The Thirst: Harry Hole 11

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘I haven’t got any skis,’ Harry smiled back.

  She laughed. ‘You’re kidding? You’re Norwegian and you haven’t got a pair of skis?’

  ‘Treason, I know.’ Harry glanced down at the paper. Looked at the date. 4 March.

  ‘I seem to remember that you didn’t have a Christmas tree either.’

  ‘Shocking, isn’t it? Someone should report us.’

  ‘You know what, Harry? Sometimes I envy you.’

  Harry looked up.

  ‘You don’t care, you just break all the rules. I sometimes wish I could be that frivolous.’

  Harry laughed. ‘With that kind of smooth talk I don’t doubt that you get both a bit of friction and a nice slippery ride, fru Syvertsen.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Have a good ski!’ Harry saluted her with the folded newspaper and walked back to the house.

  He looked at the picture of the one-eyed Mikael Bellman. Maybe that was why his gaze looked so unflinching. It was the look of a man who appeared certain that he knew the truth. The look of a priest. A look that could convert people.

  The truth is that we will never know for certain.

  We all get fooled in the end, Harry.

  Did it show? Did his doubt show?

  Rakel was sitting at the kitchen table pouring coffee for both of them.

  ‘Up already?’ he said, kissing her on the head. Her hair smelt faintly of vanilla and sleep-Rakel, his favourite smell.

  ‘Steffens just called,’ she said, squeezing his hand.

  ‘What did he want so early?’

  ‘He was just wondering how things were going. He’s called Oleg in for a follow-up after that blood sample he took before Christmas. He says there’s nothing to worry about, but he wants to see if there could be a genetic link that might explain “it”.’

  It. She, he and Oleg had hugged each other more after Rakel came home from hospital. Talked more. Planned less. Had just been together. Then, as if someone had thrown a stone in the water, the surface went back to the way it had been before. Ice. But even so, it felt like something was moving down there in the abyss beneath him.

  ‘Nothing to worry about,’ Harry repeated, as much to himself as her. ‘But it worried you anyway?’

  She shrugged. ‘Have you thought any more about the bar?’

  Harry sat and took a sip of his instant coffee. ‘When I was there yesterday I thought I’m obviously going to have to sell it. I don’t know anything about running a bar, and it doesn’t feel like much of a calling, serving youngsters with potentially unlucky genes.’

  ‘But …’

  Harry pulled on his fleece jacket. ‘Øystein loves working there. And he’s staying off the stock, I know that. Easy, unlimited access seems to make some people pull themselves together. And it is actually paying its way.’

  ‘Hardly surprising, when it can boast two vampirist murders, one near shootout and Harry Hole behind the bar.’

  ‘Hm. No, I think it’s just that Oleg’s idea of musical themes is working. Tonight, for instance, it’s nothing but the most stylish ladies over fifty. Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde …’

  ‘Before my time, darling.’

  ‘Tomorrow it’s jazz from the sixties, and the funny thing is that the same people who come to the punk evenings will show up for that too. We do one Paul Rodgers night a week in Mehmet’s honour. Øystein says we ought to have a music quiz. And—’

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It sounds like you’re planning to hold on to the Jealousy.’

  ‘Does it?’ Harry scratched his head. ‘Damn. I haven’t got time for that. A couple of daft sods like me and Øystein.’

  Rakel laughed.

  ‘Unless …’ Harry said.

  ‘Unless?’

  Harry didn’t answer, just smiled.

  ‘No, no, forget it!’ Rakel said. ‘I’ve got enough on my hands unless I—’

  ‘Just one day a week. You don’t work on Fridays. A bit of accounting and some other paperwork. You could have some shares, be chairman of the board.’

  ‘Chairwoman.’

  ‘Deal.’

  She batted his outstretched hand away. ‘No.’

  ‘Think about it.’

  ‘OK, I’ll think about it before I say no. Shall we go back up to bed?’

  ‘Tired?’

  ‘… No.’ She looked at him over her coffee cup with half-closed eyes. ‘I could imagine helping myself to some of what I see fru Syvertsen can’t have.’

