Love Story, With Murders (51 page)

Fuck you, Olaf
.

The front right tyre is exposed now and, aiming as carefully
as I can, I empty the rest of my magazine into it.

The Land Rover doesn’t move. Then Lev is next to me.

‘Are you okay?’

He doesn’t wait for my answer, just pats me down, checking me. It turns out I am okay. I only know that when Lev tells me so.

I don’t know where Olaf is. I keep thinking that Lev is being an idiot, standing here in the open. I’m fumbling for a spare magazine,
trying to alert Lev to the danger.

He changes the magazine for me. ‘You hit him in shoulder. He’s going other way now.’

Lev takes me to the front of the house, from where we can see Olaf heading down to the frozen lake. He’s moving purposefully, but not running. He has a small backpack, slung over one
shoulder only. A ski pole in one hand, his rifle in the other. He’s good on skis, I
remember, but he’s not looking too mobile now. There’s something about the way he moves which
confirms that he’s wounded.

‘He’s getting away,’ I say, stating the obvious. My head is ringing with the gunfire. I feel slow, shocked, and stupid.

‘No, I don’t think.’

Lev lays himself out on the ground. His rifle has a stand made of two little folding legs. Lev opens those out, takes a
moment to sight himself, then fires a single shot.

Olaf falls instantly.

I stare at Lev, amazed and furious. I know the whole idea of a clean capture has turned to shit, but since when did Lev think it was okay to kill the guy without even asking me? I shot at the
man too, but in that case it was him or me. I was acting in something approaching self-defence.

Lev disregards my look.
Simply folds his gun stand and says, ‘Ankle.’

Sure enough, we see Olaf righting himself, flinging us a furious look, and staggering on. But not far and not fast. He’s on the rocks by the lake shore now. He moves clumsily. Stones
glazed with ice and an ankle shot to hell. If we want to pick him up later, we’ll be able to do it at a stroll.

But we’ve things to do before that. The house
is ablaze. Any evidence we might want is rapidly disappearing, if it hasn’t already gone.

Lev runs to the house. I’m just a yard or two behind.

The front door is open. Scorching air pours out, as from an oven door. The interior is strangely lit. Nordic dawn and fireball heat. Like some carefully constructed palette of beige and grey and
violet has been ram-raided with tinfuls of orange,
red, and black. That, plus incredible heat.

I go inside.

A strip of dirty cotton curtain hangs over the door window. I rip it off. Lev knifes it into two. We hold the material over our mouths, keep our heads low. The house is small. Just one large
living space, then presumably bedroom and bathroom leading off from doors at the end.

We make for the stove.

The door’s open and there’s
stuff burning inside. Olaf was probably still feeding the fire when the corner of his house blew up and bullets poured in through his walls.

A small ash shovel stands by the stove. I use it to shovel everything out. There are some papers, a phone, a laptop. A load of crumpled-up newspapers and handfuls of firelighters. Fire and smoke
everywhere.

I burn my hand on the laptop, trying to
get it free of the firelighters.

The wooden building is burning fast now. We need to get out. I hurt my hand a second time trying to pick up the laptop, but Lev is ahead of me. He brings a cushion from the sofa. Knifes open the
top and rips out the pad. We use the cushion pad like an oven glove to bundle all the items from the stove into the cushion cover. Laptop, phone. Whatever papers
we could rescue.

We run out of the house, lungs screaming.

We’ve probably wasted our time. I doubt if Olaf wrote much on paper, and the electronics look knackered.

The valley suddenly seems amazingly clear and cold and bright.

Above the lake, a rocky hummock rises from the fields. Lev gets there before I do. He lies out on the ground, sets up his rifle. Olaf is four hundred yards
from us now. Crossing the frozen
water. Moving slowly.

Lev sights up just for the sake of it. But there’s no hurry now. No hurry at all.

I pull the laptop out of the cushion-bag. The surface is hot, but no longer scorching. I try to open the screen, but the whole machine is buckled. There’s a mess where the battery
leaked.

Lev looks at it solemnly. ‘Is fucked,’ he says.

‘Yes.’

The phone is in worse shape.

‘Is also fucked,’ says my electronics guru.

‘Yes.’

