Blessed Are Those Who Thirst

by Anne Holt

  * * *

  The bedroom was located where bedrooms usually are. Not on the same level as the living room. The hallway was on the same floor as two bedrooms, a bathroom, and something resembling a storeroom. A pine staircase led up to the first floor, where he knew he would find a living room and kitchen.

  For one reason or another, he removed his shoes. A considerate kind of gesture, far too considerate, he thought as he pondered whether he should put his muddy boots on again. But they were squelching. He would leave them where they were.

  He had problems closing the front door properly. When he forced entry, he had broken the frame so the doorjamb no longer fitted. Carefully and as soundlessly as possible, he wedged the door as far closed as it permitted. He was uncertain how long it would hold in this wind.

  Both bedroom doors were shut. It was undeniably of some importance that he chose correctly. The man might be a light sleeper.

  Finn Håverstad reasoned which of the rooms had to be larger, from the way the doors were situated and his observations of the house from outside. He chose correctly.

  A big double bed was made on one side only. The quilt was neatly folded three times, crosswise, like an enormous pillow. On the other side, near the door, lay a figure. It was not possible to see the person, who had pulled the quilt so far up that only a few tufts of hair were poking out at the headboard. They were blond. Closing the door quietly behind him, Finn Håverstad fished out the service pistol from his waistband, performed the loading motions, and crossed the room to the sleeping man.

  With exaggeratedly slow movements, like a slow-motion film, he moved the mouth of the gun toward the head in the bed. Then he pushed it suddenly and firmly against something that had to be the forehead. It had the required effect. The man woke and tried to sit up.

  “Lie still,” Håverstad snapped.

  Whether it was the command or the fact the guy had now caught sight of the gun that caused him to lie down again was not certain. At any rate, he was now wide awake.

  “What the fuck’s this?” he said, trying to appear pissed off.

  It did not work. His face was flushed with fear. His eyes were blinking and nostrils flaring in rhythm with his heavy, intense breathing.

  “Lie completely still and listen to me first,” Håverstad said in a voice so calm it surprised him. “I won’t harm you. At least not seriously. We’re just going to have a chat. But I swear one thing on my daughter’s life—if you as much as raise your voice, I’ll shoot you.”

  The man in the bed stared at the gun. Then he looked at his attacker. There was something familiar about the face, but at the same time he was one hundred percent sure he had never seen this guy before. Something about the eyes.

  “What the fuck do you want?” he ventured again.

  “I want to talk to you. Stand up. Raise your hands in the air. Don’t drop them.”

  The man again tried to get up. It was difficult. The bed was low and he was told not to use his hands. Finally he was on his feet.

  Finn Håverstad was ten centimeters taller than his victim. It gave him the advantage he needed now that the rapist was on his feet and appeared far less vulnerable than when lying in the bed. He was wearing pajamas, some kind of cotton material, without a fly or buttons. The top was a sweater with a V-neck. It looked something like a tracksuit. It was washed-out and rather tight, and the dentist took a step back when he saw the muscular body bulging beneath the flimsy material.

  The tiny recognition of uncertainty was all that was required. The rapist threw himself at Håverstad, and they both crashed against the wall only a meter behind. It proved helpful. Håverstad got the support he needed, with his back firmly against the wall, while the other man lost his balance and fell onto one knee. Quick as a flash he attempted to regain his footing, but he was too late. The butt of the gun hit him above the ear, and he fell to the floor. The pain was intense, but he did not lose consciousness. Håverstad used the opportunity to wrestle the kneeling man backward toward the bed, where he remained sitting with his back to the thick feather mattress, rubbing his head and feeling sorry for himself. Håverstad stepped across his legs, pointing the gun at him the entire time. He grabbed the pillow beside the headboard, and before the kneeling man had time to think, his attacker had forced his arm against the mattress and placed the pillow over it. He then buried the gun deep inside the downy mass and pulled the trigger.

