The Son (2 page)

‘I know you never ask for anything in return, but . . .’

He looked at the boy’s bare foot which he had tucked under. He saw the needle marks in the big vein on the instep. ‘I did my last stretch in Botsen and getting hold of drugs in there was easy, no problem. Botsen isn’t a maximum security prison, though. They say Franck has made it impossible to smuggle anything into Staten, but . . .’ Rover stuck his hand in his pocket, ‘. . . but that’s not quite true.’

He pulled something out. It was the size of a mobile phone, a gold-plated object shaped like a pistol. Rover pressed the trigger. A small flame shot out of the muzzle. ‘Seen one of these before? Yeah, I bet you have. The officers who searched me when I came here certainly had. They told me they were selling smuggled cigarettes on the cheap if I was interested. So they let me keep the lighter. I don’t suppose they’d read my rap sheet. No one bothers doing their job properly these days – makes you wonder how anything in this country ever gets done.’

Rover weighed the lighter in his hand.

‘Eight years ago I made two of these. I ain’t boasting if I tell you that nobody in Norway could have done a better job. I’d been contacted by a middleman who told me his client wanted a gun he would never have to hide, a gun that didn’t look like a gun. So I came up with this. It’s funny how people’s minds work. At first they think it’s a gun, obvs. But once you’ve shown them that you can use it as a lighter, they forget all about it being a gun. They still think it could also be a toothbrush or a screwdriver. But not a gun, no way. So . . .’

Rover turned a screw on the underside of the handle.

‘It takes two 9mm bullets. I call it the Happy Couple Killer.’ He aimed the barrel at the young man. ‘One for you, sweetheart . . .’ Then he pointed it at his own temple. ‘And one for me . . .’ Rover’s laughter sounded strangely lonely in the small cell.

‘Anyway. I was only supposed to make one; the client didn’t want anyone else to know the secret behind my little invention. But I made another one. And I took it with me for protection, in case Nestor decided to try to kill me while I was inside. But as I’m getting out tomorrow and I won’t need it any more, it’s yours now. And here . . .’

Rover pulled out a packet of cigarettes from his other pocket. ‘Because it’ll look weird if you have a lighter, but no cigarettes, right?’ He then took out a yellowed business card saying ‘Rover’s Motorcycle Workshop’ and slipped it into the cigarette packet.

‘Here’s my address in case you ever have a motorbike that needs fixing. Or want to get yourself one hell of an Uzi. Like I said, I still have some lying—’

The door opened outwards and a voice thundered: ‘Get out, Rover!’

Rover turned round. The trousers of the prison officer in the doorway were sagging due to the large bunch of keys that dangled from his belt, although this was partly obscured by his belly, which spilled over the lining like rising dough. ‘His Holiness has a visitor. A close relative, you could say.’ He guffawed with laughter and turned to the man behind him. ‘No offence, eh, Per?’

Rover slipped the gun and the cigarette packet under the duvet on the boy’s bed and took one last look at him.

Then he left quickly.

The prison chaplain attempted a smile while he automatically straightened his ill-fitting dog collar.
A close relative. No offence
. He felt like spitting into the prison officer’s fat, grinning face, but instead he nodded to the inmate emerging from the cell and pretended to recognise him. Glanced at the tattoos on his forearms. The madonna and a cathedral. But no, over the years the faces and the tattoos had become too numerous for him to distinguish between them.

The chaplain entered. He could smell incense. Or something that reminded him of incense. Like drugs being cooked.

‘Hello, Sonny.’

The young man on the bed didn’t look up, but he nodded slowly. Per Vollan took it to mean that his presence had been registered, acknowledged. Approved.

He sat down on the chair and experienced a slight discomfort when he felt the warmth from the previous occupant. He placed the Bible he had brought with him on the bed next to the boy.

‘I put flowers on your parents’ grave today,’ he said. ‘I know you haven’t asked me to, but . . .’

Per Vollan tried to catch the boy’s eye. He had two sons himself; both were grown up and had left the Vollan family home. As Vollan himself had. The difference was that his sons were always welcome back.

