Midnight Sun (19 page)

‘The symptoms are an unpleasant tiredness in the eyes,' Mattis went on. ‘And your ability to express yourself vanishes. That's why we burn dead reindeer straight away. So that we can still see each other and make sensible conversation.'

There was a pause, during which I could imagine Johnny staring at Mattis and trying to interpret his inscrutable half-grin.

‘Styrker and Brynhildsen,' Johnny said. ‘Turn the cabin inside out. And take those bloody dogs with you.'

‘He's not in there, there's no way he could be,' Brynhildsen insisted.

‘I know that. But if we can find the money and dope, we know he's still in the area.'

I heard the dogs bark frantically as they were dragged away.

‘Forgive me asking, but what happens if you don't find anything?'

‘Then you might have been right after all,' Johnny said.

‘I
know
he was the one sailing that boat,' Mattis said. ‘It was only fifty metres from shore, and he's an ugly southerner, we don't have people like that up here. With a decent boat and a good wind behind him, he could cover quite some distance in a day.'

‘And you were lying on the seashore in the middle of the night?'

‘Best place to sleep in the summer.'

I felt something crawling at the bottom of my shin. Too big to be a maggot or ant. I was breathing through my mouth, not my nose. Snake or mouse? Please, let it be a mouse. A sweet, furry little mouse, even a hungry one, but not a . . .

‘Really?' Johnny's voice was even lower now. ‘And the quickest way from the village and up to the forest is to go
round
the whole ridge? It took us over an hour. When I came up here on my own the last time I was here, it barely took me half an hour.'

‘Yes, but you'd have been shot if he'd been at home.'

The animal – or whatever it was – was moving over my foot. I felt an almost irresistible urge to kick it off, but I knew that the slightest movement or sound would be detected.

‘You know what?' Johnny sneered. ‘That's what I can't help wondering about.'

‘Oh? You might be a narrow-shouldered target, southerner, but your head's big enough.'

‘It's not that Jon Hansen can't shoot, it's that he hasn't got the guts to.'

‘Really? Well, I could have shown you a quicker route if you'd mentioned that before—'

‘I did mention it, you Sámi bastard!'

‘In north Norwegian.'

The creature had reached my knee and was moving onto my thigh. It suddenly dawned on me that it was inside my trousers.

‘Shhh!'

Had I yelped or moved?

‘What was that noise?'

Total silence out there now. I held my breath. Dear God . . .

‘Church bells,' Mattis said. ‘They're burying William Svartstein today.'

What if it was a lemming? I'd heard that they were nervous little fuckers, and now it was approaching the crown jewels. Without making any obvious movement, I took hold of my trouser leg and pulled it tight in my clenched hand, making the fabric cling to my thigh and blocking the creature's path.

‘Well, I've had enough of this stink,' Johnny said. ‘Let's check down by the stream. If the dogs are still confused by the smell of the reindeer, he might have hidden there.'

I heard them walk off through the heather. Inside my trousers the creature pushed against the blockage in the tunnel for a while, then resigned itself to going back the way it had come. Shortly after that I heard a voice call out from the cabin: ‘There's nothing here, just a rifle and his suit!'

‘Okay, lads, let's get back before the rain comes.'

I waited for what felt like an hour, but it could have been ten minutes. Then I pulled the knife out of the reindeer skin and peered out.

The coast was clear.

I crept through the heather towards the stream. I slid into the ice-cold water, letting it pour over me, washing me clean of death, shock and decay.

Slowly, slowly, I came back to life.

DEAR GOD
. . .

I hadn't said it, but I thought it there inside the animal carcass, I thought it as loudly as if I'd stood on a street corner and shouted it. And the monsters had gone, the way they did when I was little and they were hiding under my bed, or in the toy box, or in the wardrobe.

Could it be that simple? Did you just have to pray?

I was sitting outside the cabin, smoking and looking up. The leaden grey clouds were covering the whole sky now, and had brought darkness with them. It was as if the weather were running a fever. It was oppressively muggy and warm, then the next moment icy cold when the wind gusted.

