Love Story, With Murders (50 page)

The road unspools under my wheels. Trees, rocks, stars.

I’ve been pursuing my investigation of my father’s past with increasing rigour. I have over eight thousand pages of documents, over forty thousand words of notes. My investigation of
the Rattigan boys has been sidelined for the moment, but that’s okay. A girl’s got to prioritise.

I don’t have a lead that
means anything, but Jack Yorath’s comment about the whistle-blower still echoes for me. The notes we have on file say that the individual concerned –
Gareth Glyn, a mid-ranking planning officer on the city council – alleged corruption in the award of development contracts. The complaint was investigated at the time – intelligently
and appropriately, as far as I can tell – but no firm evidence
was ever found. Glyn lost his job. Set up as a planning consultant, then faded from view. Walked out on his wife in 2002, who
subsequently sold up and moved to Dolgellau. I haven’t been able to find anything further.

I think,
I need to go and speak to Mrs Glyn
. The right time to start interviewing is when your preliminary investigation has given you a platform to work with. When you’re in
a
position to ask the right questions. That moment has come.

But I don’t think very much. The car feels different now I know there are guns in the back. Heavier. More purposeful.

The dope I smoked in the evening feels like it’s left the system. I feel wrung out and cold.

After a while, it’s time to turn off the E6. I glance at Lev, wondering whether to wake him, but find that he’s
already awake.

‘Okay. I drive.’

We swap over. It’s colder up here than it was in Oslo. Partly the night. Partly being higher and out of the city. But also these accumulating northerly miles.

We’re in late March now. It’s not spring, as I’ve ever known it, but this is what passes for spring up here. Although everything is hard frozen, you can see the streaks and
marks where ice has
melted during the day. When we stopped in the middle of the night, some of the snow had that granular, crystalline quality you get when snow softens during the day and refreezes
at night.

Lev says, ‘You want him alive, yes?’

‘Yes.’

I want more than that. I want evidence. His phone, his laptop, his papers. Anything that might expose the line that links Khalifi’s murder with Mortimer’s
suicide and Barry’s
weapons. The line that links Khalifi’s corpse to Prothero’s silky arrogance. Olaf might well be cautious enough not to retain anything that might connect him to murder, but perhaps not.
Out here, on the very edge of the habitable world, he might figure that keeping a mobile phone wouldn’t prove disastrous.

Lev drives on. It’s not yet sunrise, but there’s a softening
of the darkness.

When we’re ten miles away, Lev stops. Drinks from a thermos of black tea. Also something else. I don’t know what. Maybe ethanol or something of that sort. To reduce muscle tremors. I
know marksmen use it.

He offers me tea. I say no.

The guns in the back seem huge.

I want to pee again, but don’t. Lev does, though. Gets out, pees against a tree. Walks a few feet
away, to a patch of clean snow, and rinses himself down with it. Face, neck, hands,
wrists. He’s brisk and businesslike, as though washing in a basin of warm water.

I’m scared now. Not so much for myself – not with Lev next to me – but because of the scale of these choices I’m making.

Going to Glasgow didn’t strike me as a big deal at the time. I hadn’t expected to encounter Hamish,
but was reasonably confident of managing him if I did. Likewise, the other little
things I’ve done off-piste in this case. I’m not a Watkinsian by-the-book type, and I’m happy with the compromises and decisions I’ve made.

But now? I’ve had in my head a picture of what ought to happen. Lev and I surprise Olaf in his sleep. We tie him up. We search the house. We locate all incriminating items
and place them
where the Norwegian police will surely find them. Then leave. Back to Oslo. An anonymous phone call to the local cops. Let the ordinary processes of justice do their stuff.

But a picture in my head is one thing. Reality is another. I didn’t drive up to Glasgow with a carful of guns.

We could still turn back. I almost say something when Lev returns to the car, but when
I open my mouth no words come out.

I don’t know what I’m doing.

Lev does, though. He drives with alertness. I’ve never seen him like this. In hunting mode, not training mode. When the satnav says we’re five miles from our target, Lev flicks his
headlights off. The road is a channel of dark grey through ribbons of snow.

We ride uphill. Rocks on both sides of us. Grey cliffs blotting
out the stars. When the road forks, we take the one that’s unpaved. A rough track, leading up.

