Headhunters (21 page)

‘Because then perhaps I’ll talk to you. If not, I’ll keep my mouth shut until my solicitor comes. From Oslo.’ I saw Sunded’s mouth tighten, and I upped the ante: ‘Sometime tomorrow if we’re lucky …’

Sunded angled his head and studied me as if I were an insect he was considering whether to add to his collection or just crush.

‘Fine, Kjikerud. It all started when the person sitting next to you received a phone call about a tractor abandoned in the middle of the road. They found the tractor and a flock of crows which had met for lunch on the rear loader. They had already made short work of the soft bits of a dog. The tractor belonged to Sindre Aa, but naturally he didn’t respond when we rang, so one of us popped over and found him in the rocking chair where you had put him. We found a Mercedes in the barn with a knackered engine and number plates that we traced to you, Kjikerud. At length Elverum police station made a connection between the dead dog and a routine report from the hospital about a semi-conscious man covered in muck who had been admitted with a nasty dog bite. They rang, and the duty nurse told us that the man had been unconscious, but in his pocket they had found a credit card bearing the name Ove Kjikerud. And hey presto – here we are.’

I nodded. So I knew how they had found me. But how on earth had Greve managed it? The question had been churning around in my admittedly dopey brain without yielding a result. Could Greve have contacts inside the local police as well? Someone who had made sure Greve could get to the hospital before the police? Wrong! They had just strolled into the room and saved
me
. Wrong! Sunded had done that, the uninitiated outsider, the Kripos man from Oslo. I could feel a headache coming on as the next thought announced its arrival: Suppose things were as I feared, what sort of protection would I have then in a remand cell? Suddenly the Monsen twins’ synchronised breathing did not feel so reassuring. Nothing was reassuring. I felt as though there was no one in this world I could trust any more. No one. Apart from perhaps one person. The outsider with the overnight bag. I would have to lay my cards on the table, tell Sunded everything, ensure he took me to a different police station. Elverum was corrupt, no doubt about that, probably there was more than one undercover schemer in this car.

The radio crackled again. ‘Patrol car zero one, come in.’

Pimples grabbed the radio. ‘Yes, Lise?’

‘There’s no truck outside Bamse’s. Over.’

Telling Sunded everything would of course involve revealing that I was an art thief. And how would I convince them that I had shot Ove in self-defence, indeed, almost by accident? A man who was so doped up by Greve’s potion that he must have been cross-eyed.

‘Get a grip, Lise. Ask around. No one can hide an eighteen-metre-long vehicle in this district, OK?’

The voice that answered sounded miffed. ‘Karlsen says you usually find his truck for him, since you’re a policeman and his brother-in-law. Over.’

‘I bloody well do not! You can forget that one, Lise.’

‘He says it’s not much to ask. You got the least ugly of his sisters.’

I was being shaken by the Monsen twins’ laughter.

‘Tell the idiot that we’ve got proper police work to do today for once,’ Pimples snarled. ‘Over and out.’

I really had no idea how to play this game. It was just a question of time before my true identity would be
revealed
. Should I tell them straight away or was it a card I could keep up my sleeve for later?

‘Now it’s your turn, Kjikerud,’ Sunded said. ‘I’ve done a bit of checking up on you. You’re an old acquaintance of ours. And according to our documents you’re unmarried. So what did the doctor mean when he said he would look after your wife? Diana, wasn’t it?’

That card went up in smoke. I sighed and looked through the side window. Wasteland, cultivated land. No oncoming traffic, no houses, just a cloud of dust from a tractor or a car on the distant horizon.

‘I don’t know,’ I answered. I had to think more clearly. More clearly. Had to see the whole chessboard.

‘What was your relationship with Sindre Aa, Kjikerud?’