God. Salvation. Paradise. Eternal life. It was an appealing thought. Tailor-made for scared, battered hearts. So appealing that Grandfather finally gave in and abandoned his reason and staked everything on hope. ‘You don't say no to something that's free, you know,' he told me with a wink. Like a broke sixteen-year-old sneaking into a disco with a forged ticket and a fake ID.

I packed the few things that would be coming with me. Clothes, shoes, suit, rifle and binoculars. The clouds hadn't let go of any rain yet, but it couldn't last much longer.

Johnny would be back. It was obvious that he didn't believe Mattis. And that was clearly the right thing to do when it came to Mattis. A detour round the whole ridge. Wolves. Botulism. That he'd seen me sail away. William Svartstein's funeral.

I didn't remember much of my wasted years at university, but I did remember William Blackstone, the eighteenth-century legal philosopher who occupied much the same territory as Mattis, at the crossroads of justice and faith in God. I remembered him because Grandfather had used him, Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei and Søren Kierkegaard as examples of the fact that even the very sharpest minds are prepared to believe in the stuff and nonsense of Christianity if they think it offers a chance to escape death.

Mattis hadn't betrayed me. On the contrary, he had saved me. So who had contacted Johnny and told him I hadn't left KÃ¥sund after all?

Another gust of wind, as if the weather wanted to tell me to get a move on. There was rumbling off to the west. Okay, okay, I was ready to leave now. It was night. If Johnny and the others hadn't already left KÃ¥sund, they would be asleep somewhere.

I stubbed my cigarette out on the cabin wall, picked up the leather case and slung the rifle over my shoulder. I walked down the path without looking back. Only forward. And that was how it was going to be from now on. Whatever was behind me could remain exactly that.

The sky rumbled and crackled with anticipation as I stepped out onto the gravel road. It was so dark that all I could see was the shapes of the houses and the few windows that were lit up.

I didn't believe, expect or hope anything. I just wanted to call in and return the rifle and binoculars, and thank her for the loan. And for my life. And ask if she possibly felt like spending the rest of her life with me. And then leave, with or without her.

I passed the church. Anita's house. The prayer hall. And then I was standing in front of Lea's house.

A shining, crooked witch's finger suddenly pointed down at me from the sky. The house, garage and wrecked Volvo were momentarily lit up by a ghostly blueish light. Then there was a crackling prelude before the storm broke loose.

They were in the kitchen.

I saw them through the window, the light inside was on. She was leaning against the worktop, her body arched back in a stiff, unnatural posture. Ove stood with his head thrust forward, holding a knife in his hand. It was larger than the one he had used on me. He was waving it in front of her face. Threatening her. She leaned back even further, away from the knife, away from her brother-in-law. He grabbed her neck with his free hand, I saw her cry out.

I put the rifle to my shoulder. Got his head in the sights. He was standing side-on to the window, so I could hit him in the temple. But a vague idea about the refraction of light through glass was whirling about my head, and I lowered my aim slightly. Chest height. I raised my elbows, took one deep breath – there wasn't time for more – lowered my elbows again, breathed out, and slowly squeezed the trigger. I felt strangely calm. Then another finger of light tore at the sky, and I saw his head turn automatically towards the window.

Everything around me was dark again, but he was still staring at the window. At me. He had seen me. He looked more ravaged than last time, he must have been drinking for days. Psychotic from lack of sleep, or mad with love, mad with grief for his brother, mad at being trapped in a life he didn't want. Yes, perhaps that was it, perhaps he was like me.

You're going to shoot the reflection.

So this was my fate: shooting a man, getting arrested by the police, convicted and sent to prison, where the Fisherman's men would soon appear and put a definite end to it all. Fine. I could accept that. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that I had seen his face.

I could feel my index finger start to weaken, as the spring in the trigger gained the upper hand and forced my powerless finger back. I wasn't going to manage it. I wasn't going to manage it, again.