As we get to the top, Lev travels slower, searching for the crest. He drives like a man who knows the landscape. I don’t think he can have been here before, but perhaps he’s scoped
it out on maps, on Google Earth.

He comes to a halt, just before the final rise. We get out. Lev shoves his handgun
into his coat pocket. Then takes his rifle. Checks the wind. It was still earlier, when we stopped in the
night. It’s not windy now, but there’s a whisper of breeze running down the valley. Lev feels the wind and makes a small adjustment to his sights.

I take my handgun, feeling like a girl in pigtails. Her first day at school.

We walk up to the top of the hill, but don’t stop. Lev doesn’t
want us silhouetted against the light.

We start descending.

The track is worse on this side. Exposed rock wherever water has washed away the surface.

It’s gently freezing. Our breaths make steam ghosts in the air that hang a moment, then disperse. Pines whisper to each other in Old Norse.

There’s only one dwelling visible below us. A rust-red wooden house. Not big. Single-storey.
Huddled against the cold. There’s a single outbuilding, a log store perhaps. A patch of
dirt with a parked four-by-four.

Beyond the house, the valley flattens into silver. The river coming down from the mountains widens out to a kind of lake, before narrowing again, bolting through a gap in the cliffs that wall
off the valley end. The lake is ice. The slopes on the far side forested and
steep.

It’s getting lighter all the time.

We work our way farther downhill, until Lev stops us. He pulls out some binoculars. Night-vision things, I assume.

He scopes things out. There’s no light in the house. No smoke in the chimney. No dog in the yard.

I let him do his stuff. I’m starting to feel better. Almost relaxed. As though this stupid plan might actually work.

And
because I’m relaxed, I don’t notice that Lev isn’t.

He passes me the glasses.

‘There,’ he says, pointing. ‘Also there, there, and there.’

To start with, I can’t find what he’s pointing me towards. Then I can. Dots that glow a bright green through the glasses. That are otherwise all but invisible in the frost.

I don’t know what they are, what I’m looking at.

‘Is surveillance
device. All round house.’

Then I do feel fear. The real thing. A wash of cold that pricks open every capillary. I look at Lev, because this is his world, not mine.

He shrugs. ‘We leave. We kill. We try to capture.’ Lev offers me three options, like a waiter offering a choice of soups. Tomato. Chicken. Minestrone.

‘I don’t know. I mean, isn’t there some way to . . .?’

‘Disable or
evade device? Yes, is no problem. Give me six men. Counterterrorist training. Also arctic experience. Easy.’

He looks at me, waiting for an answer.

‘Let me think.’

It feels weird standing out here, in the three-quarter dark, the surveillance cameras in front of us, a professional killer in the house below. A gun in my hand and Lev tooled up beside me.

I ask, ‘If we go in, what
are our chances of making a clean capture? No shooting, no blood?’

‘Twenty prozent. Maybe ten. I don’t know this man.’ Lev uses the German word
prozent
, instead of
percent
. The odds are terrible in either language. ‘If we
continue, is better to start now.’ Lev gestures up at the sky. He doesn’t want it to get any brighter.

My mouth says, ‘We can’t leave.’

I hear the words. Understand
why someone would think that way. Jan-Erik Fjeistad is a professional killer. Leaving him untouched means allowing him to continue his bloody trade. If we drive away
from here now, someone will pay for that decision with their life.

But I don’t move. I’m a motionless thing in a motionless world.

Lev makes a tiny gesture, asking me to commit. And this time, I say, ‘We can’t leave.’ Not
just my mouth. Me. Give a little nod of decision.

‘Okay,’ says Lev. ‘So we try to capture. Otherwise kill.’

Minestrone it is. If they’re out of minestrone, we’ll go for the chicken.

I nod. ‘Okay.’

My voice sounds like it belongs to somebody else completely. Nothing here feels real.

‘Wait here. When I say, you go there.’ He points, off the track, to a boulder partway down the
slope. ‘Don’t run. Just walk. Gun please. Safety off. If you have to fire,
aim with both hand and shoot slow.’

I nod, like I’ve understood anything, but Lev is already off. Down the hill. Dancing really. Rock to rock. Tree to tree. A shadow dancing through the half-light.

