Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

I looked at Simon. A chubby, softly spoken chef with kind eyes and an infectious laugh. Yes, we’d had laughs together too. Simon and his family had been visited by a gang with dead Justitia on their helmets. They’d launched grenades from a bazooka and within seconds the house had turned into a blazing inferno. His wife and son were still in hospital, so badly burned no one could tell him whether or not they would survive.

‘What d’you think, Simon?’ I said. ‘Should I have let him kill her?’

Simon looked at me for a long time. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last.

‘Will you help Chung get Ruben to the hospital?’ I asked.

He nodded.

Downing and Larsen came in.

‘Find anything?’ asked Fatman.

They didn’t answer. They couldn’t look me in the eye, and whatever slender hope I might still have been clinging to vanished.

Amy was in the basement, lying on a filthy mattress in a locked room. Not to stop her running away, but to hide the body. I stared at her. My heart was switched off. My brain simply registered what I saw. Unless something else had killed her first, the cause of death was obvious. Her forehead had been smashed in.

I went down the basement corridor where Larsen and Downing stood waiting.

‘We’ll interrogate them,’ I said, nodding up at the ceiling and the next floor above where the gang members were, sitting on the floor of the room, their hands strip-tied.

‘You don’t think first we should—’ Larsen began to say.

‘No,’ I interrupted. ‘Let’s get started.’

The question of guilt was soon established. We used an old trick, simple but effective. In my professional capacity as a lawyer I had often criticised the police for using it.

We placed the gang members in separate rooms, left them there for a while before two of us went in and pretended we had already spoken to the others. I did the talking, and my opening was the same every time:

‘I’m not saying who, but one of your gang has just identified you as the person who killed my daughter Amy. I’m sure you can guess who that is. I will shoot you, personally and with great pleasure, unless you can persuade me within the next five minutes that it was someone else.’

The bluff is so obvious that some of them will see through it immediately. But they can never be completely certain. And they definitely can’t be certain that the others will see through it too. So the maths goes like this: why should I keep quiet and take the chance of this being a bluff when someone else is bound to snitch anyway?

After four interrogations two had identified Brad. After six we knew it had happened with a golf club in the bedroom. I went to one of the two offices where Brad was sitting and confronted him with what we had found out.

He leaned back in the leather chair, hands behind his back in the plastic cable ties, and yawned. ‘Well then, I guess you’d better shoot me.’

I swallowed and waited. And waited. Then came the tears. Not mine, his. They dripped down on the aged grey teak of the desk. I saw them soak into the wood.

‘I didn’t mean it, Mr Adams,’ he snuffled. ‘I loved Amy. Always have done. But she...’ He took a deep, quivering breath. ‘She despised me, she didn’t think I was good enough for her.’ He gave a quick laugh. ‘Me, son and heir of the second-richest man in the city. What do you think of that?’

I said nothing. He raised his gaze and looked at me.

‘She said she hated me, Mr Adams. And you know what, that’s one feeling we do share. I hated me too.’

‘Is this your idea of a confession, Brad?’

He looked at me. Nodded. I looked at Larsen who nodded briefly to indicate that he’d seen it the same way as me. We stood up and went outside to where Downing was waiting.

‘Confession,’ I said.

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Larsen.

I took a deep breath. ‘Put him in jail.’

‘Jail?’ snorted Downing. ‘He’s gotta hang!’

‘Have you thought this through, Will?’ asked Larsen. ‘You know as well as I do that if you hand him over to the police he’ll be out on the street again by tomorrow morning.’

‘Yes, but I’m going to imprison him in his own jail.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Lock him up in the same place where he locked up Amy. He can sit there in custody until I’ve prepared the case and had him convicted.’

‘You’re going to... put Colin Lowe’s son in front of a judge and jury?’

‘Of course. Everyone’s equal in the eyes of the law. That’s the foundation our nation is built on.’

‘There I am afraid to say you are mistaken, Adams,’ said Downing.

‘Oh?’

‘Our nation is built on the principle that might is right. That’s the way it is now, and that’s the way it always has been. The rest is just playing to the gallery.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘Maybe it’s possible for might to be really in the right for once.’

Just then we heard shouting. It was coming from behind the house.

We ran outside in time to see that we were too late.

‘The Black guy confessed,’ said Fatman. He was holding a flaming torch in his hand and the light made the sweat on his forehead glisten. Like us he was staring in the direction of the tall oak tree. The rest of the men stood around us, all of them silent now.

A boy was dangling from the lowest of the branches. There was a noose around his neck. He was tall, thin, maybe sixteen years old and he wearing a T-shirt with ‘Chaos’ written on it.

‘Herbert,’ a hoarse voice shouted from a window in the house. I turned but saw no one.

‘We’ve got a confession,’ I said. ‘You’ve hanged the wrong person.’

‘Not that confession,’ said Fatman. ‘He confessed to starting that fire. And it wasn’t me that hung that guy, it was him.’

He pointed to a man standing directly beneath the hanged boy. Simon, the cook. His hands were pressed together as he looked up at the corpse and he was muttering something. A prayer, maybe. For his family. For the dead. For himself. For all of us.

As a group we had never discussed what we were going to do with the members of Chaos. All our attention had been focused on freeing Amy, and it was pretty obvious that the gang members couldn’t expect any mercy if they tried to resist. They would get hurt or be killed. For most of us that would probably be revenge enough. But we hadn’t talked about what to do if they surrendered, as they had done now.

Essentially there were only three options. Execute them. Maim them. Or let them go.

Fatman was the only one to vote for execution.

A few thought that some kind of amputation, such as severing the right hand, was in order, but there were no volunteers to perform the amputations. I suspect that the thought of nine mutilated but still fully functional young men wandering about the city with revenge on their minds was not particularly attractive.

Downing’s suggestion that they be lashed with a rope seemed to have the most support. It would probably be seen as some kind of let-off and not a motivation for revenge at a later date.

I argued that we shouldn’t hand out any punishment at all unless we could give the ‘accused’ a fair trial. That, I said, was what distinguished us from them. In rejecting revenge we would not only be true to the principles of justice our forefathers had built this land on, we would also be providing a good example for these young people, showing them that it was possible to behave in a civilised fashion in the midst of these chaotic times, that there was a way back to decency. I promised I would personally make sure that, as far as possible, Brad Lowe would be treated in accordance with our most fundamental principles of justice.