  ‘Hm. So you’ve been spying. Well, after you, chairwoman.’

  Harry glanced at the front of the paper again. 4 March. The day of his release. He followed her to the stairs. Passed the mirror without looking in it.

  Svein Finne, ‘the Fiancé’, walked into Vår Frelsers Cemetery. It was daybreak, and there was no one about. Only an hour earlier he had walked out through the gate of Ila Prison a free man, and this was his first errand. Against the white snow the small, black, rounded headstones looked like dots on a sheet of paper. He walked along the icy path, taking cautious steps. He was an old man now, and he hadn’t walked on ice for many years. He stopped in front of a particularly small headstone, just neutral initials – VG – beneath the cross.

  Valentin Gjertsen.

  No words of remembrance. Of course. No one wanted to remember. And no flowers.

  Svein Finne took out the feather he had in his coat pocket, knelt down and stuck it in the snow in front of the headstone. In the Cherokee tribe they used to place an eagle’s feather in the coffins of their dead. He had avoided contact with Valentin when they had both been in Ila. Not for the same reason as the other inmates, whom Valentin scared the life out of. But because Svein Finne didn’t want the young man to recognise him. Because he would, sooner or later. It had taken Svein one single glance on the day Valentin arrived in Ila. He had his mother’s narrow shoulders and high-pitched voice, just as he remembered her from their engagement. She was one of the ones who had tried to get an abortion while Svein was busy elsewhere, so he had forced his way in and lived there to watch over his offspring. She had lain beside him, trembling and sobbing every night until she gave birth to the boy in a magnificent bloodbath there in the room, and he had cut the umbilical cord with his own knife. His thirteenth child, his seventh son. But it wasn’t when Svein learned the name of the new inmate that he was one hundred per cent certain. It was when he was told the details of what this Valentin had been convicted of.

  Svein Finne got to his feet again.

  The dead were dead.

  And the living would soon be dead.

  He took a deep breath. The man had contacted him. And had woken the thirst inside him, the thirst he’d thought the years had cured him of.

  Svein Finne looked at the sky. The sun would soon be up. And the city would wake, rub its eyes, shake off the nightmare of the murderer who had rampaged last autumn. Smile and see that the sun was shining on them, blissfully unaware of what was coming. Something that would make the autumn look like a tame prelude. Like father, like son. Like son, like father.

  The policeman. Harry Hole. He was out there somewhere.

  Svein Finne turned and began to walk. His steps were longer, faster, more sure.

  There was so much to do.

  Truls Berntsen was sitting on the sixth floor, watching the red glow of the sun try to force its way over Ekebergsåsen. In December Katrine Bratt had moved him from the doghouse to an office with a window. Which was nice. But he was still archiving reports and incoming material about closed or cold cases. So the reason why he got there so early had to be that at minus twelve degrees, it was warmer in the office than in his flat. Or that he was having trouble sleeping these days.

  In recent weeks most of the material that needed archiving had naturally enough been late tip-offs and unnecessary witness statements relating to the vampirist murders. Someone claiming to have seen Valentin Gjertsen, probably someo
ne who also thought Elvis was still alive. It didn’t matter that the DNA test of the corpse had provided incontrovertible evidence that it really had been Valentin Gjertsen that Harry Hole had killed, because for some people facts were just minor irritants that got in the way of their obsessions.

  Got in the way of their obsessions. Truls Berntsen didn’t know why the sentence stuck, it was just something he had thought rather than said out loud.

  He picked up the next envelope from the pile. Like the others, it had been opened and its contents listed by another officer. This one featured the Facebook logo, a stamp that showed it had been sent by special delivery, and an archiving order attached with a paper clip, on which it said ‘Vampirist Case’ beside the case number, and Magnus Skarre’s name and signature next to the word case manager.