In court a witness for the defence, a teacher, had testified that Sonny had been a star pupil, a talented wrestler, popular, always helpful, indeed the boy had even expressed a desire to become a police officer like his father. But ever since his father had been found dead next to a suicide note in which he confessed to corruption Sonny hadn’t been seen at school. The chaplain tried to imagine the shame of the fifteen-year-old boy. Tried to imagine his own sons’ shame if they ever found out what their father had done. He straightened his dog collar again.

‘Thank you,’ Sonny said.

Per thought how strangely young Sonny seemed. Because he must be close to thirty by now. Yes. Sonny had served twelve years and he was eighteen when he was sent down. Perhaps it was the drugs that had preserved him, preventing him from ageing so that only his hair and beard grew while his innocent baby eyes continued to gaze at the world in wonder. A wicked world. God knows it was evil. Per Vollan had been a prison chaplain for over forty years and seen the world grow more and more sinful. Evil spread like cancer, it made healthy cells sick, poisoned them with its vampire bite and recruited them to do its work of corruption. And once bitten no one ever escaped. No one.

‘How are you, Sonny? Did you enjoy being out on day release? Did you get to see the sea?’

No reply.

Per Vollan cleared his throat. ‘The prison officer said you got to see the sea. You might have read in the papers that a woman was found murdered the next day, not far from where you were. She was found in bed, in her own home. Her head had been . . . well. All the details are in here . . .’ He tapped his finger on the Bible. ‘The officer has already filed a report saying you ran away while you were at the sea and that he found you by the road one hour later. That you refused to account for your whereabouts. It’s important that you don’t say anything that contradicts his statement, do you understand? As usual you’ll say as little as possible. All right? Sonny?’

Per Vollan finally succeeded in making eye contact with the boy. His expression told Per little about what was going on inside his head, but he felt fairly certain that Sonny Lofthus would follow orders and not say anything unnecessary to the police or the public prosecutor. All he had to do was utter a light, soft ‘Guilty’ when he was asked how he pleaded. Though it sounded paradoxical, Vollan occasionally sensed a direction, a force of will, a survival instinct that distinguished this junkie from the others, from those who had always been in free fall, who had never had any other plans, who had been heading for the gutter all along. This willpower might express itself as a sudden flash of insight, a question that revealed he had paid attention all along and seen and heard everything. Or in the way he might suddenly stand up, with a coordination, balance and flexibility you didn’t see in other habitual drug users. While at other times, like now, he seemed to register nothing at all.

Vollan squirmed in his chair.

‘Of course this means no more trips on the outside for you for quite a while. But you don’t like the outside anyway, do you? And you did get to see the sea.’

‘It was a river. Did the husband do it?’

The chaplain jumped. As when something unexpected breaks through black water right in front of you. ‘I don’t know. Is that important?’

No reply. Vollan sighed. He felt nauseous again. Recently it seemed to come and go. Perhaps he should make a doctor’s appointment and get it checked out.

‘Don’t you worry about that, Sonny. Just remember that on the outside people like you have to scavenge all day to get their next fix. While in here everything is taken care of. And don’t forget that time passes. Once you finish serving out your old sentences, you’ll be no use to them, but with this murder you can extend your detention.’

‘So it was the husband. Is he rich?’

Vollan pointed to the Bible. ‘In here you’ll find a description of the house you entered. It’s big and well furnished. But the alarm that was supposed to guard all this wealth wasn’t turned on; the front door wasn’t even locked. The family’s name is Morsand. The shipowner with the eyepatch. Seen him in the papers, have you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you? I didn’t think that you—’

‘Yes, I killed her. Yes, I’ll read up on how I did it.’

Per Vollan exhaled. ‘Good. There are certain details about how she was killed which you ought to memorise.’

‘Right.’

‘She was . . . the top of her head was severed. You used a saw. Do you understand?’

The words were followed by a long silence which Per Vollan considered filling with vomit. Throwing up was preferable to exploiting the boy. He looked at him. What determined the outcome of a life? A series of random events you had no control over or did some cosmic gravity pull everything in the direction it was predestined to go? He loosened his strangely uncomfortable dog collar, suppressed his nausea and steeled himself. Remembered what was at stake.

He got up. ‘If you need to get in touch with me I’m currently staying at the Ila Centre on Alexander Kiellands Plass.’

