Blood on Snow
- Автор: Несбё Ю
- Серия: Blood on Snow #1
- Год: 2015
- Язык: английский
- Год: Knopf, Doubleday Publishing Group
- ISBN: 978-0-385-35419-6
- Переводчик: Neil Smith
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «Blood on Snow». Краткое содержание книги:
I didn’t answer.
He said I had sixty seconds.
I said the money was in the bank, and he’d have to wait till they opened the next morning.
He tilted his head, as if that would help him work out whether I was lying.
I said I wasn’t going to run, that he could have my bed, and I’d sleep in Mum’s room.
“So you’ve taken over my place there as well, have you?” he sneered. “Don’t you know that’s illegal? Or doesn’t it say that in your books?”
That evening Mum and Dad shared the last of her drink. They went into her room. I lay on the sofa and stuffed my ears with toilet paper. But it didn’t block out her bellowing. Then a door slammed, and I heard him go into my room.
I waited until two o’clock before I got up, went into the bathroom and got the toilet brush. Then I went down to the cellar and unlocked our store cupboard. I’d been given a pair of skis when I was thirteen. By my mum. God knows what she had to go without to pay for those skis. But they were too small now, I’d grown out of them. I pulled the snow-guard off one of the poles and went back up. I crept into my room. My father was lying on his back, snoring. I stood with a foot on each side of the narrow bed-frame, put the point of the ski pole against his stomach. I didn’t want to risk his chest, because the spike might hit his sternum or one of his ribs. I put one hand through the strap on the pole, put the other one on top, and made sure the pole was at the right angle so that it wouldn’t bow or snap the bamboo shaft. I waited. I don’t know why, it wasn’t that I was scared. I wasn’t. His breathing became more unsettled, soon he’d move and roll over. So I jumped up, bending my knees under me like a ski jumper. And landed with my full weight. His skin offered some resistance, but once the hole was made the pole thrust right through him. The bamboo stick dragged part of his T-shirt with it into his stomach, and the spike bored deep into the mattress.
His eyes were black with shock as he lay there staring up at me. I’d been quick to sit on his chest so that his arms were locked down by my knees. He opened his mouth to scream. I took aim and rammed the toilet brush into his mouth. He gurgled and wriggled, but he couldn’t move. Sure I’d fucking grown.
I sat there, feeling the bamboo pole behind the small of my back, with his body struggling beneath me. And I thought to myself that I was riding my father. Now my father was my bitch.
I don’t know how long I sat there before he stopped struggling and his body became limp enough for me to risk removing the toilet brush.
“Fucking moron,” he groaned, his eyes closed. “You cut someone’s throat with a knife, not...”
“That would have been too quick,” I said.
He laughed, and coughed. Bubbles of blood at the corners of his mouth.
“Now, that’s my boy.”
That was the last thing he said. So he got the last word after all. Because I realised there and then that he was right, the bastard. I was his boy. It isn’t true that I didn’t know why I waited those extra seconds before sticking the pole into him. It was to prolong the magical moment when I, and I alone, had power over life and death.
That was the virus I had in my blood. His virus.
I carried the corpse down into the cellar and wrapped it up in the old, rotten canvas tent. My mum had bought that for me as well. She had got it into her head that we, her little family, would go on camping trips. Cook freshly caught trout beside a lake where the sun never set. I hope she got there with her drinking.
More than a week passed before the police came to ask if we’d seen my father after he was released. We said no. They said they’d make a note of it. Thanked us, and left. They didn’t seem particularly bothered. By that time I had already hired a van and taken the mattress and bedclothes to the dump to be incinerated. And that night I had driven deep into the far reaches of Nittedal, to a lake where the sun never sets, but where I wouldn’t be fishing for trout for a good long while.
I sat there on the shore looking out over the sparkling surface, thinking that this is what we leave behind, a few ripples in water, there for a while and then gone. As if they’d never been there. As if we had never been here.
That was the first time I fixed someone.
A few weeks later I got a letter from the university: “It is with great pleasure that we can confirm that you have been accepted to...” with a date and time for registration. I slowly tore it into pieces.
Chapter 12
I was woken by a kiss.
Before I realised it was a kiss, there was a moment of pure and utter panic.
Then it all came back, and the panic was replaced by something warm and soft that, in the absence of any better word, I can only call happiness.
She had rested her cheek on my chest and I looked down at her, and the way her hair was flowing over me.
“Olav?”
“Yes?”
“Can’t we just stay here for ever?”
I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do. I pulled her closer to me. Held her. Counting the seconds. Those were seconds we had together, seconds no one could take away from us, seconds we consumed there and then. But — like I said — I can’t count for very long. I put my lips to her hair.
“He’d find us here, Corina.”
“Let’s go far away, then.”
“We have to deal with him first. We can’t spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders.”
She ran one finger down my nose and chin, as if there was a seam there. “You’re right. But then we can go, can’t we?”
“Yes.”
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
“Where to?”
“Wherever you want.”
She ran her finger down my neck, over my throat and between my collarbones. “In that case, I want to go to Paris.”
“Paris it is, then. Why there?”
“Because that’s where Cosette and Marius were together.”
I laughed, swung my feet down onto the floor and kissed her on the forehead.
“Don’t get up,” she said.
So I didn’t get up.
At ten o’clock I was reading the paper and drinking a cup of coffee at the kitchen table. Corina was asleep.
The record-breaking cold was continuing. But the milder weather yesterday had made the roads like glass. A car had slid onto the wrong side of the Trondheim road. A family of three on their way up north for Christmas. And the police still had no leads on the murder in Vinderen.
At eleven o’clock I was standing in a department store. It was full of people looking for Christmas presents. I stood by the window, pretending to look at a dinner service while I watched the building on the other side of the road. Hoffmann’s office. There were two men standing outside. Pine, and a guy I hadn’t seen before. The new guy was stamping his feet, and the smoke from his cigarette was drifting right into Pine’s face, who said something the other man didn’t seem very interested in. He wore a huge bearskin hat and overcoat, but he still had his shoulders hunched up to his ears, while Pine looked relaxed in his dog-shit-coloured jacket and clown’s hat. Pimps are used to standing outside. The new guy pulled his hat further down over his ears. But I think this was more because of Pine’s verbal diarrhoea than the cold. Pine had taken the cigarette from behind his ear and was showing it to the other guy. Presumably he was telling the same old story, about how he’d had that cigarette there since the day he stopped smoking. That it was his way of showing the tobacco who was in charge. I reckon he just wanted people to ask him why he had a cigarette tucked behind his ear, so he could then bore the shit out of them.