The Thirst: Harry Hole 11

by Jo Nesbo

His smile widened. He liked her Bergen accent. ‘You’re thinking we should cut a neat hole in the glass on the balcony and wipe our shoes politely before going in?’

  ‘I was thinking that there’s no reason to waste grenades and smoke when it’s just one man who hopefully isn’t going to be armed, and doesn’t know we’re coming. And quiet and drama-free gets higher marks for style, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Falkeid said, checking the GPS and the road ahead of them. ‘But if we blast our way in, the risk of injury is lower, both for us and for him. Nine out of ten people are paralysed by the blast and light when we throw a grenade, no matter how tough they think they are. I think we’ve saved the lives of more suspects than we have our own people by using that tactic. Besides, we’ve got these shock grenades we’d like to use up before they reach their expiry date. And the lads are restless, they need a bit of rock’n’roll. There’ve been too many ballads recently.’

  ‘You’re joking, aren’t you? You’re not really that macho and childish?’

  Falkeid grinned and shrugged.

  ‘You know what?’ Bratt had leaned closer, moistened her red lips and lowered her voice. ‘I kind of like that.’

  Falkeid laughed. He was happily married, but if he hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have turned down a dinner date with Katrine Bratt and a chance to look into those dark, dangerous eyes and listen to those rolling Bergen rrs that sounded like a growling beast of prey.

  ‘One minute!’ he said loudly, and the seven men lowered their visors in an almost perfectly synchronised movement.

  ‘A Ruger Redhawk, was that what you said he had?’

  ‘That’s what Harry Hole said he had in the bar.’

  ‘Did you hear that, men?’

  They nodded. The manufacturer claimed that the plastic in the new visors could stop a 9mm bullet heading for your face, but not one from the larger-calibre Redhawk. And Falkeid thought maybe that was just as well: a false sense of security seemed to have a debilitating effect.

  ‘And if he resists?’ Bratt said.

  Falkeid cleared his throat. ‘Then we shoot him.’

  ‘Do you have to?’

  ‘Someone will no doubt come up with an opinion with the benefit of hindsight, but we prefer to be wise in foresight, and shoot people who are contemplating shooting us. Knowing that that’s OK plays an important role in our workplace satisfaction. Looks like we’re here.’

  He was standing by the window. Noticed two greasy marks left by fingers on the glass. He had a view across the city, but couldn’t see anything, just heard the sirens. No cause for alarm, you heard sirens all the time. People got caught in house fires, slipped on the bathroom floor, tortured their partners, and that’s when you heard sirens. Irritating, nagging sirens telling people to get out of the way.

  On the other side of the wall someone was having sex. In the middle of the working day. Infidelity. To spouses, to employers, probably both.

  The sirens rose and fell over the buzzing sound of radio voices behind him. They were on their way, people with uniforms and authority, but without purpose or meaning. All they knew was that it was urgent, that if they didn’t get there in time something terrible would happen.

  The air-raid siren. Now, there was a siren that meant something. The sound of doomsday. A wonderful sound that could make your hair stand on end. Hearing that sound, looking at the time, seeing that it wasn’t noon precisely and realising that it wasn’t a test. That was when he would have bombed Oslo, twelve noon. Not a soul would have run for the shelters, they’d just have stood there, staring up at the sky in surprise and wondering what sort of weather it was. Or they’d have lain there fucking with a guilty conscience, unable to act any differently. Because we can’t. We do what we have to because we are who we are. The idea of willpower allowing us to act differently from what’s dictated by who we are, that’s a misunderstanding. It’s the opposite, the only thing willpower does is follow our nature, even when circumstances make that difficult. Raping a woman, breaking down or outsmarting her resistance, running from the police, taking revenge, hiding night and day, doesn’t all this entail defying the obstacles in order to make love to this woman?

  The sirens were further away now. The lovers had finished.

