A Line of Blood (46 page)
Millicent and I got up at eight. Max was on the couch in the living room watching cartoons. Not hungry, he said, so Millicent and I drank our coffee and ate our toast without him.
When we had finished eating Millicent went upstairs and returned with her old letters. Full disclosure, she said. After all, Max had already read them. No, I had said, no, I don’t want to play policeman with my wife. How much do I really need to know? And if I felt a sadness that some parts of her past would remain unknown to me, at least that thought has been spoken now.
At half past nine Millicent went to the post office. She took with her new letters that she’d written to her parents, bought new stamps for the envelopes, and posted them: she was certain I wouldn’t much like her father or her mother when I met them.
‘As certain as I was that you wouldn’t like my mother?’ I said.
‘Yeah, OK,’ she said. ‘Who knew?’
She met Mr Ashani in the street on her way home; he was red-eyed and angry after an eighteen-hour interrogation. Mr Ashani had paid a high price for his religious views. Someone had heard him in the street; someone had come forward; some unseen neighbour had reported him for saying, ‘We must hope that this is murder.’
The police had interviewed Mr Ashani under caution; they had spent those eighteen hours effectively asking him the same two questions again and again: how much money did the neighbour owe him? Why did he want him dead?
Later that evening, Mr Ashani would find the loose board in the bedroom of the house he was selling. I had replaced it so that one end extended slightly above the level of the floor.
Being an observant man, Mr Ashani knew at once that something was out of place. Being a moral man, he took no more than was due to him from his tenant Mr Bryce (plus a small consideration for his trouble); being an excellent judge of character, he trusted that Mr Ravinder S. Mann would distribute what was due to his creditors from the brown-paper parcel that Mr Ashani carefully placed at the door of his office.
Neither of them cared to involve the police.
Four days later Millicent and I agreed the sale on our house. The offer was below the asking price, but the estate agent didn’t object when we accepted it.
In October a coroner’s court returned a verdict of suicide.
We trekked out across the ice, my son and I, the snow brittle beneath our skis.
In the middle of the bay I strained at the ice drill; a perfect cylinder of frozen seawater rose slowly above the giant bit. I felt the drill loosen as it reached the water below. Max picked up the spade and shovelled slush from the hole. We dropped in our lines and waited.
‘Morten’s dad once drove all the way to Denmark,’ said Max. ‘Over the ice.’
‘Does it go that far?’ I said.
‘Not normally. It used to though.’
The ocean creaked as ice moved slowly against ice: unseen forces, ancient and terrifying. The sun was low. There was no wind. I wondered for a moment if we were putting ourselves in danger, but saw skaters far out beyond us and put the thought from my mind.
It was Max who had drawn up the first cod. It had lain there on the ice, thrashing uselessly, gulping air. An alien creature, too large, too alive.
‘Can I have the knife, Dad?’
He killed the cod with a single efficient cut behind the head, cleaned it and threw the guts back down the hole. Then he dropped his line back through the ice after it. Controlled aggression, I thought. Isn’t
that
what separates man from boy?
Of course I have wondered about that weekend of water and unreal light. Did Millicent bring me to Oslo to scout out the territory? Did she want to see for herself a country that would not deport our son? But my wife has the soul of a romantic; there was no cynical intent behind the visit. Millicent has sworn to me that she never once suspected Max; I believe her.
She researched the country before we came back, though; she read countless journals and books at her computer; she pored over translations, mouthed strange words to herself, all
K
s and
S
s and
Ø
s. She made phone calls, anonymised through servers in the Far East, to public prosecutors in Bergen and Trondheim, to heads of Child Protection Services in Oslo. She was an English journalist with a London accent and a few theoretical questions. Everyone was very kind, and very professional. She was certain no one suspected a thing. She learned that at the very worst Max would face a light sentence in comfortable surroundings. He was, after all, eleven when he killed the neighbour. Most likely he would not be removed from his family, if the murder should ever come to light.
