by Jo Nesbo
The plain-clothes policeman – who had introduced himself as a detective when they picked me up earlier – coughed and the stocky figure turned.
‘Thank you for coming so quickly,’ said Imma Aluariz.
I felt like saying it was they who had come quickly but just nodded.
‘First I would like you to identify the body, Mister Daas.’ She stepped to one side.
I don’t know whether it’s the brain protecting itself or the brain in flight when it starts to follow quite irrelevant trains of thought in situations like that. Because what I thought at the sight of the white duvet cover and sheet against the pillowcase that was soaked in something red that had to be blood was that it was a very apt combination for San Fermín. The same way the steak knife sticking out on one side of Peter’s neck was an apt image of the bull with the handle of the matador’s sword sticking out between his shoulder blades.
‘It is my friend,’ I said, my voice shaking. ‘It is Peter Coates.’
I could feel Aluariz’s eyes on me, but knew I had no need to act shocked because I was shocked. And yet I wasn’t.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
Aluariz’s gaze moved from me to the policeman in plain clothes. He nodded and said something in Basque.
‘What did he say?’ I asked.
‘That both girls say you have been with them since this morning,’ said Aluariz. She seemed to be weighing something up before she continued. ‘It looks as though your friend has committed suicide. According to the pathologist it must have been some time between ten and twelve o’clock. The landlady found him.’
‘I see,’ was all I said. ‘How do you know it was suicide?’
‘We fingerprinted the handle of the knife and the only print we found was identical with his own.’
Identical, I thought. And yet not his own. The knife was from Jake’s.
‘What’s interesting is that he looks very like the corpse in San Sebastián. Could almost be his twin, don’t you think? And if that’s the case, why didn’t you say anything?’
I shook my head. ‘I never heard anything about Peter having a twin brother, and actually I don’t think they are very similar. I mean, the body in San Sebastián was younger, you can see that for yourself. And the hair was longer and fairer. And it didn’t have that tattoo.’ I pointed to the faded M on the chest.
‘They could still be twins even if they don’t have the same tattoo.’
I shrugged. ‘I can understand why you think the two of them look alike. It’s not easy for me to tell one Basque person from another.’
She gave me a sharp look.
I shrugged.
She took out a notebook. ‘Can you think of any reason why your friend would want to take his own life?’
I shook my head.
‘Could it be a guilty conscience because he killed someone in San Sebastián?’ she asked.
‘Is that what you suspect?’
‘The rug the body was found in is from the rooms you shared. We found your DNA there.’
‘In that case I should be a suspect too.’
‘Killers – unless they’re mad – don’t get in touch with the police and provide them with conclusive evidence but no confession. And you are not mad, Mister Daas.’
Oh yes, I thought. I’m mad all right. And if I told you my version of what’s happened you would think so too. And in parallel universes maybe that was exactly what I was doing now, and in many of them – in an infinity of them – I would be locked up in a mental hospital.
‘I need to hear exactly what you know of Peter Coates’s movements from the time you arrived in San Sebastián,’ she said.
‘If you want a statement from me I must tell you, I’m very tired,’ I said. ‘And not completely sober either. Can we do this tomorrow?’
Aluariz exchanged looks with her plain-clothes colleague. His head bobbed about a bit, as though he were weighing it up. Then he nodded.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘We’ve no reason to detain you, you’re not a suspect in either of these cases. And since our prime suspect is now dead, there’s no rush. Ten o’clock at the police station here in San Sebastián, does that sound all right?’
‘Fine.’
* * *
—
The sun was shining and the reflection from the water blinded me as I took off the sunglasses and wiped away my tears.
From where I was sitting on the hill on the deserted point of land I could see the whole of the Zurriola beach. I thought of my best friend. And of the one who was swimming in the sea below me. The woman we both had to have at any cost. Maybe he would have left her. In some universes at least he would have done. Same goes for me. But that didn’t matter, not now and not in this universe, not in this story. So once I had dried my tears I went back to this story, to my story. I picked up the binoculars and located the pink bathing cap out there in the water. I couldn’t hear her screams but training the binoculars on the beach three hundred metres further in I could see the mother – as before – running around and alerting the sunbathers to her daughter’s cries for help. I turned the binoculars to the lifeguard’s raised seat. Just as before, Miriam and her mother had waited to give their performance until the lifeguard on duty had taken a trip to the booths at the back of the beach to use the toilet.
A surfer ran down to the water, lay flat on his board and began paddling out towards Miriam. But this time she’d swum further out and he wouldn’t make it before she disappeared. And now she ducked down below the surface and was lost to sight. I counted the seconds. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. Her lung capacity was really impressive – I’d been astonished when we ran through the whole operation the day before. The surfer reached the point at which he’d seen her disappear, slipped off his board and dived down. I moved the binoculars fifty – sixty – metres closer, to the shore directly below me, where the sea washed calmly over the parallel rows of stone that ran down from the deserted and uninviting water’s edge and out into the sea. She’d removed her bathing cap, and I could only just make out the head with the dark hair breaking the surface for a couple of seconds as she drew breath before vanishing beneath the waves again.
