Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

I stared up at the house. They were inside. What were they doing now? I tried to blank out the images but I couldn’t fucking do it. I wanted to kill somone. As in, murder them. As in, take someone’s life and take the punishment for doing it. And it wasn’t anger that was talking now. Or actually, it was. But it was the kind of anger I knew I’d never be able just to walk off. It had to come out. There was no other way for it. I had to get rid of Ludvigsen. Lisa... I couldn’t finish the thought. Because even though I had this image of them on my brain, both naked in a big, hideous four-poster, there was something about the picture that didn’t add up. Something that doesn’t make sense. Like something you know you’ve forgotten someplace or other but you just can’t remember where.

Anyway, soon as I was finished emptying this bin I was going to get the jack from the toolkit, march up to his house, get inside and become a killer. Now the decision was taken I felt a strange lightness in my head, as though the tension had already smoothed itself out. I was watching the bin rise when up the phone rang. I answered.

‘Hi,’ said Lisa.

I froze. I recognised the sounds in the background. She was in the Distribution Centre. She was at work.

‘I see you’ve tried to call me several time,’ she said. ‘Sorry, but it’s all a bit chaotic here today, no one knows where Ludvigsen is. Can we talk later?’

‘Sure,’ I said, watching as the bin reached the top of its arc. ‘I love you.’

In the silence that followed I could sense her confusion.

‘You’re not...’ she began.

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘I’m hurt and upset.’ The bin began to empty. ‘But I love you.’

I hung up and looked at the Corolla. It was standing in shadow and still had dew on the windscreen. It must have been there all night.

The contents of the green wheelie bin came sliding out, and something hit the metal bottom of the hopper with a soft splash. I looked inside. There, between the bulging and knotted plastic bags and empty pizza cartons, lay a pale, plump body in blue pyjamas. And I must have met Stefan Ludvigsen before, because I recognised him. His staring, ruptured eyes looked straight past me. The marks on the throat had turned black. And it was like when the fog first starts to lift and the sun breaks through and suddenly seems twice as strong. Like ice melting from around the poles, the landscape of memories emerged with accelerating speed.

I recalled his sobbing and choked confession. His excuse was that he was recently divorced, he’d made a mistake. The kitchen knife he grabbed and began waving about in my face, thinking probably I was too drunk to be able to react quickly enough. He’d caught me one nick in the forehead before I knocked the knife out of his hand. The knife was good, it was what got me fired up. Gave me an excuse. Self-defence, for fuck’s sake. So I’d squeezed the life out of him. Not too quickly and not too slowly. Not saying I enjoyed it, that would be an exaggeration, but at least it gave him time to understand. Time to regret. Time to suffer. Just like I did.

I watched as the compressor squeezed the half-naked body into something like a foetal position.

Standing on the ladder I turned and looked at the gravel pathway leading to the front door. No drag marks. I had tidied up after me, got rid of any possible traces I’d left, inside and out.

If I was drunk when I jumped into the Corolla and drove up here in the middle of the night and rang on his bell I sobered up instantly the moment I saw him lying dead on the kitchen floor. And sober enough to realise that if I got stopped for driving under the influence on the way home I would be on record, and later on it could be connected to Ludvigsen’s disappearance. Because he had to disappear. Vanish, actually. Had I planned it all even before I rang his doorbell? Because Pijus, Pijus was right. I did have the ability to act quickly and at the same time be rational.

I went up to the cab and climbed in.

‘Well?’ said Pijus, looking at me.

‘Well what?’ I asked.

‘Anything you want to tell me? As I told you, I’ve taken an oath of confidentiality.’

What the hell was I supposed to say to that? I looked eastward, to where the sun had risen over the ridge. The round would soon be over, and we would be heading that way, to the waste disposal centre at Klementsrud where the robot scanners would sort Ludvigsen away as the organic waste he was, and the conveyer belt transport him to the hell he deserved, where every trace, every memory, everything that lay behind us would be annihilated, and nothing of what we have lost will be recycled.

And I found the words, the ones that usually get stuck somewhere on the way out; this time they flowed from the tongue like music.

‘Someone has to do the cleaning up,’ I said.

‘Amen to that,’ said Pijus.

And the garbage truck shivered into life and set off down the road.

‘Am i being of any help, officer?’

I put Simone’s coffee cup down on the tablecloth on her coffee table. Her coffee cup. Her tablecloth. Her coffee table. Even the dish of chocolates in the middle of the table is hers. Things. Strange how little things mean once you’re dead. One way or another.

Not that things were so important for her when she was alive either. I’ve just been explaining all this to the officer. That she told me I could take anything I wanted when she threw me out — the stereo, the TV, books, kitchen equipment, you name it. She was ready for it. She’d decided this was going to be a civilised break-up.

‘In our family we don’t argue over teaspoons,’ she said.

I didn’t argue either. Just stared at her, trying to discover the real reason hidden behind those vapid clichés she’d been spouting: ‘Best for us both’, ‘moving in different directions’ and ‘time to move on’. And so on.

Then she put a sheet of paper down on the table and asked me to tick off whatever I wanted.

‘It’s just an inventory I’ve made. Don’t let your feelings get in the way of common sense now, Arne. Try to see this as a controlled liquidation.’

She said. As though it was one of her father’s subsidiary companies and not a marriage she was talking about. Naturally, I had been much too proud to even look at her list. Too hurt to take anything at all from the overgrown villa in Vinderen where we had shared both the good and — the way I remembered it — the very few bad days.

Maybe it was a bit hasty of me to just give up everything like that. After all, she was a wealthy young woman, good for fourteen million, whereas I am a debt-ridden photographer with a little too much faith in his own business skills. Simone supported my idea of starting my own studio along with six other photographers. If not financially then at least morally.

‘Father doesn’t see the economic benefits,’ she said. ‘I think you should back yourself, Arne. Show him what you can do, he’s bound to invest in the project once he sees.’

On paper the money was hers, but it was her father who pulled the strings. The insistence on a prenup when we got married was, of course, his idea. He probably saw it all, how she’d soon grow out of her long-haired young photographer with his lofty dreams and his ‘artistic ambitions’.

So I went for it, aggrieved and determined to show how wrong he was about me. Took the gold medal for borrowing at a time when banks were chucking money after you if you had anything at all that looked like a business idea. It took me six months to prove that Simone’s father was right. As a rule it’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment at which a woman stops loving you. With Simone it’s easy. It happened when she opened the front door and the man standing on the steps told her he was from the enforcement court with a demand for the seizure of my assets. She treated the man with an icy politeness, wrote out a cheque, and we kept the car. She employed that same icy politeness when she asked me to take what I wanted when I left. I took my clothes, some bedlinen and a personal debt of just over one million kroner.