Being addressed by this alien name was beginning to wear me down. I was about to reply when I realised that I had been wrong. Again. The police really did think I was Ove Kjikerud! That was the name they had been given of the person admitted to hospital. But if they had passed the same message on to Greve, why had Greve visited this Kjikerud at the hospital? He had never heard of any Kjikerud; no one in the whole world knew that Kjikerud had anything to do with me – Roger Brown! It simply didn’t make sense. He must have found me via a different channel.

I saw the cloud of dust on the road approaching.

‘Did you hear my question, Kjikerud?’

First of all Greve had found me in the cabin. Then at the hospital. Even though I didn’t have the mobile on me. Greve didn’t have any contacts, either in Telenor or in the police. So how was that possible?

‘Kjikerud! Hello!’

The cloud of dust on the side road was travelling much faster than it had seemed from a distance. I saw the crossroads ahead of us and had a sudden sensation that it was
bearing
down on us and that we were on a collision course. I hoped the other car was aware that we had right of way.

But perhaps Pimples should give him a hint and use the horn. Give him a hint. Use the horn. What was it Greve had said at the hospital? ‘
Diana’s right. You really do have wonderful hair
.’ I closed my eyes and felt her hands running through my hair in the garage. The smell. She had smelt different. She had smelt of him, of Greve. No, not Greve. Of HOTE. Bearing down on us. And in slow motion everything fell into place. Why hadn’t I twigged before? I opened my eyes.

‘We’re in mortal danger, Sunded.’

‘The only person in danger here is you, Kjikerud. Or whatever your name is.’

‘What?’

Sunded peered into the mirror and raised the credit card he had shown me at the hospital.

‘You don’t look like this Kjikerud on the photo. And when I checked Kjikerud out in the files it said he was one metre seventy-three. And you are … what? One sixty-five?’

It had gone quiet in the car. I stared at the cloud of dust that was drawing near at speed. It was not a car. It was a lorry with a trailer behind. It was so close now that I could read the letters on the side. SIGDAL KITCHENS.

‘One sixty-eight,’ I said.

‘So who the hell are you?’ Sunded growled.

‘I’m Roger Brown. And on the left is Karlsen’s stolen lorry.’

All heads turned left.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ growled Sunded.

‘What’s going on,’ I said, ‘is that that lorry is being driven by a guy called Clas Greve. And he knows I’m in this car and is aiming to kill me.’

‘How …?’

‘He has a GPS tracker which means he can find me wherever I am. And he’s been doing that ever since my wife stroked my hair in the garage. With a handful of gel containing microscopic transmitters that adhere to your hair and are impossible to wash off.’

‘Cut the crap!’ the Kripos detective snarled.

‘Sunded …’ Pimples began. ‘It
is
Karlsen’s truck.’

‘We have to stop this car now and turn round,’ I said. ‘Otherwise he’ll kill all of us. Stop!’

‘Keep going,’ Sunded said.

‘Can’t you see what’s going to happen?!’ I shouted. ‘You’ll soon be dead, Sunded.’

Sunded started his lawnmower laugh, but the lawn seemed to be too high. He saw that now, too. That it was already too late.

A COLLISION BETWEEN
two vehicles is basic physics. It all comes down to chance, but chance phenomena can be explained by the equation Energy x Time = Mass x difference in Velocity. Add values to the chance variables and you have a story that is simple, true and remorseless. It tells you, for example, what happens when a fully loaded juggernaut weighing 25 tonnes and travelling at a speed of 80 kph hits a saloon car weighing 1,800 kilos (including the Monsen twins) and moving at the same speed. Based on chance with respect to point of impact, construction of bodywork and the angle of the two bodies relative to one another, a multitude of variants to this story are possible, but they share two common features: they are tragedies. And the saloon car is in trouble.

