by Jo Nesbo
They said she was good for me, that I’d quietened down, that I didn’t seem so volatile, as the child psychiatrist called it, since he didn’t dare call me unstable. And it’s true, Lisa knew how to calm me, it was when she wasn’t around or if I’d had one too many that things spiralled out of control. I was done once or twice for grievous bodily harm, but only served a couple of short stretches. And as I say, I had never laid a hand on Lisa. Never had any reason to. Not until now. I don’t think she was ever scared of me, not once in her life. Scared for others maybe, friends and relations, if they said the wrong thing to me. And I suspect she was halfway relieved when the doctor told us we couldn’t have kids. Shit, I was relieved myself, but of course I didn’t say that. But Lisa was never afraid for her own safety, and that was probably why she’d dared to admit that stuff about Ludvigsen. But how could she kid herself she knew my limits when I didn’t bloody know them myself and was sitting here wondering exactly what the fuck I might have done?
When I was ten years old my big brother and me were each given a glass of lemonade before our parents went out on a Saturday night. But the moment they were out the door my big brother spat in them both, two big, slimy blobs, and probably figured that now both drinks were his. But the thing is, you can’t drink out of a glass with a busted jaw, and at the hospital all he got through the straw was water.
Anyway, what had happened now was that Lisa was like one of those glasses of lemonade. Spat on, spoiled. There was no other way I could look at it. I’d lost what I’d been given, and all that was left after that was useless retaliation, the levelling out of the pressure. Fuck you. Fuck me.
And now I felt it coming back. The pulsing in my temples.
Maybe because we were in Kjelsåsveien and had just passed number 600.
As we moved between houses and bins I was sometimes in and out of the cab, sometimes standing on the ladder at the back. Checking the mobile every time.
Maybe she was at a meeting.
With Ludvigsen.
OK, I mustn’t think like that. And anyway, she wasn’t. I don’t know how come I was so certain about that, but I was.
And then there we were, Kjelsåsveien 612.
It was a villa, no more and no less flashy than any of the others in that area. The kind you don’t have to be rich to live in if you’d inherited it from your parents, and they didn’t need to have been rich either. But if you wanted to buy one now, it would set you back a few hundred thousand. Orchards cost money, even in the east end of town, where I live.
I noticed that the outside light above the porch was on. Either Stefan Ludvigsen didn’t care about the cost of electricity, or he was the forgetful type. Or maybe he wasn’t at work but still at home. Was that what had my pulse hammering away as I walked towards the garage? That he was going to come out, tell me that he hadn’t been able to get hold of Lisa on the phone and that he’d called the police and they were on their way to our place? And it wasn’t just the pounding of my heart that told me, I knew it with a sudden and absolute certainty: I’d done a murder last night. I felt it not just in my aching forearms, in my fingertips, in the thumbs that had pressed against the little larynx, but deep inside me. I was a killer. I saw the bulging eyes, the pleading, dying gaze up at me in resignation and despair before out they went, like red warning lights when the current’s turned off.
Did he know, Ludvigsen? Was he sitting behind a window somewhere in there, looking at me? Maybe he didn’t dare come out but was just sat there waiting for the police to arrive? I listened out through the quiet of the summer morning for the sound of sirens before opening the unlocked door to the garage where his four-wheel bin was. And there was a car. A spanking-new black BMW. Villains drive BMWs, right? Only I was the villain here. I wheeled the bin out; it was so heavy the wheels sank into the gravel and I had to push hard. I hooked it onto the hydraulics and met Pijus’s gaze in the mirror. He shouted something, but it was lost beneath the whirring of the lift.
‘Eh?’ I shouted back.
‘Isn’t that your car?’ I heard him say.
‘I don’t have any bloody BMW.
‘Not that one!’ shouted Pijus. ‘That one.’
I saw he was pointing further up the road. And there, fifty metres in front of us, stood a white Corolla. A car due any time now its EU check. A car that had a prominent dent in the bonnet from where a fist had landed to emphasise a point in a discussion with a traffic warden.
It dawned on me. I think ‘dawned’ is the right word, because it means something that happens very slowly. It happened slowly because it was so hard for me to understand that Lisa would do something like that to me. There was the BMW that Ludvigsen should’ve gone to work in, and there was the Corolla that should’ve been at home in my garage. In other words Lisa had got up, seen the car was in the garage and driven it up here to where Ludvigsen was waiting for her.
I stared up at the house. They were inside. What were they doing now? I tried to blank out the images but I couldn’t fucking do it. I wanted to kill somone. As in, murder them. As in, take someone’s life and take the punishment for doing it. And it wasn’t anger that was talking now. Or actually, it was. But it was the kind of anger I knew I’d never be able just to walk off. It had to come out. There was no other way for it. I had to get rid of Ludvigsen. Lisa…I couldn’t finish the thought. Because even though I had this image of them on my brain, both naked in a big, hideous four-poster, there was something about the picture that didn’t add up. Something that doesn’t make sense. Like something you know you’ve forgotten someplace or other but you just can’t remember where.
