Cursed Read online

  PRAISE FOR THOMAS ENGER

  ‘Spine-chilling and utterly unputdownable. Thomas Enger has created a masterpiece of intrigue, fast-paced action and suspense that is destined to become a Nordic Noir classic’ Yrsa Sigurðardóttir

  ‘A gripping narrative that begs comparison to Stieg Larsson’ Bookpage

  ‘One of the most unusual and intense writers in the field’ Barry Forshaw, Independent

  ‘An intriguing new voice in crime’ NJ Cooper

  ‘Thomas Enger is one of the finest writers in the Nordic Noir genre, and this is his very best book yet. Outstanding’ Ragnar Jónasson

  ‘Cursed is visceral and heartfelt – a gripping deep-dive into the secrets that hold families together and tear them apart’ Crime by the Book

  ‘Slick, compelling and taut, Thomas Enger combines sophisticated layers of mystery with an intensely scarred hero embarked on a tragic quest. A dark and suspenseful blast of Nordic exposure’ Chris Ewan

  ‘The Killing took us by surprise, The Bridge was a good follow-up, but the political drama Borgen knocked spots of both. For readers who enjoy these Scandinavian imports, this novel is a treat … the dialogue is sharp and snappy, and the characters seem to come alive in this sophisticated and suspenseful tale’ Jessica Mann Literary Review

  ‘It has real strengths: the careful language, preserved in the fine translation, and its haunted journalist hero … An intriguing series’ The Guardian

  ‘A powerful new voice and a writer I will follow with great interest’ Raven Crime Reads

  ‘Suspenseful, dark and gritty, this is a must-read’ Booklist

  ‘This promises to be a crime fiction series worth watching’ Library Journal

  ‘The careful revealing of clues, the clever twists, and the development of Henning Juul and the supporting characters make this a very promising start to a new series’ Suspense Magazine

  ‘Superbly compelling … the characters leap right off the page, and the relationship between them is as twisted and complex as the story itself’ Shotsmag

  ‘Thomas Enger writes a murderous thriller that begs comparison to Jussi Adler-Olsen or Stieg Larsson. With Cursed Enger has proved that he definitely belongs in the top ten of Scandinavian authors’ literaturmarkt.info

  ‘Unexpected and surprising … like a fire in the middle of a snowfall’ Panorama

  ‘Thomas Enger is like a bottle of very good red wine. With time he just gets better and better. Cursed is a top-class crime thriller from a top-class author’ Mokka

  ‘The name is Thomas Enger. Make sure you remember it, because he’s a man about to join the ranks of the best crime novel writers of the Nordic countries … and he has achieved something quite exceptional already with his first novel, Burned … It’s one of the best crime novels this reviewer has read for a long time, in a language that sparkles and gleams with strong images, and at a tempo that almost makes you forget to draw breath’ Kristeligt Dagblad

  ‘Unforgettable … the interweaving stories are simply engrossing. A masterful debut thriller from an author who happens to be Scandinavian’ Misfit Salon

  ‘An excellent read … fascinating’ Journey of a Bookseller

  ‘An intriguing Norwegian whodunit’ Genre Go Round

  ‘A fascinating addition to the Scandinavian Noir genre. I look forward to the series unfolding’ Crimesquad

  CURSED

  A crime novel

  Thomas Enger

  Translated by Kari Dickson

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  PROLOGUE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  COPYRIGHT

  PROLOGUE

  August 2009

  Daniel Schyman knew that people would talk about this day.

  It was one of those days when the grass and bushes by the roadside sparkled. The air was sharp and clear. The sky above the trees was so blue it almost hurt the eye. He knew that, right now, the forest would smell raw and cold, but soon the adders would slither out, unsure about what time of year it was. And the larger animals in the forest would seek out the shade, where they would lie chewing on heather and on the berries that had started to ripen. And when the sun was at its highest, everything would smell warm and dry, and every step in the forest, every startled flap of the wing, would be heard from far away. Just thinking about it made his body tingle.

  After Gunilla died, Schyman had struggled to find a reason to get up in the morning. They didn’t have any children, nor did they have many friends. The silence frequently kept him chained to the armchair in the living room, from where he stared out at the surrounding fields and countryside with empty eyes, and wondered what more life had to offer a man like him.

  Nothing, was what he most often concluded; an answer that made him wonder if perhaps he should follow Gunilla into eternity. But it was not like him to give up, so time and again he had hauled himself out of the chair and decided to devote himself to what he loved most in life. On days like today, he was in no doubt that he had made the right decision.

  Schyman turned off the road, leaving the asphalt for the gravel, and slowing down as he drove between the trees. It was almost as though he was holding back so he wouldn’t experience everything too fast. When he reached the red barrier, he was surprised to see it was already open, but he thought no more about it and parked in a large open area beside the path that in winter served as a ski track. Another car was already there; it had obviously arrived quite recently – he could still see its tracks in the damp gravel. Schyman turned off his engine, got out of the car and opened the boot to let Lexie out. She had a harness on.

