Authors: Anne Holt
Since the obligatory bequest to his own children was a mere bagatelle in comparison to Georg Koll’s entire fortune, there was a reality behind this threat. It made no difference whatsoever to Marcus. He burned the letter and tried to forget the whole thing. And when the estate was divided up fifteen years later, in 1999, it turned out that his father, convinced of his own immortality, had omitted to make a will.
Marcus stuck stubbornly to his guns. He still wanted nothing to do with his father’s money.
He gave in only when his grandfather, who never mentioned Georg either, managed to convince Marcus that he was the only one of the
three siblings capable of managing the family fortune in a professional way. His brother was a teacher, his sister an assistant in a bookshop. Marcus himself was an economist, and when both siblings insisted that the best thing would be to set up a new company with the combined assets of their father’s estate, with all three of them as joint owners and Marcus as director and administrator, he allowed himself to be persuaded.
‘Just look at it as a bloody good joke,’ Mathias had said with a grin. ‘The bastard did Mum and us out of money all his life, and now we can live very well on the proceeds he worked so hard to keep from us.’
It was ironic, Marcus had gradually come to accept. A splendid irony.
‘Dad,’ little Marcus said impatiently. ‘What does that say? What does it mean?’
His father smiled absently and dragged his gaze away from the ridge, the fjord and the white sky. He was feeling hungry.
‘Right,’ he said, fixing a tiny screw in place. ‘There, that’s the rotor finished. Then we do this … Do you want to do it?’
The boy nodded, and slotted in the four blades.
‘We did it, Dad! We did it! Can we go outside and fly it? Can we do it now?’
He picked up the remote control in one hand and the finished helicopter in the other, tentatively, as if he didn’t quite trust it not to fall apart.
‘It’s too cold. Much too cold. As I said yesterday, it could be weeks before we can take it outside.’
‘But Dad …’
‘You promised, Marcus. You promised not to go on about it. Why don’t you ring Rolf instead and ask if he’s coming home for our special lunch?’
The boy hesitated for a moment before putting everything down without a word. Suddenly he brightened up with a smile.
‘Granny and the others are here!’ he shouted, running out of the room.
The door slammed behind him. The sound rang in Marcus’s ears until once again only the faint snoring of the oblivious dogs and the crackling of the fire filled the enormous room. Marcus’s gaze rested on the fire, then swept around the room.
He really did live in a cliché.
The house in Åsen.
It was large, but set back from the road so that only the top floor was visible to passers-by. When he bought the house he had decided to remove the ridiculous wooden panelling on the outside, along with the turf roof and the portico in front of the garage, which bore the legend
Home Sweet Home
, roughly carved and with a dragon’s head at either end. Just when he was about to tackle the panelling, Rolf had entered his and young Marcus’s lives. Rolf had laughed until he cried when he saw the house in all its glory for the first time, and he refused to move in unless Marcus promised to keep the more eccentric and what one might call rustic elements.
‘We’re an extended family with a twist,’ Rolf would laugh.
A little bit richer than most, Marcus thought, but he said nothing.
Rolf wasn’t thinking about the money. He was thinking about their family life, with little Marcus and a wide circle of aunts and uncles and cousins, his grandmother and friends who came and went and were almost always at the house in Åsen; he was thinking about the dogs and the annual hunting trip in the autumn with friends, old friends, boys Marcus had grown up with and never lost contact with. Rolf always laughed so heartily at the happy, ordinary, trivial life they led.
Rolf was always so happy.
Everything had turned out the way Marcus had hoped.
He had even managed to use his father’s money for something good. His father had consigned him to oblivion and regarded him as a lost soul. By condemning his son’s future, Georg Koll had paradoxically given him a new one. The first, wild years lay behind him, and Marcus had managed to avoid the disease that had brutally taken so many of those he knew, in pain and embarrassment and often loneliness. He was deeply grateful for this, and when he burned the letter from his father he resolved that Georg Koll would be wrong. Utterly and emphatically wrong. Marcus would be what his father had never been: a man.
