Ю Несбё - Macbeth

‘But not enough for a watertight conviction. Cawdor the bedbug could have come back. And then the scandal would have dragged on interminably. A court case with one hell of a shit-storm that could easily have left stains here and there. Not exactly what the police need when they’re trying to win back the town’s trust. You have my full support, Chief Commissioner. You have to crush them. One turn of your heel and it’s over.’

Duncan smiled. ‘That’s quite a detailed analysis, but I hope you’re not suggesting I had anything to do with Cawdor’s premature demise, ma’am.’

‘No, God forbid.’ She placed a hand on the chief commissioner’s arm. ‘I’m only saying what Banquo usually says: there are several ways to skin a cat.’

‘Such as?’

‘Hm. Such as ringing a man and telling him that Judgement Day has come. The evidence is so overwhelming he’ll have SWAT at his door in minutes; he’ll be publicly humiliated, stripped of all his honours, his name will be dragged through the gutters to the stocks. He has only a few minutes.’

Duncan studied the poker table beneath. ‘If I had some binoculars,’ he said. ‘I’d be able to see their cards.’

‘You would.’

‘Where did you get your binoculars, ma’am? A gift from birth?’

She laughed. ‘No, I had to buy them. With experience. Dearly bought.’

‘Of course I haven’t said anything, but Cawdor served in the force for many years. Like most of us he was neither a-hundred-per-cent good nor a-hundred-per-cent bad. Perhaps he deserved, perhaps his family deserved, to have had a choice as to which way out he took.’

‘You’re a nobler person than me, Chief Commissioner. I’d have done the same, but exclusively for selfish reasons. Santé .’

They raised glasses and clinked.

‘Talking about binoculars,’ Lady said, nodding towards the others in the bar. ‘I see Inspector Duff and young Caithness have their antennae tuned in.’

‘Oh?’ Duncan arched an eyebrow. ‘They’re standing at opposite ends of the bar, from what I can see.’

‘Exactly. They’re keeping the maximum distance between them. And still checking every fifteen seconds where the other is.’

‘Not much escapes your eye, does it?’

‘I saw something when I asked you what your dark, selfish motive was.’

Duncan laughed. ‘Can you see in the dark too?’

‘My sensitivity to the darkness is inherited, Chief Commissioner. I sleepwalk in the darkest night without hurting myself.’

‘I suppose the motive for the best charitable work can be called selfish, but my simple view is that the end justifies the motive.’

‘So you’d like a statue like the one Kenneth got? Or the love of the people, which he didn’t get?’

Duncan held her gaze, checked the bodyguards behind them were still outside hearing range, then emptied his glass and coughed. ‘For myself I wish to be at peace in my soul, ma’am. The satisfaction of having done my duty. Of having maintained and improved my forefathers’ house, so to speak. I know it’s perverse, so please don’t tell anyone.’

Lady took a deep breath, pushed off from the balustrade and lit up in a big happy smile. ‘But what is your hostess doing? Interrogating her guests when there’s supposed to be a party! Shall we go and meet the others? And then I’ll go down to the cellar and get a bottle that has been waiting for an occasion just like this.’

After enduring Malcolm’s lengthy analysis of the loopholes in the new tax law Duff made an excuse and went to sit at the bar to reward himself with a whisky.

‘Well?’ said a voice behind him. ‘How was your day off with the family?’

‘Fine, thanks,’ he said without turning. Pointed to a bottle for the waiter and showed with two fingers that he wanted a double.

‘And tonight?’ Caithness asked. ‘You still want to stay over at... the hotel?’

The code word for her bed. But he could hear the question was not only about tonight but the nights to come. She wanted him to repeat the old refrain: the assurance that he wanted her, he didn’t want to return to his family in Fife. But this all took time, there were many aspects to consider. It was incomprehensible to him that Caithness didn’t know him any better, that she doubted this could be what he really wanted. Perhaps that was why he answered with a certain defiance that he had been offered a bed at the casino.

‘And do you want that? To stay here?’

Duff sighed. What did women want? Were they all going to tie him up, tether him to the bed head and feed him in the kitchen so that they could milk his wallet and testicles to overwhelm him with more offspring and a guilty conscience?

‘No,’ he said, looking at Macbeth. Considering he was the focus of the party, he seemed strangely burdened and ill at ease. Had the responsibility and gravity of his new post already intimidated the happy, carefree boy in him? Well, now it was too late, both for Macbeth and for himself. ‘If you go first I’ll wait a suitable length of time and follow you.’

He noticed her hesitate behind him. He met her eyes in the mirror behind the shelves of bottles. Saw she was about to touch him. Sent her an admonitory glance. She desisted. And left. Jesus .

Duff knocked back his drink. Got up to go over to Macbeth, who was leaning on the end of the bar. Time to congratulate him properly. But right at that moment Duncan came between them; people flocked around him, and Macbeth was lost in the melee. And when Duff saw him again, Macbeth was on his way out, rushing after Lady’s skirt tails, which he saw leaving the room.

Macbeth caught Lady up as she was unlocking the wine cellar.

‘I can’t do it,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I can’t kill my own chief commissioner.’

She looked at him.

She grabbed the lapels of his jacket, pulled him inside and closed the door. ‘Don’t fail me now, Macbeth. Duncan and his guards are set up in their rooms. Everything’s ready. You’ve got the master key, haven’t you?’

Macbeth took the key from his pocket and held it up for her. ‘Take it. I can’t do this.’

‘Can’t or won’t?’

‘Both. I won’t do it to because I can’t find the will for such villainy. It’s wrong. Duncan’s a good chief commissioner, and I can’t do anything better than him. So what’s the point, apart from feeding my ambition?’

‘ Our ambition! Because after hunger, cold, fear and lust there is nothing more than ambition, Macbeth. Because honour is the key to respect. And that is the master key. Use it!’ She was still holding his lapels, and her mouth was so close to his he could taste the fury in her breath.

‘Darling—’ he began.

‘No! If you think Duncan is such an honourable man listen to how he killed Cawdor to spare himself the embarrassing revelations that might have leaked out if Cawdor had lived.’

‘That’s not true!’

‘Ask him yourself.’

‘You’re only saying that to... to...’

‘To steel your will,’ she said. She let go and instead pressed her palms against the lapels as if to feel his heartbeat. ‘Just think that you’re going to kill a murderer, the way you killed the Norse Rider, then it’ll be easy.’

‘I don’t want it to be easy.’

‘If it’s your morals that are getting the better of you, then just remember you’re bound by the promise you made me last night, Macbeth. Or are you telling me that what I saw and interpreted as courage when you killed Ernest Collum was just a young man’s recklessness because it wasn’t your life at stake but my croupier’s? While now, when you have to risk something yourself, you flee like a cowardly hyena.’