  As always, he stood and looked at her, at her tail wagging back and forth, at the light in her eyes. He had paid nine and a half thousand for her, but there wasn’t a sum large enough to cover her true value. Lexie was the best beagle in the world – always ready for a walk, always pleased to see him, even when he had only popped out to the shop.

  Schyman took out his rucksack and shotgun, a Husqvarna that his father had given him on his sixteenth birthday, and he had used every autumn since. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely right to call the man his father any more, given what he’d learned over the past few days.

  To think that he was actually Norwegian.

  He couldn’t imagine what his parents – his real parents – must have gone through. What they must have sacrificed.

  War was a board game from hell, in which you had no control over your fate, and rarely d
id any good come of it. Even though Sweden had remained neutral in the Second World War, its people were still affected by what happened. The couple who had brought him up had opened their home to give shelter and help to people they didn’t know; and they weren’t the only ones. Sacrificing oneself for others was an ideal that Schyman valued highly – it was perhaps the greatest of all virtues.

  Schyman no longer felt sad or melancholy when he thought about the people he had grown up with, the people he had called family – mother and father – but in the past few days he had pondered what his life might have been like if they had lived just a little longer. He had been left on his own with the farm and forest when he was only seventeen. The man who had phoned him a few days ago, who was coming to see him later on today, had told him that it was originally intended that he would be told about his background when he turned eighteen. If that had happened, things could and would have been very different.

  But he was happy with his life all the same. A little more money wouldn’t have changed that much. And he would never be Norwegian. Schyman would stay in Värmland until the day he died.

  He looked over at the other car that was parked by the path. Funnily enough, it was Norwegian, too: the letters LJ sat beside the flag of red, white and blue – colours that always made him think of oil and the Winter Olympics. He had never seen the car before and didn’t recognise the registration.

  Did the owner have a hunting permit?

  Perhaps the owner was not here to hunt, even though that was why most people came, especially so early in the morning. In his younger days, he might have tried to find out who had taken such a liberty; it was his forest, after all. But things like that weren’t so important to him any more.

  Schyman clipped a lead onto Lexie’s harness and they started to walk. They had been out hunting every day for the past week and, as always, she tugged eagerly at the lead. He loved letting her take him deep into the forest; he listened to her panting, to the music around him – the twigs that snapped underfoot, the flapping wings of birds taking flight, the wind soughing in the trees, the spongy gurgle of trodden moss slowly rising again.

  He didn’t usually let Lexie off the lead straightaway. As a rule, it took a while before the hare was flushed out, and sometimes it didn’t happen, but that was hunting. Every time, though, was just as thrilling as the last: when he took up his position in terrain where he guessed a hare might be hiding, with Lexie ready to get on its trail any minute. When he knew his quarry was close; when he felt his heart pounding in his throat; when he had to get things just right, everything he had practised, making it all as precise and effective as possible…

  That was when he felt alive.

  And the silence that followed. The release of tension.

  There was nothing better.

  They had been walking for about half an hour when Lexie stopped and pricked up her ears. Her tail stiffened. Schyman, too, heard something snap in the undergrowth somewhere further into the forest. It couldn’t be a hare. In the sixty years or so that he had been hunting in the forests of Värmland, he had never yet heard a hare.

  He wondered whether he should let Lexie off the lead, but quickly decided against it. Last autumn, a pack of four wolves had passed through his forest. There were more and more wolves in Sweden.

  Lexie had her nose to the ground and was pulling at the lead. She held her head a few centimetres above the ground, moved from side to side, pulled, quivered, sniffed and stopped, turned her ears, then moved off again. Deeper into the forest, the ground alternated between clawing heather and boggy hollows, squelching underfoot.

  Soon she stopped again.

  Schyman called out a hello, but got no answer. Nor did he hear anything. Not straightaway. Not until he heard a click close by.

  He turned his head quickly. Spotted the clothes that almost blended in with the surroundings. A green baseball cap. A barrel pointing straight at him from a distance of about twenty metres.

  Then a bang.

  A powerful force threw him backwards. His rucksack took some of the impact of his landing, as did the lingonberry bushes; and when his head fell back into the soft greenery, it tickled his cheeks. But he couldn’t move, he just lay there, listening to the sound of the shot penetrating further and further into the forest.

  And then silence.

  It didn’t hurt, not until Schyman tried to draw breath – then his mouth filled with blood. It felt like razor-sharp claws were tearing at his chest. He felt something warm and sticky running down the side of his stomach. The smell was metallic and pungent.

