“Dad? The phone we sent in for the perpetrator, where did we find it when we came in?” Jack suddenly asks.
“It was there, on that little table,” Jim says.
“That explains it,” Jack sighs.
“Explains what?”
“We’ve been thinking about this wrong all along.”
45
Witness Interview
Date: December 30
Name of witness: “Jules” and “Ro”
JACK: Because you’re witnesses to such a serious offense as this, I really must insist on being able to speak to you separately rather than both at the same time.
JULES: Why?
JACK: Because that’s just the way it is.
JULES: Sorry, but has your body been taken over by a demon that sounds like my mother? What do you mean, “just the way it is”?
JACK: You’re witnesses in a criminal investigation. There are rules.
JULES: Is either of us suspected of committing a crime, then?
JACK: No.
JULES: Well, then. Then we’ll do this together. You know why?
JACK: No.
JULES: Because that’s just the way it is!
JACK: Christ, if there’s ever been a more difficult group of witnesses, I have no idea where that could have been.
JULES: Excuse me?
JACK: I didn’t say anything.
JULES: Yes you did, I heard you muttering.
JACK: It was nothing. Okay, you win, you can do this together!
RO: Jules is just worried I’ll say something stupid if she isn’t here.
JULES: Quiet now, darling.
RO: See?
JACK: For God’s sake, don’t you two ever stop babbling? I said okay! I’ll interview you both at the same time! But this isn’t how it’s supposed to work!
RO: Do you have to be so angry?
JACK: I’m not angry!
RO: Okay.
JULES: Yeah, right.
JACK: I need your real names.
RO: These are our real names.
JACK: They’re nicknames, surely?
JULES: Please, can’t you just focus on the interview? It doesn’t really matter, does it? I need to go to the toilet.
JACK: Okay, okay, sure. Because “what’s your name?” is a really complicated question.
JULES: Stop muttering and just ask your questions.
JACK: Right, I’m just a police officer, so obviously it’s perfectly reasonable for you to decide what goes on in here.
JULES: What?
JACK: Nothing. I just need to confirm that the two of you were inside the apartment for the entirety of the hostage situation. Were you?
RO: I don’t know about “hostage situation.” That sounds very harsh.
JULES: Please, Ro, pull yourself together now. What do you think we were if we weren’t hostages? Accidentally threatened with a pistol?
RO: We were more just an unfortunate consequence of some bad decisions.
JULES: Because someone tripped and happened to slip inside a ski mask?
JACK: Please, can you both just try to focus on my question?
JULES: Which one?
JACK: Were you inside the apartment the whole time?
RO: Jules was in the hobby room for quite a long time.
JULES: It’s not a hobby room!
RO: Closet, then. Stop being picky.
JULES: You know perfectly well what it’s called.
JACK: You were in the closet? How long for? I mean, how long before you came out of the closet?
JULES: What did you just say?
JACK: I mean, well, no, that’s not what I mean.
JULES: Right. So what exactly did you mean, then?
JACK: Nothing. I didn’t mean “come out of the closet” in any way except in relation to the fact that you were physically inside a… well, a closet.
JULES: We were in the apartment the whole time.
RO: Why do you sound so angry?
JULES: Maybe it’s the hormones, Ro? Is that what you’re trying to say?
RO: No, it really isn’t. Well, I certainly didn’t actually say that, in which case it doesn’t count.
JACK: I appreciate that you’ve had a difficult day, but I’m just trying to understand where everyone was at various times. For instance, when the pizzas were delivered.
RO: Why’s that important?
JACK: That’s the last time we know for certain that the perpetrator was in the apartment.
RO: I was sitting on the chaise longue when we had the pizza.
JACK: What’s that?
JULES: That bit at the end of the sofa. Kind of like a divan.
RO: No it isn’t—how many times do I have to tell you that it’s nothing like a divan? Do you know how you can tell that a chaise longue isn’t a divan? Because then it would be a divan!
JULES: Give me strength! Are we going to have the same argument now as when I didn’t know what a commode was? Do you know what a commode is?
JACK: Me? It’s a type of lizard, isn’t it?
JULES: See? I told you.
RO: It’s not a lizard!
JULES: It’s that cabinet in the bathroom, under the washbasin, apparently.
JACK: I had no idea.
JULES: No normal person knows that.
RO: Did you both grow up in caves? Seriously? A commode is a kind of cousin to a vanity. You know what one of those is, presumably?
JACK: Yes, I know what a vanity is.
JULES: How can you know that and yet still call a wardrobe a walk-in closet?
RO: Because a wardrobe is a word used by someone who blogs about juicing and hasn’t pooped a solid turd for three years, whereas a vanity is a proper piece of furniture!
JULES: See what I have to put up with? She was obsessed with vanities and commodes for three months last year because she was going to be a cabinetmaker. Just before she was going to be a yoga instructor, and just after she was going to be a hedge fund manager.
RO: Why do you always have to exaggerate? I was never going to be a hedge fund manager.