Anyway, soon as I was finished emptying this bin I was going to get the jack from the toolkit, march up to his house, get inside and become a killer. Now the decision was taken I felt a strange lightness in my head, as though the tension had already smoothed itself out. I was watching the bin rise when up the phone rang. I answered.
‘Hi,’ said Lisa.
I froze. I recognised the sounds in the background. She was in the Distribution Centre. She was at work.
‘I see you’ve tried to call me several time,’ she said. ‘Sorry, but it’s all a bit chaotic here today, no one knows where Ludvigsen is. Can we talk later?’
‘Sure,’ I said, watching as the bin reached the top of its arc. ‘I love you.’
In the silence that followed I could sense her confusion.
‘You’re not…’ she began.
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘I’m hurt and upset.’ The bin began to empty. ‘But I love you.’
I hung up and looked at the Corolla. It was standing in shadow and still had dew on the windscreen. It must have been there all night.
The contents of the green wheelie bin came sliding out, and something hit the metal bottom of the hopper with a soft splash. I looked inside. There, between the bulging and knotted plastic bags and empty pizza cartons, lay a pale, plump body in blue pyjamas. And I must have met Stefan Ludvigsen before, because I recognised him. His staring, ruptured eyes looked straight past me. The marks on the throat had turned black. And it was like when the fog first starts to lift and the sun breaks through and suddenly seems twice as strong. Like ice melting from around the poles, the landscape of memories emerged with accelerating speed.
I recalled his sobbing and choked confession. His excuse was that he was recently divorced, he’d made a mistake. The kitchen knife he grabbed and began waving about in my face, thinking probably I was too drunk to be able to react quickly enough. He’d caught me one nick in the forehead before I knocked the knife out of his hand. The knife was good, it was what got me fired up. Gave me an excuse. Self-defence, for fuck’s sake. So I’d squeezed the life out of him. Not too quickly and not too slowly. Not saying I enjoyed it, that would be an exaggeration, but at least it gave him time to understand. Time to regret. Time to suffer. Just like I did.
I watched as the compr
essor squeezed the half-naked body into something like a foetal position.
Standing on the ladder I turned and looked at the gravel pathway leading to the front door. No drag marks. I had tidied up after me, got rid of any possible traces I’d left, inside and out.
If I was drunk when I jumped into the Corolla and drove up here in the middle of the night and rang on his bell I sobered up instantly the moment I saw him lying dead on the kitchen floor. And sober enough to realise that if I got stopped for driving under the influence on the way home I would be on record, and later on it could be connected to Ludvigsen’s disappearance. Because he had to disappear. Vanish, actually. Had I planned it all even before I rang his doorbell? Because Pijus, Pijus was right. I did have the ability to act quickly and at the same time be rational.
I went up to the cab and climbed in.
‘Well?’ said Pijus, looking at me.
‘Well what?’ I asked.
‘Anything you want to tell me? As I told you, I’ve taken an oath of confidentiality.’
What the hell was I supposed to say to that? I looked eastward, to where the sun had risen over the ridge. The round would soon be over, and we would be heading that way, to the waste disposal centre at Klementsrud where the robot scanners would sort Ludvigsen away as the organic waste he was, and the conveyer belt transport him to the hell he deserved, where every trace, every memory, everything that lay behind us would be annihilated, and nothing of what we have lost will be recycled.
And I found the words, the ones that usually get stuck somewhere on the way out; this time they flowed from the tongue like music.
‘Someone has to do the cleaning up,’ I said.
‘Amen to that,’ said Pijus.
And the garbage truck shivered into life and set off down the road.
THE CONFESSION
‘am i being of any help, officer?’
I put Simone’s coffee cup down on the tablecloth on her coffee table. Her coffee cup. Her tablecloth. Her coffee table. Even the dish of chocolates in the middle of the table is hers. Things. Strange how little things mean once you’re dead. One way or another.
Not that things were so important for her when she was alive either. I’ve just been explaining all this to the officer. That she told me I could take anything I wanted when she threw me out – the stereo, the TV, books, kitchen equipment, you name it. She was ready for it. She’d decided this was going to be a civilised break-up.
‘In our family we don’t argue over teaspoons,’ she said.
I didn’t argue either. Just stared at her, trying to discover the real reason hidden behind those vapid clichés she’d been spouting: ‘Best for us both’, ‘moving in different directions’ and ‘time to move on’. And so on.
Then she put a sheet of paper down on the table and asked me to tick off whatever I wanted.
‘It’s just an inventory I’ve made. Don’t let your feelings get in the way of common sense now, Arne. Try to see this as a controlled liquidation.’
She said. As though it was one of her father’s subsidiary companies and not a marriage she was talking about. Naturally, I had been much too proud to even look at her list. Too hurt to take anything at all from the overgrown villa in Vinderen where we had shared both the good and – the way I remembered it – the very few bad days.
Maybe it was a bit hasty of me to just give up everything like that. After all, she was a wealthy young woman, good for fourteen million, whereas I am a debt-ridden photographer with a little too much faith in his own business skills. Simone supported my idea of starting my own studio along with six other photographers. If not financially then at least morally.
