The Thirst

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Thanks for the offer, Chief, but the answer’s no.’

  ‘We need you, Harry.’

  ‘Yes. Here.’

  Bellman let out a laugh. ‘I don’t doubt that you’re a good teacher, but you’re not the only one. Whereas you happen to be unique as a detective.’

  ‘I’m through with murders.’

  Mikael Bellman shook his head with a smile. ‘Come off it, Harry. How long do you think you can hide yourself away here, pretending to be something you’re not? You’re not a herbivore like him down there. You’re a predator. Just like me.’

  ‘The answer’s still no.’

  ‘And it’s a well-known fact that predators have sharp teeth. That’s what puts them at the top of the food chain. I see Oleg’s sitting down near the front. Who’d have thought he’d end up at Police College?’

  Harry felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up in warning. ‘I’ve got the life I want, Bellman. I can’t go back. My answer’s final.’

  ‘Especially as a clean record is an essential prerequisite to being admitted.’

  Harry didn’t respond. Aune harvested more laughter, and Bellman chuckled too. He put a hand on Harry’s shoulder, leaned in and lowered his voice a bit more. ‘It may be a few years ago now, but I’ve got connections who would swear on oath that they saw Oleg buying heroin that time. The penalty for that is a maximum of two years. He wouldn’t get a custodial sentence, but he could never become a police officer.’

  Harry shook his head. ‘Not even you would do that, Bellman.’

  ‘No? It might look like shooting sparrows with a cannon, but it really is very important to me that this case is solved.’

  ‘If I say no, you have nothing to gain by ruining things for my family.’

  ‘Maybe not, but let’s not forget that I … what’s the word? Hate you.’

  Harry looked at the backs of the people in front of him. ‘You’re not the sort of man who lets himself be governed by his feelings, Bellman, you don’t have enough of them for that. What would you say when it came out that you’d been sitting on this information about Police College student Oleg Fauke for so long without doing anything about it? There’s no point bluffing when your opponent knows what bad cards you’re holding, Bellman.’

  ‘If you want to stake the boy’s future on the fact that I’m bluffing, go ahead, Harry. It’s just this one case. Solve it for me, and all the rest will disappear. You can have until this afternoon to give me your answer.’

  ‘Out of curiosity, Bellman – why is this particular case so important to you?’

  Bellman shrugged. ‘Politics. Predators need meat. And remember that I’m a tiger, Harry. And you’re only a lion. The tiger weighs more and has even more brain per kilo. That’s why the Romans in the Coliseum knew a lion would always be killed if they sent it out to fight a tiger.’

  Harry saw a head turn round down towards the front. It was Oleg, smiling and giving him the thumbs up. The lad would soon turn twenty-two. He had his mother’s eyes and mouth, but his straight black hair came from the Russian father no one remembered any longer. Harry returned the thumbs up and tried to smile. When he turned back to Bellman, he was gone.

  ‘It’s mostly men who are afflicted with Othello syndrome,’ Ståle Aune’s voice rang out. ‘While male murderers with Othello syndrome have a tendency to use their hands, female Othellos use knives or blunt instruments.’

  Harry listened. To the thin, thin ice on top of the black water beneath him.

  ‘You look serious,’ Aune said when he came back to Harry’s office from the toilet. He drank the last of his coffee and put his coat on. ‘Didn’t you like my lecture?’

  ‘Oh, I did. Bellman was there.’

  ‘So I saw. What did he want?’

  ‘He tried to blackmail me into investigating this latest murder.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘No.’

  Aune nodded. ‘Good. It eats away at your soul, having as much close contact with evil as you and I have had. It may not look like it to other people, but it’s already destroyed parts of us. And it’s high time our nearest and dearest got the same attention that the sociopaths have had. Our shift is over, Harry.’

  ‘Are you saying you’re throwing in the towel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hm. I see what you’re saying in general terms, but are you sure there isn’t something more specific?’