I lay back in the grass. Soon she would be here. Disguised as someone else. And yet the same person. And we would try to sneak out of the country and enter another reality. A fresh start, with fresh opportunities. I realised I was still counting, but that now I was counting down. Counting down what was left of my old life. A high, piercing sound reached my ears, too high for a grasshopper or a cricket. A solitary male cicada looking for a female, with a sound that could carry for miles. That’s a long way for such a small creature, I thought.
Soon, I could imagine I was already hearing her footsteps. I closed my eyes. And when I opened them again, I saw her. And for a fleeting instant the thought struck me: that I had been here, just like this, before.
THE ANTIDOTE
somewhere there‘s a harsh cry from a bird. Or maybe it’s some other kind of creature, Ken doesn’t know. He holds the test tube up against the white sun, pushes the tip of the needle down through the plastic cap and draws the clear, yellowish liquid up into the barrel. A drop of sweat finds a way down between his close-set eyebrows and he curses under his breath as the salt stings his eye.
The constant and already deafening droning of the insects seems just to get louder. He looks at his father, sitting with his back against a grey tree trunk, the skin almost blending with the bark. Light flickers across his face and his khaki shirt, as though he were sitting beneath a disco ball in one of Ken’s favourite London clubs. But he is actually sitting by the bank of a river in the east of Botswana and staring up into the lattice of trembling leaves that filter the sunlight through what Ken Abbott does not know is an acacia xanthophloea, a fever tree. Ken Abbott doesn’t know very much at all about the burning hot, green and nightmarish wo
rld around him. All he knows is that he has very little time to save the life of the person who means more to him than anyone else on earth.
* * *
—
Emerson Abbott never had great ambitions for his son. He had seen too many examples of the tragic results the pressure of such expectations in upper-class families could have on the children. He didn’t even need to look far. Not even as far as those public-school friends of his who had failed to achieve the successes expected of them, and who drank until every bottle in the world was dry before plucking up courage for the great leap, from penthouse apartments in Kensington or Hampstead and five floors down to where the asphalt is just as hard as it is in Brixton and Tottenham. Not even as far as Archie, the nephew whom he had last seen among bloodstained sheets and disposable needles in a hotel room in Amsterdam, with the mark of the angel of death’s kiss already shaped on his lips, who had refused to go home with him and carelessly pointed a revolver in his direction in a way that told Emerson Archie didn’t much care which way it was pointing when he pulled the trigger.
No, Emerson didn’t need to look far. Only as far as the mirror.
For nearly thirty years he had been an unhappy publisher who published books written by idiots that were about idiots and that were bought by idiots. But there were enough of these idiots for Emerson in the course of his professional career to have tripled the already considerable family fortune, a fact that gave greater pleasure to his wife Emma than it did to himself. He could well remember that warm summer day in Cornwall when they got married, but he had forgotten why. Perhaps she was just in the right place at the right time, and from the right family, and in a very short while he no longer knew which interested him less: the money, the books or his wife. He had hinted at the possibility of divorce, and three weeks later she had told him, radiant with joy, that she was pregnant. Emerson experienced a deep and sincere happiness that lasted for about ten days. By the time he sat in the waiting room at St Mary’s Hospital he was unhappy again. It was a boy. They named him Ken after Emerson’s father, got a nanny for him, sent him to a boarding school and one day he was standing in his father’s office and asking if he could have a car.
Emerson had looked up in surprise at the young man standing in front of him. He had inherited his mother’s equine features and almost lipless mouth, but the rest came undoubtedly from him. The long, narrow nose with his father’s close-set eyebrows formed a T-shape in the middle of the face with two pale blue eyes on each side. They had expected that his blond hair would gradually turn into his mother’s mousy grey, but that hadn’t happened. Ken had already developed the blasé and the would-be self-irony that gives the British their reputation for charm, and his blue eyes twinkled when he saw his father’s confusion.
Emerson realised that even though he had intended to make ambitious plans for his son he would probably never have had time to realise them. How could his son have become an adult without his having noticed it? Had he been too busy being unhappy, of being the person everyone in his circle thought he ought to be, and if that was the case, why didn’t that include being a father to his only son? It pained him. Or did it? He thought about it. Yes, it really did pain him. He raised his hands impotently aloft.
Maybe Ken had counted on his father’s guilty conscience, and maybe not. At any rate, he got his car.
* * *
—
By the time Ken was twenty he no longer had the car. He lost it in a bet with another student over who could get back to the college fastest from one of those boring Oxford pubs. Kirk was driving a Jaguar, but Ken had still thought he had a chance.
The year after that he lost the equivalent of an annual grant from his father’s educational fund in the course of a single evening’s poker and drinking with the heir to Roland’s fortune. He had three jacks and thought he had a chance.
