The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Can you help me find Brad Lowe?’ she said.

  ‘But I told you –’

  ‘You told me nothing I don’t want to know, and I suggest we carry on like that. Can you guarantee that he will appear in a court case, yes or no?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, surprised.

  ‘Good. His next of kin have been informed of the charge and now you have been. It means that you and those who helped you when you found Amy must be willing to appear as witnesses.’

  ‘Are you saying that…?’

  We stopped by a red Ferrari. I found it hard to believe the low, sexy sports car could belong to her until she unlocked it.

  ‘I’m making no promises,’ she said. ‘All I’m saying is that after due consideration the public prosecutor’s office has come to the conclusion that we have enough evidence to charge Brad Lowe with murder.’

  IX

  The attack came just before dawn.

  They were well prepared, obviously familiar with the layout of the property, and counting on being met by force.

  They were wearing camouflage and came gliding over the wall like porpoises across the surface of the water.

  ‘These boys are pros,’ said Downing as he leaned back in his chair and studied the monitors.

  Less than two minutes had passed since the silent alarms on the outside of the wall had been triggered. Downing, who had been on watch, had roused us and we were now gathered down in the basement. The women and children were locked in the secure room directly opposite the cell where we were keeping Brad, while Downing, Chung, Larsen and I kept watch from the control room at the other end of the basement. On the monitors our camouflaged cameras – ordinary game cameras with night vision – showed the attackers gathering on the inside of the wall and then spreading out to approach the house from different sides.

  ‘About thirty men,’ said Downing. ‘Various types of weapons but light, automatic rifles. I don’t see any hand grenades or flamethrowers, so this looks like a surgical attack – the only ones to die will be those who are meant to die.’

  All except Brad, I thought, but kept my mouth shut.

  ‘Night vision, same old type as mine. These are experienced veterans, boys. The worst type of opponent.’

  ‘There are so many of them,’ said Larsen. His voice was trembling. ‘Shouldn’t we detonate the mines now?’

  ‘That is scenario two,’ said Downing as he drummed with his fingers on the side of the keyboard. ‘What does that mean, Larsen?’

  Larsen gulped. ‘That we don’t activate the mines and booby traps until they start the attack,’ he whispered.

  ‘Precisely. Chung?’

  ‘Yes?’ said Chung, who had just come in after making sure all the women and children were safely locked inside the secure room.

  ‘When the mines and the booby traps start going off, switch on the current to the wall. I don’t want any of them escaping.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Adams, you pilot the drone and give us overhead views.’

  ‘Copy,’ I said, using the military jargon we had just adopted.

  ‘And, Larsen, you’re ready with the machine guns, right?

  ‘Yep,’ he said, adjusting his position in the chair and taking hold of the joystick on the remote control.

  All of us were trying to sound a bit tougher than we actually felt. At the same time I think we also felt a sort of excitement that the thing we had been preparing and steeling ourselves for was finally happening.

  ‘Right then, scenario two. When they start to move I’m going to count down to three and on zero we activate. Questions?’

  Silence.

  ‘Ready?’

  Yes, in three voices.

  A lot of things aren’t the way they seem in films.

  This wasn’t one of them.

  The next few seconds – because it lasted only a few seconds when we saw the recordings afterwards – were as unreal as anything I’ve seen on the big screen.

  When they attacked and we switched on the floodlights, when the mines started to explode and the body parts were flying through the air, when the booby-trapped shotguns cut down one attacker after another, when several of them desperately tried to retreat and climb back over the wall that was now live, and I saw through the drone camera how the jerking bodies fell to the ground, how the bullets from Larsen’s machine guns meant that they carried on jerking, it was really quite hard to believe it was all actually happening out there.

  Then the explosions and the gunfire stopped and suddenly everything was very quiet.

  Outside, some of the wounded began screaming for help. Larsen – who was sitting in a chair next to Downing and operating the machine guns through a joystick, the way you would in a computer game – had stopped shooting. Now he looked at the monitors, including the one showing the images from my drone. He used these to take aim. He fired only in short bursts, and with each burst there was one less cry for help.

  Soon all was deathly silence.

  We stared at the screens. There were bodies everywhere.

  ‘We’ve beaten them,’ said Chung cautiously, as though he didn’t quite believe what he was saying himself.

  ‘Yee-ha!’ Larsen hollered, his arms stretched up in the air. It was as though a light that had been turned off in his head for a long time was suddenly switched on again.

  I piloted the drone over the wall. A hundred metres down the hill three armoured trucks stood stationary, their engines turning over. And an SUV that I seemed to recognise.

  ‘They’ve got more men on the outside,’ I said. ‘Shall we turn on the loudspeakers and tell them we’re opening the gates so they can fetch their dead?’

  ‘Wait,’ said Downing. ‘Look.’

  He pointed to the alarm lights. One of them was on.

  ‘Someone’s broken the kitchen window,’ he said.

  I flew the drone back and sure enough, the shutter on the kitchen window had been twisted to one side, probably with a crowbar.

