Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

In the bedroom I put the box with the grey stone on the shelf above the bed, next to the other stone that lay there. The bed was so big and empty, the silk sheets looked so chilly that as I lay down I had the feeling I was about to swim out to sea.

Two weeks later I received a phone call from George Kostopoulos.

‘A body’s been found in the sea not far from the beach where Franz disappeared,’ he said. ‘Or actually, on land — the body was speared on one of the rocks where the waves break. It’s exposed and people don’t go there much, but it looks as though someone has started climbing along a route fifty or sixty metres above the rocks and fallen. A climber called it in.’

‘I think I know where it is,’ I said. ‘Has the body been identified?’

‘Not yet. It’s so badly smashed up from lying there that I’m surprised the climber was even able to recognise it as human. My own first impression was that it was a dead dolphin. Skin, face, ears, sexual organs, all gone. But there’s a hole in the skull that can hardly be anything but a bullet-hole.’

‘It could still be a refugee from a boat.’

‘I know, we had a few washed up here last year, but I doubt it. I’ve sent a DNA sample from the body, so we’ll get the answer in a couple of days. I was just wondering...’

‘Yeah?’

‘If it matches the DNA profile from the saliva sample we took from Franz Schmid’s water glass, what do we say?’

‘We say we have made a positive identification.’

‘But remember, we got that DNA through a... in an unauthorised manner.’

‘Oh? As far as I remember we asked Franz Schmid and he gave it to us of his own free will.’

It was silent at the other end.

‘Is that the way...’ he began.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s the way we do it in Athens.’

The results arrived three days later.

According to the report, the DNA from the human remains on the rocks matched that voluntarily given to detectives by Franz Schmid in Pothia. My name was not mentioned.

I held the phone below the tablecloth as I read the news in order not to distract the woman who was in the process of telling me that she believed her husband’s overdose must have been because he’d got his heart pills and his other medication mixed up, maybe because he was so confused by the young trainee at work he was planning to leave his family for.

I stifled a yawn and thought about that climbing route out there south of the beach. I had obtained a copy of the climbers’ guide to Kalymnos and discovered that the route was called Where Eagles Dare, grade 7b. Even in the picture it looked fantastic. If I was ever going to get in good enough shape to climb it, it would take training and I would need to lose a few kilos. And for me to have time for that people would either have to take a break from killing each other, or else I would have to take a break. A long one.

Five years later

I looked out of the plane window. The island beneath was unchanged. A yellow block of limestone dropped into the sea by Poseidon to make the earth tremble.

But the skies were clouded over.

The weather was less stable in spring, the taxi driver told me on my way into Emporio, I would do better to come in the autumn. I smiled as I looked at the oleander bushes in full bloom on the hillsides and breathed in the scent of thyme.

Helena and Julian were standing on the steps of the restaurant with little Ferdinand as I emerged from the taxi. Julian smiled broadly while Helena embraced me as though she would never let go. We had exchanged emails regularly, by which I mean she told me how things were going, and I read her messages. Read the way I listened, and replied briefly, mostly follow-up questions, as was my habit when in conversation.

It hadn’t been easy in the beginning, she wrote. Julian was more affected by what had happened than was initially apparent. After the euphoria of being rescued and being back with her had passed he became dark, closed-off and difficult, a different man from the one she had fallen in love with, it seemed to her. And he spoke so much of his brother. He excused Franz. It seemed important to Julian that she, and her parents too, should understand that Franz wasn’t evil, he had simply been very, very much in love.

In fact it got so bad she was thinking about leaving him, until something happened that changed everything: she had become pregnant.

And from that day on it was as though Julian had woken up and become again the Julian she could scarcely remember now from the single night they had spent together before he went missing. Happy, good, kind, warm, loving. Maybe he never became quite as full of life and crazy as she remembered from that night, but what of it? Don’t all women think their husbands were a little more exciting in the early days? And what more can one ask of a man than that he is faithful, loving, and works hard for the family? Even Helena’s father had to admit that she had got a husband who was a hard worker and reliable, someone he could safely hand the restaurant on to when that time came.

According to Helena, Julian had cried like a child himself on Ferdinand’s arrival. Like his father the boy radiated love. ‘Like some kind of heater,’ she wrote. ‘And when the winter storms batter Kalymnos you couldn’t wish for anything better.’

‘So you think you’re ready for Where Eagles Dare,’ said a smiling Julian once I was installed in my room and we were seated at lunch in the restaurant. Grilled octopus. It was their speciality, and it really did taste fabulous. I noticed that Julian didn’t eat it and wondered if it might have something to do with the myth that octopuses feeds on corpses. Not a myth, of course. Every creature in the sea feeds on the drowned when the chance comes along.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But at least I’ve done a little climbing on the crags around Athens.’

‘Then we’ll start out early tomorrow,’ he said.

‘It’s an extremely long route,’ I said. ‘Forty metres.’

‘No problem, I have an eighty-metre rope lying around somewhere.’

‘Excellent.’

The ringtone on his phone played. He was about to take the call when he stopped and looked at me.

‘You look so pale, Nikos? Is everything OK?’

‘Of course,’ I lied, and managed to return his smile. My stomach was twisting, and I could feel the sweat breaking out all over my body. ‘Take the call.’

He gave me a long, searching look. He perhaps thought it was the height of the route that had caused my reaction.

He picked up the phone and finally the tune stopped playing.

Whole Lotta Love.

Same thing as usual. The song not only took me forty years back in time, to a tree in a yard in Oxford, it actually made me feel physically ill.

Julian must have realised it wasn’t the climbing. ‘Didn’t you like the music?’ he asked once his call was finished.

‘It’s a long story,’ I said, and laughed now that I had had time to compose myself. ‘But I thought you didn’t like Led Zeppelin. I seem to remember you had something a bit softer on your phone.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes, some Ed something. Ed Cheap. Ed Sheep...’

‘Ed Sheeran!’ cried Helena.

‘That’s it,’ I said and looked at Julian.

‘I love Sheeran,’ said Helena.

‘How about you, Julian?’

Julian Schmid raised his glass of water. ‘It’s quite possible to like both Zeppelin and Sheeran.’

He drank for a long time without taking his eyes off me.

‘I just thought of something,’ he said when finally he put his glass down again. ‘The weather forecast for tomorrow says there might be rain, it’s actually impossible to know whether the cloud fronts round here are going to hit the island or not. Even though the route is overhanging, the wind will drive in so much rain that the wall will get soaked, so why don’t we head out there now? You’re here for such a short time, this way we can be sure you’ll be able to have a crack at it before you have to leave.’