Inborn
Cover
PRAISE FOR THOMAS ENGER
‘A deep and complex book. Satisfyingly tense and dark’ Sunday Times Crime Club
‘A tightly plotted mix of thriller and courtroom drama, and a compelling, twisty tale of murder, secrets and lies … Inborn is full of emotion’ Off-the-Shelf Books
‘These are crime novels with a heart – Enger infuses each story with humanity, delivering characters the reader will root for and cry over, sometimes quite literally’ Crime by the Book
‘One of the most unusual and intense talents in the field’ Barry Forshaw, Independent
‘It has real strengths: the careful language, preserved in the fine translation, and its haunted journalist hero … An intriguing series’ Guardian
‘Dark and unsettling … This unforgettable, chilling Norwegian Noir novel has been beautifully translated by Kari Dickson’ Ewa Sherman, European Literature Network
‘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
‘A fascinating addition to the Scandinavian Noir genre. I look forward to the series unfolding’ Crimesquad
‘Unexpected and surprising … like a fire in the middle of a snowfall’ Panorama
‘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
‘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
‘Thomas Enger is one of the finest writers in the Nordic Noir genre, and this is his very best book yet. Outstanding’ Ragnar Jónasson
‘A gripping narrative that begs comparison to Stieg Larsson’ Bookpage
‘Suspenseful, dark and gritty, this is a must-read’ Booklist
‘From the gritty tension of the plot, to its emotional depths, this is a powerfully compulsive page-turner’ LoveReading
‘Visceral and heartfelt – a gripping deep-dive into the secrets that hold families together and tear them apart’ Crime by the Book
‘The plot is satisfyingly challenging, and the tension is maintained throughout, with characters like Trine revealing their story in instalments, and the swift movement between characters in page-turningly short chapters … there’s also a clever, sleight-of-hand ending’ Promoting Crime
‘Thomas Enger is such a skilled writer that you can only marvel at the intricate plot’ Books, Life and Everything
‘It is cleverly and intricately written, and I am in awe of Enger’s ability to make such complex relationships and background stories come together so seamlessly!’ Portable Magic
‘The author does a fantastic job of creating a dark, twisted story, one soaked in criminality and which left me breathless … If you like a good crime series with a slice of dark menace – I would definitely recommend this!’ Chillers, Killers and Thrillers
‘Enger has weaved a magical plot to once again leave me breathless, the storylines coming together in such a sleek and intelligent way it’s impossible to find a single fault’ Emma the Little Bookworm
‘Fast-paced and so very tense, I was gripped! Dark. Chilling. Emotive’ Ronnie Turner
‘This is a fluffing cracker of a book. As much as I never wanted it to end, I loved every minute of it. Every single page-turn’ Jen Med’s Book Reviews
‘Tense and atmospheric, like all the books I’ve read from this author, the writing is so beautifully immersive and the plotting is taut and terrifyingly emotional’ Liz Loves Books.
‘Enger made this reading journey an exciting one, delivering a killer plot that is nuanced and a masterpiece in thriller writing’ Books are my Cwtches
‘I really loved this book, it is dark, gritty, gripping and had me hooked’ Donna’s Book Blog
‘Dark in nature, with just the right amount of action and emotion. I highly recommend it’ Keeper of Pages
‘Utterly gripping, with a real human aspect. Bravo, Mr Enger. Highly recommended!’ Bibliophile Book Club
‘Dripping with mystery, intrigue and suspense, this atmospheric crime thriller will keep you guessing until the very last page’ Crime Book Junkie
‘Tense and foreboding throughout, especially after the tantalisingly horrific prologue. I was gripped right until the very end – which took me totally by surprise. An outstanding read’ Mrs Blogg’s Books
‘Not just brilliant, it is totally outstanding and worthy of hitting our small screens. My advice is simple: cancel all your plans, ignore the phone and lock yourself away as you will not put this book down. Breath-taking’ The Last Word Book Review
‘The plotting is simply superb. I was riveted and genuinely couldn’t tear myself away. There are so many little threads that come together for the grand finale … Thomas Enger is a talented and clever writer, he manages to hook you in and keep you prisoner until that last word’ Emma’s Bookish Corner
‘A poignantly beautiful book … There can’t be many crime novels that I finish with the tears rolling down my face, but then there aren’t many that are so sensitively and evocatively written. I cannot recommend it highly enough’ Hair Past a Freckle
‘A gritty crime thriller, for those readers who really like to get their teeth into a book, best read over a shorter period to keep on top of the plot, but highly recommended by me … Now to get my hands on Thomas Enger’s other books!’ I Loved Reading This
‘It had a fast-paced, compelling story line that kept me wanting to read on’ What Cathy Read Next
‘Enger combines emotional turmoil, grief and guilt with solid crime scenarios, then infuses his story with a healthy shot of Scandinavian je ne sais quoi’ Cheryl M-M’s Book Blog
