‘I’m sure that’s good advice,’ Harry said, lifting his coffee cup to his lips and looking up at Hagen. ‘If you think survival’s so bloody important.’
35
SUNDAY MORNING
‘THERE THEY ARE,’ Harry said to Hallstein Smith, who braked and stopped the car in front of the two men who were standing in the middle of the forest track, arms folded.
‘Brr,’ Smith said, sticking his hands in the pockets of his multicoloured blazer. ‘You’re right, I should have worn more clothes.’
‘Take this,’ Harry said, pulling off his black woolly hat with its embroidered skull and crossbones and the name ‘St. Pauli’ underneath.
‘Thanks,’ Smith said, pulling it down over his ears.
‘Good morning, Hole,’ the sheriff said. Behind him, where the track was no longer driveable, stood two snowmobiles.
‘Good morning,’ Harry said, taking off his sunglasses. The sunlight reflecting off the snow stung his eyes. ‘And thanks for agreeing to help at such short notice. This is Hallstein Smith.’
‘You don’t have to thank us for doing our job,’ the sheriff said, and nodded towards a man who was dressed the same way as him, in blue-and-white overalls that made them look like overgrown toddlers. ‘Artur, can you take the guy in the blazer?’
Harry looked on as the snowmobile carrying Smith and the police officer disappeared along the track. The noise cut through the cold, clear air like a chainsaw.
Jimmy straddled the oblong seat of the snowmobile and coughed before turning the ignition key. ‘If you’ll permit the local sheriff to drive a snowmobile?’
Harry put his sunglasses back on and got on behind him.
Their conversation the previous evening had been short.
‘Jimmy.’
‘Harry Hole here. I’ve got what I need – can you arrange snowmobiles, and show us the way to the house tomorrow morning?’
‘Oh.’
‘There’ll be two of us.’
‘How the hell did you get—?’
‘Half eleven?’
Pause.
‘OK.’
The snowmobile followed the trail left by the first one. In the scattered community below them in the valley the sunlight glinted off windows and the church spire. The temperature fell rapidly when they entered dense pine forest that shut out the sun, and plummeted when they headed into a depression in the landscape where the ice-covered river ran.
The journey only took three or four minutes, but Harry’s teeth were still chattering when they stopped next to Smith and the officer beside an overgrown, ice-covered fence. In front of them was a wrought-iron gate, cemented in snow.
‘And there you have the Pig House,’ the sheriff said.
Thirty metres from the gate a large, ramshackle, elaborate three-storey house loomed up, guarded by tall pines on all sides. If the planks lining the walls had ever been painted, the paint was now all gone, and the house was varying shades of grey and silver. The curtains behind the windows looked like they were made of rough sheets and canvas.
‘Dark place to build a house,’ Harry said.
‘Three floors of old-school Gothic,’ Smith said. ‘That must break building regulations here, doesn’t it?’
‘The Hell family broke all sorts of regulations,’ the sheriff said. ‘But never the law.’
‘Hm. Could I ask you to bring some tools, Sheriff?’
‘Artur, have you got the crowbar? Come on, let’s get this over with.’
Harry got off the snowmobile and sank into the snow halfway up his thighs, but he managed to reach the gate and climb over. The other three followed.
There was a covered veranda along the front of the house. It faced south, so perhaps the house got a bit of sunlight in the middle of the day in the summer. Why else would you have a veranda? As a place where the midges could drain you of blood? Harry went over to the door and tried to see something behind the frosted glass before pressing the rust-red button of an old-fashioned doorbell.
It worked, at least, because a bell rang deep inside the house.
The other three came and stood beside him as Harry rang the bell again.
‘If he was home he’d have been standing in the doorway waiting for us,’ the sheriff said. ‘You can hear those snowmobiles from two kilometres away, and the road only leads here.’
Harry tried again.
‘Lenny Hell can’t hear that in Thailand,’ the sheriff said. ‘My family are waiting to go skiing, so let’s get this glass smashed, Artur.’
The policeman swung the crowbar and the window beside the door shattered crisply. He pulled one of his gloves off, stuck his hand through and fumbled for a while with a look of concentration before Harry heard the sound of a lock turning.
‘After you,’ Jimmy said, opening the door and holding his hand out.
Harry stepped inside.
It seemed uninhabited, that was the first thing that struck him. Maybe it was the lack of modern comforts that made him think of the houses of famous people that had been turned into museums. Like the time when he was fourteen and his parents took him and Sis to Moscow, where they visited the house where Fyodor Dostoevsky once lived. It had been the most soulless house Harry had ever seen, which may go some way to explaining why Crime and Punishment came as such a shock when he read it three years later.
Harry walked through the hall and into the large living room. He pressed the light switch on the wall but nothing happened. The daylight filtering in through the greyish-white curtains, though, was enough for him to see the steam from his own breath, and the few pieces of old-fashioned furniture scattered randomly around the room, as if matching tables and chairs had been split up after an acrimonious inheritance dispute. He could see heavy paintings hanging crookedly on the walls, probably as a result of changes in temperature. And he could see that Lenny Hell wasn’t in Thailand.
Soulless.
Lenny Hell – or at least someone who resembled the picture Harry had seen of Lenny Hell – was sitting in a wing-backed chair in the same majestic posture in which Harry’s grandfather used to fall asleep when he was sufficiently drunk. With the difference that his right foot was slightly raised from the floor, and his lower right arm was hovering a few centimetres above the arm of the chair. In other words, the body had tipped slightly to its left after rigor mortis had set in. And that was a long time ago. Five months, perhaps.
The head made Harry think of an Easter egg. Brittle, dry, empty of content. It looked as if the head had shrunk, forcing the mouth open and revealing the dry, grey gums holding the teeth. There was a black hole in his forehead, bloodless seeing as Lenny Hell was sitting with his head tilted backwards, gawping and staring stiffly at the ceiling.
When Harry went round the chair he saw that the bolt had gone right through the tall chair-back. A black metal object, the shape of a pocket torch, was lying on the floor beside the chair. He recognised it. When Harry was about ten years old his grandfather decided it would do the boy good to see where the pork ribs for Christmas dinner came from, and took him with him behind the barn where he placed a contraption he called the slaughtering mask, even though it wasn’t a mask, over the forehead of Heidrun, the big sow. Then he pressed something, there was a sharp bang, and Heidrun jerked as if taken by surprise and fell to the ground. Then he had drained her of blood, but what Harry remembered most was the smell of powder and the way Heidrun’s legs started to twitch after a while. His grandfather had explained that that was how the body worked, that Heidrun was long since dead, but Harry had nightmares about twitching pigs’ legs for ages afterwards.
The floorboards behind Harry creaked and he heard breathing that quickly became very heavy.