Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

I was finished, and so wet and cold my teeth were chattering as I stood there staring at that perforated brass plate below the bell. I had considered telling him that I had actually seen Brad killing Amy but decided that with Brad’s father on the warpath it would endanger not just my life but Dumbo’s and Maria’s too. My goal was to get Dumbo out; what happened to Brad was a matter of indifference to me.

‘Mr Green?’ I said.

Silence. Then a wet coughing. And then that hoarse voice, a little less slurred now: ‘I’ll need your address if I’m going to call you as a witness.’

I gave the address where Maria and I lived, dictating the flat number so slowly and carefully that even a drunkard defence lawyer who’d long ago stopped caring about anything would be able to get it right.

‘It’ll be safest for you if you don’t talk to anyone about what you know, or tell anyone you’ve been here,’ he said. ‘I’ll contact you — don’t contact me.’

On the driver down afterwards I had to stop on a bend. A coyote stood motionless in the middle of the road and looked at me. The eyes reflected light, and I almost thought it was a ghost. Coyotes usually run, but this one stood its ground. Like me. I thought of getting the Remington out and shooting it — we were out of meat, and maybe this would be edible if you cooked it long enough — then remembered that Ragnar and the twins had taken the gun. I waited for the coyote to move, but it didn’t. Instead two more came slinking into the street light.

Just recently there had been more of them on the roads; not just coyotes but more animals in general. And fewer people. At night I could ride through one district after another and never see a soul. Were they all staying indoors, the way people did during the pandemic? Or had they left the city and moved out to the countryside?

I automatically checked the rear-view mirror to see if there were any coyotes behind me as well.

No. Not yet.

I revved the engine, opened the throttle and rode at them, horn blaring.

The coyotes didn’t seem particularly afraid. They moved reluctantly out of the way. One of them snapped at me as I rode by.

When I got back from Rat Island the last time I hadn’t told Heidi I’d turned down Colin’s offer of tickets on the New Frontier aircraft carrier. Not that I thought she would have agreed to the trade-off, because I felt sure she was as determined as I was that Brad should stand trial for what he’d done. But at least in not knowing there was a choice she was spared the dilemma, and the gnawing doubt about whether we had made the right decision in depriving Sam of what was perhaps — what was actually pretty definitely — his chance of a better life.

At the same time I was still waiting for Colin to make his next move. If he had an alternative plan to free Brad, and it succeeded, wouldn’t I then bitterly regret that I had turned down his offer? Or would I continue to feel that I had done the right thing, responded the way a decent and upright person should respond? Maybe I wouldn’t have the satisfaction of seeing my daughter’s killer get his just punishment, but at least I hadn’t lost my soul.

And then it came. The next move.

I was in the garden when Adele Matheson phoned me and told me the news over a very poor connection. That a certain Gabriel Norton, nicknamed Dumbo, had confessed to Amy’s murder. And unless the confession was withdrawn, or evidence produced that exonerated Norton, then naturally she couldn’t proceed with the case against Brad Lowe.

I said that this was Colin Lowe’s doing. That either this Dumbo was taking one for the team, or else they were threatening him with something that was worse than life imprisonment.

‘We can’t exclude the possibility,’ said Matheson. ‘But...’

She didn’t need to finish. As long as we couldn’t prove that Dumbo was lying or being manipulated, then there wasn’t much we could do.

I leaned against a tree, checked that Heidi and Sam were too far away to overhear anything, and tried to gather my thoughts. Adele Matheson waited patiently, but all I could do was open and close my mouth. Not a word came out.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said after a few moments. ‘We must just hope that this Dumbo changes his story or fails to convince the court that he’s a killer. I heard one detective say that they can’t quite get the angle between the point of impact and the golf club to add up with the fact that Norton is a dwarf.’

‘A dwarf?’

‘I’m sorry, short. Or whatever the prevailing euphemism is. Anyway, circumstantial technical evidence like that doesn’t count for much when there’s a confession.’

I was only half listening. Thinking. So the one who’d confessed was the boy who’d rung the bell that evening with the girl. The same two I had let go the night we took the villa.

‘I’ll talk to him,’ I said.

‘By all means, try,’ said Matheson.

‘I mean it. I stopped one of ours from shooting him and the girl when they escaped on her motorcycle. He might be aware of the fact that I... well, that I saved their lives. Maybe I can get him to feel he owes me something in return.’

Matheson didn’t reply.

‘I’ll keep you posted,’ I said.

‘Then goodbye.’ She said it the way you say goodbye to someone you think it’s unlikely you’ll be seeing again.

I was searched before being allowed into the large visiting room. Four other visitors were already inside, talking on the phone to inmates behind the glass partition — it was just like when I visited Maria in hospital during the pandemic. The warden indicated my chair, number eight. Dumbo wasn’t there yet.

I was looking forward to telling him I had spoken to his lawyer and that he would be calling me as a witness so that I could give Dumbo an alibi. We were just to say that we were together, nothing about how I’d seen through the keyhole that it was Brad. That way everything would be fine. We wouldn’t be lying, we just weren’t telling them everything.

As I took my seat I saw a familiar face behind the glass in number-one booth, in the far corner. It was Kevin Wankel. So it was here the stupid meathead was serving his life sentence.

I sat waiting and watching for Dumbo to come through the door.

It didn’t look as though Kevin had a lot to say to his visitor. They sat in their respective chairs, her slumped, him with his greasy hair and the stubby brown teeth in his meths mouth.

Then the door at the back on the prisoners’ side opened and Dumbo came in wearing the same striped prison outfit. His face lit up when he saw me, and I guess mine did too. The warden behind him said something I couldn’t hear through the glass and pointed to the chair in front of me.

As Dumbo started walking towards me I sensed a movement in my peripheral vision. I didn’t immediately react to it; Kevin had obviously suddenly made up his mind the visit was over and was heading towards the exit door and Dumbo. As he came closer I noticed he was holding his hand inside the back of his trousers.

I jumped up and yelled, but that damn glass wall reaching up to the ceiling choked off most of the sound.

There was a glint of steel as Kevin swung his hand in a low arc, caught Dumbo in the stomach and pulled the blade towards him. Dumbo doubled over. Both hands went to his stomach and I could see the blood running between the stubby fingers. Kevin grabbed hold of Dumbo’s hair and pulled his head back, exposing the throat and cutting it with a sideways, arcing slash. Blood sprayed and splashed across the floor and Dumbo tumbled forward. Two wardens stormed in and Kevin dropped his weapon. It looked like a flattened piece of metal. He put up his hands in a show of surrender. Two guards pinned Kevin to the floor while a third came running in and pressed a hand against the gaping wound in Dumbo’s neck. The pressure in the fountain of blood was gone and now it was just pumping weakly.