I look through the papers, but they look like trash to me. Literally. Stuff that Olaf pulled from the dustbin so he could get a fire burning more quickly. If we can’t salvage data from the
electronics, I doubt if we’ll have anything useful at all.

The smoke which was leaking from the house is billowing
now. A dirty grey mostly, but tongued with orange. There are gaps in the roof now. A latticework of rafters outlined in black.

Lev has his sights fixed on Olaf’s back. He adjusts his posture by infinitesimal amounts. Either to keep pace with Olaf’s movements or to move his aim onto different targets. Head.
Chest. Leg.

Olaf, as though feeling that invisible pressure, turns and looks at
us. Motionless. A black figure against the white.

I don’t know what we look like to him. Don’t know what his thoughts are as he sees his house ablaze, his possessions gone, his cover blown.

What do you think when you’re in that position? What do you think as you turn back to your direction of travel and see your future? A frozen lake. A facing slope of rock, snow, and pines.
On the run
for ever, uphill and alone, shoulder wounded and ankle smashed. And a rifle bead tightening on your back.

I don’t know. I don’t know what he thinks.

I do know that when I was alone in the snow, I didn’t feel on my own. I felt myself part of the police family. Felt Buzz. Felt Mam and Dad and Ant and Kay.

I say to Lev, ‘Leave him.’

‘Leave? Really?’

‘Yes.’

If there’s salvageable
data from the electronics, we’ve got it. If not, it’s gone for ever.

And we’ve done enough to debar Fjerstad from his current career. A shoulder can be fixed, perhaps. The ankle, possibly not. But the physical side of things is only half of it. We’ve
made a thorough-going mess of Fjerstad’s home. His car is riddled with bullets. There are bullet casings everywhere. The Norwegian police will
have to investigate hard. As they do, I’ll
find a way to allege, anonymously, on the Internet that Fjerstad is a contract killer. I’ll link him to Khalifi, to McCormack. Publish photos, his army résumé, his address
details, everything.

Contract killers need darkness to operate in. By the time we’ve finished, Fjerstad’s face will be on every newspaper in Norway. On the radar of every police
service in the world. He
won’t do to others what he did to Khalifi. What he tried to do to me.

I start explaining this to Lev, but he doesn’t care. He lays down the gun and rummages in his pocket. Gets out a joint. Lights it. Takes a puff and offers it to me.

I shake my head. My attention is all with Olaf, who is moving differently now. Slowly and with a sudden terrible vigilance.

I turn to Lev, not sure what’s going on.

Lev says, ‘Is not lake. Is river.’ He traces the line of the river’s flow with his finger. I see it now that he shows me. A bluishness in the ice. A difference in the way it
carries the snow.

Olaf is moving with acute care now.

With fear, I think you would say. With fear.

I see him jolt. His boot has gone through the ice. He recovers but
proceeds.

And I don’t want him to. All of a sudden, I don’t want this anymore. I want him to retrace his steps. We’ll share a smoke, shake hands, forget about all this. If he can give me
anything on Prothero or Saadawi, I’ll take it. And if not – well, we’ll shake hands anyway. I don’t want this.

But Olaf doesn’t know what I think. Doesn’t know, doesn’t care.

He goes on. Stumbles
once more and recovers. Then another stumble – and he’s gone. The grey ice field suddenly darkens as water blackens it. Olaf’s head and hat are visible
above the ice. His arms. He’s trying to roll his weight out of the water and back onto the ice. But each time he tries it, the ice shelf crumbles beneath him. He’s too far now for us to
see his movements in any detail. He’s a fly struggling against
glass.

It doesn’t take long. We’re too distant to witness the final choreography in any detail. We just see that, one moment, there is a head above the water, and the next moment, only a
level silence. Black, silver, white. And moving water. A glimpse of moving water.

Half a minute passes without sign of further movement.

Lev offers me the joint again and I take it.

‘This is
first time for you, I think.’

‘No. The second,’ I say that automatically, because it happens to be the truth. But there are different possible truths and I’ve chosen the wrong one. So I correct myself,
‘The second time I’ve killed someone, but it feels like the first. The one before went very fast. I didn’t have time to notice anything.’

‘You are okay?’

‘Yes.’