‘Dad!’
The boy came running into the room, his arms flung wide.
‘They’re all coming! Rolf said the bulldog had three puppies and everything was fine and he’s on his way home and he’s looking forward to—’
‘Good, good.’ Marcus laughed and got up to accompany the boy into the hallway. He could hear several cars in the courtyard; the guests were arriving.
He stopped in the doorway for a moment and looked around.
The doubt which had tormented and nagged him for several weeks had finally gone. He had a sharp instinct, and had made a fortune by following it. In the early summer of 2007 he had spent weeks fighting a strong urge to sell up and get out of the stock market. He had sat up night after night with analyses and reports, but the only sign he could see that something was wrong was the stagnation of the US property market. When the first downgrading of bonds linked to the unsafe sub-prime loans came later that summer, he made his decision overnight. Over a period of three months he cashed in more than a billion in US shares at a significant profit. A few months later he would wake in the middle of the night out of sheer relief. His fortune remained in the bank until interest rates began to fall.
Marcus Koll was now buying properties at a time when everything was cheap. When he sold them in a few years, the profit would be formidable.
He had to protect himself and his family. He had a right to do so. It was his duty.
Georg Koll had reached out from beyond the grave to try to destroy Marcus’s life once again, and he simply could not be allowed to do that.
*
‘May I?’
Adam Stubo nodded in the direction of a yellow armchair in front of the television. Erik Lysgaard showed no sign of reacting. He just sat there in a matching chair in a darker colour, staring straight ahead, his hands resting in his lap.
Only then did Adam notice the knitting and the long, almost invisible grey hairs stuck to the antimacassar on the back of the armchair. He pulled out a dining chair and sat on that instead.
He was breathing heavily. A slight hangover had been plaguing him since he got up at half past five, and he was thirsty. The flight from Gardermoen to Bergen had been anything but pleasant. True, the
plane was almost empty, since there weren’t many people desperate to get from Oslo to Bergen at 7.25 on Christmas morning, but the turbulence had been a problem and he had had far too little sleep.
‘This is not a formal interview,’ he said, unable to come up with anything better. ‘We can do that later, down at the police station. When you’re …’
When you’re feeling better, he was about to say before he stopped himself.
The room was light and pleasant. It was neither modern nor old-fashioned. Some of the furniture was clearly well used, like the two wing-backed armchairs in front of the TV. The dining room also looked as if it had been furnished with items that had been inherited. The sofa, however, around the corner in the L-shaped living room, was deep and cream-coloured, with bright cushions. Adam had seen exactly the same one in a Bohus brochure that Kristiane absolutely insisted on reading in bed. Along one wall were bookshelves built around the window, full of titles indicating that the Lysgaards had a wide range of interests and a good knowledge of languages. A large volume with Cyrillic letters on the cover lay on the small table between the armchairs. The pictures hanging on the walls were so close together that it was difficult to get an impression of each individual work. The only one that immediately caught his attention was a copy of Henrik Sørensen’s
Kristus
, a blonde Messiah figure with his arms open wide. Actually, perhaps it wasn’t a copy. It looked genuine, and could be one of the artist’s many sketches for the original, which was in Lillestrøm Church.
The most striking item was a large Nativity crib on the sideboard. It had to be more than a metre wide and perhaps half a metre deep and tall. It was contained in a box with a glass front, like a tableau. The baby Jesus lay on a bed of straw among angels and little shepherds, sheep and the three wise men. A bulb shone inside the simple stable, so cleverly hidden that it looked as if Jesus had a halo.
‘It’s from Salzburg,’ said Erik Lysgaard, so unexpectedly that Adam jumped.
Then he fell silent again.
‘I didn’t mean to stare,’ said Adam, venturing a smile. ‘But it really is quite … enchanting.’
The widower looked up for the first time.
‘That’s what Eva Karin says. Enchanting, that’s what she always says about that crib.’
He made a small snorting sound as if he were trying to stop himself from crying. Adam edged his chair a little closer.