‘Father doesn’t see the economic benefits,’ she said. ‘I think you should back yourself, Arne. Show him what you can do, he’s bound to invest in the project once he sees.’
On paper the money was hers, but it was her father who pulled the strings. The insistence on a prenup when we got married was, of course, his idea. He probably saw it all, how she’d soon grow out of her long-haired young photographer with his lofty dreams and his ‘artistic ambitions’.
So I went for it, aggrieved and determined to show how wrong he was about me. Took the gold medal for borrowing at a time when banks were chucking money after you if you had anything at all that looked like a business idea. It took me six months to prove that Simone’s father was right. As a rule it’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment at which a woman stops loving you. With Simone it’s easy. It happened when she opened the front door and the man standing on the steps told her he was from the enforcement court with a demand for the seizure of my assets. She treated the man with an icy politeness, wrote out a cheque, and we kept the car. She employed that same icy politeness when she asked me to take what I wanted when I left. I took my clothes, some bedlinen and a personal debt of just over one million kroner.
I should have taken the coffee table. Because I like this coffee table. I like the small dents on its surface, souvenirs of our wild parties, the paint splashes from the time I decided to paint everything in the living room green, and the one leg that was ever so slightly crooked from the first and only time we ever made love on it.
The investigating officer sits in an armchair facing me, and the notebook lies untouched on the table in front of him.
‘I read that she was found on this sofa,’ I say as I raise my coffee cup.
An unnecessary detail, of course. It was on all the front pages. The police couldn’t rule out suspicious circumstances, and her family name was enough to arouse media interest. According to the coroner’s report the cause of death was cyanide poisoning. At one time Simone took a course in goldsmithing with the idea of taking over her father’s chain of shops, but as so often before she soon got bored with it. The bottles of cyanide she had smuggled out of the workshop were still down in the cellar. For the thrill of it, she maintained. But since there was nothing to suggest the poison came from her own bottles and no indication of how she had ingested it, the police were unwilling to conclude without further investigation that it was suicide.
‘I know what you’re thinking, officer.’
I can feel the springs beneath the sofa cover against my thighs. An old rococo sofa, her style. Had he had her on this sofa, her new guy, the architect? He moved in just a few weeks after I moved out. For all I know he was screwing her on the sofa while I was still living in the house. The officer doesn’t ask me to explain what I mean when I say I know what they’re thinking, so I go ahead on my own initiative:
‘You’re thinking she wasn’t the type to take her own life. And you’re absolutely right. Don’t ask me how, officer, but I know she was murdered.’
He doesn’t appear to be all that interested in my observations.
‘And I also know that murder is bound to look bad for me as the scorned husband. It gives me a motive. I could have come to see her, I knew where she kept the poison, I could have slipped it into her coffee and then left. I imagine that’s why you’ve been to my place, to see if there’s a match between any of my clothes and the fibres you found here in Simone’s house.’
The officer doesn’t respond. I sigh.
‘But since neither the fibres nor the footprints or fingerprints are mine you have no definite proof against me. So some bright spark has suggested bringing me here to the villa to see how I deal with being back at the scene of the crime. A little bit of psychological warfare. Am I right?’
Still no response.
‘The reason you haven’t found anything is simple. I haven’t been here, officer. At least not this past year. And the housekeeper does a thorough job with her vacuum cleaner.’
I put down my coffee cup and take a Twist from the dish of chocolates. Coconut. Not my favourite, but perfectly acceptable.
‘It’s almost sad, officer. The way all traces of a person can be removed so quickly and so easily
. As though one had never existed.’
The chocolate spins round four times when I pull on the ends of the wrapper. I remove the silver foil, fold it four times, run a fingernail over the folds and put it on the coffee table. Then I close my eyes and pop the chocolate into my mouth. Holy Communion. The absolution of sins.
Simone loved chocolates. Especially Twist. Every Saturday when I did the shopping at Kiwi I used to buy a big bag of them. It was one of our few routines. It was a sort of anchor in a life based on opportunism, whims, the occasional evening meal together and, as a rule, waking up in the same bed. We blamed our jobs, and I believed that everything would be different once we had a child. That would bring us together. A child. I remember how shaken she was the first time I brought it up.
I open my eyes again.
‘We were the perfect Twist couple, Simone and I,’ I say, and halfway expect the officer to raise one eyebrow and give me a puzzled look. ‘I’m not thinking of the dance but the chocolate,’ I explain. The officer evidently doesn’t have a sense of humour. ‘I like liquorice and nougat and I hate banana creams. As it happens she loved the banana creams. You know, the ones with the yellow-and-green wrapping. Oh yes, of course, you’ve already…If ever we had guests I had to take them all out before I put the dish out, so she could have them herself the next day.’
I think about adding a light laugh, but instead – and quite unexpectedly – the little anecdote gives rise to an emotional avalanche. I feel something swelling in my throat. I’ve no intention of saying anything at all but then I hear my own tormented whisper:
‘We loved each other, officer. We more than loved each other. We were the air each other breathed, we kept each other alive, do you understand? No, of course, why should you?’
