Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

George nodded and looked contented rather than annoyed. When I’d wondered how and not least why Franz had managed to carry a handgun with him on the plane from California, George had suggested we check Marinetti’s antique shop in Pothia. According to George, Marinetti had a cellar so full of antiques dating from the long years of the Italian and then the German occupation of Kalymnos that he hardly knew just exactly what he had.

‘Can we say the case is solved now?’ enquired Christine.

George turned to me as though forwarding the question.

‘Case closed,’ I said. ‘But not solved.’

‘No?’

I shrugged. ‘We have, for example, no body to give us final proof of what we think has happened. Maybe the two brothers are sitting on a plane back to the USA and laughing at us after the greatest practical joke ever.’

‘You don’t believe that,’ said George.

‘Absolutely not. But as long as there are other possibilities, there will always be a doubt. The physicist Richard Feynman says we can’t be absolutely certain about anything at all, the best we can do is presume with varying degrees of certainty.’

‘But if there is a doubt, what do we do about it?’ asked Christine, who actually looked quite upset about it.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘We content ourselves with a reasonable degree of certainty and set to work on the next case.’

‘Doesn’t that leave you—’ Christine stopped, looked as though she was afraid she might be about to go too far.

‘Frustrated?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

I had to smile. ‘Remember, I’m the Jealousy Man. Usually I’m around for the first or second day of a murder investigation. I’m the man with the divining rod, the one who indicates the spot on the ground where water might be found, and then leaves the digging to others. I’ve had lots of training in leaving cases behind me without getting all the answers.’

Christine looked to be assessing me. I could see she didn’t believe me.

‘Am I jealous?’ she asked, putting her hands on her hips and adopting a provocative expression.

‘I don’t know. You would have to tell me something first.’

‘Such as what?’

‘What you think might have made you jealous, for example.’

‘What if I don’t want to, what if it hurts me too much?’

‘Then I would have no way of knowing,’ I said, and clapped my hands together. ‘And now, people, how about we get something to eat?’

‘Right!’ said George. But Christine carried on looking at me. She probably knew that I knew. The story behind those red eyes. She was jealous.

For the remainder of the day I wandered along narrow paths on the mountain on the southern side of the beach where we had found Franz Schmid’s car and gun. The high, inaccessible limestone walls reminded me of the vaulted ceilings in Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford which, in their dark, English seriousness were so different from, for example, the exuberant brightness of the Mitropoli Cathedral in Athens. Maybe that’s why — despite the fact that I am an atheist — I felt more at home in Christ Church. I spoke to my boss on the phone. He said they would send a detective and two techs the next day if the wind had dropped, and that he wanted me back, a woman had been murdered in Tzitzifies, and her husband couldn’t provide an alibi. I advised him to put someone else on the case.

‘The victim’s family say they want you,’ said my boss.

‘Surely that’s for us to decide.’

He said the name of the family. One of the shipping dynasties. I gave a sigh and hung up. I love my country, but some things just never change.

My eye caught an unusually broad overhang. Or more accurately: it was the overhang that caught my eye. I saw an elegant line running from a cleared belay station in towards the rock face. Here and there light from a metal glue-in bolt reflected the sunlight. Because of the overhang I couldn’t quite locate the anchor, and because the mountains fell directly into the sea right next to the path and the belay station, I was unable to step any further out. But it had to be a long route, at least forty metres.

I looked down fifty or sixty metres to where the waves broke against the rocks. When the climber was lowered down from the anchor, he or she would have to swing back and forth so as to reach the belay station and not be lowered straight down into the sea. But what a beautiful route it was! In due course, as my gaze moved upward, my brain began automatically to analyse, to visualise the climbing movements the holds and contours would require. It was like turning over the ignition in a machine unearthed after being buried beneath ruins for years. Did it still work? I turned the key, pressed the accelerator. The climbing motor whined reluctantly, coughed, protested. But then it started. And the protests stopped. Now the muscles remembered and glowed with pleasure as the brain recalled climbing. I could see no other routes in the vicinity and guessed that most climbers thought it was a long way to travel just to climb one — even though spectacular — route. But I would have done it, even if it was the last route in my life.

The imaginary climb was still a presence in my body in the evening. I had ordered another bottle of Pitsiladi to my room. The wind had eased off slightly, the waves didn’t beat quite so fiercely against the limestone, and in isolated pockets of complete silence I could hear music coming from down in the bar. I guessed Victoria Hässel would be there. I sat there. It was ten o’clock, and I had drunk enough to be able to go to bed.

On waking the next day, I could no longer hear the wind and the discordant fluting sounds from the cracks and pipes and chimneys I had become so used to.

I threw open the window. The sea was blue, no trace of white, and it was no longer raging but groaned. Pumped heavy, lazy rollers across the body of the land, like a lover after orgasm. The sea was tired. Like me.

I got back into bed and called down to Reception.

The ferry was running again, said the receptionist. The next departure was in one hour, and that would give me plenty of time to make the next plane to Athens, which left at three — should he order a taxi for me?

I closed my eyes. ‘Let me order...’ I began.

‘Time?’

‘No taxi. Two bottles of Pitsiladi.’

There was a brief silence.

‘I’m afraid we’ve run out of that brand, Mr Balli. But we do have Ouzo 12.’

‘No thanks,’ I said and hung up.

I lay there for a while listening to the sea before calling down again.

‘Have them sent up,’ I said.

I drank slowly but steadily. My eyes followed the shadows in Telendos, how they moved, grew shorter, and then — as the afternoon came — stretched out again in what looked almost like a gesture of triumph. I thought of all the stories I had listened to in the course of my work. That it was true what they said, a confession is a story that’s just waiting for an audience.

When darkness fell I went down into the bar. As I had expected, Victoria Hässel was sitting there.

I met Monique in Oxford. She was studying literature and history, like me, but she was in the year above me so we didn’t attend the same lectures. But in places like that the foreigners gather and are drawn together, and soon we had met each other so many times socially that I plucked up the courage to ask her out for a beer.

She made a face. ‘Well, it’ll have to be a Guinness.’

‘You like Guinness?’

‘Probably not, I hate beer. But if we have to drink beer then it’s got to be Guinness. It’s supposed to be the worst of the lot, but I promise I’ll be more positive than I sound.’

Monique’s logic was that everything ought to be tried, and with an open mind; that way it can be dismissed afterwards with new insight and a good conscience. That went for everything; ideas, literature, music, food and drink. And me, I have thought with hindsight. For we were as different as can be imagined. Monique was the sweetest, most captivating girl I had ever met. She was bubbly and good-humoured, and so kind to everyone around her that all I could do was give up and accept the role of bad cop. She was so unaffected by her upper-class background, her matchless intelligence and almost irritatingly flawless beauty that you had no option but to like her in spite of it all. And when she looked at you, looked at you, then of course there was nothing for it but just to give up. Abandon all resistance and fall head over heels in love. She treated her many suitors with a sweet mixture of tactful consideration and mild rejection that made you feel that, behind her principle of trying everything there was something else, something that was natural and not principled. Monique was saving herself for the right man, she was a virgin not from conviction but by inclination.