White blood? I realised it was the other way round, that the hole was in the milk carton. Automatically and with a kind of despair, I raised the gun, somewhat surprised that I still could, and fired. The sound kick-started my fury: at least the bang was more potent than the bloody Uzi’s. And the Israeli homo pistol also went quiet then. I lowered the gun, in time to see Ove staring at me with a frown on his forehead. And there, right above the frown, was a small, elegant, black hole. Then his head fell back and hit the pillow with a soft thud. My fury
was
gone. I blinked and blinked, it was like having a rolling TV image on my retina. Something told me that Ove Kjikerud was not going to make any more comebacks.

I DROVE ALONG
the E6 with my foot jammed down on the accelerator, the rain hammering against the windscreen and the wipers desperately sweeping to and fro in Kjikerud’s Mercedes 280SE. It was a quarter past one, five hours since I had got up, and I had already managed to survive my wife’s attempt on my life unscathed, dump the body of my partner in a lake, rescue said body, then alive and kicking, just to see my alive and kicking partner try to shoot me. Whereupon, with a flukey shot, I had seen to it that he became a corpse once again and I a murderer. And I was only halfway to Elverum.

The driving rain was bouncing off the tarmac like milk being frothed, and automatically I hunched over the wheel so as not to miss the sign for the turn-off. For the place I was going to now did not have an address I could tap into the Pathfinder GPS.

The only thing I had done before leaving Kjikerud’s house was to put on some dry clothes I found in a wardrobe, grab his car keys and remove the cash and credit card from his wallet. I left him lying on the bed as he was. If the alarm went off, the bed was the only spot in the house that was not covered by a camera. I also took the Glock with me as it seemed sensible not to leave the murder weapon at the crime scene. And the bunch of keys with the key to his house and to our regular meeting
place
, the cabin outside Elverum. It was a place for contemplation, planning and visions. And it was a place where nobody would come looking for me, as no one knew that I knew that this place existed. Not only that, it was the only place I could go, unless I wanted to get Lotte involved in this business. And this business, what the hell was all this business actually? Well, at this very moment it involved being hunted down by a crazy Dutchman whose very profession it was to hunt people down. And before long there would be the police, too, provided they were just a little bit smarter than I supposed. If I were to have any chance, I would have to make it difficult for them. I would have to change my car, for example, as there is little that makes it easier to identify a person than a seven-figure registration number. After hearing the beep from the alarm, which was automatically activated when I let myself out of Ove’s house, I drove back towards my own. I was aware that Greve might be waiting for me there, so I parked in a side street some way off. I put my wet clothes in the boot, took the Rubens from inside the roof lining and put it in my portfolio, locked the car and walked off. Ove’s car was still where I had seen it earlier. I got in, placed the portfolio on the seat next to me and headed for Elverum.

There was the turn-off. It came out of nowhere, and I had to concentrate on braking without losing control. Poor visibility, aquaplaning, it was easy to drive a car into a hedge, and I didn’t need the cops or whiplash right now.

Then I was in the country. Wisps of mist hung over the farms and the undulating fields on either side of the road that gradually became narrower and narrower and more winding. I was caught in the spray from the tyres of a lorry advertising Sigdal Kitchens, and it was a relief when the next turn-off came and I had the road to myself.
The
holes in the tarmac became bigger and more frequent, and the farms smaller and fewer. A third turn-off. Gravel road. A fourth. Fucking wilderness. Rain-heavy, low-hanging branches scraped against the car like a blind man’s fingers identifying a stranger. Twenty minutes more driving at a snail’s pace and I was there. That was how long it had been since I’d last seen a house.

I pulled the hood on Ove’s sweater over my head and jogged into the rain, past the barn with the strangely tilting extension. According to Ove, this was because Sindre Aa, the grumpy recluse of a farmer who lived here, was such a cheapskate that he hadn’t laid any foundations for the annexe, which over the course of years had sunk into the clay, centimetre by centimetre. I had never spoken to the bloody farmer myself, Ove had taken care of that side of things, but I had seen him from a distance a couple of times and recognised the lean, bent figure standing on the steps of the farmhouse. God knows how he could have heard the car approaching in this rain. A fat cat was rubbing itself against his legs.

