Fear Not (3 page)

Marcus Koll turned away and decided to go home.

Only now did he realize how tired he was.

If he hurried he might manage three hours’ sleep before the boy demanded his attention. It was Sunday, after all, and it would soon be Christmas. Presumably some of the snow that had fallen yesterday would still be lying on the hills around the city. They could go out. Skiing, perhaps, if they went far enough into Marka.

The last thing Marcus Koll did before leaving was to open the little jar of white, oval tablets in the top drawer. They were probably past their best-before date. It was such a long time ago. He tipped one of them into the palm of his hand. A moment later he put it back, screwed on the lid and locked the drawer.

It was over. For now.

The sirens were already approaching.

*

‘Are the police on their way? Is that them? Has someone called an ambulance? Those sirens are the police, for God’s sake! Call an ambulance! Give me a hand here!’

The security guard had one arm over the edge of the quayside. One foot was resting on a slippery crossbar no more than half a metre above the surface of the water. The other was dangling back and forth in a desperate attempt to keep the heavy body balanced.

‘Grab hold of me! Get hold of my jacket!

A young lad lay down on his stomach in the slush and seized the guard’s sleeves with both hands. His eyes were shining. He would be eighteen in a couple of months, but was blessed with dark stubble that made it possible for him to go from bar to bar all night without any questions being asked. He was broke, and had mostly stuck to finishing the dregs of other people’s beer. Right now he felt stone-cold sober.

‘That’s not him,’ he panted, getting a firmer grip. ‘The guy who fell in is further out.’

‘What? What the hell are you talking about?’

The guard stared at the body he was desperately trying to haul out of the water. He had a good grip on the collar, but the body inside the clothes was lifeless and as heavy as lead in the water, with the hood pulled up and fastened.

‘Help,’ someone yelled in the dark water further out. ‘Help! I …’

The cry died away.

The boy with the stubble let go of the guard.

‘You’ll have to hang on yourself!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll get the other one!’

He stood up, kicked off his shoes, pulled off his padded jacket and dived into the dark water without hesitation. When he came up he was in the exact spot where he had seen the drunken man splashing around.

‘Were there two of them? Did two people fall in? Did you see? Did anyone see?’

The guard was still hanging on with one arm over the quayside, bellowing. His other hand was clutching something that was definitely a body: a head facing away from him, two arms and a dark jacket. It was just so heavy. So bloody heavy. His arms were aching and he had no feeling in his fingers.

He didn’t let go.

The young man who had just jumped in was gasping for air. The first paralyzing shock of the cold water had given way to an agonising pain so fierce that his lungs were threatening to go on strike. He was treading water so frenetically that half his body was above the surface. Beneath him he could see nothing but a dark, colourless depth of water.

‘There!’ shouted an out-of-breath police officer from the quay.

The boy turned around and made a grab. He couldn’t actually see anything. It was more of a reflex action. His fingers closed around something and he pulled. The half-drowned drunk broke the surface of the water with a roar, as if he had already started screaming underwater. His rescuer had a firm hold on his hair. The drunk tried to wrench himself free and clamber on top of the younger man at the same time. Both of them disappeared. When they came up a few seconds later, the older man was lying on his back, his arms and legs outstretched on the water. He screamed with pain as his rescuer
refused to let go of his hair, and, in fact, clutched it more tightly as he wound a rope four times around his other arm, without considering where it had come from.

‘Have you got it?’ shouted the police officer up above. ‘Can you hold on?’

The boy tried to answer, but ended up with a mouthful of water. He managed to give a sign with the arm that was attached to the rope.

‘Pull,’ he groaned almost inaudibly, swallowing even more water.

Never in his life had he imagined that the cold could be so intense. The water seared its way into every pore. Needles of ice pierced him all over. His temples felt as if someone were trying to push them into his brain, and it seemed as if his sinuses were packed with ice. He could no longer feel his hands, and for one moment of pure, sheer terror he thought his testicles had disappeared. His crotch was on fire, a paradoxical warmth spreading from his balls and out into his thighs.

