Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

‘But you remember seeing me there?’

‘There was something familiar about you,’ she said. ‘But it was more like...’

‘Déjà vu?’

‘Exactly. As though you were someone I had met in exactly that way, only I’d never been at that restaurant before.’

‘Like a glimpse into a parallel universe.’

‘Does that sort of thing interest you too?’

I laughed. ‘Peter says he’s going to study it. We’ll see how far he gets. But you said something on the phone. You said, “It’s you.” As though you’d been expecting me to show up. Was that another déjà vu?’

‘Perhaps. Your voice...’ She glanced out over the square, watchful. ‘I honestly don’t know. It’s really quite confusing, isn’t it?’

I took out my wallet. ‘I have to go to the police station,’ I said. ‘Want to come with me?’

‘Why?’

‘To give a—’

‘No. Why should I come with you?’

I shrugged. ‘Peter doesn’t know that I’m here. Can we agree to leave it that way?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t lie. Not to friends, at least.’

‘Is that what he is? A friend?’

‘Yes.’

‘And if he’s in love with you?’

‘If he is then it’s his problem.’

‘But then what would you do? Let him help you and your mother anyway?’

She looked at me with a kind of surprised indignation. ‘I’m not sure you and I know each other well enough for you to ask me that kind of insinuating question, Martin.’

‘You’ve just told me your most intimate personal story, Miriam. If I want to, I’m thinking I can sell the information to this Kolyev for a pretty good price. But you trust me. Do you know why you trust me?’

‘No, I don’t,’ she said, shoving her chair back from the table as though about to get up and leave.

‘You don’t trust me, or you don’t know why?’

‘The last one,’ she said curtly.

‘Instinct,’ I said. ‘You might have suspected that Peter sent me to find out what your motives are, but you know that’s not why.’

‘Then why are you here?’

‘Because I love you.’

It was as though the sky had fallen inside my head. Not because it wasn’t true — I had loved her from the moment I looked into her eyes under the water. Or before that. Yes, before. What happened under the water happened for the second time. I can’t put it any other way, it was my own déjà vu. The reason that the San Sebastián clouds and sun and sky came tumbling down like that was because I said it out loud. It was like stepping outside present reality, like breaking through a glass ceiling or a fake sky, like emerging from this Truman Show reality into another one. Maybe no more real than the false one — maybe this one too had its fake sky and its hidden audience — but the two of them together were a little bit truer than just the one by itself, of that much I was certain. Miriam stood up, and when I lifted my gaze to look at her face I was blinded by the low sun and saw nothing until she was gone.

‘That’s that,’ said Inspector Imma Aluariz as she accompanied me from the forensic laboratory back along the corridor to the lift. ‘You should be back in Pamplona before the festival gets going again.’

I nodded. It hadn’t taken long. A long cotton bud held by a man wearing latex gloves, a swab in my mouth and — as Aluariz had summed things up — that was that.

‘Only one other thing,’ she said as she pressed the lift button. ‘You asked who the deceased was.’

‘I was just curious to...’

‘Shall we take a look at him?’

The lift doors parted in front of us and she gestured with her hand for me to enter first. She followed me in and pressed the button with (— 1) on it.

‘Forensics are down in the basement, so this won’t take long,’ she said.

‘I really don’t need to—’

‘Just to confirm whether or not the victim is someone you’ve seen before. It would be helpful for us.’

We stood in silence as the lift descended with a low rumbling sound, the kind of sound effects that, as Peter had once pointed out, people accept in films from space, even though they should know that absence of atmosphere means absence of sound.

Down in the basement we headed along a corridor. There were fewer lights, fewer people. The ceiling was lower, the temperature lower. And yet I began to sweat. My hands were clammy, my heart beating faster.

We passed through a couple of doors, Aluariz placing the card hanging on a cord around her neck against the card reader, and suddenly we were in an ice-cold room. Standing in front of us was a man dressed like a surgeon, obscuring the view of a steel bench with a light blue sheet covering what I realised must be a corpse. The way he was standing, and the short, wordless nod the two exchanged, made me realise that our entry was something they had planned. And when he jerked the sheet aside as though it were an unveiling I saw that their eyes were not on the body, they were watching me. In other words, the encounter had been set up in order to observe my response. And perhaps because I realised this I was able to moderate and hide at least some of my surprise.

‘You seem shocked,’ said Aluariz.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen a corpse before.’

‘Have you seen this person before?’

I pretended to be thinking about it. Then I slowly shook my head.

‘Never. Sorry.’

I left the police station after giving them my address in Pamplona and a promise to keep them informed of my whereabouts if I moved on over the next fourteen days, until the results of the DNA test were in. In the taxi on the way to the railway station I looked at my hands. They were still shaking.

The last train to Pamplona had already gone, but I knew there were plenty of buses around the time of San Fermín. But when I approached a ticket kiosk at the bus terminal I was told that all the buses were full and that the first available seat was on an early-morning bus leaving in time for the start of el encierro, the bull run. Out in the street I hailed a taxi, asked the driver how much to take me to Pamplona. He quoted a price that was way beyond my means, and when I tried to bargain he just shrugged apologetically and said: ‘San Fermín.’ So instead I asked him to take me to a reasonably priced place in San Sebastián where I could spend the night, and he waited while I bought a ticket for the 05.30 bus.

I tried two places. Both were fully booked, both said that every other place they knew of was full too. So I got the taxi driver to drop me off at the place where Peter and I had stayed. Though it had been a large double room it hadn’t cost any more than the singles I’d been looking at. I stood in the back yard, and as the proprietor opened the door of his flat he showed no signs of recognising me. Maybe that’s what happens when you see hundreds of new arrivals every year.

‘Full,’ was all he said.

I explained which room I’d been in, that just an hour earlier it had appeared to be vacant.

‘Yes, but guest looking now,’ he said in his broken English.

‘I’ll take it,’ I heard a familiar voice saying behind me.

I turned round.

Miriam was standing with the proprietor’s wife.

‘For how long?’ asked the proprietor.

‘Indefinitely,’ said Miriam, and looked at me.

‘Perdón?’

‘Sorry,’ she said without taking her eyes off me. ‘A long time, I think.’

‘I hadn’t expected to see you again quite so soon,’ Miriam said as we walked along the bank of the wide river that winds through the town. Its name, she had told me, was the Urumea.

‘Were you expecting to see me again at all?’ I asked.

Miriam had called her mother and they had agreed they didn’t need to move in until the next day, so I would be able to spend the night there.