The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

by Jo Nesbo

  But still something was bothering me. I knew him too well. He would never have let me get away so easily if he didn’t have a backup plan. Some kind of alternative.

  XI

  It’s night. I’m riding southwards and thinking back to the day Ragnar and the O’Leary twins took Dumbo. How different everything could have been. Or could it? Anyway, I’m headed for the slaughterhouse, and for the end of this story. Behind me is a spike strip and a guy who tried to stop me; there’s the house where I first met Will Adams, and the Lowe building where it looks like it won’t be long before the mob gets inside. Maybe everything is preordained, maybe people like me just do the bidding of fate. The fuel gauge is on red. OK, let fate decide if I’m to run out of petrol and things don’t end the way they were planned. Because something unexpected always happens. Like the way, for example, that Dumbo reappeared again a week after he disappeared.

  * * *

  —

  I’d lost hope of seeing Dumbo again when my phone rang. Maria woke me, pointing to it almost in fear. It hadn’t rung at all for the past couple of months because most of the networks were down and only one operator was still working.

  I picked up and heard Dumbo’s voice: ‘They’re allowing me one call.’

  He was in the prison in Downtown. It was the last one still in operation and being used to hold people in custody as well as prisoners serving long sentences. An hour later we sat facing each other on different sides of a thick partition in the large visiting room, each with a telephone in our hand. He was wearing a striped outfit. I’d called it retro, which at least made him laugh, since he realised I’d said something that was meant to be funny.

  Then he told me what had happened, and neither of us was laughing any more.

  After Ragnar and the others had kidnapped Dumbo they’d taken him to Chaos’s new clubhouse. From Dumbo’s description I knew it had to be in the abandoned slaughterhouse down by the oilfield, on the road out to the airport. One evening Ragnar had brought a man back to the slaughterhouse and told those Dumbo shared the room with to get out.

  ‘Ragnar pointed to me and said I was perfect,’ said Dumbo. ‘The man could have me if he got the gang somewhere decent to live, a new bike for Ragnar, twelve Kalashnikovs and fifty bazookas and fifty hand grenades. Plus one hundred and fifty grams of meth, two hundred tabs of Rohypnol, two hundred antabiato…no, anta…’

  ‘Antibiotics,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, and –’

  ‘That’ll do,’ I said. Sometimes Dumbo had a surprisingly good memory for details, especially insignificant details. ‘But the man wasn’t going to pay all that for just one night, was he?’

  ‘No,’ said Dumbo. ‘For the rest of his life.’

  ‘So he was from that club down by the docks.’

  ‘No, he was from Rat Island, he said.’

  ‘And? Did he say what he wanted you to do?’

  ‘Yes. It was Ragnar said it.’

  ‘What did Ragnar say?’

  ‘Ragnar said I was to tell the police who would be coming soon that I hit that girl on the head with a golf club. And I was to say the same thing to the judge.’

  I stared at him. ‘And if you didn’t?’

  Dumbo’s large eyes filled with tears and his voice trembled. ‘He said they would feed me to the rats on Rat Island.’

  ‘Then of course you had to say yes. But when the judge heard that…’

  ‘I didn’t say yes,’ Dumbo said, his voice still choked. ‘I said no. Because that would mean I would have to be in jail for the rest of my life, and I didn’t want that.’

  ‘I understand. But you told the police you did it – that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? That was very clever, because they can’t feed you to the rats before you tell the judge they threatened you.’

  ‘No!’ shouted Dumbo and beat his forehead against the glass screen. He sometimes did that when he got frustrated because he couldn’t explain what he meant. I saw a warden making his way towards us.

  ‘Easy, Dumbo.’

  ‘They didn’t threaten me. They threatened you! They said they’d kill Yvonne if I didn’t do as they said.’

  I took it in, piece by piece. Those bastards. All they need to know is what’s irreplaceable for someone. Once they know that they’ve got them. Or got her.

  Behind me the warden coughed. I put my hand to the glass screen.

  ‘I’ll get you out of here, Dumbo. I promise. I’ll get you out. You hear?’

  Dumbo pressed his hand up against mine on the glass wall and the tears came rolling down his cheeks.

  * * *

  —

  ‘One minute. The helicopter will be landing in one minute!’

  Of course it feels absurd to be standing here on top of a skyscraper twirling a glass of champagne while down below us civilisation as we know it is falling apart. On the other hand it wouldn’t feel much less absurd without the champagne.

  The lieutenant approaches, whispers something in Colin’s ear, then runs back to the helicopter deck where the last of the rich and privileged wait to be lifted up and whisked away to a fresh start on board the New Frontier.

  ‘He says the mob has got inside,’ says Colin. ‘But my people have cut the cable to the lifts so they’ll have to fight their way up the stairs. Do you know, by the way, why staircases in old castles and cathedrals always run clockwise going upwards?’ As usual Colin Lowe doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘It gave the defenders the advantage over their attackers because they could use their swords in their right hands.’

  ‘Interesting,’ I say. ‘Incidentally, is there a way down that doesn’t run the risk of getting your head chopped off? For those not travelling on the helicopter, I mean.’

  ‘Sure. Relax, everything’ll be fine. Look, there it is.’

  A moving point of light comes swaying towards us. I look down into my glass, at the bubbles released from the bottom of it and rising up to the surface. Inexorable as a physical law.

  ‘Tell me, Colin, were you infected with fear? Like the rats?’

  Colin looks at me in some surprise. He hasn’t yet raised his glass for the toast I know he’s planning to make. To friendship, to family, to the good life. The three regulars.

  ‘What are you thinking of?’ he asks.

  ‘When you bought Dumbo’s confession. Did you panic?’

  Colin shakes his head. ‘I don’t know to what extent a father is capable of rational thought when it comes to his own son or daughter, but when this Ragnar contacted me and said he had an offer I couldn’t refuse, he turned out to be right.’

  ‘Your conscience didn’t bother you?’

  ‘As you know, Will, mine is not as active as yours. So no, it didn’t make too much noise. According to Ragnar, Dumbo was so severely mentally handicapped he was unfit to plead and by law couldn’t be punished anyway.’

  ‘It isn’t that simple, Colin. And I think you know it.’

  ‘You’re right. It’s probably that I wanted it to be that simple. Anyway, it seemed to me he deserves whatever punishment they can give him. Ragnar told me he raped Heidi.’

  I grip the stem of the glass so tightly that for a moment I’m certain I’ll snap it. Against the orange sky of evening I see the helicopter approaching between the skyscrapers. It makes me think of a grasshopper. Like that lovely, pea-green specimen I took home with me from my grandmother’s farm one summer holiday. On the drive home I had it in a jam jar with a hole punched in the lid. But when we arrived it was dead, and for years afterwards my father would reminisce about it at family gatherings, about how inconsolable I had been, that I’d pushed a pin into my fingertip as a way of punishing myself. I could never understand why the grown-ups laughed.

  ‘I’m thinking about what happened afterwards,’ I say.

  ‘You know very well I had nothing to do with that,’ sighs Colin.


  ‘But you could have prevented it.’

  ‘The list of our sins of omission is infinitely long, Will. Of course you can accuse me of lacking the imagination to realise the extent of Ragnar’s cynicism. But had he asked me I would never have allowed it to happen.’

  By now I can just about hear the helicopter, the rotor blades whipping the air, the drone of the engine.

  * * *

  —

  It was raining next day when I went to the courthouse. I wasn’t allowed to see Dumbo but heard that his defence lawyer was someone named Marvin Green, from the firm of Amber & Doherty. It took me the rest of the day to find the firm’s offices; apparently they’d moved from the address I got at the courthouse and were now located in a graffiti-covered office block. I wasn’t allowed in, just told through the door phone that Green wasn’t there. When I asked where I could find him, said it was urgent because I had information concerning one of his cases, the person at the other end just laughed. She said I would either find Green at the pub on the corner or he’d gone home for the day. I went to the pub, heard from the barman that Green had just left, went back to the office block and after a lot of fuss and bother got Green’s address. It was pouring with rain and riding up the hill was like riding up a stream.