Lev laughs at that.
Takes the joint from me and draws hard on it. ‘Stupid question, this one. Everybody always ask it, including me.
Are you okay?
Everybody says yes. Always this:
yes
. And –’ He waves his hand at the lake of ice. ‘Is still a person.
Boof!
’

‘Yes.’

Olaf’s house is pouring with flame now. The roof is mostly gone. You can see the roof joists still, spiderlike through the fire. They won’t last.
The walls are still largely intact,
but they’ll be completely gone too.

I don’t know how much information there might have been there. But we won’t find out. Olaf’s property is rapidly reuniting with its owner. Entering the same dark house by
different routes.

Fire and ice.

Hamish was a thug. Unprincipled and brutal. Olaf too, I assume. But he wasn’t only that. In another world,
another life, I could imagine sharing a drink with him. Enjoying an evening in
his company. As it was, I’ve spent one evening with him and one morning. The latter resulted in his death. The former, almost, in mine.

Lev and I are still smoking, but slowly. A rose-gold light tints the mountaintop above us. I don’t know which of us starts it, but one of us begins laughing, then the other joins
in. We
lie on our backs in the snow, passing the joint to and fro, laughing for no reason at all, except that we are alive and we might not have been, and the light is golden and it might not have
been.

I say, ‘I think I knew. I was just pretending I didn’t.’

Lev, not surprisingly, doesn’t know what I mean, so I explain.

‘I had this picture in my head, that we would stroll into
Olaf’s house at dawn, catch him unawares, locate all the evidence we could possibly need. But in truth, I think I knew that
was always an outside bet. I think I knew we might have to use force.’

‘Always better to have gun.’ Lev shrugs.

‘Tomato. Chicken. Minestrone. I guess I knew I’d be eating chicken.’

Lev looks at me with those eternal brown eyes of his. He doesn’t know what I’m
talking about. Doesn’t care. He finishes the joint and flicks it away into the snow. I pick it
up.

‘DNA on the saliva,’ I explain.

We walk back up the hill and down the other side to the car.

Start driving back to Oslo.

Lev at the wheel, because he doesn’t trust me to drive this short of sleep. It’s twenty minutes before we pass anyone at all and seventy minutes before I see
a CCTV camera.

The Norwegian cops will find the evidence of our shootout, all right, but they won’t be able to place our car at the scene and have no reason to guess that a kooky Welsh cop and her
screwed-up Spetsnaz buddy are the ones they need to interview.

Somewhere along the way, we stop for food. Lev fills his plate with cheese and sausage. I can’t face any of that. I take a bowl
of muesli, but don’t make much of a dent in it.

Olaf was alive and now he is dead.

That’s a pencil mark of a kind. One more impressive if you witness the transition than if you don’t. It’s not that I feel myself so separate from the world of the dead. I
don’t. I feel no more distant from Olaf than I did before. The opposite, if anything. But there
was
a transition. One state changing
to another. Something indelible.

When we get back to Oslo, I go straight to bed. When I wake up, Lev is still around, but the car has no weapons in it.

And last night never happened.

Three days later, back in England, I take the laptop and phone to a commercial data-recovery outfit that has done work for the Ministry of Defence, among others. I show
Olaf’s phone and laptop to a technician, but even before I have them properly out of my bag, he says, ‘You are joking, right?’ Three minutes later, I’m leaving the premises,
with Lev’s diagnosis amply confirmed. Is fucked.

Just like our case against Barry Precison. Against Idris Prothero.

I won’t leave it there, of course. The man is an arms smuggler who tried to have me killed. But I’ll leave it there for now. I’ve got no other option.

Two final postscripts.

The first is a weird one. I did go up to Dolgellau. Found the whistle-blower’s wife: Mrs
Glyn – Delia. In her early sixties. Living in a council flat, nice enough, but no spare cash.
She had the angry, injured look often worn by the slightly mad. Her clothes weren’t quite right either. A too-short flowery dress worn with bright red tights and heavy black shoes. Hair not
very recently washed. I don’t judge these things. I’ve been there. Ticked all those boxes and then some. Truth
is, I feel comfortable around such people. At ease.

Delia made tea. Concentrating hard to do it right. Made it, poured it, complained about her back. We sat at a small Formica table in her kitchen. Unlined cotton curtains splattered with grease
from the frying pan.