Jan Egil smashed open the door on his side and ducked his head, still holding the blue-grey pistol in his hand. Then, bent double, he got out, with his eyes on the car behind.
I peered into the cock-eyed side mirror. The black car had positioned itself like a barrier between us and the rest of the world. Around us lay the district of Groruddalen, dotted with glittering lights, as distant as the stars in the sky above us. White smoke drifted from a tall chimney, giving off an acrid smell, as if from burning waste. The only light to reach us came down from two tall pylons, filtered by the darkness. The two men who got out of the car behind — with the same caution and wariness as Jan Egil — were barely visible, no more than two large, dark silhouettes. But the matt gleam from their hands spoke its own unambiguous language. They were not coming to the party with empty hands, either.
One of them called out: ‘Out of the car, both of you!’
Since Jan Egil was already outside I calculated that it must have been me he was referring to. I heaved a heavy sigh and felt a sense of inevitability in my stomach. Then I pushed the battered door to its full extent, swung myself out, placed my feet on the gravel and slowly exited the car, copying Jan Egil’s example by holding the door in front of me like a shield.
‘Freeze!’ shouted the man. He turned to the other who already had a mobile phone to his ear and was talking.
‘What the hell do you want from us?’ I shouted.
‘Shut up!’
‘Who are you phoning?’
‘Shut up, I said!’ answered the man, brandishing with menace a considerably larger weapon than Jan Egil’s. From this distance it didn’t look very inviting, a machine gun of the variety that sold like hotcakes in the organised section of the criminal community, in tiger-town Oslo and elsewhere.
They said something we couldn’t hear. I turned my head to Jan Egil. ‘Any idea who they are?’
‘Not the cops, that’s for sure.’
‘No, I’d worked that one out, too.’
He wasn’t letting the two armed men out of his sight. Standing there — with his top-heavy body, weapon in hand, cap down over his forehead, the little hair I could see shaved tight to the skull — he reminded me of a bully boy, a threat to everything in the vicinity, me included. Anger and pent-up violence radiated off him, and it was not difficult to recognise the disproportionately muscle-bound frame and the vacant look as belonging to someone who had overdosed on anabolic steroids for much too long.
Inside me, I still carried the image of the small, tearful boy on the Rothaugen estate that hot July day of 1970 when Elsa Dragesund and I had gone to pick him up, and it struck me: had we done this to him? Was this the result of twenty-five years of public service commitment, trying to make him a different and better person, or at least trying to secure him a place in society that both he and we could tolerate? Was this the best we could achieve, the sum of our success?
‘What the hell are you mixed up in, Johnny boy?’
‘Don’t call me that!’
‘Sorry, but… is it me or you they’re after?’
Suddenly one of the men by the black car shouted. ‘Didn’t we tell you to keep your mouths shut over there?’
I swivelled round. ‘What the hell’s wrong with you? Are you feeling left out? You’re warmly invited to take part in the conversation, if you like!’
He hoisted the gun to his face and pointed it at me. ‘Shut up, I said!’
‘Shut your mouth yourself!’ Jan Egil snapped. ‘I’ve got you in my sights! Move one centimetre this way and you’re a dead man!’
For a moment the whole picture seemed to freeze. I prepared myself for the worst, then the situation suddenly changed. We heard the sound of a car before we saw it. Round the bend from the gate it came, a large black Mercedes which soon slowed down when the driver caught sight of us. As quietly as a panther, it drew up at an angle beside the two armed men and the other black car.
The door slid open, and in the gleam from the tall pylons I glimpsed a silhouette as he got out. He was a tall, powerful man, and even before the light from the distant headlamp hit his face, I knew who it was. Now I could see the pattern that I should have seen eleven years ago.
54
‘Nice to see you again, Hansie!’ I shouted.
‘I think I’m the one who should say that, Varg,’ he replied with a tight-lipped smile. He kept a wary eye on Jan Egil and his gun. He whispered something to the two others.
‘So it was you they rang!’
‘Who else?’
I moved to the side, around the open car door and a few steps forward. From the corner of my eye I saw Jan Egil twitch.
‘Varg! What are you doin’?’ he said.
‘Take it easy, Jan Egil. We’re out in open countryside now.’
‘Open countryside! What the hell d’you mean by that?’
A gun belonging to one of the men twitched, too, but Hans raised an authoritative hand and gave a brief command.
‘Stay where you are!’ he shouted to me.
‘OK,’ I said and stopped. ‘Does that mean we can talk?’
‘What about?’
‘You know every well. About everything.’
He eyed me with a stony face, mute.
‘I should have known in Forde, eleven years ago, when you were telling me about your childhood with such passion, about poverty and how you never wanted to experience the same again.’
‘Should have known what, Varg?’
‘How ruthless you’d been to avoid winding up in a similar situation again.’
‘I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about! This is a local score we have to settle, between Jan Egil and us.’
‘Between…?’
‘Between two groups. It was foolish of you to get involved in this. Now we’ll have to — ’
‘Gang warfare, is that what you’re trying to make me believe? Don’t give me that bollocks! You’re petrified you’re on his blacklist, and you should be higher up on the bloody list than I am.’
‘You talk too much, Varg. But you’ve always been like that. Waffling on about all those brainless ideas of yours.’
‘Oh, shut up, Hans! Do you want me to extract all your lies from you, one by one? I suppose that was what Hammersten threatened to do as well, being the born-again Christian he was. He wanted to do penance and renounce all his sins. Especially with regard to Jan Egil, who had to pay for them. The snag was that it wasn’t only his sins he would have to do penance for. He had an accomplice. No, wrong. Not even an accomplice. You were the Mr Big, Hans, right from the very outset.’
He took a couple of steps closer. I did the same. Our eyes were locked; we were like two cowboys in the final scene of a western.
‘You talk too much, Varg! This is rubbish. You must be able to hear that yourself.’
‘Listen to my reasoning then!’
‘I don’t have the bloody time to — ’
‘We can start from a few days ago. Hammersten told you he could no longer keep all he knew to himself. And, worst of all, he wanted to tell Jan Egil. You beat him to death with a baseball bat, and when Jan Egil legged it, you took the opportunity to put the bat in his room. Yet again, damning evidence.’
‘Yet again?’
‘I’m thinking of the rifle in Angedalen.’
‘For Christ’s sake, I had nothing to do with the murder of Kari and Klaus.’
‘No?’
‘I think the turnip on your shoulders is beginning to go rotten, Varg. You might recall that I was in Bergen when it all happened.’
‘We-ell. In theory, on your way to Bergen perhaps, but…’
‘Which Terje Hammersten was able to corroborate, unless you’ve forgotten.’
‘Not any more, and besides… very convenient that was. You and Hammersten giving each other an alibi in a kind of mutual alliance, since you were both in Angedalen that night.’
‘You can prove that, can you?’ The sarcasm lay thick on his vocal cords.
‘A little detail that has always buzzed around my head is the key to the Libakk farmhouse. The spare key hanging in the hallway cupboard. No one broke in that night the murders took place, and that was part of the circumstantial evidence that pointed to Jan Egil. But you… you’d left the house, according to your statement, a few hours earlier and could have taken the key with you. Later that night you went back, either alone or most probably with Hammersten, you unlocked the door and committed the atrocity.’