Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

‘Take them out,’ I said. ‘Freeze them.’

I returned to my office, intending to complete my letter to the confederations.

But instead I sat there, staring at the blank sheet of paper, seeing the dead mice in my mind’s eye. I wasn’t particularly surprised by what had happened — but why wasn’t I? It was one thing that the aggression in the mice appeared to have been a side effect of Ankh, another thing altogether for the mice to continue to be aggressive even after the doses were reduced. Was it possible that the medication brought about a permanent change in the chemistry of the brain? Other questions arose: among mice there can hardly be a complex scale of aggression, and the difference between hissing at another mouse and killing it are probably minimal. What effects might Ankh have on the behaviour of humans? Klara’s behaviour was an isolated case and could well be the result of completely different factors. Nor had she developed murderous tendencies. Or had she? What would have happened if I had stopped giving her the antidepressants along with the Ankh?

And so, as the sun sank below the rooftops, reddened by the factory smoke, I had still not begun my letter. Instead I started going back over our research material. Might it be something in the Ankh that was causing the aggression? And if so, could it be removed without affecting Ankh’s power to retard the ageing process?

At ten o’clock that evening, after the others in the team had gone home, I went to the laboratory and took blood samples from two of the dead mice. I then took one from myself and ran tests. Read the results and concluded that it was as I had thought. The active ingredient that retarded the ageing process was the same as that which triggered the aggression. One and the same thing, two sides of the same coin.

But the blood-analysis machine showed something else too. That the level of Ankh in the mice’s blood was lower than it ought to have been, given that they had been injected that same day. I took one of the capsules from the fridge and put it under the microscope. In less than a minute I had located the two holes in the lid, invisible to the naked eye but in the microscope enormous craters. Someone had punctured the capsules with a microscopically small hypodermic needle. Through one of the holes they had withdrawn Ankh from the capsule, and through the other replaced the stolen medicine with some other fluid, probably water.

As Head of Research I had access to my team’s clock-cards and I checked these to see if there was a pattern, if the same person had been clocking out last from the laboratory recently. Because Ankh had a very limited shelf life and wasn’t needed in large quantities for the African pygmy mice, the medicine was in continuous production, but in extremely small quantities. In other words, a thief would need to operate in the same way, continuously, and on a very small scale.

I found what I was looking for. A name. Anton, a quiet and shy individual who, although thirty-nine years old, still worked as a research assistant. I don’t know whether it was lack of ambition or because he had never taken the last part of his biology exams. Or it could have been for health reasons — over the last couple of years he had been off sick for long periods at a time. Whatever, on account of his long tenure and responsibility for tidying the laboratory at the end of the day, he was a keyholder, and from the others’ clock-cards I could see he had been alone in the laboratory for at least two evenings every week over the last year.

I mulled it over for a while before calling Kopfer and telling him what I had discovered.

Then I turned out the light and went home.

Two hours later I was sitting on the sofa with a beer watching the TV when it came on the news. A reporter standing in the street in front of a squad car with a flashing blue light said that the police had tried to arrest a thirty-nine-year-old man in his home, suspected of stealing from the company where he was employed, and that the suspect had attacked the two policemen with a knife, critically injuring one of them. The man had now barricaded himself inside his flat. Armed police had arrived and were trying to engage him in dialogue, but the thirty-nine-year-old had shown no willingness either to communicate or to give himself up. The excitable reporter pointed to a house and explained that the man had just been seen in a window, waving a bloody knife and shouting threats and obscenities. At this point the anchorman in the studio interrupted and gravely announced that they had just heard from the hospital that the badly injured policeman had been declared dead.

I stared at the TV pictures. The police stood sheltering behind their cars, their guns pointed in the direction of Anton’s house. If they didn’t already know it, they would soon find out that he had killed their colleague. It was as though I could see their fingers squeezing a little harder on the triggers. I didn’t need to watch any more; the outcome was a foregone conclusion and I switched off the TV. I put the empty beer bottle on the table and looked at the syringe that lay there. That I myself had taken Ankh home was hardly a question of theft. It had been done to speed up the testing on humans, on Klara. And, after she had responded positively, although with what might look like unfortunate side effects, on myself. I had been taking Ankh for a month and a half now and hadn’t noticed any sign of depressive thoughts or increased aggression. But of course, it could well be the case that the individual involved is not aware of his own feelings, that he or she rationalises them away and regards the situation itself as difficult or demanding of a violent response, that the cause is not to be found in his or her own psyche or behaviour.

I thought of the body in the bathtub.

I, who had never laid a hand on another person, not even as a child, had killed a man.

Ankh. If I hadn’t seen it before it was clear enough to me now. Ankh was not a recipe for eternal life, it was a recipe for chaos and death. Fortunately, for the time being at least, the recipe was a secret, the formula that gave more than just the ingredients involved but also the correct procedures, pressures and temperatures necessary, and that could not be reproduced by an examination of the material itself; for that they would need to get hold of me, find the recipe in my brain.

The memory-shredder. It was still in El Aaiún.

I called the airport. And found I was in luck. If I could make it to Vienna the following day I could get a seat on board the weekly flight to London, and from there the Madrid plane that departed every other day. From then on I would have to improvise. I booked the ticket.

Afterwards I called Switzerland. I got Fru Tsjekhov on the line, apologised for ringing so late and explained that Klara should be completely taken off the medicine I sent them. That I had discovered it might be the direct cause of her mental condition. And that we could only hope the damage wasn’t permanent, but that it would probably take some time before she was herself again.

I went up to the bedroom and packed a bag. Some clothes, the few roubles I had, and a wedding photo of Klara and me. If I drove all night I could make Vienna by daybreak.

When I entered the bathroom to get my toiletries I stood looking in the mirror at the bath behind me.

I turned, pulled away the rug and looked at Bernard Johansson. At the hole in the forehead. The coagulated black blood that had run over the bottom of the bathtub. I might perhaps manage to delete myself, but once they found the body of my closest associate they would definitely put his brain through Exor. How long would it take them to fill in the remainder of the formula? A hundred years? Ten years? One year? But it was too late to hide the body now.