There was another crack of thunder above me, like a voice barking an order.

Knut.

Even Futabayama kept on losing before he started to win.

I took another deep breath. I had got rid of my block. I aimed the sights straight at Ove's ugly face and fired.

The blast echoed across the rooftops. I lowered the rifle. Looked through the shattered glass. Lea was holding her hands up in front of her mouth and staring down at something. Beside her, on the white wall above her head, it looked as though someone had painted a grotesque rose.

The last echo died away. The whole of KÃ¥sund must have heard it; soon the village would be crawling with people.

I went up the steps. Knocked – I don't know why. Went in. She was still standing in the kitchen, she hadn't moved, was staring down at the body lying in a pool of blood on the floor. She didn't look up, I don't know if she even knew I was there.

‘Are you okay, Lea . . .?'

She nodded.

‘Knut . . .'

‘I sent him to Father's,' she whispered. ‘I thought that if they worked out why I was ringing the church bells, they'd come here and . . .'

‘Thank you,' I said. ‘You saved my life.'

I tilted my head and looked down at the dead man. He stared back with broken eyes. He was more suntanned than last time, and his face was otherwise unharmed. Just an almost innocent-looking hole in his forehead, right under his blond fringe.

‘He came back,' she whispered. ‘I
knew
he was going to come back.'

That was when it struck me. That his left ear was uninjured. That there wasn't so much as a hint of a mark on it. And there should have been, the bite was only a couple of days old. Then it slowly dawned on me. When Lea said he had come back, she meant . . .

‘I
knew
there was no sea or earth that could hold this devil down,' she said. ‘No matter how deep we buried him.'

It was Hugo. The twin brother. I had shot the reflection.

I shut my eyes tight. Opened them again. But nothing had changed, I hadn't dreamed it all. I had murdered her husband.

I had to clear my throat to make my voice heard:

‘I thought it was Ove. It looked like he was trying to kill you.'

At last she stared at me.

‘Better you killed Hugo than Ove. Ove would never have dared touch me.'

I nodded towards the body. ‘But he would?'

‘He was one jab of the knife away from it.'

‘Because?'

‘Because I told him.'

‘What?'

‘That I want to get away from here. That I want to take Knut with me. That I never wanted to see him again.'

‘You didn't want to see him again, either?'

‘I told him that I . . . I'm in love with someone else.'

‘Someone else.'

‘You, Ulf.' She shook her head. ‘I can't help it. I love you.'

The words trembled round the walls like a hymn. And the blue light in her eyes was so strong that I had to look away. One of her feet was in the spreading pool of blood.

I took a step towards her. Two. Put both feet in the blood. Gently put my hands round her shoulders. I wanted to check first that it was okay for me to pull her towards me. But before I figured it out she had fallen towards me and buried her face under my chin. She sobbed once, twice. I felt her warm tears trickling down under the collar of my shirt.

‘Come,' I said.

I ushered her into the living room, where a lightning flash lit up the room and showed me the way to the sofa. We lay down on it, close together.

‘I got such a shock when he was suddenly standing there in the kitchen door,' she whispered. ‘He said he'd got drunk on his boat with the engine running. When he woke up, he was a long way out to sea and the petrol had run out. He had oars, but the wind just kept driving the boat further out. The first few days he thought it was probably for the best. After all, we had made him think everything was his fault, that he was worthless after he hurt Knut. But then the rain came, and he survived. And then the wind changed direction. And that was when he decided it hadn't been his fault.' She let out a bitter laugh. ‘He stood there and said he was going to sort everything out, that he'd sort me and Knut out. When I told him Knut and I were going to leave, he asked if there was someone else. So I said we would be leaving on our own, but that, yes, I did love someone else. I thought it was important for him to know that. That I was capable of loving a man. Because then he would realise that he could never get me back.'

While she was talking the temperature in the room had fallen, and she huddled closer to me. So far nobody had come to see why the rifle had been fired. And as the next clap of thunder broke, I realised why. And that no one was going to come.