JULES: What were you going to be, then?
RO: A day trader.
JULES: What’s the difference?
RO: I didn’t get around to learning that. That was around the time I started to get interested in cheese.
JACK: I’d like us to go back to my question.
RO: You look stressed. It’s not good to bite your tongue like that.
JACK: I’d be less stressed if you just answered the question.
JULES: We sat on the sofa and ate pizza. That’s the answer to your question.
JACK: Thank you! And who was in the apartment at that time?
JULES: The two of us. Estelle. Zara. Lennart. Anna-Lena and Roger. The bank robber.
JACK: And the real estate agent?
JULES: Of course.
JACK: And where was the real estate agent?
JULES: Just then?
JACK: Yes.
JULES: Am I your GPS or something?
JACK: I just want you to verify that everyone else was sitting around the table eating pizza.
JULES: I suppose so.
JACK: You suppose so?
JULES: What’s your problem? I’m pregnant and there were people with guns, I had a lot of things to think about, I’m not some preschool teacher counting knapsacks on a bus.
RO: Is this a candy?
JACK: It’s an eraser.
JULES: Stop eating everything!
RO: I was only asking!
JULES: You know she opens the fridge in every apartment we look at? Do you think that’s acceptable behavior?
JACK: I really don’t care.
RO: They want you to look in the fridge. That’s all part of the real estate agent’s so-called “homestyling,” everyone knows that. Once I found tacos. They still rank in the top three tacos I’ve ever eaten.
JULES: Hang on, you ate the tacos?
RO: They want you to.
JULES: You ate food you found in some stranger’s fridge? Are you kidding?
RO: What’s wrong with that? It was chicken. Well, I think it was chicken. Everything tastes like chicken when it’s been in the fridge awhile. Apart from turtle. Have I told you about the time I ate turtle?
JULES: What? No! Stop talking now, I’m going to throw up, seriously.
RO: What do you mean, stop talking? You’re the one who keeps saying you want us to know everything about each other!
JULES: Well, I’ve changed my mind. Right now I think we know just the right amount about each other.
RO: Do you think it’s weird to eat tacos at a viewing?
JACK: I’d appreciate it if you didn’t involve me in this.
JULES: He thinks it’s sick.
RO: He didn’t say that! You know what is sick? Jules hides candy and chocolate. What sort of adult does that?
JULES: I hide expensive chocolate, sure, because I’m married to a wormhole.
RO: She’s lying. One time I discovered she’d bought sugar-free chocolate. Sugar-free! And then she hid that as well, as if I wouldn’t even be able to stop myself eating sugar-free chocolate, like some bloody psychopath.
JULES: And then you ate it.
RO: To teach you a lesson. Not because I enjoyed it.
JULES: Okay, I’m ready to answer your questions now!
JACK: Wow. Lucky me.
JULES: Do you want to ask your questions or not?
JACK: Okay. When the perpetrator let you go, and you left the apartment, do you remember who went downstairs with you?
JULES: All the hostages, of course.
JACK: Can you list them, please, in the order you remember them going down the stairs?
JULES: Sure. Me and Ro, Estelle, Lennart, Zara, Anna-Lena, and Roger.
JACK: What about the real estate agent?
JULES: Okay, and the real estate agent.
JACK: The real estate agent must have been with you as well?
JULES: Are we nearly finished here?
RO: I’m hungry.
46
All professions have their technical aspects that outsiders don’t understand, tools and implements and complicated terminology. Perhaps the police force has more than most, its language is constantly changing, older officers lose track of it at the same rate that younger officers invent it. So Jim didn’t know what the damn thing was called, the telephone thingy. He just knew that there was something special about it that meant you could make calls even though there was hardly any signal, and that Jack was delighted that the station had been given one. Jack was perhaps capable of being more delighted by telephone thingies than Jim thought was strictly reasonable, but it was this phone they had sent in to the bank robber at the end of the hostage drama, so it turned out to be fairly useful after all. It was actually Jim who came up with the idea, which he was not a little proud of. Just after the hostages had been released, the negotiator had called the bank robber on that phone in an attempt to negotiate a peaceful surrender. That was when they heard the shot.
Naturally, Jack has explained the technology in the phone to Jim in great detail, so obviously Jim still calls it “that special telephone thingy which gets a bloody signal where there isn’t a bloody signal.” When they were about to send it in to the bank robber, obviously Jack told Jim to make sure the ringtone was set properly. Which of course it wasn’t.
* * *
Jack is looking around the apartment.
“Dad, did you make sure the ringtone on that phone was switched on when we sent it in?”
“Yes. Yes. Yes, of course,” Jim replies.
“So… no, then?”
“I might have forgotten that. Maybe.”
Jack rubs his whole face with his palms in frustration.
“Could it have been on vibrate?”
“It could have been, yes.”
Jack reaches out and touches the little table where the phone had been lying when they stormed the apartment. It’s barely standing up on three legs, a definite challenge to gravity. He looks at the place on the floor where they found the pistol. Then he follows something invisible with his gaze and goes over to the green curtain. The bullet is in the wall.