  Truls Berntsen took out the contents. On top was a letter in English. Truls didn’t understand all of it, but enough to recognise that it referred to a court disclosure order, and that the enclosed material was printouts of the Facebook accounts of all the murder victims in the vampirist case, plus the still missing Marte Ruud. He leafed through the pages and noticed that some of them were stuck together, so he guessed that Skarre hadn’t looked through everything. Fine, the case had been solved and the perpetrator would never find himself in the dock. But obviously Truls would dearly love to catch that bastard Skarre with his trousers down. He checked the names of the people the victims had been in contact with. Looked rather optimistically for Facebook messages to or from Valentin Gjertsen or Alexander Dreyer which he could accuse Skarre of having missed. He scanned page after page, only stopping to check senders and recipients. He sighed when he got to the end. No mistakes there. The only names he had recognised apart from the victims had been a couple that he and Wyller had dismissed because they had been in touch with the victims by phone. And it was surely only natural that some of the same people who had been in touch by phone, such as Ewa Dolmen and that Lenny Hell, had also been in contact on Facebook.

  Truls put the documents back in the envelope, stood up and went over to the filing cabinet. He pulled out the top drawer. Let go of it. He liked the way it glided out, with a sigh, like a goods train. Until he stopped the drawer with one hand.

  Looked at the envelope.

  Dolmen, not Hermansen.

  He hunted through the drawer until he found the file containing the interviews from the phone list, then took it and the envelope back to the desk. He leafed through the printouts until he found the name again. Lenny Hell. Truls remembered the name because it had made him think of Lemmy, even if the guy he had spoken to over the phone had sounded more like a terrified bastard with that tremble in his voice that so many people – regardless of how innocent they were – got when they found out it was the police calling them. So, Lenny Hell had been in touch with Ewa Dolmen on Facebook. Victim number two.

  Truls opened the file of interviews. Found the report of his own brief conversation with Lenny Hell. And his conversation with the owner of Åneby Pizza & Grill. And a note he didn’t understand, in which Wyller reported that Nittedal Police Station had vouched for both Lenny and the owner of the pizzeria, confirming that Lenny had been in the restaurant at the time of Elise Hermansen’s murder.

  Elise Hermansen. Victim number one.

  They had questioned Lenny because he had called Elise Hermansen several times. And he had been in touch with Ewa Dolmen on Facebook. There was the mistake. Magnus Skarre’s mistake. And, possibly, Lenny Hell’s mistake. Unless it was just a coincidence. Single men and women of a similar age seeking each other within the same geographic area of what was after all a fairly sparsely populated country. There were more improbable coincidences. And the case was closed, there was nothing to consider. Not really. But on the other hand … The papers were still writing about the vampirist. In the USA, Valentin Gjertsen had acquired an obscure little fan club, and someone had bought the book and film rights to his life story from his estate. It may not have been on the front pages any more, but it could be again. Truls Berntsen got his phone out. Found Mona Daa’s number. Looked at it. Then he stood up, grabbed his coat and walked towards the lift.

  Mona Daa screwed up her eyes and pushed with her arms as she curled the dumbbells up towards her chest. She imagined she was unfurling her wings and flying away from here with her arms outstretched. Across Frognerparken, across Oslo. That she could see everything. Absolutely everything.

  And she was showing them.

  She had seen a documentary about her favourite photographer, Don McCullin, who became known as a humanitarian war reporter because he showed the worst aspects of humanity in order to encourage reflection and soul-searching, not for cheap thrills. She couldn’t say the same of herself. And it had struck her that there was one word that hadn’t been mentioned in the one-sided hagiography of the documentary. Ambition. McCullin became the best, and he must have met thousands of admirers in between his battles, quite literally. Young colleagues who wanted to be like him, who had heard the myth about the photographer who stayed with the soldiers in Hue during the Tet Offensive, and the anecdotes from Beirut, Biafra, Congo, Cyprus. Here was a photographer who achieved what human beings thirsted for most, recognition and acclaim, yet not a word about how it could make a man put himself through the very worst trials, take risks he would otherwise never have dreamt of. And – potentially – commit similar offences to the ones he was documenting, all to take the perfect picture, get the groundbreaking story.