  Aune shrugged. ‘Only that I’ve worked too much and spent too little time at home. And when I work on a murder case, I’m not at home even when I am there. Well, you know all about that, Harry. And Aurora, she’s …’ Aune filled his cheeks with air and blew it out. ‘Her teachers say it’s a bit better now. Children sometimes shut themselves off at that age. And they try things out. The fact that they have a scar on their wrist doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re engaged in systematic self-harm, it could just be natural curiosity. But it’s always upsetting when a father realises he can no longer get through to his child. Maybe all the more upsetting when he’s supposed to be a hotshot psychologist.’

  ‘She’s fifteen now, isn’t she?’

  ‘And this could all be over and forgotten by the time she turns sixteen. Phases, phases, that’s what that age is all about. But you can’t put off caring for your loved ones until after the next case, or your next day at work, you have to do it now. Wouldn’t you say, Harry?’

  Harry rubbed his unshaven top lip with his thumb and forefinger as he nodded slowly. ‘Mm. Of course.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be off,’ Aune said, reaching for his briefcase and picking up a pile of photographs. ‘These are the pictures from the crime scene that Katrine sent. Like I said, they’re no use to me.’

  ‘Why would I want them?’ Harry wondered, looking down at a woman’s body on a bloodstained bed.

  ‘For one of your classes, maybe. I heard you mention the devil’s star case, so you obviously use real murder cases, and real documents.’

  ‘In that instance it works as a template,’ Harry said, trying to tear his eyes away from the woman’s picture. There was something familiar about it. Like an echo. Had he seen her before? ‘What’s the victim’s name?’

  ‘Elise Hermansen.’

  The name didn’t ring any bells. Harry looked at the next picture. ‘These wounds on her neck, what are they?’

  ‘You really haven’t read a thing about the case? It’s on all the front pages, it’s hardly surprising that Bellman’s trying to pressgang you. Iron teeth, Harry.’

  ‘Iron teeth? A satanist?’

  ‘If you read VG, you’ll see that they refer to my colleague Hallstein Smith’s tweet about it being the work of a vampirist.’

  ‘A vampirist? A vampire, then?’

  ‘If only,’ Aune said, taking a page torn out of VG from his case. ‘A vampire does at least have some basis in zoology and fiction. According to Smith and a few other psychologists around the world, a vampirist is someone who takes pleasure from drinking blood. Read this …’

  Harry read the tweet Aune held up in front of him. He stopped at the last sentence. The vampirist will strike again.

  ‘Mm. Just because there are only a few of them doesn’t mean that they’re not right.’

  ‘Are you mad? I’m all for going against the flow, and I like ambitious people like Smith. He made a big mistake when he was a student and landed himself with his nickname, “the Monkey”, and I’m afraid that means he still doesn’t have much credibility among other psychologists. But he was actually a very promising psychologist until he got into this business with vampirism. His articles weren’t bad either, but obviously he couldn’t get them published in any peer-reviewed journals. Now he’s got something printed at last. In VG.’

  ‘So why don’t you believe in vampirism?’ Harry said. ‘You yourself have said that if you can think of any form of deviancy, there’ll be someone out there who’s got it.’

  ‘Oh yes, it’s all out there. Or will be. Our sexuality
is all about what we’re capable of thinking and feeling. And that’s pretty much unlimited. Dendrophilia means being sexually excited by trees. Kakorrhaphiophilia means finding failure sexually arousing. But before you can define something as a -philia or an -ism, it has to have reached a degree of prevalence, and have a certain number of common denominators. Smith and his group of mythomaniac psychologists have invented their own -ism. They’re wrong, there isn’t a group of so-called vampirists who follow any predictable pattern of behaviour for them or anyone else to analyse.’ Aune buttoned up his coat and walked towards the door. ‘Whereas the fact that you suffer from a fear of intimacy, and are incapable of giving your best friend a hug before he leaves, is decent material for a psychological theory. Give Rakel my love, and tell her I’ll magic those headaches away. Harry?’

  ‘What? Yes, of course. I’ll tell her. Hope things work out OK with Aurora.’