  He tried to remember how it sounded, the alarm that meant important message, listen to the radio. Did they still use that one? When he was a boy there was one radio station, but which one should you listen to in order to hear that message, which must be incredibly important, yet not quite dramatic enough to mean that you had to run to the shelters. Maybe the plan made provision for them to take over all radio stations, for a voice to announce … what? That it was already too late. That the shelters were closed, because they couldn’t save you, nothing could. That what mattered now was to gather your loved ones around you, say your goodbyes, and then die. Because he had learned this much. That many people organise their entire lives to facilitate one single goal: not to die alone. Few succeed, but the lengths people were prepared to go to because of this desperate fear of crossing that threshold without having someone to hold their hand. Ha. He’d held their hands. How many? Twenty? Thirty? And they hadn’t looked any less terrified or alone as a result. Not even the ones he had loved. Now, they obviously hadn’t had time to love him back, but they had been surrounded by love all the same. He thought about Marte Ruud. He should have treated her better, not let himself get dragged along. He hoped she was dead now, and that it had happened quickly and painlessly.

  He heard the shower on the other side of the wall, and the radio voices on his phone.

  ‘… when the vampirist in some sections of academic literature is described as intelligent and showing no signs of mental illness or social pathology, that creates an impression that we are dealing with a strong and dangerous enemy. But the so-called “Sacramento Vampire”, the vampirist Richard Chase, is probably a more typical comparison when it comes to Valentin Gjertsen’s case. Both demonstrated mental disorders from an early age, bed-wetting, a fascination with fire, impotence. They were both diagnosed with paranoia and schizophrenia. Chase, admittedly, had taken the more common path of drinking animal blood. He also injected himself with chicken blood and made himself ill. Whereas Valentin as a boy was more interested in torturing cats. At his grandfather’s farm, Valentin hid newborn kittens, he kept them in a secret cage so that he could torment them without any of the adults knowing. But both Valentin Gjertsen and Chase become obsessional after they carry out their first vampirist attack. Chase kills all seven of his victims within the space of just a few weeks. And, just like Gjertsen, he kills most of them in their own homes, he goes round Sacramento in December 1977 trying doors, and if they’re open, he takes that as an invitation and goes in, as he explains later under questioning. One of his victims, Teresa Wallin, was three months pregnant, and when Chase found her home alone, he shot her three times and raped her corpse while stabbing her with a butcher’s knife and drinking her blood. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?’

  Yes, he thought. But what you daren’t mention is that Richard Trenton Chase removed several of her internal organs, cut off one of her nipples, and collected dog shit from the backyard which he forced into her mouth. Or that he used one victim’s penis as a straw to drink the blood of another of his victims.

  ‘And the similarities don’t end there. Just like Chase, Valentin Gjertsen is coming to the end of the road. I can’t see him killing more people now.’

  ‘What makes you so sure of that, herr Smith? You’re working with the police, have you got any specific leads?’

  ‘What makes me so sure has nothing to do with the investigation, which I naturally can’t comment on, either directly or indirectly.’

  ‘So why?’

  He heard Smith take a deep breath. He could see the absent-minded psychologist in front of him, sitting there taking notes. Eagerly asking about childhood, bed-wetting, early sexual experiences, the forest he set light to, and particularly the cat-
fishing, as he called it, which involved getting his grandfather’s fishing rod, throwing the line over the beam in the barn, attaching the hook under the chin of one of the kittens, winding the line back until it was hanging in mid-air, then watching the kitten’s hopeless attempts to climb up and free itself.

  ‘Because Valentin Gjertsen isn’t anything special, apart from being extremely evil. He’s not stupid, but he’s not particularly intelligent. He hasn’t achieved anything special. Creating something requires imagination, vision, but destruction requires nothing, only blindness. What’s saved Gjertsen from being caught in the past few days isn’t skill, but pure luck. Until he is caught, which will be soon, naturally Valentin Gjertsen remains a dangerous man to get too close to, the way you should watch out for dogs that are frothing at the mouth. But a dog with rabies is dying, and, despite all his evil, Valentin Gjertsen is – to use Harry Hole’s vernacular – just a wretched pervert who’s now so out of control that he’s going to make a big mistake very soon.’