By the time he turned twenty-four he had thanks to some miracle or other acquired documents showing that he had some knowledge of English literature and history and without any great difficulty got a job as a trainee in an English bank of the old school, meaning that the board knew how to appreciate an Oxford graduate who knew his Keats and his Wilde, and took it for granted that carrying out a credit valuation of a customer or analysing financial transactions were talents people from his social background were born with or could pick up along the way.
Ken ended up in stocks and shares and was an unqualified success. He called the most important investors each day to tell them the latest dirty jokes, took the more important ones out to dinner and strip clubs, and the most important ones of all down to his father’s country place, where he got them drunk and, on the rare occasions when the opportunity arose, screwed their wives.
The board were debating whether to kick him upstairs and make him a head trader when it emerged that he had lost almost £15 million of the bank’s money on unauthorised dealings in futures on the orange juice market. He was summoned to appear before the board where he explained that he had thought he had a chance and was at once kicked not upstairs but out of the bank, the City and the whole of London financial life.
He began drinking but couldn’t quite make it work and instead started going to the greyhound races, though he’d never been able to abide dogs. It was then that the gambling really got out of hand. Not in pounds and pence, because Ken, despite his name, no longer had a credit rating. And anyway, it would have been difficult for him to top that orange juice deal. But the compulsive gambling consumed all his time and all his energy, and before too long he was tumbling headlong down a dark pit and on his way to the bottom. Or presumed bottom. Because so far, the falling hadn’t stopped, and looking on the bright side of things that might well mean there was no bottom.
Ken Abbott funded his accelerating addiction to gambling by turning to the only person he knew who still didn’t seem to have realised what was going on: his father. For the son had discovered that Emerson Abbott had the most wonderful talent for forgetting. Each time he knocked on the door to ask for money his father would stand there, looking at him as though it were for the first time. In fact, looking at him as though it was the first time he had ever stood there at all.
* * *
—
Ken pulls the needle up out through the plastic cork.
‘Do you remember how to do it?’ By now his father’s voice is no more than a hoarse whisper.
Ken tries to smile. He had never been able to stand needles, or else he would never have stopped taking cocaine but gone all the way with it. Not that he wanted to join the 27 Club like Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison but, alas, he’s like Oscar Wilde in that he can resist everything except temptation. What he has to resist right now is the desire to throw up at the sight of the needle. But he has no choice. This is a matter of life and death.
‘Remember and remember,’ mumbles Ken. ‘Remind me. I have to locate a vein?’
His father shakes his head. He’s rolled up his trouser leg and points to his leg where two small holes puncture the skin. Blood is beading on one of them.
‘Forget about veins. Just inject the syringe close to the bite. Small injections, three or four pricks. Then one in the thigh.’
‘The thigh?’
Despite his condition the father manages to give Ken one of those exasperated looks he hates so much. ‘So it’s closer to the heart than the bite.’
‘Are you certain it was an Egyptian cobra, Father? It can’t have been one of those thingummies…’
‘Thingummies?’
‘I don’t know…a boomslang or something like that.’
Emerson Abbott tries to laugh but all that comes out is a cough.
‘A boomslang is a small green bastard that hangs in the trees all day, Ken. This one was black and it was wriggling along the ground. And the boomslang is haemotoxic, so the blood would have been pouring out of my mouth, my ears and my arse by now.
Don’t you remember how we went through all this?’
‘I just want to be completely sure before I give you the injection.’
‘Of course. I’m sorry.’ His father closes his eyes. ‘I just hope you don’t feel these weeks have been a waste of time.’
Ken shakes his head and he means it. Sure, he’s hated every second of the twenty-seven days he’s been here, hated the long hot days trudging round the snake farm behind his father and the grizzled old Black foreman whose parents, in a darkly humorous moment, had named Adolf. Those voices have gone in one ear and out the other, about the green and the black mambos, about the fangs at the front and the back of the mouth, about the ones that can bite even when you’re holding them up by the tail, about which ones are to be fed mice and which ones birds. He doesn’t give a shit about whether cobras come from Egypt or Mozambique, all he knows is that there are a hell of a lot of them, and that his father must have been off his trolley when he bought the farm.
In the evenings they sat on the veranda in front of the house, his father and Adolf both sucking on pipes as they heard the cries of the animals out there, with Adolf describing the legends and beliefs related to each one of them as they announced themselves in this way. When the moon rose and the cold laughter of the hyenas made Ken shiver, Adolf told stories about the Zulus, who believed that snakes were the spirits of the dead and let them come into their houses; and about how the tribes in Zimbabwe would never kill pythons because a long drought was certain to ensue. And when Ken laughed at these superstitions his father talked about certain remote regions of the north of England, places in which people still observed an old ritual involving snakes: if you saw an adder you had to kill it at once, draw a circle round it with a cross inside and then read over it from Psalm 68. And as Ken watched in astonishment his father stood up there on the veranda and declaimed into the pitch-black jungle night: