The Son by Jo Nesbø Read Free Book Online

chair and wiggled out a tin of snus from his jeans pocket.
    ‘A woman?’ she suggested.
    ‘I was going to say clever.’
    She blushed and he could see the discomfort in her eyes.
    ‘Are you clever?’ Simon asked, pushing a piece of snus under his upper lip.
    ‘I came second in my year.’
    ‘And how long are you planning on staying with Homicide?’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘If drugs didn’t appeal to you, why would murder?’
    She shifted her weight again. Simon saw that he had been right. She was one of those people who would make a brief guest appearance before disappearing up the building to the higher floors and up the ranks. Clever. Probably leave the police force altogether. Like the smart buggers at the Serious Fraud Office had done. Taken all their skills with them and left Simon in the lurch. The police force wasn’t a place you stayed if you were bright, talented, ambitious and wanted a life.
    ‘I left the crime scene because there was nothing to be found there,’ Simon said. ‘So tell me, where would you start?’
    ‘I would talk to his next of kin,’ Kari Adel said, looking around for a chair. ‘Map his movements before he ended up in the river.’
    Her accent suggested she was from the eastern part of west Oslo where people were terrified that the wrong accent might stigmatise them.
    ‘Good, Adel. And his next of kin—’
    ‘—is his wife. His soon-to-be ex-wife. She threw him out recently. I’ve spoken to her. He was staying at the Ila Centre for drug addicts. Is it OK if I sit down . . .?’
    Clever. Definitely clever.
    ‘You won’t need to now,’ Simon said, getting up. He estimated her to be at least fifteen centimetres taller than him. Even so, she had to take two steps to one of his. Tight skirt. That was all good, but he suspected she would soon be wearing something else. Crimes were solved in jeans.
    ‘You know you’re not allowed in here.’
    Martha blocked the access to the Ila Centre’s front door as she looked at the two people. She thought she had seen the woman before. Her height and thinness made her hard to forget. Drug Squad? She had blonde, lifeless hair, wore hardly any make-up and had a slightly pained facial expression that made her look like the cowed daughter of a rich man.
    The man was her direct opposite. Roughly 1.70 metres tall, somewhere in his sixties. Wrinkles in his face. But also laughter lines. Thinning grey hair above a pair of eyes in which she read ‘kind’, ‘humorous’ and ‘stubborn’. Reading people was something she did automatically when she held the obligatory introduction interview with new residents to establish what kind of behaviour and trouble the staff could expect. Sometimes she was wrong. But not often.
    ‘We don’t need to come inside,’ said the man who had introduced himself as Chief Inspector Kefas. ‘We’re from Homicide. It’s about Per Vollan. He lived here—’
    ‘Lived?’
    ‘Yes, he’s dead.’
    Martha gasped. It was her initial reaction when she was told that yet another man had died. She wondered if it was to reassure herself that she was still alive. Surprise came next. Or rather, the fact that she wasn’t surprised. But Per hadn’t been a drug addict, he hadn’t sat in death’s waiting room with the rest of them. Or had he? And had she seen it, known it subconsciously? Was that why the usual gasp was followed by the equally routine mental reaction: of course. No, it wasn’t that. It was the other thing.
    ‘He was found in the Aker River.’ The man did the talking. The woman had TRAINEE written on her forehead.
    ‘Right,’ Martha said.
    ‘You don’t sound surprised?’
    ‘No. No, perhaps not. It’s always a shock, of course, but . . .’
    ‘. . . but it’s par for the course in our line of work, yes?’ The man gestured at the windows in the building next door. ‘I didn’t know Tranen had shut.’
    ‘It’s going to be an upmarket patisserie,’ Martha said, hugging herself as if