When, at 10.13, the lorry and trailer driven by Greve hit patrol car zero one, a Volvo 740 manufactured in 1989, just in front of the driver’s seat, the car engine, both front wheels and Pimples’ legs were pushed sideways through the car body as the car was launched into the air. No airbags were activated as these had not been installed in Volvos before 1990. The police car – which was already a total wreck – sailed over the road, high above the crash barrier and landed on the compact clump of spruce trees lining the river at the bottom of the slope. Before the police car burst through the first treetops it
had
performed two and a half somersaults with one and a half twists. There were no witnesses present to confirm what I have said, but this is exactly what happened. It is – as I mentioned before – simple physics. The same as the fact that the relatively undamaged lorry continued straight over the deserted crossroads where it braked with a screech of bare metal. It snorted like a dragon as the brakes were finally released, but the smell of scorched rubber and burnt disc brake linings hung over the landscape for several minutes afterwards.

At 10.14 the spruce trees had stopped swaying, the dust had settled, the lorry stood with the engine idling as the sun continued to shine steadily down on the Hedmark fields.

At 10.15 the first car passed the crime scene, and the driver probably noticed nothing except for the lorry standing on the gravel side road and what might have been fragments of broken glass crunching under the car tyres. He would not have seen a trace of a police car lying on its roof down under the trees by the river.

I know all of this because I was in a position that enabled me to state that we were lying on the car roof, hidden from the road by the trees alongside the river. The times given depend on the accuracy of Sunded’s watch, which was ticking away right in front of me. At least I think it was his; it hung from the wrist of a severed arm protruding from a piece of grey raincoat.

A puff of wind wafted over carrying with it the resin smell of brake linings and the sound of a diesel engine idling.

The sunshine flickered down through the trees from a cloudless sky, but around me it was raining. Petrol, oil and blood. Dripping and draining away. Everyone was dead. Pimples no longer had any Pimples. Or any face for that matter. What was left of Sunded was squashed
flat
like a cardboard figure; I could see him peering out from between his own legs. The twins seemed more or less whole but had stopped breathing. That I was alive myself was solely down to the Monsen family’s aptitude for amassing body weight and forming it into perfect airbags. But those same bodies which had saved my life were now wresting it from me. The whole of the car body was crushed and I was hanging upside down from my seat. One arm was free, but I was squeezed in between the two policemen so tightly that I could neither move nor breathe. For the time being, however, my senses were functioning perfectly. Such that I could see petrol trickling out, feel it running down my trouser legs, along my body and out of my tracksuit neck. And hear the lorry up on the road, hear it snorting and clearing its throat and jerking. I knew he was sitting there, Greve, thinking, appraising. He could see on the GPS tracker that I wasn’t moving. He was thinking that he still ought to go down and make sure everyone was dead. On the other hand, it would be tricky getting down the slope and even trickier getting back up. And surely no one could have survived that crash? But you slept so much better knowing you had seen it with your own eyes …

Drive, I begged. Drive.

The worst thing about being fully conscious was that I could imagine what would happen if he found me soaked in petrol.

Drive. Drive!

The lorry’s diesel engine was chuntering away as though carrying on a conversation with itself.

Everything that had happened was clear to me now. Greve had not gone up to Sindre Aa on the steps to ask where I was, he could see that on the display of his GPS tracker. Aa had to be got rid of simply because he had seen Greve and his car. But while Greve had been walking
up
the path to the cabin, I had moved to the outside toilet, and as he hadn’t found me in the cabin, he had checked the tracker again. And discovered to his amazement that the signal had gone. Because the transmitters in my hair at that point were submerged under crap, which HOTE’s transmitters, as has been mentioned before, do not have signals powerful enough to penetrate. Idiot that I am, I had had more luck than I deserved.

Greve had then sent out the dog to find me while he waited. Still without a signal. Because the crap that dried round the transmitters was still blocking the signals while I was checking Aa’s body and then fleeing on the tractor. It was not until the middle of the night that Greve’s GPS tracker would have begun to receive signals again. Which was when I was lying on a stretcher in the hospital shower and the crap was being washed out of my hair. Greve had jumped into his car and was at the hospital by dawn. God knows how he had stolen the lorry, but anyway he had no problem finding me again, me, Brown, the babbling nutter who was veritably imploring to be caught.