‘Brilliant Scandi Noir from an accomplished and exciting writer. What more could you ask for? Highly recommended’ Reflections of a Reader
‘Amazing. Gripping. Thrilling. Cleverly written. Blew me away. That prologue will have you hooked. The whole story had me hooked. Fast-paced, easy to read. You literally won’t want to put this book down’ Gemma’s Book Reviews
‘In Enger’s searing fifth and final novel featuring Oslo investigative reporter Henning Juul, Henning … obsessively pursues the criminals responsible for his son’s death. Meanwhile, malignant figures relentlessly stalk him … Enger seamlessly integrates … individual stories into a larger tale of dirty business and politics. As Henning approaches the end of his painful journey, he longs for the certainty that he has touched someone’s life. His excruciating ordeal will touch the heart of every reader’ Publishers Weekly
Inborn
Thomas Enger
Contents
- TITLE PAGE
- PUBLISHER’S NOTE:
- PROLOGUE
- 1: NOW
- 2: THEN
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7: NOW
- 8: THEN
- 9: NOW
- 10: THEN
- 11: NOW
- 12: THEN
- 13: NOW
- 14: THEN
- 15: NOW
- 16: THEN
- 17: NOW
- 18: THEN
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22: NOW
- 23: THEN
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27: NOW
- 28: THEN
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32: NOW
- 33: THEN
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38: NOW
- 39: THEN
- 40
- 41: NOW
- 42: THEN
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48: NOW
- 49: THEN
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53: NOW
- 54: THEN
- 55
- 56
- 57: NOW
- 58: THEN
- 59
- 60: NOW
- 61: THEN
- 62
- 63
- 64
- 65
- 66
- 67: NOW
- 68: THEN
- 69
- 70
- 71: NOW
- 72: THEN
- 73
- 74
- 75
- 76
- 77
- 78
- 79: NOW
- 80: THEN
- 81
- 82: NOW
- 83: THEN
- 84
- 85: NOW
- 86: THEN
- 87
- 88: NOW
- EPILOGUE
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
- COPYRIGHT
Publisher’s note:
Inborn is based on Thomas Enger’s YA thriller, Killerinstinkt, translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson. The new book contains a complete update and rewrite by the author in English.
PROLOGUE
THE NIGHT OF
Before he made the mistake of opening the door, Johannes Eklund was thinking about the show. He thought about the cheers and the admiring looks the girls had given him, the beers he was going to drink once he caught up with everyone at the opening-night party. The sex, God willing, he was going to get.
In those minutes that passed before he stepped through the doorway and stared in disbelief at what he saw in front of him, Johannes’ mind had been filled with dreams. High on the praise that the night’s performance had received, his eyes had been firmly fixed on the future, on private jets and sold-out concerts, on a way of life he had yearned for every single day since his father introduced him to Stone Temple Pilots and the glamour of rock ‘n’ roll some four years ago.
Right before his throat made that anxious little noise, Johannes wasn’t giving the slightest thought to the fact that he had school tomorrow, nor that he was due to hand in an essay on social economics later this week. School was no longer going to be important to him. Tonight’s show had only made that even more evident.
But then his presence was noticed, and he stood there watching for a few seconds, trying to comprehend what was going on in front of him. Then the stench of urine, sweat and metal rose to his nostrils and made him forget all about the distant future and the very recent past. He couldn’t even process what he was seeing. All he could think was that he wasn’t supposed to be there. That he had to get out.
Now.
His shoes, still wet from the rain, slipped on the floor as Johannes started to run, but he managed to stay on his feet and pick up some speed. The sound of boots, hard against the floor behind him, made him force his legs to move even faster. Heart racing and lungs screaming, he reached the end of the corridor. As he was about to open the door that led to the staircase, he turned and caught a glimpse of the person speeding towards him, eyes so dark it made Johannes tremble and whimper.
He grabbed at the door and ran through. He was about to descend the staircase, when he felt a powerful hand on his shoulder. He turned and raised his hands as if to protect himself, whispering a plea that died on his lips as intense pain jolted through his jaw, paralysing the rest of the muscles in his face. His feet lost touch with the ground, and as the back of his skull made contact with the top of the staircase, it felt and sounded as if something in his head had smashed into a thousand pieces.
He didn’t pass out, but part of him wished that he had. He tried to get up, but something connected with his upper body and pushed him forcefully further down the stairs. Unable to break his fall, he landed on his back and shoulder. Then he toppled down the stairs and came to rest at the bottom.
He couldn’t move.
Couldn’t think, at least not at first. He wanted to scream for help, and he managed to cover his face with his arm, but it was pulled sharply aside. He squinted up at the person above him. Only then did Johannes fully understand how much trouble he was in.