He was finding it more difficult to move. He knew his eyes were dead. Somebody must have unscrewed them. There was nothing but wetness, cold and darkness. It couldn’t have been more than a minute since he dived in, but it occurred to him that this was the last thing he would ever experience, losing his balls in the depths of the December sea, because of some fucking idiot on Aker Brygge.

Suddenly he was out.

He was lying on the ground on a blanket that looked as if it were made of aluminium foil, and somebody was trying to remove his clothes.

He held on tight to his trousers.

‘Take it easy,’ said a police officer, presumably the same one that had thrown the rope. ‘We need to get those wet clothes off. The paramedics will soon be here to look after you.’

‘My balls,’ whimpered the boy. ‘And my fingers, they …’

He turned away. Two police officers – the place was crawling with them now – were just laying a person down on the ground a few metres away. Streams of water poured from the figure as they struggled, but he didn’t move. As soon as they had put him down, an ambulance driver came running over with a trolley. The older police officer pushed him away when he tried to help move the body again.

‘He’s dead. Look after the living.’

‘Fuck,’ groaned the boy.

‘He’s dead? He didn’t make it?’ ‘He’s not the one you saved,’ the police officer said calmly, still struggling to undress the boy. ‘I think it was too late for him. Your man is over there. The one who’s put his hat back on.’

He grinned and shook his head. His movements were rapid, and soon the reckless young man realized his sexual organs were still intact. He gave in and allowed himself to be undressed. Three police officers were busy cordoning off the area with red-and-white tape, and one of them placed a tarpaulin over the body on the trolley.

‘H-h-h-hey you there,’ said the man in the hat, moving closer. ‘W-w-w-w-were you trying to sc-sc-scalp me?’

He was still fully dressed. Someone had placed a woollen blanket around his shoulders. Not only were his teeth chattering, but his entire body was shaking, droplets of water cascading from the clumps of hair sticking out from beneath his sodden hat.

The boy on the ground didn’t remember any hat.

‘I s-s-s-s-saved my hat,’ the other man grinned. ‘I h-h-h-held on to it as hard as I could.’

‘Shift yourself,’ the police officer said wearily. ‘Over there!’

He pointed to an ambulance parked at an angle on the quayside, casting its blue flashing light across the melee of uniformed figures.

‘Who-who-who’s that?’ asked the man, completely unmoved as he gazed with interest at the lifeless form on the stretcher. ‘I d-d-d-didn’t s-s-s-see h-h-h-him in the wa-wa-water.’

‘That’s nothing to do with … Arne! Arne, can you take this guy over to the ambulance? He’s pushing his luck here.’

The shivering man was led away to the ambulance with a certain amount of brute force.

‘He could at least have thanked you,’ said the police officer, waving over one of the paramedics. ‘It was pretty brave, jumping in like that. Not everybody would have had the courage. Over here!’

He stood up and placed his hand on the shoulder of a man in a high-visibility yellow uniform.

‘Look after our hero,’ he said with a smile. ‘He needs warming up.’

‘I’ll just go and get another stretcher. Two seconds and …’

The boy shook his head and tried to get to his feet. He was naked beneath a thick blanket, and without his even noticing somebody had
pushed his feet into a pair of trainers that were far too big. The paramedic grabbed him under one arm as he swayed.

‘I’m fine,’ mumbled the boy, pulling the blanket more tightly around him. ‘I’m just so fucking cold.’

‘I think we’d be better with a stretcher,’ the paramedic said doubtfully. ‘It’s just …’

‘No.’

The boy wobbled towards the ambulance. When he had almost reached the edge of the quay, he stopped for a moment. The salty gusts of wind blowing in from the fjord suddenly made him realize how close he had been to death. He was on the point of bursting into tears. Embarrassed, he pulled the blanket over his eyes. He had to take a little sidestep, and tripped over the edge of the blanket. In order to keep his balance, he grabbed hold of the nearest thing. It was the tarpaulin covering the body on the stretcher.

Things took a definite turn for the worse.