He saw the boy’s quizzical look.

‘Just for the time being, you understand.’ He laughed quickly. ‘My wife threw me out and as I know the people who run the centre, they—’

He stopped abruptly. Suddenly he realised why so many of the inmates went to the young man to talk. It was the silence. The beckoning vacuum of someone who simply listens without reaction or judgement. Who extracts your words and your secrets from you without doing anything at all. He had striven for that ability as a chaplain all his life, but it was as if the inmates sensed that he had an agenda. They didn’t know what it was, only that there was something he wanted by knowing their secrets. Access to their souls and later a possible recruitment prize in heaven.

The chaplain saw that the boy had opened the Bible. It was such a simple trick, it was comical; the cut-outs in the pages created a compartment. Inside were folded papers with the information Sonny needed in order to confess. And three small bags of heroin.

2

ARILD FRANCK BARKED
a brief ‘Enter!’ without taking his eyes off the document on his desk.

He heard the door open. Ina, his secretary in the front office, had already announced his visitor and, for a split second, Arild Franck considered asking her to tell the chaplain that he was busy. It wouldn’t even be a lie; he had a meeting with the Commissioner at Politihuset, Oslo Police’s headquarters, in half an hour. But recently Per Vollan hadn’t been as stable as they needed him to be and there was no harm in double-checking that he could still hold it together. There was no room for screw-ups in this case, not for any of them.

‘Don’t bother sitting down,’ Arild Franck said, signing the document and getting up. ‘We’ll have to walk and talk.’

He headed for the door, took his uniform cap from the coat stand and heard the chaplain’s shuffling feet behind him. Arild Franck told Ina that he would be back in an hour and a half and pressed his index finger against the sensor at the door to the stairwell. The prison was on two floors and there was no lift. Lifts equalled shafts which equalled any number of escape routes and had to be closed off in the event of fire. And a fire and its ensuing evacuation chaos was just one of many methods ingenious inmates had used to break out of other prisons. For the same reason, all electric cables, fuse boxes and water pipes had been laid so they were inaccessible to the inmates, either outside the building itself or cemented into the walls. Here nothing had been left to chance.
He
had left nothing to chance. He had sat with the architects and international prison experts when they drew up the blueprint for Staten. Admittedly the Lenzburg Prison in the Aargau canton in Switzerland had provided the inspiration: hypermodern, but simple and with an emphasis on security and efficiency rather than comfort. But it was him, Arild Franck, who was responsible for its creation. Staten was Arild Franck and vice versa. So why had the board, in their infinite wisdom, damn them all to hell, made him only assistant prison governor and appointed that moron from Haldern Prison as governor? Yes, Franck was something of a rough diamond and, no, he wasn’t the kind of guy who would suck up to politicians by jumping for joy at every bright new idea about how to reform the prison system while the previous reforms had yet to be implemented. But he knew how to do his job – keeping people locked up without them getting ill, dying or becoming noticeably worse human beings as a result. He was loyal to those who deserved his loyalty and he looked after his own. That was more than could be said for his superiors in this rotten-to-the-core, politically motivated hierarchy. Before he was deliberately overlooked for the post of governor, Arild Franck had hoped for a small bust as a memorial in the foyer when he retired – though his wife had expressed the opinion that his bull neck, bulldog face and straggly comb-over wouldn’t suit a bust. But if people failed to reward your achievements, his view on the matter was you just had to help yourself.

‘I can’t keep doing this, Arild,’ Per Vollan said behind him as they walked down the corridor.

‘Doing what?’

‘I’m a chaplain. What we’re doing to the boy – making him take the fall for something he didn’t do. Serve time for a husband who—’

‘Hush.’

Outside the door to the control room, or ‘the bridge’ as Franck liked to call it, they passed an old man who paused his swabbing of the floor and gave a friendly nod to Franck. Johannes was the oldest man in the prison and an inmate after Franck’s own heart, a gentle soul who sometime in the previous century had been picked up – almost by chance – for drug smuggling, had never hurt a fly since and over the years had become so institutionalised, conditioned and pacified that the only thing he dreaded was the day he was released. Sadly, inmates like him didn’t represent a challenge for a prison like Staten.