His thoughts turned towards his family and his friends, to the songs he had yet not written, songs that would never be loved, and the tears began to roll down his cheeks. As he felt blow after blow raining down on his face, feeling the numbness travel from his head to the rest of his body, Johannes’ mind drifted away from what was happening to him. He thought about all the fun he had planned. The dreams that would never come true. And as the white lights above him started to fade, he thought of the taste of a girl’s lips. The feel of her body. And when Johannes Eklund could no longer feel a single thing, he could not help but wonder what on earth he’d walked in on, and why the hell he had to die.
1
NOW
‘Nervous?’
The court officer at Romerike District Court looks at me with a tentative smile. She’s been sitting next to me for fifteen minutes, but this is the first time I have noticed that her teeth are yellow. I stop picking at my sweaty fingers, and nod.
‘First trial?’ she asks.
Her breath smells of stale coffee and old cigarettes. I nod again.
‘Hell of a case,’ she says with a sigh. It seems like she’s talking to herself now.
I think about the hours ahead of me. Everything I need to relive and remember. Everything I will be asked, everything I need to talk about, in front of everybody. I remind myself to stick to my story. There are details the court and the judges – and the whole of Norway – don’t need to hear.
The door in front of me opens. A man in uniform gestures for me to get up and follow him. I take a deep breath and stand up. I look at the male officer and wonder for a brief second what he thinks of the case, what he thinks of me. For months the newspapers and the TV stations have been reporting on what happened in Fredheim last October. But I can’t tell one way or the other what he thinks. His look is just dead serious.
I straighten my trouser legs, button my jacket and pull down my slightly too-short shirt sleeves. I wonder whether anyone is going to believe me. They have to, I tell myself. They simply have to.
The uniformed man leads me through a wide door into a big room. Just like on TV, a sea of faces turns towards me. There’s a sudden silence, then it gives way to whispering. I try to focus on the stand ahead of me, grateful that I still have about twenty feet to walk before I get there. The sound of my own footsteps gives me something to concentrate on.
My mother is here. I can see from her face that she’s having a hard time. I wonder how much she’s had to drink and if she’s brought a flask with her.
When I reach the witness box, I turn and look at the crowd of people in front of me. I don’t really see anyone in particular, just heads. Every seat in the room seems to be taken. People are even standing at the back. As I begin to focus, I see reporters, laptop screens. Familiar faces from Fredheim. Some of my friends, schoolmates – if I can even call them that anymore. Police Chief Inspector Yngve Mork is here, as is Mari’s mother. I can’t see her dad, though, nor any of Johannes’ parents.
The lawyer for the prosecution is a slim, small lady. She looks slightly masculine in her tight dark-blue suit. I don’t really know anything about her, except that her name is Håkonsen. She takes a sip of water from the glass in front of her and looks at me with inquisitive eyes. As if she’s wondering whether she will be able to break me, or something.
She wishes me a good morning, before politely asking me to state my name and address – for the record.
‘My name is Even Tollefsen,’ I whisper.
‘Please speak up’, the judge says.
I move closer to the microphone and cough slightly before repeating myself. I try to give the two other judges an apologetic smile. I don’t get one in return. I tell them our address – Granholtveien 4 – and that we live in Fredheim.
‘It’s about an hour’s drive from Oslo.’
I don’t know why I said that. They know where Fredheim is. After what happened in October, everybody does.
‘How old are you, Even?’ the prosecutor continues.
‘I’m seventeen.’
I can’t keep my voice steady, so I try to take a deep breath. My chest hurts.
Now the prosecutor wants me to talk about my family. I catch a glimpse of my mother again. She’s slumped down in her seat. It looks as if she’s trying to hide.
‘My father died in a car crash when I was seven.’ I say, my mouth feeling dry. ‘So I was basically brought up by my uncle Imo.’
‘Imo?’
‘Sorry. Ivar Morten,’ I say. ‘Everyone in Fredheim calls him Imo.’
There is a slight chuckle in the room. It relaxes me a little.
‘But you lived with your mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘And your brother Tobias.’
‘Correct.’
‘OK. Would you say that you had a happy childhood?’
I look at my mother again, before staring at the table in front of me for a few seconds. ‘Like I told you, my father died when I was very young. So no, I wouldn’t necessarily say that I was a happy kid. Depends on how you look at it, I guess.’
‘Are there other ways to look at it?’ the prosecutor wants to know. I move about in my chair.
‘Obviously, I missed my father,’ I say. ‘And we moved a couple of times, back and forth, and my mother … she wasn’t doing very well, to be honest, but I managed to make a lot of friends. So I guess in some ways I was a happy kid. It helped that I played football.’
‘Alright, Even,’ Ms Håkonsen says. ‘Do you mind if I call you Even?’
‘Not at all.’
‘OK. Thank you. Let’s move on a little bit.’