  Harry was left staring into space after Aune had gone. The previous evening he had walked into the living room while Rakel was watching a film. He had glanced at the screen and asked if it was a James Gray film. It was a perfectly neutral picture of a street with no actors in it, without any specific cars or camera angles, two seconds of a film Harry had never seen. OK, a picture can never be completely neutral, but Harry still had no idea what made him think of that particular director. Apart from the fact that he had watched a James Gray film a few months ago. That could be all it was, an automatic and trivial connection. A film he had seen, then a two-second clip that contained one or two details that swirled through his brain so quickly that he couldn’t identify what the points of recognition were.

  Harry took out his mobile phone.

  Hesitated. Then he pulled up Katrine Bratt’s number. It had been over six months since the last time they were in touch, when she had sent him a text on his birthday. He had replied with ‘thanks’, no capital letter or full stop. He knew she knew that didn’t mean he didn’t care, just that he didn’t care about long text messages.

  His call went unanswered.

  When he rang her internal number at Crime Squad, Magnus Skarre picked up. ‘So, Harry Hole himself.’ The sarcasm was so heavy that Harry was left in no doubt. Harry hadn’t had many fans at Crime Squad, and Skarre certainly hadn’t been one of them. ‘No, I haven’t seen Bratt today. Which is pretty odd for a new lead detective, because we’ve got a hell of a lot to do here.’

  ‘Hm. Can you tell her I—?’

  ‘Better to call back, Hole, we’ve got enough to think about.’

  Harry hung up. Drummed his fingers on the desk and looked at the pile of essays at one end of it. And at the sheaf of photographs at the other. He thought about Bellman’s analogy about predators. A lion? OK, why not? He’d read that lions that hunt alone have a success rate of only fifteen per cent or so. And that when lions kill large prey, they don’t have the strength to rip their throats open, so they have to suffocate them. They clamp their jaws around the animal’s neck and squeeze the windpipe. And that can take time. If it’s a big animal, a water buffalo for instance, the lion sometimes has to hang there, tormenting itself and the water buffalo for hours, yet still has to let go in the end. And that’s one way of looking at a murder investigation. Hard work and no reward. He had promised Rakel that he wouldn’t go back. Had promised himself.

  Harry looked at the bundle of photographs again. Looked at the picture of Elise Hermansen. Her name had stuck in his mind automatically. As had the details of the photograph of her lying on the bed. But it wasn’t the details. It was the whole. The film Rakel had been watching the night before had been called The Drop. And the director wasn’t James Gray. Harry had been wrong. Fifteen per cent. All the same …

  There was something about the way she was lying. Or had been lain out. The arrangement. It was like an echo from a forgotten dream. A cry in the forest. The voice of a man he was trying not to remember. The one who got away.

  Harry remembered something he had once thought. That when he fell, when he pulled the cork from the bottle and took the first swig, it wasn’t the way he imagined, because that wasn’t the decisive moment. The decision had already been taken long before. And from that moment on, the only question was what the trigger would be. It was bound to come. At some point the bottle would be standing there in front of him. And it would have been waiting for him. And he for it. The rest was just opposite charges, magnetism, the inevitability of the laws of physics.

  Shit. Shit.

  Harry stood up quickly, grabbed his leather jacket and hurried out.

  He looked in the mirror, checked that the jacket was sitting the way it should. He had read the description of her one last time. He disliked her already. A ‘w’ in a name that should be spelled with a ‘v’, like his, was a good enough reason for punishment on its own. He would have preferred a different victim, one more to his own taste. Like Katrine Bratt. But the decision had already been taken for him. The woman with a ‘w’ in her name was waiting for him.

  He fastened the last button on the jacket. Then he left.

  8

  FRIDAY AFTERNOON

  ‘HOW DID BELLMAN manage to persuade you?’ Gunnar Hagen was standing by the window.

  ‘Well,’ the unmistakable voice said behind him, ‘he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.’ There was a bit more gravel to it now than when he had last heard it, but it had the same depth and calmness. Hagen had heard one of his female colleagues say that the only beautiful thing about Harry Hole was his voice.

  ‘And what was the offer?’