  The address wasn’t far from the villa we’d been driven out of. But this was a small house, almost a bungalow, the type of place the artists who first moved up here long ago built for themselves. But it had steel gates and walls with embedded glass and barbed wire.

  I rang the bell.

  ‘Who is it?’ said a hoarse, slurred voice though the speaker on the wall.

  I looked up into the camera on the gatepost, gave my name and said I had information that could help Mr Green in his defence of Gabriel Norton, aka my friend Dumbo.

  I heard the chinking of glass. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘You mean come in?’

  ‘Go on, as in “talk”. I don’t let strangers in.’

  So I said what I had to say standing out there in the rain. That Dumbo hadn’t killed Amy but was the victim of a plot aimed at whitewashing the rich man’s son Brad Lowe. It was a long speech and since I was neither interrupted nor given any other sign that anyone was listening I began to wonder whether Green had just hung up. But at least no one came out to chase me off so I carried on talking. Told him how Dumbo and I – back before we knew each other – almost by chance had saved each other’s lives in a fire, and how we’d stuck together since then. We’d joined a gang, and that’s how we managed to survive. I said there were probably a lot of things Dumbo was guilty of, but not the killing of Amy. I’d been in the house and could give him an alibi for the time the murder was committed.

  I was finished, and so wet and cold my teeth were chattering as I stood there staring at that perforated brass plate below the bell. I had considered telling him that I had actually seen Brad killing Amy but decided that with Brad’s father on the warpath it would endanger not just my life but Dumbo’s and Maria’s too. My goal was to get Dumbo out; what happened to Brad was a matter of indifference to me.

  ‘Mr Green?’ I said.

  Silence. Then a wet coughing. And then that hoarse voice, a little less slurred now: ‘I’ll need your address if I’m going to call you as a witness.’

  I gave the address where Maria and I lived, dictating the flat number so slowly and carefully that even a drunkard defence lawyer who’d long ago stopped caring about anything would be able to get it right.

  ‘It’ll be safest for you if you don’t talk to anyone about what you know, or tell anyone you’ve been here,’ he said. ‘I’ll contact you – don’t contact me.’

  On the driver down afterwards I had to stop on a bend. A coyote stood motionless in the middle of the road and looked at me. The eyes reflected light, and I almost thought it was a ghost. Coyotes usually run, but this one stood its ground. Like me. I thought of getting the Remington out and shooting it – we were out of meat, and maybe this would be edible if you cooked it long enough – then remembered that Ragnar and the twins had taken the gun. I waited for the coyote to move, but it didn’t. Instead two more came slinking into the street light.

  Just recently there had been more of them on the roads; not just coyotes but more animals in general. And fewer people. At night I could ride through one district after another and never see a soul. Were they all staying indoors, the way people did during the pandemic? Or had they left the city and moved out to the countryside?

  I automatically checked the rear-view mirror to see if there were any coyotes behind me as well.

  No. Not yet.

  I revved the engine, opened the throttle and rode at them, horn blaring.

  The coyotes didn’t seem particularly afraid. They moved reluctantly out of the way. One of them snapped at me as I rode by.

  XII

  When I got back from Rat Island the last time I hadn’t told Heidi I’d turned down Colin’s offer of tickets on the New Frontier aircraft carrier. Not that I thought she would have agreed to the trade-off, because I felt sure she was as determined as I was that Brad should stand trial for what he’d done. But at least in not knowing there was a choice she was spared the dilemma, and the gnawing doubt about whether we had made the right decision in depriving Sam of what was perhaps – what was actually pretty definitely – his chance of a better life.