She gets up and starts to walk up and down in front of me, as if she’s thinking deeply about something. Suddenly she stops and says, ‘Mari Lindgren.’
Ms Håkonsen stares at me for a few seconds. ‘Could you please tell the court what kind of relationship you had with her?’
Just hearing her name makes my whole body ache. I take a deep breath again. ‘Mari Lindgren was my girlfriend,’ I say, my voice tiny and sad.
‘For how long?’
‘About five months.’
The courtroom is so silent even the slightest of movements can be heard.
‘But she wasn’t your girlfriend on Monday the 17th of October last year, was she?’
I don’t answer straight away. I just wait a few seconds then shake my head.
Ms Håkonsen looks at me sternly. ‘For the sake of court proceedings,’ she says, ‘you have to answer the question aloud.’
‘Um, no,’ I reply. ‘She wasn’t.’
‘Why wasn’t she?’ Ms Håkonsen asks. ‘What happened?’
‘She … broke up with me.’
‘And why did she do that?’ Ms Håkonsen sounds as if she is already getting tired of my answers.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘Well, I didn’t. At the time.’
‘You mean you didn’t know on the night of 17th October?’
I lift my head slightly, searching for Mari’s mother. My eyes lock on hers. She instantly looks away.
‘Correct,’ I reply.
‘But you know now.’
‘I do.’
Ms Håkonsen looks at me for a few moments.
‘I understand why you don’t want to talk about that, but I’m afraid we will have to go into the specifics or your break-up a little bit later. Just so you know.’
‘OK,’ I say and cough into my palm.
‘Good. When did she break up with you?’
I can feel the sweat starting to form between my shoulder blades. I hope it won’t show on my face as well.
‘A couple of days before…’ I stop for a few beats.
‘A couple of days before the 17th of October?’
I nod, angry at myself for not being calmer and cooler about this. Ms Håkonsen is about to reprimand me again, but I quickly answer:
‘Yes.’
‘OK. Alright. Let’s talk about the morning after. The morning of October the 18th. Tell us what happened.’
2
THEN
Yngve Mork had never spoken to God. He hadn’t even thought that he could, or should; but the previous night, at a quarter past two, he had sat up in his bed, lifted his gaze towards the ceiling and addressed Him directly for the first time in all his sixty-three years.
He had asked if she was OK now, if she had found peace. He asked if she was still angry with him and if He might allow him to see her one more time – for real. But his words had been quietly absorbed by the faded yellow plaster of the ceiling. They hadn’t even been spat back at him like a mocking echo.
Some mornings he woke up with the lingering remnants of a dream in his mind, and with the sudden, panicked thought that she might have come to see him during the night; that she had given him some sign he had missed or already forgotten – a wave or a kiss. He was always hoping that she really was trying to reach out to him, trying to tell him something – trying to say that she had found it in her heart to forgive him.
Today, though, Yngve’s mobile phone alarm startled him just before seven. It had been yet another one of those almost-sleepless nights. He had turned over again towards the empty side of the bed, only to see that there weren’t any fresh dents in the linen, no marks on the pillow from the pen she had used while trying to solve a newspaper crossword. He had sniffed, searching for a hint of her perfume, the smell that had been beside him for forty-one years; but all he could register was his own odour, a smell that seemed even older and more useless now that he no longer had anyone to share it with.
All the other women in Åse’s family had grown old. It was the men who found death at an early age – and under the strangest circumstances. A clumsy bicycle accident or a tumble down a ladder when trying to clear leaves from a gutter. A piece of meat that got stuck in a throat during a celebratory dinner. The women could be sick for years, but somehow they seemed to recover.
So why couldn’t Åse do the same?
Another question Yngve had asked The Ceiling.
He got up and went downstairs, and sat at his breakfast table with a buttered slice of bread and a generous helping of Danish liverpaste in front of him. He had coffee and a glass of orange juice as well, but there were no sounds to keep him company other than the ones he made himself: the flipping of a newspaper page, a knife quietly placed on the side of the plate. A quick sniff to get rid of an itch just underneath the tip of his nose. He didn’t want the radio on in case he interrupted her hummings in the bathroom, her steps that might appear in the hallway, the drawers she would open and close whenever she got dressed. Even if she would never do that ever again.
Yngve’s coffee needed some sugar, so he got up and opened the cupboard above the stove. There he stopped and stared at a yellow box of tea he had bought for her two and a half weeks before she died. It was still wrapped in plastic.
Could you put the kettle on, please, Yngve?
Her distant voice made him sob. But before he was sucked into yet another typhoon of grief, the phone rang. He looked at the number and saw that it was being redirected from the 113 service. He would have to take it – he was on call. But first he grabbed the kitchen sink with both hands and steadied himself for a moment. Then he answered, giving his full name and rank.
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