  Mona had agreed to sit in a cage and wait for the vampirist. Without telling the police and potentially saving people’s lives. It would have been easy to sound the alarm, even if she did think she was being watched. A note slipped discreetly across the table to Nora. But she had – like Nora’s sexual fantasy of allowing herself to be raped by Harry Hole – made it feel like she was obliged to go through with it. Of course she had wanted it. The recognition, the acclaim, seeing the admiration in younger colleagues’ eyes when she was giving her acceptance speech for the Journalism Award, humbly saying that she was just a lucky, hard-working girl from a small town in the north. Before going on, slightly less humbly, to talk about her childhood, the bullying, and revenge and ambition. Yes, she would talk out loud about ambition, she wouldn’t be afraid to tell it how it was. And she wanted to fly. Fly.

  ‘You need a bit more resistance.’

  It had got harder to lift the weights. She opened her eyes and saw two hands pushing down gently on the weights. The person was standing immediately behind her, so that in the big mirror in front of her she looked like some sort of four-armed Ganesh.

  ‘Come on, two more,’ the voice whispered in her ear. She recognised it. The police officer’s. And now she looked up and saw his face above hers. He was smiling. Blue eyes below a white fringe. White teeth. Anders Wyller.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she said, forgetting to push with her arms, but feeling herself fly anyway.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Øystein Eikeland asked, putting a half-litre of beer on the counter in front of the customer.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Not you, him there,’ Øystein said, gesturing over his shoulder with his thumb towards the tall man with the crew cut who had just walked behind the bar and was filling the cezve with coffee and water.

  ‘Can’t deal with any more instant coffee,’ Harry said.

  ‘Can’t deal with any more time off,’ Øystein said. ‘Can’t deal with being away from your beloved bar. Hear what this is?’

  Harry stopped to listen to the rapid, rhythmic music. ‘Not until she starts singing, no.’

  ‘She doesn’t, that what’s so great,’ Øystein said. ‘It’s Taylor Swift, “1989”.’

  Harry nodded. He remembered that Swift or her record company hadn’t wanted to put the album on Spotify, so instead they’d released a version with no singing.

  ‘Didn’t we agree that today’s singers were only going to be women over fifty?’ Harry said.

  ‘Didn
’t you hear what I said?’ Øystein said. ‘She’s not singing.’

  Harry gave up any idea of arguing against the logic of that. ‘People are here early today.’

  ‘Alligator sausage,’ Øystein said, pointing at the long, smoked sausages hanging above the bar. ‘The first week was because it was weird, but now the same people are back wanting more. Maybe we should change the name to Alligator Joe’s, Everglades, or—’

  ‘Jealousy is fine.’

  ‘OK, OK, just trying to be proactive here. Someone’s going to nick that idea, though.’

  ‘We’ll have had another one by then.’

  Harry put the cezve on the hotplate and turned round just as a familiar figure came in through the door.

  Harry folded his arms as the man stamped his boots and glared across the room.

  ‘Something wrong?’ Øystein wondered.

  ‘Don’t think so,’ Harry said. ‘Make sure the coffee doesn’t boil.’

  ‘You and that Turkish not-boiling thing.’

  Harry walked round the bar and went over to the man, who had unbuttoned his coat. Heat was steaming off him.

  ‘Hole,’ he said.

  ‘Berntsen,’ Harry said.

  ‘I’ve got something for you.’

  ‘Why?’

  Truls Berntsen grunt-laughed. ‘Don’t you want to know what it is?’

  ‘Only if I’m happy with the answer to the first question.’

  Harry saw Truls Berntsen attempt an indifferent smirk, but fail and swallow instead. And the blush on his scarred face could of course be the result of the transition from the cold outside.

  ‘You’re a bastard, Hole, but you did save my life that time.’

  ‘Don’t make me regret it. Out with it.’

  Berntsen pulled the document file from the inside pocket of his coat. ‘Lemmy – I mean Lenny Hell. You’ll see that he was in touch with both Elise Hermansen and Ewa Dolmen.’

  ‘Really?’ Harry looked at the yellow folder, held together by a rubber band, Truls Berntsen was holding towards him. ‘Why haven’t you gone to Bratt with this?’