  ‘A passed pawn,’ said Downing. He put on his night vision and picked up his rifle. ‘Adams, you take over here.’

  The next moment he was out the door and had disappeared into the dark corridor outside.

  We looked at each other. ‘Passed pawn’ was a term we’d learned. It meant soldiers operating independently of the unit. Without waiting for orders they could react at lightning speed to any opportunities that suddenly opened up. We listened but we couldn’t hear Downing’s footsteps. He had briefly shown us a ninja technique for silent walking but there hadn’t been time to train in hand-to-hand fighting, we’d been so focused on making certain the walls were impregnable.

  We heard a bang that made us jump.

  Then a sound like someone falling down the basement stairs.

  We waited. I was holding the automatic shotgun so tightly my forearm ached.

  I counted to ten, and when Downing still hadn’t knocked I turned to the other two.

  ‘Downing’s dead,’ I said.

  ‘This passed pawn will never breach the secure room,’ Chung said confidently.

  ‘Yes, but he can get Brad out,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take a look.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ whispered Larsen. ‘The passed pawn has night vision – you won’t have a chance, Will!’

  ‘That is exactly my chance,’ I said, checking that my gun was loaded and the safety catch off.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I pointed to the control panel, to the switch that controlled all the lighting in the house.

  ‘Turn the light on when I go out, turn it off again in eight seconds, then on and off every five seconds.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Do as he says,’ said Chung, who I could see had got the idea.

  I opened the door and slipped out into the darkness.
The light went on. I ran towards the stairs, about as ninja-like as a rhinoceros. Downing lay there at the bottom. The night vision obscured his eyes but from the hole in his forehead I could see he was dead. I counted the seconds silently inside as I pulled the night vision off him. I sensed rather than heard the enemy approaching, hoping that the blinding of the light would delay him just long enough while he had to stop and remove the night vision.

  Six, seven.

  I had just got the night vision on when the light went again.

  Now I heard the steps, heading away. He was retreating, had to get his goggles on again.

  I followed the sound, trying to step more quietly but guessing he couldn’t hear me as well anyway now that he was on the move himself.

  I came to the T-junction with the security room to the right and Brad’s cell on the left. Counted. Three, four. Flipped up the goggles and slipped round the corner to the right as the light came on.

  Nothing.

  I turned and there he was, standing seven, eight metres away from me, in front of the door to Brad’s cell. Wearing black, not camouflage. He turned towards me, towards the light, for it was clear he could see nothing, and he lifted a hand to remove the goggles he had down over the balaclava.

  Maybe the balaclava made it easier, I don’t know, but I dropped to my knees, aimed and fired at him. To my amazement none of the bullets seemed to hit him. He tore off the goggles and tossed them away so they skidded over the floor and then he fired, the sounds echoing deafeningly around the stone walls. I didn’t feel any pain, just a pressure in my left shoulder, as though someone had given me a friendly shove. But I lost all strength in that arm and the rifle slipped to the floor.

  The passed pawn saw that I was helpless, but instead of firing wildly he took aim with the rifle steadied against his shoulder. It looked as though it was a point of honour for him to drop his enemy with a bullet through the forehead.

  I raised my right hand, the palm towards him, and for a fraction of a second he hesitated, as though this universal and timeless gesture of submission touched some instinct in him. Because that’s how I like to think of mercy.

  Five…

  Dark again, and I rolled from my kneeling position down and sideways as he fired. I pulled the goggles back down, saw the figure in the puke-green light, raised the rifle with my right hand and pulled the trigger. One shot. Then another. The second one got him. And the third. The fourth missed and ricocheted off the wall behind him. But the fifth hit, I think. And the sixth.

  The lights came on and went off twice before I had emptied the magazine.

  It was only later, after they had retrieved their dead and wounded, and I had taken off the night goggles, that it struck me: I no longer felt the dizziness and nausea I had felt earlier. On the contrary, I had never felt more balanced, more on top of things, clearer.

  And at about daybreak, for the first time since Amy disappeared, Heidi slipped across to me in bed and put her arms around me. I kissed her and then – more careful with each other than we usually were – we made love.

  X

  A few days after we had repulsed the attack, I was back on Rat Island. Again Colin was waiting for me on the jetty. He looked wasted. Not thinner, wasted.

  Rats darted back and forth in front of us on our way to the prison building.

  ‘There are more of them,’ I said, looking down at the sloping rocks which had been white the last time I was here. Now they looked black, not from the waves that broke over them as I had thought when I stood looking from the fishing boat on the way in, but because there were so many rats covering them.

  ‘I think they swim over in the night,’ said Colin, noticing the direction of my gaze. ‘They’re frightened.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of other rats. Those on the mainland are running out of food, they’ve started eating each other. So the smaller rats come over here.’

  ‘Won’t they start eating each other here too?’

  ‘In the end, yes.’

