Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

‘And yet I’ve never been jealous of Henrik Bakke. Isn’t that funny? At least not in the sense of hating him or having a grudge against him. I think the way I looked at it was that he was just another guy same as me, he loved Simone more than anything else on earth. I actually thought of him more as someone in the same boat as me than as a rival.’

I fish around with my tongue in the corner of my mouth where a shred of coconut has got stuck and feel a momentary stab of discomfort. The officer’s silence is deafening.

‘OK. So that wasn’t exactly true. I was jealous of Henrik Bakke. At least the first time I met him. Let me explain. One day he called me at my office and asked if we could meet, he had some papers for me from Simone. I knew these must be the divorce papers, and even though it was, of course, unspeakable of her to use her new lover to deliver them I was curious to know who he was and so I agreed to a meeting at a restaurant. I presume he was just as curious about me.

‘Anyway, he turned out to be a really nice person — polite without being servile, intelligent but in a discreet way, and with a humorous appreciation of the comical aspect of our situation. We drank a couple of beers, and when he began after a while to talk about Simone it didn’t take long for me to realise that he was having exactly the same trouble with her as I had had. She was a cat. She came and went as she pleased, she was spoiled and moody, and loyalty was not her most outstanding quality. If I can put it like that. He complained of all the men friends she had and wondered why she couldn’t have female friends like other women. Talked about the nights she’d come home drunk after he’d gone to bed, and all the new and exciting people she’d met who she was so keen to tell him about. In a sort of aside he asked if I’d seen her since we’d split up and I’d moved out, and with a smile I had to tell him no. The smile was because I had realised that he was probably more jealous of me than I was of him. Isn’t that something of a paradox, officer?’

The officer opens his mouth but then he changes his mind and leaves his jaw hanging half open. It looks very silly. Actually I had decided not to say too much, but it’s funny how another person’s silence can affect you. To start with I experienced it as threatening, but I can see now that it isn’t what you might describe as a speaking silence. Not that the officer looks especially interested or attentive; what he exudes is more a sort of neutral nothingness. It’s an absence of speech, a vacant space that operates like a vacuum sucking up my own words.

‘We had another beer and a few good laughs as we swapped stories about some of her foibles. Such as how she always changed her mind after she ordered the food, so you had to get the waiter over and change the order. Or the way she always had to go to the toilet after she’d turned out the light and said ‘goodnight’. And of course the Saturday shopping expedition and what a catastrophe it was if you forgot to buy the Twists.

‘So I wasn’t all that surprised to meet Bakke again at the Kiwi store on Saturday morning a couple of weeks later. We both laughed when I looked in a very demonstrative way at the bag of Twists in his shopping trolley. And he asked about the divorce papers, he said Simone’s lawyer was waiting for them. I said I’d had a lot to do but that I would see to it next week. I was perhaps a little annoyed with him for bringing it up. I mean, what was the rush? He’d taken my place in her bed, surely that was enough to be going on with? It almost seemed as though he could hardly wait to get married to her. And her millions. So I asked him straight out if they were planning to get married. He looked bewildered, so I repeated my question. He smiled wanly and shook his head. And then I got the picture.’

I straighten the liquorice wrapper between my fingers. ‘Lakris — lakrits — lakrids’ it says. Danish and Swedish as well as Norwegian. Easy to understand anyway. It’s good when neighbours speak almost the same language.

‘There was something in his eyes, a pain I recognised from my own reflection in the mirror back then. Bakke was on his way out. Simone was bored. It was just a question of time, and he knew it, already he could taste the bitter fruits of defeat. Have you investigated that, officer? Asked her girlfriends if she had any such plans? You ought to, because that could give him a motive, don’t you think? Crime passionnel, isn’t that what you call it?’

Is that a smile I see curling the officer’s lips? He doesn’t respond. Of course not, he’s under an oath of silence as regards anything to do with the investigation. All the same, at the thought of Henrik Bakke being a suspect I can’t help but smile as well. I don’t even try to hide it. We smile.

‘Quite a paradox, isn’t it? I never did get round to sending in those divorce papers, so Simone and I were still man and wife when she died. That makes me the sole heir, officer. So if it really was Henrik Bakke who killed her, what that means is that the man who stole the love of my life from me has made me a millionaire. Me. How’s that for one of life’s little ironies?’

My laughter echoes back at me from the flock wallpaper and the oak parquet flooring. I exaggerate it slightly, slap my thighs and put my head back. Then I see the officer’s eyes. Cold, like a shark’s. They nail me to the sofa. I stop instantly. Has he realised? I take another chocolate, a Daim, have already unwrapped it, but then change my mind and take a Nougat Bali instead. I repack the Daim in its wrapper. Must think. No, no need to think. One look at the officer is enough.

‘The good thing about Twist is the wrapping,’ I say. ‘That you can change your mind. You can wrap it up again without anyone’s being able to see it’s been opened. Unlike most other things. Confessions, for example. Once a confession has been so to speak unwrapped then that’s it, it’s too late.’

The officer nods his head. It’s more like a bow.

‘OK,’ I say. ‘No more games.’

I say this as though I’ve just made up my mind here and now, but of course that’s not the case. For several minutes now I’ve just been waiting for the right moment. And the right moment is now.

‘You found those little bottles of cyanide solution in the cellar, didn’t you, officer?’ The chocolate melts on my tongue, and I can feel the hard centre against my soft palate. ‘One was missing. I took that with me when I was thrown out. Not really sure why. I was pretty far down, maybe I had some idea of doing away with myself. You make hydrocyanic acid from cyanide, but you probably know that?’

My fingers sift through the chocolate bowl and find a banana cream but then put it straight back. Old habits.

‘A couple of days after I met Bakke at the Kiwi store I bought a bag of Twists. At a chemist’s I bought a disposable syringe which I filled with cyanide when I got home. I then opened the bag of chocolates, took out the banana creams and carefully unwrapped them, injected the poison, wrapped them again and put them back in the bag. The rest was simplicity itself. The following Saturday I waited outside the Kiwi store until Bakke pulled up in Simone’s Porsche, slipped into the store in front of him with the bag of Twists under my coat, placed the bag at the front of the shelf with the Twists and from my position behind the shelving was able to see that he had picked the right bag.’

The officer sits with head bowed. As though he’s the one confessing to murder by poison rather than me.

‘I read that when Henrik Bakke found her he thought at first she was asleep. Pity he wasn’t there when she died. He might have learned something. I mean, it must be fascinating to study a human being in transit between life and death, don’t you think?’