  ‘So you want to reassure Oslo’s inhabitants by …’

  He heard a sound and switched the podcast off. Listened. It was the sound of shuffling feet right outside the door. Someone concentrating on something.

  Four men dressed in Delta’s dark uniform were standing at Alexander Dreyer’s door. Katrine Bratt was watching from the corridor, twenty metres away.

  One of the men was holding a one-and-a-half-metre battering ram shaped like a giant tube of Pringles with two handles on it.

  It was impossible to tell the four of them apart behind their helmets and visors. But she assumed that the man holding up three gloved fingers was Sivert Falkeid.

  During the silent countdown she could hear music from the flat. Pink Floyd? She hated Pink Floyd. No, that wasn’t true, she just felt deeply suspicious of people who liked Pink Floyd. Bjørn had said he only liked one Pink Floyd track, then had pulled out an album with a picture of something that looked like a hairy ear on it, said it was from before they became big, and played an ordinary blues track with a howling dog on it. The sort of thing they use on television programmes that have run out of ideas. Bjørn had said he gave any track featuring a bit of decent bottleneck guitar a full amnesty, and the fact that this one featured double bass drums, rough vocals and tributes to dark powers and rotting corpses – just the way Katrine liked it – was also a plus. She missed Bjørn. And now, as Falkeid lowered his last finger to form a clenched fist, and as they swung the battering ram that was about to smash in the door of the man who in the past seven days had murdered at least four, and probably five, people, she thought about the man she had left.

  The lock shattered and the door was smashed in. The third man threw a flash grenade and Katrine Bratt covered her ears. The Delta men cast shadows across the corridor in the light from the flat that Katrine registered a fraction of a second before the two explosions that followed.

  Three of the men disappeared inside with their MP5s against their shoulders, the fourth stood outside with his weapon trained on the doorway.

  She took her hands away from her ears.

  The grenade had knocked out Pink Floyd.

  ‘Clear!’ Falkeid’s voice.

  The police officer outside turned to Katrine and nodded.

  She took a deep breath and walked towards the door.

  Went inside the flat. There was still smoke in the air from the grenade, but surprisingly little smell.

  Hall. Living room. Kitchen. The first thing that struck her was that it looked so normal. As if a perfectly ordinary, clean, tidy person lived there. Who made food, drank coffee, watched television, listened to music. No meat hooks hanging from the ceiling, no bloodstains on the wallpaper, no newspaper cuttings about murders and pictures of the victims on the walls.

  And the thought hit her. That Aurora had been wrong.

  She looked in through the open bathroom door. It was empty, no shower curtain, no toiletries except one object on the shelf below the mirror. She went in. It wasn’t a toiletry. The metal was stained with black paint and red-brown rust. The iron teeth were closed, forming a zigzag pattern.

  ‘Bratt!’

  ‘Yes?’ Katrine went into the living room.

  ‘In here.’ Falkeid’s voice was coming from the bedroom. It sounded calm, measured. As if something was over. Katrine stepped across the threshold and avoided touching the door frame, as if she was already aware that this was a crime scene. The wardrobe door was open, and the Delta men were standing on either side of the double bed with their semi-automatics aimed at the naked body that was lying on top of it, its lifeless eyes staring up at the ceiling. It was giving off a smell that she couldn’t place at first, so she leaned a bit closer. Lavender.

  Katrine pulled her phone out, rang a number and got an answer immediately.

  ‘Have you got him?’ Bjørn Holm sounded out of breath.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But there’s a woman’s body here.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Not living, anyway.’

  ‘Damn. Is it Marte Ruud? Hang on, what do you mean, “not living”?’

  ‘Not dead, not alive.’

  ‘What …?’

  ‘It’s a sex doll.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A fuck doll. An expensive one, from the looks of it, made in Japan, very lifelike. At first I thought it was a person. Alexander Dreyer is Valentin, at least, the iron teeth are here. So we’ll have to wait and see if he shows up. Heard anything from Harry?’

  ‘No.’