After a while, he stops against a tree. I’m about to follow him, when I realise he hasn’t yet given the instruction
to move. So I stay put. Lev checks his binoculars again, then his
scope, then the binoculars.

Somewhere around us the colours shift a millionth of a shade as dawn strengthens its grip.

Then Lev signals and I walk down the hill. The house we’re approaching has only a single window facing us. Lev has his rifle fixed on that window. He doesn’t acknowledge me as I walk
past not ten yards
from him. We are within the range of the surveillance devices now. I can see the nearest one, a small black box on a rickety fencepost. Wires too, presumably, but I don’t
see them.

Then I’m behind my rock and Lev moves again.

He points me at a new rock. I walk fast toward it. Smear myself into its shadow.

Then Lev’s turn. As he passes me, there’s a sound from the house. I hear the
detonation and it takes me half a second to realise the shot comes from Olaf. I don’t see where the
bullet strikes, but Lev hasn’t stopped moving. He gets to a thin rise of ground, now just 150 metres from the house. Settles into a firing position. Lying on his belly, legs slightly spread
and to the side. Fires.

I can’t see where the bullet goes. Don’t know what Lev is trying to do. He
turns, beckons me toward him, makes a gesture to indicate I need to come slowly, then rolls back onto his
belly and fires another shot. He fires three more times as I descend.

When I get next to Lev, the house feels very close indeed. I can see Olaf’s gun now, a thin metal line against the angle of the open casement.

Without taking his eye off his rifle scope, Lev fills me in.

‘Okay,
Fjerstad has rifle, not just shotgun. From this range, very good shot can hit us, so be careful. But this rifle’ – Lev indicates his own – ‘is for snipers,
not just for hitting big stupid animal. Also, bullet can go through wall, no problem. Fjerstad maybe knows this. Anyway, is worried.’ His voice adjusts and turns posh and English.
‘Right now Mr Fjerstad is shitting himself.’

I nod,
as though this is all normal.

Nod, and see as I do that there is smoke beginning to rise from the house’s only chimney. That’s either because Olaf is starting to prepare himself a nice grilled breakfast, or
because he’s in the business of destroying evidence.

I say, ‘He’s burning evidence.’

‘Naughty man. Is not allowed. I think we ask him to leave the house.’

Lev swings his rifle
through ten degrees. Aims at the big green oil tank up against the wall of the house. He puts two bullets into the tank, waits for a spill of oil, then shoots another round
onto the tank’s concrete base.

Bullet. Concrete. Spark. Flame.

The oil tank disappears in a fireball. Intense orange and black. Oily clouds circling down around the updraught. You can feel the heat from here. The
house starts to blaze.

While I’m admiring the flame, Lev puts five bullets through the timber walls. A kind of hurry-up to Olaf, as though having an oil tank explode outside wasn’t enough.

Then Lev is moving again. Running for the corner of the house. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, so I follow him. I still have my gun in my hand. Still haven’t fired it.
The ground is rocky and
sloping, but I run the way Lev does. By instinct. Letting my feet find their own placement.

Lev is twenty yards ahead of me. He’s fixed, I think, on gaining access to the front of the house, to get a clear sweep of the terrain there. If he can get to the front corner of the
house, his superior weaponry and his vastly superior fighting skills will give him command of the battlefield. But
there’s a stand of trees and low bushes between the house and the track
leading back up the hill. The trees block Lev’s view. Because I’m farther back, they don’t block mine. The upper branches of the trees are already starting to singe and crackle
with the flame.

Olaf isn’t in the house anymore. He’s not trying to defend his turf. He’s trying to get the hell away. He’s at the door of
his Land Rover Defender. Gunning his engine.
Heading up the hill.

I scream something to Lev, but my feet are travelling faster than my brain. I burst out onto the track. Olaf is forty yards away, thirty.

He’d happily run me down. I’d happily shoot him dead.

The car is accelerating towards me as fast as it can, given the adverse slope and the uneven terrain. I see Olaf’s face, tense
and white at the wheel.

Him against me.

I find a shooting stance.

Fire.

Feet planted. Hands out. Squeeze the trigger.

Fire, fire, fire, fire.

The windscreen ahead of me is shattered glass. The vehicle hits a pothole and instead of adjusting course, slews up the bank and almost overturns.