Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

‘Yes. I think he killed his brother. Can you mail me the printouts as soon as you get them from the telephone company?’

‘Yes. Shall I ask them to send Julian Schmid’s text messages and call logs too?’

‘Unfortunately that requires a court order so long as he’s not officially confirmed dead. But you’ve got his phone?’

‘Sure have,’ said George and opened a drawer.

I took the phone, sat in a chair at his desk and tapped in the PIN code written on the Post-it note on the back. Browsed through the calls logs and text messages.

I saw nothing of immediate relevance to the case. Just a message about a climbing route that had been ‘Sent’, which in climber’s lingo means that it has been climbed and which automatically made my palms begin to sweat. Mutual congratulations exchanged. Dinners arranged, the name of the restaurant where ‘the gang’ were gathering and the time. But by the look of it, no conflict and no romance.

I jumped as the phone began to vibrate in my hand at the same time as a male vocalist started singing in the kind of pathos-filled and passionately choked-up falsetto that shows you’re a devotee of mainstream pop from the 2000s. I hesitated. If I answered I would probably have to explain to a friend, a colleague or relative that Julian was missing and presumed drowned on a climbing holiday in Greece. I took a deep breath and pressed ACCEPT.

‘Julian?’ whispered a female voice before I had time to say anything.

‘This is the police,’ I said in English and then stopped. I wanted to let it hang there. Allow the realisation that something had happened to sink in.

‘Sorry,’ said the female voice with resignation. ‘I was hoping it might be Julian, but... any news?’

‘Who is this?’

‘Victoria Hässel. A climbing friend. I didn’t want to bother Franz and... yeah. Thanks.’

She hung up and I took a note of the number.

‘That ringtone,’ I said. ‘What was it?’

‘No idea,’ said George.

‘Ed Sheeran,’ came the voice of the dog owner from the other side of the partition. ‘ “Happier”.’

‘Thanks,’ I called back.

‘Anything else we can do?’ asked George.

I folded my arms and thought it over. ‘No. Or actually yes. He was drinking from a glass in there. Can you get it fingerprinted? And DNA if there’s any saliva on the rim.’

George cleared his throat. I knew what he was going to say. That this would require the permission of the person involved, or a court order.

‘I suspect the glass might have been at a crime scene,’ I said.

‘Sorry?’

‘If in the DNA report you don’t link the DNA to a named individual but simply to the glass, the date and the place, that’ll be OK. It might not be admissible in a court of law, but it could be useful for you and me.’

George raised one of his chaotic eyebrows.

‘That’s the way we do it in Athens,’ I lied. The truth is that sometimes that’s the way I do it in Athens.

‘Christine,’ he said.

‘Yes?’ There was the scraping of a chair and the girl in the tourist-police uniform peered over the divider.

‘Can you send the glass in the interrogation room for analysis?’

‘Really? Do we have permission from—’

‘It’s a crime scene,’ he said.

‘Crime scene?’

‘Yes,’ said George, without taking his gaze from me. ‘Apparently that’s the way we do things here now.’

It was seven in the evening and I was lying on the bed in the hotel room in Massouri. The hotels in Pothia were all full, probably because of the weather. That was OK by me, I was nearer the centre of things here. High above me, on the hills on the other side of the road, yellow-white limestone rock rose up. Mysteriously beautiful and inviting in the moonlight. There had been a fatal accident on the island in the summer, the newspapers had written about it. I remember I hadn’t wanted to read about it but did so anyway.

On the other side of the hotel the mountainside plunged more or less straight down into the sea.

The second day of searching was over, the waters in the sound between Kalymnos and Telendos had been calmer further out. But, given the forecast for tomorrow, there wasn’t going to be any third day, I was told. In any event, when someone is believed to have been lost at sea, the search is limited to two days, American or not. The wind rattled the windowpanes and I could hear the sound of the waves breaking against the rocks out there.

My task — to make a diagnosis, to decide whether jealousy of a homicidal nature was involved — was over. The next step — the tactical and technical investigation — wasn’t my strongest suit. My colleagues from Athens would take care of that. Now the weather had postponed the changing of the guards, and it emphasised and even exposed my inadequacies as a homicide detective. I simply lacked the imaginative ability to see how a murderer might have set about killing someone and then hiding his tracks. My chief said it was because what I possessed in the way of emotional intelligence I lacked in practical imagination. That’s why he called me the jealousy investigator, that’s the reason I was sent in as a scout and pulled out as soon as I had given the case the red or green light.

There’s something called the eighty per cent rule in murder cases. In eighty per cent of cases the guilty party is closely related to the victim, in eighty per cent of cases the guilty party is the husband or boyfriend, and in a further eighty per cent of these the motive is jealousy. It means that as soon as we answer a call in the Homicide Department and hear the word ‘murder’ at the other end of the line, we know there’s a fifty-one per cent chance that the motive is jealousy. This is what makes me, in spite of my limitations, an important man.

I can pinpoint exactly when it was I learned to read other people’s jealousy. It was when I realised that Monique was in love with someone else. I went through all the agonies of jealousy, from disbelief, via despair, to rage, self-contempt and finally depression. And perhaps because I had never before in my life been exposed to such emotional torture, I discovered that, at the same time as the pain was all-consuming, it was like observing oneself from the outside. I was a patient lying without an anaesthetic on the operating table at the same time as I was a spectator in the gallery, a young medical student getting his first lessons in what happens when a person has the heart cut out of their breast. It might seem strange that the extreme subjectivity of jealousy can go hand in hand with that kind of cold, observational objectivity. My only explanation is that I, as the jealous one, took steps that made me a stranger in my own eyes, to such an extent that it forced me into the position of the frightened observer of myself. I had lived enough to see the self-destruction in others but had never thought the poison might lie within me too. I was mistaken. And what was surprising was that the curiosity and fascination were almost as strong as the hate, the pain and the self-contempt. Like a leper who watches as his own face dissolves, sees the diseased flesh, his own rotten interior manifest itself in all its grotesque and disgusting and terrifying horror. I emerged from my own leprosy permanently damaged, that much is clear, but it also rendered me immune. I can never again experience jealousy, not in that way. If that also means I can never love anyone, not in that way, I really don’t know. Maybe there were other things my life besides jealousy that led to my never having felt the same about anyone as I felt about Monique. On the other hand: she made me what I have become in my professional life. The Jealousy Man.

From childhood onwards I have had a striking ability to become deeply engaged in stories. Family and friends described it as everything from remarkable and moving to pathetic and unmanly. To me it was a gift. I wasn’t a part of Huckleberry Finn’s adventures; I was Huckleberry Finn. And Tom Sawyer. And, when I started at school and learned how to be Greek, the Odyssey, of course. Naturally, they don’t have to be the great tales of world literature. A very simple, even badly told story about infidelity, real or imagined, it doesn’t matter which, will do. I am inside the story. From the first sentence I am a part of it. It’s like turning on a switch. And it also means that I am able to spot quickly any false notes. Not because I have a unique talent for reading body language, the timbre of a voice or the automatic rhetorical strategies of self-defence. It’s the story. Even in a crudely and very obviously falsely conceived character I am able to read the main themes, the person’s probable motivation and place in the story, and on the basis of this I know what inexorably leads to what in this character. Because I have been there myself. Because our jealousy evens out the difference between you and me, beyond the barriers of class, sex, religion, education, IQ, culture, upbringing, our behaviour begins to resemble each other’s, the way drug addicts resemble each other in their behaviour. We are all of us living dead who rave through the streets driven on by this single need: to fill the enormous black hole that is inside us.