‘Shut up, Harry.’
Harry shut up. Oleg opened his eyes. There was a feverish, desperate sheen to them. His voice was hoarse, but quite clear now.
‘You should have let him complete the job, Harry.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘You have to let me do this.’
‘Do what?’
No answer.
‘Do what, Oleg?’
Oleg placed a hand behind Harry’s head, pulled him down and whispered: ‘You can’t stop this, Harry. It’s all happened. It has to run its course. If you get in the way, more will die.’
‘Who’s going to die?’
‘It’s too big, Harry. It’ll swallow you up, swallow everyone up.’
‘Who’s going to die? Who are you protecting, Oleg? Is it Irene?’
Oleg closed his eyes. His lips barely moved. Then not at all. And Harry thought he looked like he had when he was eleven and had just fallen asleep after a long day. Then he spoke.
‘It’s you, Harry. They’re going to kill you.’
As Harry was leaving the prison the ambulances had arrived. He thought of how things used to be. The town as it used to be. His life as it used to be. While he had been using Oleg’s computer he had also looked for Sardines and Russian Amcar Club. He hadn’t found any signs to suggest they had been resurrected. Resurrection may be generally too much to hope for. Perhaps life doesn’t teach you much, apart from this one thing: there is no way back.
Harry lit a cigarette, and before he took the first drag, the brain already celebrating the fact that nicotine would accompany the blood, he heard the sound being played back, the sound he knew he would hear for the rest of the evening and night, the almost inaudible word that had first crossed Oleg’s lips in the cell:
‘Dad.’
PART TWO
16
THE MOTHER RAT licked the metal. It tasted of salt. She gave a start as the fridge sprang into life and began to hum. The church bells were still ringing. There was a way into the nest she hadn’t tried. Hadn’t dared to try since the human blocking the entrance was not yet dead. But the high-frequency howls of her young were making her desperate. So she did. She darted up the jacket sleeve of the human. There was a vague smell of smoke. Not smoke from a cigarette or a bonfire, but something else. Something in gas form that had been in the clothes, but had been washed out so that only a few molecules of air were left between the innermost threads in the cloth. She approached the elbow, but it was too narrow there. She stopped and listened. In the distance there was the sound of a police siren.
There were all those brief moments and choices, Dad. Those I thought were unimportant, here today, gone tomorrow, as it were. But they pile up. And before you know it they have become a river that drags you along with it. That leads you to where you are going. And that was where I was going. In fricking July. No, I wasn’t going there! I wanted to go elsewhere, Dad.
As we turned in towards the main building Isabelle Skøyen stood on her drive, in her tight riding breeches, legs akimbo.
‘Andrey, you wait here,’ the old boy said. ‘Peter, you check the area.’
We got out of the limousine to a cowshed smell, the buzz of flies and distant cowbells. She shook hands stiffly with the old boy, ignored me and invited us in for a coffee, ‘a’ being the operative word.
In the corridor hung pictures of nags with the best bloodlines, the most racing cups and fuck knows what. The old boy walked along by the photos and asked if one was an English thoroughbred and praised the slim legs and impressive chest. I wondered whether he was talking about a horse or her. Nevertheless, it worked. Isabelle’s expression thawed a little and she became less curt.
‘Let’s sit in the lounge and talk,’ he said.
‘I think we’ll go to the kitchen,’ she said and the ice was back in her voice.
We sat down, and she put the coffee pot in the middle of the table.
‘You pour for us, Gusto,’ the old boy said, looking out of the window. ‘Nice farm you have here, fru Skøyen.’
‘There’s no “fru” here.’
‘Where I grew up we called all women who could run a farm “fru” whether they were widows, divorced or unmarried. It was considered a mark of respect.’
He turned to her with a broad smile. She met his eyes. And for a couple of seconds it was so quiet all you heard was the retard fly banging against the window trying to get out.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘Good. For the moment let’s forget these photos, fru Skøyen.’
She stiffened on her chair. In the phone conversation I’d had with Isabelle she had at first attempted to laugh off the suggestion that we could send the photographs of her and me to the press. She said she was a single, sexually active woman who had taken a younger man, so what? First of all, she was an insignificant secretary to a councillor, and second this was Norway. Hypocrisy was what they pursued at American presidential elections. So I had painted the threat in bright colours with concise strokes. She had paid me, and I could prove it. She was a punter, and prostitution and drugs were issues she tackled in the press on behalf of the Social Services Committee, didn’t she?