‘The justice system is rational and humane there,’ Millicent said to me one evening. ‘You guys have European passports. And I’ll get leave to remain because of you. We really have no other choice.’
Yes, I know. But what kind of father would risk his son being tried and sentenced as an adult? Max was not a Freak of Nature. He had not led a Life of Depravity. He was not The Monster Next Door.
Millicent and I were damaged people. That’s why we fitted, of course: any two-dollar shrink would say so. And like so many damaged people of our generation, we masked our pain behind alcohol and easy cynicism. Which worked well until we had Max.
Our cynicism confused our son. It masked the line between pain and cruelty. But Max saw the contradiction too – that I never acted on my anger, that I did nothing to change my circumstances. He saw this as my tragic flaw and he killed Bryce because he knew that I would not.
His mother and I were certain that Max wouldn’t make the same choice a second time. He had learned from his terrible mistake.
Now that Max had time to reflect on what it meant to take a life he was truly sorry for what he did. Our only-begotten son killed from the very purest of motives, which is love, and from the very oldest, which is revenge.
When Max is a little older he will come to understand this as his own tragic flaw. For now it must be enough that he is sorry.
I did read the letter Millicent wrote to Sarah. I read it first on my own, and then again with Max. It was beautiful, and simple, and very raw indeed. We read the letter with Millicent’s permission, and it made us both cry.
I looked at my boy, beautiful in the low sun, backlit and self-assured. You knew, I thought.
‘What, Dad?’
His bearing had changed: he was fitter now, more poised. A little taller.
‘Dad, you’re staring at me.’
‘I was thinking … Are you OK, Max? You seem to be OK.’
‘I’m fine, Dad.’
You knew, I thought. You’re the only one of us who knew, Max. Millicent couldn’t explain how she had wandered from the path. Nor could I. But you knew exactly why you killed Bryce. You wanted to keep the family together, thought that was what it took. Your crime ruined your life, as it did ours, but you knew why you committed it.
What Max had wanted, in short, was this: father and son, fish and ice. Love expressed through the doing of stuff.
‘You’re fine, Max? You’re sure you’re fine?’
‘I like it here,
for faen
.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
In an hour there were five cod. Max threaded an orange cord through their gills and carried them in a gloved hand as we skied slowly back across the ice to where Millicent stood waiting on the shore.
My agent Judith Murray and my editor Julia Wisdom both saw something in my manuscript, and made me rewrite and rewrite until we were all happy with it. To them and to everyone else listed here I am extremely grateful. Tim Lott, Eleanor Moran, Kate Stephenson, John Tague, Thorgeir Kolshus, Charles Boyle and Tor Øverbø read and advised on drafts. Johnny Acton, Phil Wiget and Jeremy Drysdale read early chapters and encouraged me to keep writing. Kathy O’Donnell, Lucinda Acton, Fiona McLaney, Dominic Edmonds, Leslie O’Neill, Gabrielle Osrin, Francis McPherson and Satnam Virdi helped me with the research. Dehra Mitchell, Oliver James, Davinder Virdi, Thomas Bjørnflaten and Simon Aylwin gave specialist professional advice. Ida von Hanno Bast, Signe and Stein Lundgren, the staff of Kaffebrenneriet on Frognerveien, and the House of Literature in Oslo all – in one way or another – gave me a place to write. And Charlotte Lundgren did every one of these things, and more.
Ben McPherson was born in Glasgow and grew up in Edinburgh, but left Scotland when he was eighteen. He studied languages at Cambridge, then worked for many years in film and television in London.
In 1998, after working a 48-hour shift, he went for a drink at the Coach and Horses in Soho and met the woman he would go on to marry. Similarities to the characters in
A Line of Blood
end there.
Ben now lives in Oslo with his wife and their two sons. He is a columnist for
Aftenposten
, Norway’s leading quality daily newspaper.
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