  The gunshot sounded like a faint plop. They were both taken aback, Håverstad by what he had done and also that the shot was so faint, the other that the pain was delayed. Then it struck him. He was about to scream, when the sight of the barrel waving in his face made him clench his teeth. He pulled his arm toward his chest and moaned. It was pouring with blood.

  “Now perhaps you understand what I mean,” Håverstad whispered.

  “I’m a policeman,” the other groaned.

  A policeman? Was that contemptible, inhuman destructive machine a policeman? Håverstad wondered for a moment what he should do with this information. Then he shrugged it off. It made no difference. Nothing made any difference. He felt stronger than ever.

  “Get up,” he ordered once more, and this time the policeman didn’t attempt to do anything at all. Continuing to moan faintly, he allowed himself to be ordered upstairs to the first floor. Håverstad was careful to follow several paces behind, fearing that the other man would fling himself backward.

  The living room was in darkness with curtains closed. Only a glimmer from the kitchen, where the light above the stove was switched on, made it possible to see anything at all. Letting the policeman stand beside the stairs, Håverstad turned on a light on the wall at the kitchen entrance. He remained standing, surveying the room. He waved the other man over to a wicker chair. The policeman thought at first he was to sit down, but was forestalled.

  “Position yourself with your back to the back of the chair!”

  The policeman had difficulty remaining upright. Blood still streaming from his arm, he blanched, and even in the faint light Håverstad could see the terror in his face and the sweat on his high forehead. It did him an unspeakable amount of good.

  “I’m bleeding to death,” the policeman complained.

  “You’re not bleeding to death.”

  It was quite difficult to tie the man’s arms and legs tightly with only one hand. Occasionally he was forced to use both hands, but all the same he did not release his grip on the pistol and kept it pointed at the other man. Fortunately, he had foreseen the problem and brought with him four lengths of rope, already cut. Finally, the policeman was tied up. His legs were spread and each was tied to a chair leg. His arms were bent backward and attached to the part of the armrest where it curved upward to form the chair back. The chair was not particularly heavy, and the man was having problems retaining his balance. The way he was standing, he seemed continually to be about to fall over. Lifting a huge television from a little glass cabinet with wheels, Håverstad ripped out the cables and dropped the set onto the seat of the wicker chair.

  He stepped into the kitchen and opened a cupboard. Wrong cupboard. At the third attempt, he found what he was searching for: a large, ordinary carving knife, made in Finland. He ran his thumb along the edge and returned to the living room.

  The man was almost prostrate and looked like a dead jumping jack. The ropes prevented him from collapsing altogether, and he was sitting in an absurd, almost comical position: straddled, with knees bent and arms helplessly twisted backward. Finn Håverstad dragged a chair in front of him and sat down.

  “Do you remember what you were doing on May twenty-ninth?”

  The man obviously had no idea.

  “In the evening? Saturday a week and a half ago?”

  Now the policeman knew what had seemed familiar about this guy. The eyes. The chick in Homansbyen.

  Until now he had been afraid. He was afraid about the injury to his arm, and he was afraid of this grotesque character who was apparently deriving pervers
e pleasure from tormenting him. But he hadn’t thought he was going to die. Until now.

  “Take it easy,” Håverstad said. “I’m still not going to kill you. We’re just going to talk for a while.”

  Then he stood up and took hold of the other man’s pajama top. He pushed the knife inside it and pulled it down so the sweater was suddenly converted into a jacket. A tattered, lopsided jacket. He took hold of the waistband of his trousers and repeated the process. The trousers fell down, stopping at thigh level because of his sprawled legs. But everything significant was exposed, naked and defenseless.

  Finn Håverstad sat down on the chair again.

  “Now we’re going to talk,” he said, with an Austrian pistol in one hand and a large Finnish carving knife in the other.

  * * *

  Although she had originally intended to wait for another half hour, she got to her feet and headed for her destination. Waiting was a nightmare.