“The perpetrator didn’t shoot himself,” Jack says in a low voice.
Then it dawns on him that the perpetrator wasn’t even in the apartment when the shot was fired.
“I don’t get it,” Jim says behind him, not angrily like some dads would, but proudly, like only a few dads can. Jim likes hearing his son explain the reasoning behind his conclusions, but there’s no satisfaction in Jack’s voice when he does so now. “The phone was on that wobbly table, Dad. The pistol must have been lying next to it. When we called the phone after all the hostages had been released, it started to vibrate, the table shook, and the pistol fell to the floor and fired. We thought the perpetrator shot himself, but he wasn’t even here. He was already gone. The blood… the stage blood or whatever the hell it is… must have been poured out in advance.”
Jim looks at his son for a long time. Then scratches his stubble.
“Do you know something? On the one hand this seems like the smartest crime in the world…”
Jack nods, stroking the large lump on his forehead, and finishes his dad’s thought for him: “… but on the other, it seems to have been carried out by a complete idiot.”
At least one of them is right.
* * *
Jack sinks down onto the sofa, and Jim collapses on it as if he’s been pushed. Jack picks up his bag, takes out all the notes from the witness interviews, and spreads them out around him without explaining what he’s doing. He reads through everything one more time. When he puts the last page down, he bites his way methodically along his tongue, because that’s where Jack’s stress lives.
“I’m an idiot,” he says.
“Why?” Jim wonders.
“Bloody hell! Bloody, bloody… I’m an idiot! How many people were in the apartment, Dad?”
“You mean how many prospective buyers?”
“No, I mean in total, how many people were there in total in the apartment?”
Jim starts waffling, in the hope that it will make him sound like he understands anything of all this: “Let’s see… seven prospective buyers. Or, well… there were really only those two, Ro and Jules, and Roger and Anna-Lena, and Estelle, who wasn’t really interested in buying the apartment…”
“That’s five,” Jack nods impatiently.
“Five, yes. That’s it, yes. And then there’s Zara, we don’t really know why she was there. And then there’s Lennart, who was there because Anna-Lena had hired him. So that makes… one, two, three, four, five…”
“Seven people in total!” Jack nods.
“Plus the perpetrator,” Jim adds.
“Exactly. But also… plus the real estate agent.”
“Plus the real estate agent, yes, so that makes nine, then!” Jim says, immediately cheered by his own mathematical prowess.
“Are you sure, Dad?” Jack sighs.
He looks at his dad for a long time, waiting for him to realize, but gets no response. Absolutely none at all. Just two eyes staring at him the way they did many years ago after they’d watched a film together, and Jack had to explain at the end: “But, Dad, the bald guy was dead, that’s why only the little kid could see him!” And his dad exclaimed: “What? Was he a ghost? No, he couldn’t have been, because we could see him!”
She laughed at that, Jim’s wife and Jack’s mom, God, how she laughed. God, how they miss her. She’s still the one who makes them more understanding toward each other, even though she’s no longer here.
* * *
Jim aged badly after she died, became a lesser man, never quite able to breathe back in all the air that had gone out of him. When he sat in the hospital that night, life felt like an icy crevice, and when he lost his grip on the edge and slipped down into the darkness inside him, he whispered angrily to Jack: “I’ve tried ta
lking to God, I really have tried, but what sort of God makes a priest this sick? She’s never done anything but good for other people, so what sort of God gives an illness like this to her?!”
Jack had no answer then, and he has no answer now. He just sat quietly in the waiting room and held his dad until it was impossible to tell whose tears were running down his neck. The following morning they were angry at the sun for rising, and couldn’t forgive the world for living on without her.
But when it was time, Jack got to his feet, grown-up and straight-backed, walked through a series of doors, and stopped outside her room. He was a proud young man, certain in his beliefs, he wasn’t religious and his mom had never said a single stern word to him about that. She was the sort of priest who got shouted at by everyone, by religious people for not being religious enough, and by everyone else because she was religious at all. She had been to sea with sailors, in the desert with soldiers, in prison with inmates, and in hospitals with sinners and atheists. She liked a drink and could tell dirty jokes, no matter who she was with. If anyone even asked what God would think about that, she always replied: “I don’t think we agree about everything, but I have a feeling He knows I’m doing the best I can. And I think maybe He knows I work for Him, because I try to help people.” If anyone asked her to sum up her view of the world, she always quoted Martin Luther: “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” Her son loved her, but she never managed to get him to believe in God, because although you might be able to drum religion into people, you can’t teach faith. But that night, all alone at the end of a dimly lit corridor in a hospital where she had held so many dying people by the hand, Jack sank to his knees and asked God not to take his mom away from him.
When God took her anyway, Jack went into her bed, held her hand too hard in his, as if he were hoping she might wake up and tell him off. Then he whispered disconsolately: “Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll take care of Dad.”
Anxious People: A Novel Page 18