  Katrine’s gaze fell on a coat hanger and a pair of underpants that were lying on the floor in front of the wardrobe. ‘I don’t like it, Bjørn. He wasn’t at the hospital either.’

  ‘No one likes it. Shall we put out an alert?’

  ‘For Harry? What would be the point of that?’

  ‘You’re right. Listen, don’t disturb things too much, there could be evidence of Marte Ruud there.’

  ‘OK, but I have a feeling that any evidence has been cleaned up. Judging by the flat, Harry was right, Valentin is extremely clean and tidy.’ Her eyes went back to the coat hanger and underpants. ‘Mind you …’

  ‘What?’ Bjørn said.

  ‘Fuck,’ Katrine said.

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘He threw some clothes in a bag in a hurry and grabbed his toiletries from the bathroom. Valentin knew we were coming …’

  Valentin opened the door. And saw who had been shuffling about outside. The cleaner, who had been bent over holding the key card to the door of his hotel room, straightened up.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ she smiled. ‘I didn’t know the room was occupied.’

  ‘I’ll take those,’ he said, and took the towels from her hand. ‘And could you please clean again?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I’m not happy with the cleaning. There are finger marks on the window. Please clean the room again, let’s say in an hour?’

  Her surprised face disappeared behind the door as he closed it.

  He put the towels on the coffee table, sat down in the armchair and opened his bag.

  The sirens had fallen silent. If it was them he had heard, perhaps they were inside his flat now, it wasn’t more than a couple of kilometres up to Sinsen, as the crow flies. It had already been half an hour since the other man had called to say that the police knew where he was and what name he was using, that he had to get out. Valentin had packed only the most important things, and left the car there seeing as they had the name it was registered under.

  He took the folder out of the bag and leafed through it. Looked at the pictures, addresses. And he realised that for the first time in a very long while, he didn’t know what to do.

  He heard the psychologist’s voice inside his ear.

  ‘… just a wretched pervert who’s now so out of control that he’s going to make a big mistake very soon.’

  Valentin Gjertsen stood up and undressed. Picked up the towels and went into the bathroom. Turned on the hot water in
the shower. Stood in front of the mirror, waiting for the water to get scalding hot as he watched the condensation spread across the mirror. He looked at the tattoo. Heard his phone start to ring and knew it was him. Reason. Salvation. With new instructions, new orders. Should he ignore it? Was it time to cut the umbilical cord, the lifeline? Time to break free entirely?

  He filled his lungs. And screamed.

  28

  WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON

  ‘SEX DOLLS ARE nothing new,’ Smith said, looking down at the plastic and silicon woman on the bed. ‘When the Dutch ruled the seven seas, the sailors used to take a sort of doll-like vagina with them, sewn out of leather. It was so common that the Chinese called it a “Dutch wife”.’

  ‘Really?’ Katrine asked, watching the white-clad angels of the forensics team as they examined the bedroom. ‘So they spoke English?’

  Smith laughed. ‘Got me. The articles in academic journals are in English. In Japan there are brothels containing nothing but sex dolls. The most expensive ones are heated, so they stay at body temperature, they have skeletons which mean you can bend their arms and legs into natural and unnatural positions, and they have automatic lubrication of—’

  ‘Thank you, I think that’s enough,’ Katrine said.

  ‘Of course, sorry.’

  ‘Did Bjørn tell you why he was staying in the boiler room?’

  Smith shook his head.

  ‘He and Lien had things to do,’ Wyller said.

  ‘Berna Lien? Things to do?’

  ‘He just said that as long as this wasn’t assumed to be a murder scene, he’d leave it to the others.’

  ‘Things to do,’ Katrine muttered as she walked out of the bedroom with the other two hot on her heels. Out of the flat, out to the car park in front of the apartment blocks. They stopped behind the blue Honda where two forensics experts were examining the boot. They had found the keys in the flat, and it had been confirmed that the car was registered to Alexander Dreyer. The sky above them was steel grey, and on the far side of Torshovdalen’s billowing grass-covered slopes Katrine could see the wind grabbing the treetops. The latest forecast said that Emilia was only a matter of hours away.