Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

I walked over to him.

He lay with his back to me, apparently unconscious. But as I got closer it was as though the sea monster on the back of his leather jacket flexed, and I saw his hand grab for something in the waistband of his trousers. I ran and kicked his hand as he turned. A glistening pistol — it looked like an expensive Glock — spun through the air. I could have let him get to his feet, I could have taken him anyway, but I had an audience. A gang wondering if this girl who said she was the leader was tough enough. Efficient enough. Merciless enough. So I gave Ragnar a simple but effective foot jab while he was still lying there. And before he’d recovered from that I was behind him with a so-called rear naked choke, my left arm around his throat, the right arm locking it, my forehead pressed against the back of his head as though comforting him. Then squeeze and cut off the supply of blood to the brain. Within ten seconds Ragnar was unconscious. I let go of him, pulled down one of the meat hooks directly above him. Glanced over at the table fifteen metres away and saw they were all watching. Rolled Ragnar onto his stomach, pulled up the red leather jacket and choked back the nausea as I drove the hook into the pale skin of his back. I crossed to the wall and turned the crank and Ragnar was hauled up into the air, the blood running evenly and steadily down his back towards the waistband of his trousers. I left him dangling a half-metre above the ground, walked over to his bike, unfastened the chain and then used it to tie his hands behind his back. Ragnar regained consciousness and began swearing and screaming at me, tried to twist himself loose but soon stopped, probably because he felt the meat hook digging into his muscles and tissue.

I walked back to the table and stood there. I could almost see the questions in their eyes. Who the hell was going to lead them now? Who was going to provide them with their next meal, with clothes, a roof over their heads and a place where they could be safe from their enemies? It wasn’t going to be that loser hanging there on the meat hook, that much was obvious. But could it really be her — a girl?

‘You took something that belongs to me,’ I said. ‘A Remington rifle. Which one of you has it?’

Of course they couldn’t help themselves; everyone turned towards the guy who had it.

‘You,’ I said to him, a boy with big red pimples who couldn’t have been more than fifteen. ‘Go and get it. Now.’

He stood up and began to walk towards the bikes.

‘Run!’

He ran.

‘You others come with me,’ I said, turning and heading back towards Ragnar. I heard nothing behind me and thought: shit, I’ve lost them. But then I heard the clinking of cutlery and the scraping of chair legs.

We stood in a semicircle around Ragnar. He was breathing heavily, his face twisted in pain, but he kept his mouth closed. Though it was nothing like when Dumbo got his throat cut, the blood dripped steadily from his boots and ran down the slope to the nearest sluice just the way it was meant to.

‘This man here forced one of our own to confess to a murder he didn’t commit,’ I said, pointing up at Ragnar. ‘After that he had him liquidated. There aren’t many rules in Chaos, but the ones we do have are all we have.’ I was talking loudly, louder than I had planned. Maybe it was to drown out the echo that made it sound as if I was standing in a church. ‘Rule number one: one for all and all for one. If we follow that then we’re invincible. If we don’t, Chaos will be history inside a month.’

I looked round. A couple of them nodded.

I heard running footsteps. I turned and the pimply guy handed me my Remington.

‘Ragnar,’ I said. ‘This is your jury. Do you plead guilty as charged?’

He groaned and kicked out with one leg, causing his body to half turn.

‘No, all right then,’ I said. I loaded the rifle and raised it. ‘Then...’

He made a hissing sound and I lowered the rifle.

‘I did it for us.’ His whisper was almost inaudible. ‘For Chaos. We wouldn’t get weapons, nothing, if Dumbo withdrew his confession.’

‘How much did you have to offer Kevin to kill Dumbo?’

‘Not much,’ he whispered.

‘No, because Kevin’s serving life already so he had nothing to lose.’

‘Nothing to lose,’ Ragnar repeated. His head was dangling now.

‘I’m presuming you didn’t tell anyone here you were planning to have a member of the gang liquidated?’

‘All the weapons, the food...’ Ragnar groaned, his chin on his chest. ‘Without me we wouldn’t have had anything.’

‘We would have had Dumbo.’

Ragnar didn’t reply. His body had rotated back to its original position.

‘OK,’ I said, addressing the others. ‘Those who are against me sentencing this person to death, raise your hand.’

No hands.

‘The condemned man gets to choose. Do you want to hang there till you die or do you want a bullet?’

Ragnar lifted his head slightly. His eyelids looked heavier. I had to make an effort to hear what he was saying: ‘I’ll take that bullet.’

I raised the Remington, pressed my cheek against the cool, good butt of the rifle. With an effort Ragnar lifted his head again slightly, as though to make my job easier. Aiming for his forehead I had the idea of trying to make the bullet-hole form a triangle with the eyes.

Then I fired.

I met Adele Matheson and Chief Inspector Gardell at the airport in the morning. It had been closed during the pandemic, when most of the privately owned airlines had gone bankrupt and never opened up again.

I’d parked out on the runway and could see the cars driving towards me like undulating spectres through the shimmering heat haze. As they got closer their outlines became clearer; one was a police car, the other a low, red sports car. They parked one on each side of me and we all got out.

‘Thanks for coming,’ I said.

‘No need, but I don’t have much time,’ said Adele Matheson.

‘Why here?’ asked Gardell, who was still wearing sunglasses.

‘The visibility’s good,’ I said. I knew they had noticed the Kalashnikov lying on my passenger seat. ‘I just wanted to let you know that as from this afternoon Brad Lowe will be a free man. I’ve arranged for one of his relatives to fetch him.’

Matheson nodded. ‘Chief Inspector Gardell and I take this as being simply information you possess and not implying in any way involvement in any potential case of false imprisonment.’

‘I expressed myself in such a way as to allow of that interpretation.’

‘Then you won’t get any problems from us,’ said Adele Matheson.

‘What remains to be seen, of course, is how Brad Lowe interprets it. If he makes a complaint against me then you know where I am.’

‘If that’s all, then I have a case in court in an hour’s time,’ said Matheson.

I offered my hand. At first she just looked at it as though I had made a gesture that was obscene or at best old-fashioned. Then she shook it lightly. Gardell remained standing where she was as Matheson headed back to her Ferrari. ‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Haven’t I answered that question once before?’

‘That business about respect for the courts and the rule of law? I don’t buy any of that. Put it another way: I think you’re as driven by revenge as the rest of us.’

‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ I said as I watched Matheson’s red wonder turning dreamlike in the haze. ‘It’s from the law of Moses, one of the earliest collection of laws we know of. It says the perpetrator must pay in kind for the harm done to others. But how can a perpetrator pay for having taken away a member of someone else’s family? The greatest harm isn’t necessarily to the one whose life has been lost but to those who have lost someone they love. The ones left behind who have to live with the loss, the pain and the guilt. The perpetrator should have to live with the same pain.’