‘During the next few days,’ he said quietly, pausing to think for a moment. ‘During the next few days many people will tell you they know how you’re feeling. But very few actually do. Even if most people of our age …’
Adam had to be ten years younger than Erik Lysgaard.
‘… have experienced the loss of someone close, it’s completely different when a crime is involved. Not only has the person been snatched away all of a sudden, but you’re left with so many questions. A crime of this kind …’
I have no idea what kind of crime this is, he thought as he kept talking. Strictly speaking, nothing had been established so far.
‘… is a violation of far more people than the victim. It can squeeze the strength out of anyone. It’s—’
‘Excuse me.’
Erik’s son Lukas Lysgaard opened his mouth for the first time since he had shown Adam into the living room. He seemed tired and looked as if he had been crying, but was quite composed. So far he had stood in silence by the far window looking out over the garden. Now he frowned and moved a little closer.
‘I don’t really think my father needs consolation. Not from you, anyway, with respect. We would prefer to be alone. When we agreed to this interview …’
He quickly corrected himself.
‘… to this conversation, which is
not
an interview, it was, of course, because we would like to help the police as much as we can. Given the circumstances. As you know I am willing to be interviewed by the police as soon as you wish, but when it comes to my father …’
Erik Lysgaard straightened up noticeably in his armchair. He stretched his back, blinked hard and raised his chin.
‘What is it you want to know?’ he asked, looking Adam straight in the eye.
Idiot, Adam thought about himself.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Of course I should have left you both in peace. It’s just that … For once we haven’t got the media hot on our heels. For once it’s possible to get a little ahead of the pack out there.’
He jerked his thumb over his shoulder as if there were already a horde of journalists on the front step.
‘But I should have known better. I’ll leave you alone today. Of course.’
He stood up and took his coat from the back of one of the dining chairs. Erik Lysgaard looked at him in surprise, his mouth half-open and a furrow in his forehead, just above the thick glasses with their heavy, black frames.
‘Haven’t you got any questions?’ he asked, his tone gentle.
‘Yes. Countless questions. But as I said, they can wait. Could I possibly use your bathroom before I leave?’
He directed this request to Lukas.
‘Along the hallway. Second on the left,’ he mumbled.
Adam nodded briefly to Erik Lysgaard and headed for the door. Halfway across the room he turned back.
Hesitated.
‘Just one thing,’ he said, scratching his cheek. ‘Could I ask why Bishop Lysgaard was out on her own at eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve?’
An odd silence filled the room.
Lukas looked at his father, but there wasn’t really any kind of enquiry in his eyes. Just a wary, expressionless look, as if he either knew the answer or thought the question was of no interest. Erik Lysgaard, however, placed his hands on the arms of the chair, leaned back and took a deep breath before looking Adam in the eye once more.
‘That’s nothing to do with you.’
‘What?’ Somewhat inappropriately, Adam started to laugh. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said that’s nothing to do with you.’
‘Right. Well, I think we’ll have to …’
Silence fell once more.
‘We can talk about this later,’ he added eventually, raising a hand in Erik’s direction as he left the room.
The surprising and absurd answer had made him forget for a moment how much he needed the bathroom. As he closed the door behind him he could feel that it was urgent.
Along the hallway, second on the right.
He mumbled to himself, placed his hand on the knob and opened the door.
A bedroom. Not large, maybe ten square metres. Rectangular, with the window on the short wall facing the door. Under the window stood a neatly made single bed with lilac bed linen. On the pillow lay a folded item of clothing. A nightdress, Adam assumed, inhaling deeply through his nose.
Definitely not a guest room.
The sweet smell of sleep mingled with a faint, almost imperceptible perfume.
It wasn’t possible to open the door fully, it bumped against a cupboard on the other side.
He ought to close the door and find the toilet.
There was no desk in the little room, just a fairly large bedside table with a pile of books and a lamp beneath a shelf containing four framed family portraits. He recognized Erik and Lukas straight away, plus an old black-and-white photograph which presumably showed the little family many years ago, when Lukas was small, on a boat in the summer.