‘Hello!’ I shouted well before I arrived at the steps.

No answer.

‘Hello, Aa!’ I repeated. Still no answer.

I stopped by the foot of the steps and waited in the rain. The cat padded down the steps towards me. And there was me thinking cats hated rain. It had almond-shaped eyes, just like Diana, and pressed itself against me as though I were an old friend. Or maybe as though I were a total stranger. The farmer lowered his rifle. Ove had told me Aa used a telescopic sight on the old rifle to see who was dropping by since he was too stingy to buy himself proper binoculars. But for the same reason he had never indulged in ammunition either, so it was probably quite safe. I assumed the rifle routine also had
the
intended effect on the number of visitors. Aa spat over the railing.

‘When’s that Kjikerud comin’, Brown?’ His voice creaked like an unlubricated door and ‘Kjikerud’ was spat out as if it were a form of exorcism. How he had got hold of my name I had no idea, but it certainly wasn’t from Ove.

‘He’s coming later,’ I said. ‘Can I park my car in the barn?’

Aa spat again. ‘It ain’t cheap. And that ain’t your car, it’s Kjikerud’s. How’s he gettin’ here?’

I took a deep breath. ‘On skis. How much is it?’

‘Five hundred a day.’

‘Five … hundred?’

He grinned. ‘You can leave it on the road for nothin’.’

I pulled out three of Ove’s two-hundred notes, went up the steps to where Aa was waiting with a bony outstretched hand. He stuffed the money into a bulging wallet and spat again.

‘You can give me the change later,’ I said.

He didn’t answer, just slammed the door hard behind him as he went in.

I reversed into the barn, and in the dark I almost skewered the car on the line of sharp steel prongs on a silage loader. Fortunately, the loader, which was attached to the back of Sindre Aa’s blue Massey Ferguson tractor, was in the raised position. So instead of piercing the rear fender or puncturing the tyres, the lower edge scraped the boot lid and warned me just in time to avoid getting ten steel prongs through the rear window.

I parked beside the tractor, took the portfolio and ran across to the cabin. Luckily, the spruce forest was so dense that not much rain seeped through, and after letting myself into the simple log cabin, my hair was still
surprisingly
dry. I was going to light the fire but rejected the idea. Having taken the precaution of hiding the car, I didn’t think it was a good idea to send up smoke signals to say the cabin was occupied.

It was only now that I noticed how hungry I was.

I hung Ove’s denim jacket over a chair in the kitchen, went through the cupboards and at length found a solitary can of stew from the last time Ove and I had been here. There was neither cutlery nor a can-opener in the drawers, but I managed to bang a hole in the metal lid with the barrel of the Glock. I sat down and used my fingers to shovel down the greasy, salty contents.

Then I stared out of the window at the rain falling on the forest and the tiny yard between the cabin and the outside toilet. I went into the bedroom, put the Rubens portfolio under the mattress and lay down on the lower bunk to think. I didn’t get to do much thinking. It must have been all the adrenalin I had produced that day because all of a sudden I opened my eyes and realised I had been asleep. I checked my watch. Four o’clock in the afternoon. I fished out my mobile and saw there were eight missed calls. Four from Diana who probably wanted to play the concerned wife and, with Greve listening over her shoulder, would ask where on earth I was. Three from Ferdinand who was probably waiting to hear about the nomination or at least instructions on what they should do now with the Pathfinder job. And one I didn’t recognise immediately because I had deleted her from my address book. But not from my memory or heart. And while examining the number, it struck me that I – a person who in the course of his more than thirty years on this planet had assembled enough student friends, ex-girlfriends, colleagues and business connections for a network that filled two megabytes in Outlook – had one single acquaintance I could trust. A woman I had known,
strictly
speaking, for only three weeks. Well, shagged for three weeks. A brown-eyed Dane who dressed like a scarecrow, answered in monosyllables and had a name consisting of five letters. I don’t know which of us this was more tragic for.

I rang directory enquiries and asked for a number abroad. Most switchboards close down at four in Norway, most likely because the majority of the receptionists have gone home, to a sick partner according to statistics, in the country with the shortest working hours in the world, the biggest health budget and the highest proportion of sick leave. The HOTE switchboard answered as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I didn’t have a name or a department, but took a risk.