Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

Victoria Hässel straightened up at the end of the bed and buttoned up a pair of freshly washed climbing pants and looked at me in disbelief. ‘In the first place I’m going climbing now. In the second place you got me to talk about myself and nothing else but myself for over four hours in the bar yesterday. Have you really forgotten that?’

I shook my head, smiling as I tried in vain to recall it. ‘I just wanted to know more,’ I lied, and saw that she knew I was lying.

‘Cute,’ she said, walked round the bed and kissed me on my high forehead. ‘Later, maybe. You smell of my perfume, just so you know.’

‘My sense of smell is terrible.’

‘And mine is wonderful. But don’t worry, I come out easily in the wash. See you later today? Adio.’

I wondered whether to tell her that finally, two days after the ferry and the planes had begun to leave Kalymnos again, I had booked a seat on a flight to Athens. But it wouldn’t have changed anything, would just have meant a little more play-acting.

‘Adio, Victoria.’

George picked me up as arranged an hour before my flight departed. It was a ten- or twelve-minute drive, and I still only had hand luggage.

‘Better now?’ he asked as I got into the car.

I had called Athens and explained that I was sick, that they should put someone else on the Tzitzifies case. I rubbed my face.

‘Yes,’ I said, and it was true, I didn’t feel at all bad. Maybe Ouzo 12 does taste like crap, but I’ll give it this, the hangover is nothing like as bad as you get with Pitsiladi. And I had drunk myself clear. For a while, the clouds were gone.

I asked him to drive slowly. I wanted to enjoy my last view of Kalymnos. It really was lovely here.

‘You should come in the spring, when the flowers bloom, and there’s more life and colour in the mountains.’

‘I like it the way it is,’ I said.

When we reached the airport, George announced that the plane from Athens was delayed, since there was no sign of it on the runway. He parked, and suggested we sit in his car until we saw the plane land.

We sat in silence and looked out on Palechora, the town made of stone.

‘People from Kalymnos used to hide out up there sometimes in the old days,’ said George. ‘From pirates. Sieges could last for weeks, months. They had to sneak out at night to fetch water from camouflaged wells. They say children were conceived and born up there. But it was a prison, no question about it.’

A swishing in the air above us. A swishing through my head.

The ATR-72 and the thought arrived at the same moment.

‘The prison of love,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Both Franz and Julian had dates with Helena in one of the buildings in Palechora. Franz said he had sentenced his brother to life imprisonment in his own prison of love. That could mean...’

The brief roaring of the propellers drowned out my words as the plane landed and was waved in behind us, but from the look on George’s face I could see he had already understood where I was heading.

‘I guess this means,’ he said, ‘that you won’t be taking the plane to Athens after all?’

‘Call Christine. Tell her to bring Odin with her.’

From a distance Palechora looked like a true ghost town. Grey-black, lifeless and petrified, something the Medusa had looked at. But now, close up — as happens in murder cases too — the details, the nuances and colours began to appear. And the smell.

George and I hurried through the ruins towards one of the houses that was still more or less intact. Christine was standing in the doorway holding Odin, who was barking and keen to get inside. She had been the first to arrive, along with two members of the mountain rescue team, and we’d been communicating over the walkie-talkie. We had stepped up our pace after she reported her find but still had a hundred-metre climb before we were there. They made the discovery in what was probably Palechora’s only cellar. Later I learned that the cellar had been used to store dead bodies in during sieges, since the soil inside the fortress walls wasn’t deep enough to bury them.

The first thing that struck me when George and I bent down and entered the low-ceilinged cellar, and before my eyes had adapted to the dark, was the stench.

Maybe my old eyes take a little longer to get dark-adapted than they used to, maybe that was why I was able to control my feelings as the sight of Julian Schmid gradually took shape in front of me, his naked body still partially covered by a dirty woollen blanket. One of the mountain rescue men was squatting beside him, but there was little he could do. Julian’s arms reached stiffly above his head, hands clasped as though in prayer, fastened by handcuffs to an iron bolt in the stone wall.

‘We’re waiting for Teodore,’ whispered George, as though this were an autopsy or a church service. ‘He’s bringing something to cut the handcuffs.’

I looked at the floor. A pool of faeces, vomit and urine. That was the source of the smell.

The figure on the floor coughed. ‘Water,’ he whispered.

Someone from the mountain rescue team had obviously already given him all he had, so I stepped forward and pressed my bottle against the dry lips. It was like seeing a half-dead mirror image of Franz. Or rather: Julian Schmid seemed thinner than his twin brother, had a large blue mark on his forehead, perhaps from that billiard ball, and his voice sounded different. Was it because his brother was an exact copy of himself that Franz was unable to kill Julian? Indeed, had it even made it easier for Franz to take his own life? I had my own reasons for thinking so.

‘Franz?’ whispered Julian.

‘He’s gone,’ I said.

‘Gone?’

‘Disappeared.’

‘And Helena?’

‘She’s somewhere safe.’

‘Can... one of you tell her? That I’m OK?’

George and I exchanged glances. I nodded to Julian.

‘Thank you,’ he said, and drank again. And as though the water ran straight through his head, tears began to trickle from his eyes. ‘He didn’t mean it.’

‘What?’

‘Franz. He... he just went crazy. I know it. It sometimes happens to him.’

‘Maybe,’ I said.

A crackle came from George’s walkie-talkie and he went outside.

A moment later he put his head back in. ‘The ambulance has arrived. It’s waiting down on the road.’ He disappeared again. The stench really was overpowering.

‘I think that deep down Franz wanted you to be found,’ I said quietly.

‘You think so?’ said Julian.

I knew then that he knew Franz was dead. And that this was the prayer he looked as though he had been praying, that I would tell him what he needed to hear. What he had to hear if he was ever to be whole again. So I did.

‘He regretted it,’ I said. ‘He actually told me that you were here. He wanted me to rescue you. He had no way of knowing how slow on the uptake I was.’

‘It hurts so much,’ he said.

‘I know,’ I said.

‘What can you do?’

I looked around. Picked up a grey stone from the ground and pressed it into his hands. ‘You squeeze that. Imagine that it’s drawing all the pain out of you.’

The bolt cutters arrived and Julian was taken away.

I called Helena and gave her the news that Julian had been found alive. As we were talking it struck me that never before had I, as a detective, broken the news to someone that a loved one had been found alive. But Helena’s reaction wasn’t dissimilar to what usually happened when I broke the news of a death: a few seconds silence while the brain probably searched for the reason for this misunderstanding, the reason why this couldn’t possibly be true. And then — not finding one — the tears as the reality of the situation dawned on them. Even those who in time turned out to be the jealous guilty party would start to cry, often more disconsolate than the shocked innocent. But Helena’s tears were different. They were tears of joy. A sunlit downpour. It stirred something within me, some vague memory, and I felt a lump in my throat. And as she sobbed her gratitude I had to cough in order to keep my voice steady.