  At the same time I was still waiting for Colin to make his next move. If he had an alternative plan to free Brad, and it succeeded, wouldn’t I then bitterly regret that I had turned down his offer? Or would I continue to feel that I had done the right thing, responded the way a decent and upright person should respond? Maybe I wouldn’t have the satisfaction of seeing my daughter’s killer get his just punishment, but at least I hadn’t lost my soul.

  And then it came. The next move.

  I was in the garden when Adele Matheson phoned me and told me the news over a very poor connection. That a certain Gabriel Norton, nicknamed Dumbo, had confessed to Amy’s murder. And unless the confession was withdrawn, or evidence produced that exonerated Norton, then naturally she couldn’t proceed with the case against Brad Lowe.

  I said that this was Colin Lowe’s doing. That either this Dumbo was taking one for the team, or else they were threatening him with something that was worse than life imprisonment.

  ‘We can’t exclude the possibility,’ said Matheson. ‘But…’

  She didn’t need to finish. As long as we couldn’t prove that Dumbo was lying or being manipulated, then there wasn’t much we could do.

  I leaned against a tree, checked that Heidi and Sam were too far away to overhear anything, and tried to gather my thoughts. Adele Matheson waited patiently, but all I could do was open and close my mouth. Not a word came out.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said after a few moments. ‘We must just hope that this Dumbo changes his story or fails to convince the court that he’s a killer. I heard one detective say that they can’t quite get the angle between the point of impact and the golf club to add up with the fact that Norton is a dwarf.’

  ‘A dwarf?’

  ‘I’m sorry, short. Or whatever the prevailing euphemism is. Anyway, circumstantial technical evidence like that doesn’t count for much when there’s a confession.’

  I was only half listening. Thinking. So the one who’d confessed was the boy who’d rung the bell that evening with the girl. The same two I had let go the night we took the villa.

  ‘I’ll talk to him,’ I said.

  ‘By all means, try,’ said Matheson.

  ‘I mean it. I stopped one of ours from shooting him and the girl when they escaped on her motorcycle. He might be aware of the fact that I…well, that I saved their lives. Maybe I can get him to feel he owes me something in return.’

  Matheson didn’t reply.

  ‘I’ll keep you posted,’ I said.
>
  ‘Then goodbye.’ She said it the way you say goodbye to someone you think it’s unlikely you’ll be seeing again.

  XIII

  I was searched before being allowed into the large visiting room. Four other visitors were already inside, talking on the phone to inmates behind the glass partition – it was just like when I visited Maria in hospital during the pandemic. The warden indicated my chair, number eight. Dumbo wasn’t there yet.

  I was looking forward to telling him I had spoken to his lawyer and that he would be calling me as a witness so that I could give Dumbo an alibi. We were just to say that we were together, nothing about how I’d seen through the keyhole that it was Brad. That way everything would be fine. We wouldn’t be lying, we just weren’t telling them everything.

  As I took my seat I saw a familiar face behind the glass in number-one booth, in the far corner. It was Kevin Wankel. So it was here the stupid meathead was serving his life sentence.

  I sat waiting and watching for Dumbo to come through the door.

  It didn’t look as though Kevin had a lot to say to his visitor. They sat in their respective chairs, her slumped, him with his greasy hair and the stubby brown teeth in his meths mouth.

  Then the door at the back on the prisoners’ side opened and Dumbo came in wearing the same striped prison outfit. His face lit up when he saw me, and I guess mine did too. The warden behind him said something I couldn’t hear through the glass and pointed to the chair in front of me.

  As Dumbo started walking towards me I sensed a movement in my peripheral vision. I didn’t immediately react to it; Kevin had obviously suddenly made up his mind the visit was over and was heading towards the exit door and Dumbo. As he came closer I noticed he was holding his hand inside the back of his trousers.

  I jumped up and yelled, but that damn glass wall reaching up to the ceiling choked off most of the sound.