It couldn’t have been more than five minutes since he came ambling along Aker Brygge, alone, fed up and with no money for a taxi home. During those paltry 300 seconds he had swum in icy water, been certain he was going to die, saved a man from drowning, been praised by the police and almost frozen to death. In that same period of time, two fully equipped ambulances and three police cars containing a total of six uniformed officers had arrived at the scene. Which was almost incomprehensible, given the brief time span. In addition, as soon as he was pulled up on to the quay and the police had taken responsibility for the lifeless body he had held in a grip of iron, the security guard had called in no less than five of his colleagues from the nearby office buildings.

In the midst of this chaotic crowd of uniformed men and one lone woman, some thirty members of the public were milling about, all in various states of intoxication and all paying little attention to the temporary police cordon. Those who were still around in the early hours of this Sunday morning were drawn to the dramatic scene like moths to a flame. And since no more than five minutes had passed since Aker Brygge had been more or less deserted, the police had yet to grasp the connection between the security guard, the young swimmer, the drunk in the hat and the dead body that two of them
had struggled to haul out of the water. The police had their procedures, of course, but it was dark, it was chaos, and the most important thing had been to get the drunk out of the water alive. For that reason, and perhaps also because one of their own had managed to fall in while they were heaving the body out, only two officers had taken a closer look at the corpse. One of them, a young man, was bent over and throwing up ten or fifteen metres beyond the cordon without anyone even noticing.

The other had covered the body and was quietly explaining the situation to a detective inspector when the young man with the stubble lost his balance due to sheer exhaustion.

He fell backwards. His blanket started to slip off. For a little while he was more preoccupied with not revealing his nakedness than regaining his balance, so he grabbed hold of the tarpaulin with both hands as he fell. It had got stuck on the far side of the trolley, which started to tip over. For a moment it looked as if the weight of the corpse would be enough to prevent total disaster, but the boy didn’t let go. He went down wearing nothing but the oversized trainers. The back of his head struck the icy ground with an audible thud. The pain made him cry out, then he lost consciousness for a couple of seconds.

When he came round, he noticed the smell first of all.

Something was lying on top of him, something that was suffocating him, taking his breath away with the stench of rotten flesh and sewers. Someone screamed and it occurred to him that he ought to open his eyes. The corpse was lying in perfect symmetry with his own body, as if in a kiss of death, and he found himself staring straight into the opening in the hood.

There was something in there that from a purely logical point of view had to be a head.

After all, it was inside the hood of a padded jacket.

In the police report which would be written some hours later it would emerge that for the time being the police were assuming that the body had been in the water for approximately one month. In the same report they would stress the fact that in all probability it was the clothes that were holding the body together, by and large. From a purely clinical point of view the corpse would be described as ‘badly swollen, partly disintegrating’, whereupon the writer of the report
briefly pointed out that it was impossible to establish with any certainty whether it had been a man or a woman. However, the clothes might possibly indicate the former.

The boy, who had spent the whole of Saturday night trailing round Oslo in his quest for girls and booze, and who had thrown himself fearlessly into the fjord in the middle of winter to save another person’s life, passed out once more. This time he remained unconscious for a considerable period; he didn’t come round until he was lying in a bed in the hospital at Ullevål, his mother sitting beside him. He started to cry as soon as he saw her. The poor lad sobbed like a child, clinging tightly to her warm, safe embrace as he tried to suppress the memory of the last thing he had seen before the blessed darkness had borne him away from the sea monster.

From a hole in the formless mass, right where there had once been an eye, a fish had suddenly poked its head out. A tiny shimmering silver fish, no bigger than an anchovy, with black eyes and quivering fins; they had stared at one another, the boy and the fish, until it suddenly flicked its body and fell from the dead head, straight into the boy’s bellowing mouth.

‘F
rom now on we shall always have fish on Christmas Eve!’

Adam Stubo picked up the cod’s head from his plate with his fingers before sucking out the eye and chewing thoughtfully. His mother-in-law, who was sitting opposite him at the oval dining table, pursed her lips and turned her head away, raising her eyebrows. Her husband had already had a little too much to drink. He pointed at his son-in-law with both his knife and fork.