  More snapping branches as the sound faded into the distance. He tried to keep his eyes open, but it was hard to see.

  Schyman heard Lexie whining, felt her nose on his forehead, her wet, rough tongue against his cheek. He tried to get up and lift his hand to her neck, but couldn’t; instead, he collapsed back onto the heather and lingonberry. Lexie blocked out the sunlight, which was now starting to warm.

  He needed that warmth.

  Daniel Schyman knew that people would talk about this day. He closed his eyes and felt the light evaporate.

  Gunilla, he thought.

  Eternity is waiting.

  1

  ‘Where is it? Where is it?’ Nora Klemetsen hissed, angry with herself more than anything else. She didn’t have time for this. It was nearly a quarter to eight; the bus would be just around the corner.

  She rummaged through her bag to check that her mobile phone, keys and the cards she needed were there. Would she never learn? Why could she never get things ready the evening before?

  Nora went into the kitchen, put her bag on the table and bent down. Her scarf fell over her eyes. Impatiently she threw it back over her shoulders, noticing a bit of eggshell and a pen under one of the chairs, breadcrumbs, and a ball of black fluff from the woollen socks she always wore when she was at home.

  She straightened up, took off her jacket and the long scarf – it was too warm to wear it in here – and went into the living room. Maybe she’d had it in her lap when she sat watching TV after Iver had left? And then she put it down when she went to have a shower and brush her teeth?

  She lifted up the cushions on the sofa, looked under the blue-flowered throw that had managed to conceal the remote control, then got down on her hands and knees and peered under the light-brown three-seater sofa, which she really hadn’t been able to afford, before glancing under the table in the corner on which stood a lamp and the radio. But it wasn’t there either.

  Could it somehow have got under the TV unit?

  Nora crawled over; the cold parquet floor hurt her knees, which were already tender from before. She studied the dust and crumbs that were a constant reminder of how long it was since she’d done a good clean, but that was all she could see.

  Nora scrambled to her feet, feeling a bit dizzy; she hadn’t eaten yet – she always ate three pieces of plain crispbread when she got to work.

  She tried to think through what she had done the day before. Not much: Sunday papers in bed, brunch on the sofa in front of the telly, an hour’s stroll up and down the river, supper with Iver and an evening forcing herself to think as little as possible.

  No, she hadn’t had it in her hand yesterday.

  Nora went back to the kitchen table, turned her bag upside down and shook it hard so that all the coins, hair bands, receipts and dusty throat pastilles fell out – even a mitten she’d been looking for since the spring suddenly appeared on the kitchen table. And then there it was, under the worn mitten.

  The ball.

  She clasped it in her hand and sat down for a moment, squeezing it and rolling it around and around until all the glitter inside was dancing and whirling about. When it stopped, she saw the heart with an arrow through it, and the imprint of his teeth – as though Jonas had tried to bite it in two, unaware of what the consequences might be if he actually managed to. Glitter and fluid everywhere, on his lips, his sweater, the floor.

  It was
n’t a ball as such, it was a hard plastic sphere, but Jonas refused to see it as anything but a ball, and so that’s what it was.

  Nora couldn’t bear to hold the thought, the memory, any longer, so she stood up and dropped the ball back in her bag, put her jacket and scarf on again and went to look in the full-length mirror in the hall. She picked off some hairs that were caught on her sleeve, fixed her fringe, straightened her jacket and put the bag over her shoulder.

  There.

  Now the day could begin.

  It was autumnal outside.

  Nora had always liked this time of year – when the weather was so grey and wet that the only thing you could do was bury yourself under a blanket and enjoy all there was to do on a sofa. In that way, she was just like Henning. If there was an excuse not to go out – except to work, of course – he would find it: there was a good film or series on TV; it was such a long time since they’d lit the fire; he was in the middle of a great book, or trying to get through all the newspapers he hadn’t managed to read during the week.

  There was so much she loved about Henning. His sense of humour, his quick wit. But it wasn’t just what he said or did, or who he was. It was more something she saw in his eyes. Even though she had short hair and freckles, and frightened everything that moved when she sneezed; even though she reminded people of a toad whenever she got drunk and started to hiccup; even though she got tetchy and slammed the door when he hadn’t put the cushions back on the sofa or put away the laundry when it was dry, his eyes never changed. His eyes that said he still wanted her, no matter what.

  When Nora was growing up, the walls were constantly changing. Her father was in the army, so it was hard to settle anywhere, hard to make lasting friendships – something she struggled with well into adulthood. Even when she finally did make friends, she wasn’t very good at nurturing relationships.

  Henning had been everything she wanted: a refuge, a lover, a friend – someone with whom she could share both her fleeting thoughts and her deeper meditations. Someone she could be completely honest with, without having to worry about the consequences. It had been perfect, as long as there was only the two of them.