Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

It was him all right, Brad Lowe. Gone wrong. But lovesick.

So there was a faint hope at least.

‘So that’s nine minutes until the helicopter gets here!’ shouts the lieutenant. The halyard is slapping quicker, the wind has got up.

Colin signals to a man who then disappears into a penthouse apartment and re-emerges carrying a champagne cooler with the neck of a green bottle sticking up.

‘We might as well say goodbye in style,’ smiles Colin. ‘The decadents used to say après moi, le déluge, but in our case — since the deluge is already upon us — vintage champagne should be popped and drunk by those with the palates — and the throats — to appreciate it. Before their throats get cut.’

‘Well,’ I say as I accept a glass from the man holding the cooler, ‘I’m probably a little more optimistic than that, Colin.’

‘You always have been, Will. After all that’s happened I can only admire the fact that your faith in the human race remains intact. I wish I had even a fraction of your trust. And your heart. At least you’ve got that to keep you warm. But all I have is this cold, rational brain. It’s like living alone in an enormous stone castle in the dead of winter.’

‘Like your prison on Rat Island.’

‘Yes,’ says Colin. ‘And by the way, I’ve heard a new explanation of why there are so many rats there. In the 1800s before they built the prison, there was an isolation hospital there for people with typhoid fever. They knew that they were going to die, and no one in the city wanted anything to do with a corpse with typhoid fever, not even relatives. And the rats knew it too. After dark they sat would sit squeaking and hissing and chattering and waiting for the fresh corpses to be tossed out of the hospital’s back door. If someone died on that island the body would be consumed before sunrise. It was a satisfactory arrangement for all concerned.’

‘Do you believe that story? Or do you still think they fled there, the same way you did?’

Colin nods. ‘Typhoid from humans can’t infect rats but even rats can be infected by our fear. And frightened rats are aggressive, so we’re afraid of them and slaughter them indiscriminately. It’s not the virus that’s going to do for us, Will, but our fear of each other.’

I think of fear. The fear on the night Chaos came to our home. The fear I tried in vain to communicate on the night Heidi and I reported the case, and the following day, when we spoke to detectives at the police station.

The two investigators seated behind the desk no longer looked in my eyes nor in Heidi’s but instead down at the notebooks in front of them. I assumed the reason was the horrendous story we had just told them: that our daughter had been kidnapped and my wife raped while I sat tied up in the garage. Not until later did I realise it was because we had just told them we were convinced the gang leader was Brad Lowe, son of the IT entrepreneur Colin Lowe.

‘We’ll look into it,’ said the female investigator who had introduced herself as Chief Inspector Gardell. ‘But don’t hold your breath.’

‘Don’t hold your breath? How the hell do you expect us to breathe?’ I wasn’t aware I was shouting until I felt Heidi’s hand on my arm.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘But our daughter is out there and we’re sitting here and... and...’

‘We understand,’ said Gardell. ‘I expressed myself badly. What I was trying to say was that it might take time. In the current situation the police simply don’t have the resources to investigate all crimes of violence.’

‘I realise you must have your priorities,’ said Heidi, ‘but this is a recent kidnapping, involving a young person, with a perpetrator who we’ve more or less handed to you on a plate. If anything should have priority...’

‘We promise to do the best we can,’ said Gardell, exchanging looks with her colleague. ‘We’re on our way out to the scene of a murder, but you’ll be hearing from us.’

They stood up, and so did I.

‘Aren’t you going to take fingerprints?’ I said. ‘DNA, talk to the neighbours...’

‘As I say...’ said Gardell.

For the remainder of the day I tried in vain to get in touch with Colin.

I also drove to the apartment his son had taken the keys to, only to establish the truth of what Colin had said: that all that remained of it was a burned-out shell.

I drove round the streets, almost hoping a gang would try to stop me, I’m not really sure why. But that didn’t happen; it looked as though all activity had come to a standstill. Like a truce had been declared.

I drove home and Heidi and I lay with Sam between us. Perhaps it was to give him the feeling of total security we had been unable to give Amy.

At daybreak Sam was sleeping deeply and I asked Heidi if she would tell me the rest of what had happened, the details that had not emerged in the concise description she had provided for the police.

‘No,’ was her brief answer.

I looked at her and wondered how she could remain so cool and calm. I knew psychological shock could manifest itself as apathy, but that was not what this was. It felt as though she had taken control of her own mind and body and forced herself to assume this chilly calm, the same way certain animals can lower their own body temperature.

‘I love you,’ I said.

She didn’t answer. And I understood. She had blocked out all emotions, chilled her heart to ice so that it wouldn’t run out of her and across the table and onto the floor. Because then she wouldn’t be any use to either of us. Out of love she now loved us a little less. That had to be the explanation.

‘I love you,’ he said.

She didn’t reply.

I watched them through the keyhole. Saw Brad lean towards the girl, Amy. She sat there on his bed with her head bowed. She was wearing a pair of comically large, checked golf trousers and a man’s shirt that Brad must have taken from the wardrobe of the people who lived here before; they hadn’t taken much with them when they left.

I looked around carefully, listened out for the others down in the kitchen; I didn’t want to be caught in the act of spying on our leader.

Then I put my eye back to the keyhole again.

She was so pretty, even with her hair hanging down and covering most of her face.

Was that why I was spying on them?

After the robbery we’d gone straight home. I rode behind Brad’s bike up one of those narrow, deep valleys that cut furrows through the hills at the northern end of town. Once — when this was coyote country — artists and hippies had lived here, people who couldn’t afford to live in the city centre. Now it was the other way around: the poor lived in the centre and the rich in big houses with views over the bay and the skyscrapers down there. But many things were going back the other way again. Several of the houses were empty, and we saw more coyotes and wild dogs trotting along the roads in search of something to eat.

Chaos’s new clubhouse was directly opposite a house where a gang had killed six people, including the wife of a wealthy film director. That was a long time ago. We moved here after the fire at Brad’s apartment in Downtown. It was a villa belonging to one of the partners in Brad’s father’s company and when the pandemic started Brad heard his father mention that this guy had moved to New Zealand and taken his family with him. It was apparently pretty common for rich doomsday preppers to buy houses down there, a place far enough away to shelter them from all the rest of the world’s miseries. Well, you can’t get lucky all the time every time and before the TV news channels closed down they were reporting that New Zealand was one of the countries hardest hit by the virus. Brad said that whether the owner was dead or not the big house was standing there so empty it was almost inviting us in.