  In fact it took less time than she had thought. After only a minute at a brisk pace, she had reached the street leading past the rapist’s abode. It was totally deserted. Slowing down, she gave herself a shake and moved off in the direction of the house.

  * * *

  “Turn off the sirens.”

  They were well outside their own district. Police Inspector Salomonsen was a competent driver. Even now, on side roads and with intersections every twenty meters or so, he was driving rapidly and smoothly, without too much skidding or discomfort. She had briefed him on the situation, and via the radio they had received the go-ahead for use of weapons.

  She watched the illuminated numbers on the dashboard. It would soon be two o’clock.

  “Don’t slow down,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said.

  * * *

  “Do you really have any idea what you’ve done?”

  The policeman sitting tightly bound in his own living room had a vague idea. He had made a major mistake. It should never have happened. He had miscalculated. Hugely. Now he could only comfort himself with the fact that no one had ever taken revenge in such a way before.

  Not in Norway, he said to himself. Not in Norway.

  “You have defiled my daughter,” the man snarled, leaning forward in his seat. “You have destroyed and despoiled my little girl!”

  The tip of the knife grazed the rapist’s genitals, and he groaned in alarm.

  “Now you’re afraid,” the other man whispered, letting the knife roam playfully over his groin. “Now perhaps you are just as scared as my daughter was. But you didn’t care about that.”

  By then the rapist could not tolerate any more. Taking a deep breath, he emitted a deranged, piercing howl that could have wakened the dead.

  Plunging forward, Finn Håverstad drove the huge knife from behind, upward in an enormous arc, gathering speed and strength. The point struck the rapist in his sprawling crotch, penetrating his testicles, perforating the musculature in his groin, and disappearing into his abdominal cavity, where it stuck fast, the blade having ruptured an artery.

  The scream stopped as suddenly as it had started. The sound was chopped straight off, and it became eerily silent. The rapist collapsed completely, the chair threatening to topple over, despite the weight of the television set on the seat.

  Someone came storming up the stairs. Finn Håverstad turned around quietly as he heard the footsteps, wondering only how the neighbors had been alerted so quickly. Then he saw who it was.

  Neither of them uttered a word. Kristine Håverstad rushed toward him, in what he anticipated would be an embrace. Stretching his arms out to his daughter, he was knocked sideways when she instead clawed along his arm to grab hold of the pistol. It dropped to the floor and she retrieved it before he managed to regain his footing.

  He was much larger than her and far stronger. All the same, he was not able to prevent a shot being fired as he gripped her arm, firmly but not too hard, since he wanted to avoid hurting her. The bang made them both jump skyward. Terror stricken, she let go of the gun, and he let go of her. For several seconds they stood staring at each other, before Kristine grabbed hold of the knife handle protruding from the rapist’s loins, like a bizarre rock-hard spare penis. When she withdrew the knife, the blood gushed out.

  * * *

  Hanne Wilhelmsen and Audun Salomonsen were taken aback that their colleagues from Asker and Bærum had not yet arrived on the scene. The silent road lay in darkness, with no sign of the anticipated flashing blue lights. The car juddered to a halt in front of the terrace of houses. As they ran toward the entrance, they heard the sound of police sirens not too far off in the distance.

  The door had been forced. It was wide open. They had arrived too late.

  When Detective Inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen reached the top of the stairs, she was confronted by a sight she knew would stay with her forever.

  Tied to a chair with his arms twisted behind him, his legs sprawled at an angle, and his chin resting on his chest, hung her colleague Olaf Frydenberg. He resembled a frog. He was almost naked, and a river of blood was streaming down from his pubic region to a rapidly growing puddle at his feet. Before carrying out any examination, she knew he was dead.

  Nevertheless, she held her gun in front of her with both hands, pointing away to a corner of the living room and ordering the two people there to stand back from the victim. They obeyed immediately, with eyes downcast, like dutiful children.

  There was no pulse. She forced an eyelid open. The eyeball stared dead and senseless at her. She speedily started to loosen the ropes around his wrists and ankles.