  ‘Fifty per cent extra for overtime and double pension contributions.’

  The head of Crime Squad smiled briefly. ‘And you don’t have any conditions?’

  ‘Just that I’m allowed to pick the members of my group myself. I only want three.’

  Gunnar Hagen turned round. Harry was slouched in the chair in front of Hagen’s desk with his long legs stretched out in front of him. His thin face had gained some more lines, and his thick, short blond hair had started to turn grey at the temples. But he was no longer as thin as the last time Hagen had seen him. The whites around his intense blue irises may not have been clear, but they weren’t marbled with red the way they had been when things had been at their worst.

  ‘Are you still dry, Harry?’

  ‘As a Norwegian oil well, boss.’

  ‘Hm. You do know that Norwegian oil wells aren’t dry, don’t you? They’ve just been shut down until the price of oil rises again.’

  ‘That was the image I was trying to convey, yes.’

  Hagen shook his head. ‘And there was me thinking that you’d get more mature with age.’

  ‘Disappointing, isn’t it? We don’t get wiser, just older. Still nothing from Katrine?’

  Hagen looked at his phone. ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘Shall we try calling her again?’

  ‘Hallstein!’ The call came from the living room. ‘The kids want you to be the hawk again!’

  Hallstein Smith let out a resigned but happy sigh and put his book, Francesca Twinn’s Miscellany of Sex, down on the kitchen table. It was interesting enough to read that biting off a woman’s eyelashes is regarded as an act of passion in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea, but he hadn’t found anything he could use in his PhD, and making his kids happier was certainly more fun. It didn’t matter that he was still tired from the last game, because birthdays only came round once a year. Well, four times a year when you had four children. Six, if they insisted on their parents having birthday parties too. Twelve, if you celebrate half birthdays as well. He was on his way to the living room, where he could already hear the children cooing like doves, when the doorbell rang.

  The woman standing outside on the step stared openly at Hallstein Smith’s head when he opened the door.

  ‘I managed to eat something with nuts in the day before yesterday,’ he said, scratching the irritating outbreak of livid red hives on his forehead.

  He looked at her and realised t
hat she wasn’t staring at the hives.

  ‘Oh, that,’ he said, taking off his hat. ‘It’s supposed to be a hawk’s head.’

  ‘Looks more like a chicken,’ the woman said.

  ‘It is actually an Easter chicken, so we call it a chickenhawk.’

  ‘My name is Katrine Bratt, I’m from Crime Squad, Oslo Police.’

  Smith tilted his head. ‘Of course, I saw you on the news last night. Is this about what I said on Twitter? The phone hasn’t stopped ringing. It wasn’t my intention to cause such a fuss.’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Of course, but I hope you don’t mind slightly, er … boisterous children.’

  Smith explained to the children that they were going to have to come up with their own hawk for a while, then led the policewoman into the kitchen.

  ‘You look like you could do with some coffee,’ Smith said, pouring a cup without waiting for an answer.

  ‘It ended up being a late night,’ the woman said. ‘I overslept, so I’ve come straight from bed. And I managed to leave my mobile at home, so I was wondering if I could borrow yours to call the office?’

  Smith passed her his mobile and watched as she gazed helplessly at the ancient Ericsson. ‘The kids call it a stupid-phone. Do you want me to show you?’

  ‘I think I remember,’ Katrine said. ‘Tell me, what do you make of this picture?’

  As she tapped at the phone, Smith studied the photograph she had handed him.

  ‘Iron dentures,’ he said. ‘From Turkey?’

  ‘No, Caracas.’

  ‘Right. There are similar sets of iron teeth in the Museum of Archaeology in Istanbul. They’re supposed to have been used by soldiers in Alexander the Great’s army, but historians doubt that, and think instead that the upper classes used them in some sort of sadomasochistic games.’ Smith scratched his hives. ‘So he used something like this?’

  ‘We’re not sure. We’re just working from the bite marks on the victim, some rust and a few flakes of black paint.’

  ‘Aha!’ Smith exclaimed. ‘Then we need to go to Japan!’