  We went inside, entering a part of the building that had been converted into a sort of mansion-type medieval castle. Liza was waiting at the top of the first-floor stairs and she shook my hand. Previously we would always hug each other. That was another of the customs that had vanished with the coming of the pandemic, although in our case now that wasn’t the only reason: Amy’s absence and Brad’s absence made the children almost painfully present.

  She excused herself, saying she had things to do, and disappeared, leaving Colin and I to enter the large and sparsely furnished dining room just in time to see an unusually large rat disappear through the door at the other end.

  ‘Damn, that was big,’ I said.

  ‘But not so big that it doesn’t run away from us and not the other way round,’ said Colin. ‘Although that’s probably just a matter of time,’ he added with a sigh.

  We sat down and two servants approached, placed white serviettes in our laps and served us directly from a steaming saucepan.

  ‘We can’t even serve the food from ordinary dishes,’ said Colin. ‘They’re everywhere and they’ll risk anything once they pick up the smell of food. And they reproduce faster than we’re able to shoot them.’

  I looked at the stringy lumps of meat in the brown stew in front of me. I presumed it was meat from animals we’re accustomed to eating, but once the thought had been planted the imagination wasn’t easy to stop.

  ‘It was good to come,’ said Colin, who didn’t seem to have much of an appetite either. ‘All things considered.’

  ‘You attacked us,’ I said. ‘You killed one of us.’

  ‘You killed nineteen of ours and you’re holding my son prisoner.’

  ‘He’s in custody,’ I said. ‘Awaiting a fair trial. The public prosecutor told you Brad was going to be charged, but you still attacked us. Because you know he’ll be found guilty.’

  ‘You’re putting yourself above the law.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t believe in the law.’

  ‘No, but you say you do, Will. And a man can only be condemned for betraying his own principles, not someone else’s.’

  ‘Or for not having any at all.’

  Colin forced a smile. I knew why. These were the kinds of exchanges we used to have when we were growing up together, starting in the days when we dominated the school debating society and developing still further once it became my job to oppose his sometimes over-hasty thought processes. As usual he was the one who had the last word:

  ‘Not having principles is also a principle, Will. As in, for example, adhering to the view that no principle shall be allowed to get in the way of your own survival and the survival of those closest to you.’

  I looked down at my hands. Usually they were shaking. It started at about the same time as the pandemic. But now they weren’t. ‘What do you want, Colin?’

  ‘I want Brad,’ he said. ‘And I want your villa.’

  I neither laughed nor forced a smile. I just placed my serviette on the table and stood up.

  ‘Wait.’ Colin got to his feet too. Held up a hand. ‘You haven’t heard my offer.’

  ‘You’ve got nothing I want, Colin. Don’t you understand that?’

  ‘Not you maybe, but what about Heidi and little Sam? What if I have something that can give them a new and better life, a chance to build a better society, one that follows the rule of law? Have you heard of the New Frontier? It’s an aircraft carrier. It’s sailing soon. There will be three thousand five hundred people on board. I’ve got three tickets on that boat. Bought them a while ago. Cost me a fortune. You can’t buy tickets any more, no matter how much you’re willing to pay. You get my three, and in exchange you give me Brad and the villa.’

  I shook my head. ‘Keep your tickets, Colin. Letting Brad get away unpunished would make a mockery of Amy’s memory.’

  �
��Ah, see how the noble Will Adams descends to our level. Suddenly it’s not about keeping strictly to one’s principles in the name of all mankind. Now it’s revenge for your daughter.’

  ‘It was a manner of speaking, Colin. Regardless of what I might think, Heidi would never agree to a trade-off like that.’

  ‘Women are often more pragmatic in such matters than men. They see the benefit to the community, they laugh at our obsession with pride and honour.’

  ‘So then I’ll give you your answer before she has the chance to contradict me. No.’

  * * *

  —

  On the way back down to the boat the rats didn’t run out of our way quite so quickly.

  ‘You weren’t afraid I might take you prisoner and offer a swap for Brad?’

  I shook my head. ‘Everyone in the house is agreed that we won’t give in to any form of blackmail if I don’t return. Even though I left no instructions about what to do about Brad in that case, I think we both know what would happen to him.’

  ‘He wouldn’t get the trial you want to give him.’

  Naturally he’d thought about it.

  ‘Is it because of the rats that you want to get away from here?’ I asked.

  Colin nodded. ‘Beth is ill. We think it’s typhoid – she might have got it from a rat bite. We’ve tried everything we can think of to kill the damn things without killing ourselves at the same time. Did you know that rats and humans share ninety-seven per cent of the same DNA? One day the rat-human will appear. If it hasn’t already.’

  ‘She’ll get better once she’s on board the carrier,’ I said. ‘I hear some of the best doctors in the country were offered tickets at discount prices.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Colin. ‘And yet you really are willing to deprive your family of those tickets because of a principle you know means nothing in the world of the rat?’

  I didn’t answer, just took the short step from the jetty and onto the fishing boat, turned and watched Colin grow smaller and smaller as we chugged away from the island.