  “We’ll try artificial respiration,” she said obstinately to her colleague. “Get the first aid equipment.”

  “I did it,” Finn Håverstad interrupted suddenly from his corner of the room.

  “It was me!”

  Kristine Håverstad sounded desperate.

  “He’s lying! It was me!”

  Wheeling around abruptly, Hanne Wilhelmsen scrutinized the two of them more closely. She felt no anger. Not even resignation. Only an immeasurable, profound sadness.

  They both wore the same expression they had adopted the first time they had been sitting in her office. A helpless, sorrowful countenance that even now was more striking on the huge man than on his daughter.

  Kristine Håverstad still held the knife in her hand. Her father was clutching the pistol.

  “Put down your weapons,” she requested, almost kindly. “There!”

  She was pointing at a glass table by the window. Then she and her colleague Salomonsen set to work on an entirely futile resuscitation procedure.

  THURSDAY, JUNE 10

  The calendar had settled down again. At long last. Lowlying cloud cover, appropriate for the time of year, was drifting across the Oslo sky, and the temperature was around fifteen degrees Celsius, the average for June. Everything was as it should be, and the citizens took relief in the knowledge that the storm damage had not been as severe as had been feared the previous day.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen sat in the canteen at the police station in Grønland. Paler than everyone else, she felt sick. She had missed two nights’ sleep in four days. She would go home soon. The superintendent had ordered her to stay away over the weekend. At least. Furthermore, he had asked her to apply for the post of chief inspector, something she definitely would not do. In any case and under whatever circumstances, not today. She wanted to go home.

  Håkon Sand, on the other hand, appeared unusually pleased with himself. He was sitting smiling, lost in thought, but snapped out of it when he realized that Hanne Wilhelmsen was genuinely closer to physical breakdown than he had ever seen her before.

  The canteen was situated on the sixth floor, with a fantastic view. Far out on the Oslo Fjord, a Danish ship was slowly approaching land, fully laden with pensioners and luggage illegally crammed with Danish sausages and cheap bacon. The grass outside the curved building was no longer strewn with people, and only one or two optimists were stretched out, peering expectantly up at the sky to
check whether the sun might return anytime soon.

  “There had to be a first time,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said, rubbing her eyes. “The way we let people down, it was really only a matter of time before some people took matters into their own hands. The bloody worst of it is . . .”

  She restrained herself, shaking her head.

  “The bloody worst of it is I understand them.”

  Håkon Sand scrutinized her more closely. Her hair was unwashed. Her eyes were still blue, but the black ring around the irises seemed larger, as though it had eaten its way toward the pupils. Her face seemed puffy, and her bottom lip had cracked in the middle, where a narrow, hardened line of blood divided her mouth in two.

  Squinting at the bright June sunlight, her eyes followed the Danish ferry. She had not received answers to so many questions. If only she had reached the house in Bærum a few minutes earlier. Five minutes. Max.

  “For instance, where did he get all that blood from?”

  Uninterested, Håkon Sand shrugged his shoulders.

  “I’m preoccupied with something entirely different.” He brushed her question aside, gazing at her with a sly and expectant expression, in the hope that the detective inspector would ask what he was talking about.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen, however, was deep in her own thoughts, and now the Danish boat was experiencing minor problems with a little cargo vessel insisting on right of way in the shipping lane. To be honest, she had not heard what he said.

  “They’ll probably get away with it,” he said, a fraction too loudly, with a touch of bitterness at the detective inspector’s lack of interest. “It’s likely we won’t be able to bring a prosecution against either of them!”

  That helped. Letting the Danish ferry shift for itself, Hanne stared at him, her eyes brimming with skepticism.

  “What did you say? Get away with it?”

  Kristine Håverstad and her father were being detained in custody. They had killed a man. Neither had tried to lie their way out of it. They were insistent. What’s more, they had been caught in flagrante only five minutes later.