The Thirst: Harry Hole 11

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘You’re saying someone must have given him instructions in advance?’

  ‘I’m saying someone could have given Valentin Gjertsen instructions. That’s been the problem with this case right from the start. Vampirists don’t have the capacity for planning that these murders demonstrate.’

  ‘Hm. We didn’t find a 3D printer in Valentin’s flat. Someone else could have made the copies of the keys for him. Someone who had previously made copies of keys for himself, to let himself into the homes of women who had dumped him. Who had rejected him. Who had gone on to meet other men.’

  ‘Bigger men,’ Smith said.

  ‘Jealousy,’ Harry said. ‘Morbid jealousy. But in a man who’s never hurt a fly.’

  ‘And when a man isn’t capable of hurting anyone, he needs someone to act for him. Someone who can do the things he can’t.’

  ‘A murderer,’ Smith said, nodding slowly.

  ‘Someone who’s prepared to kill for the sake of killing. Valentin Gjertsen. So we have one man who plans, and another who acts. The agent and the artist.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Smith said, rubbing his cheeks with his hands. ‘Now my dissertation is actually starting to make sense.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I was in Lyon recently, giving a lecture about the vampirist murders, and even if my colleagues have been enthusiastic as far as my pioneering work goes, I keep having to point out that there’s something missing that stops it from qualifying as truly groundbreaking, and that is that these murders don’t fit the general profile of a vampirist that I’ve come up with.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘An individual with schizophrenia and aspects of paranoia who, as a result of their overwhelming thirst for blood, kills whoever happens to be closest to them, an individual who can’t commit murders that require a lot of planning and patience. But this vampirist’s murders point more towards an engineering personality.’

  ‘A brain,’ Harry said. ‘Who approaches Valentin, who has had to put a stop to his activities because he can’t move freely without being caught by the police. The brain offers Valentin the keys to the flats of single women. Pictures, information about their routines, when they come and go, everything Valentin needs to get them without having to expose himself. How could he turn down an offer like that?’

  ‘A perfect symbiosis,’ Smith said.

  Oleg cleared his throat.

  ‘Yes?’ Harry said.

  ‘The police spent years trying to find Valentin. How did Lenny find him?’

  ‘Good question,’ Harry said. ‘They didn’t get to know each other in prison, anyway. Lenny’s past is as clean as a priest’s dog collar.’

  ‘What did you say?’ Smith asked.

  ‘A dog collar.’

  ‘No, the name.’

  ‘Lenny Hell,’ Harry repeated. ‘What about it?’

  Hallstein Smith didn’t answer, just stared at Harry with his mouth open.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Harry said calmly.

  ‘Bloody hell, what?’ Oleg said.

  ‘Patients,’ Harry said. ‘With the same psychologist. Valentin Gjertsen and Lenny Hell met each other in the waiting room. Is that it, Hallstein? Come on, the risk of further murders outranks the oath of confidentiality.’

  ‘Yes, it’s true that Lenny Hell was a patient of mine a while ago. And he used to come here, and he knew about my habit of working in the barn at night. But he and Valentin couldn’t have met here, because Valentin’s sessions with me took place in the city.’

  Harry pushed himself forward on his chair. ‘But is it possible that Lenny Hell is a morbidly jealous individual who worked with Valentin Gjertsen to kill women who had dumped him?’

  Hallstein Smith rubbed his chin thoughtfully with two fingers. Nodded.

  Harry leaned back in his chair. Looked at the computer screen, and the frozen image of the injured Valentin making his way out of the barn. The arrow on the scale, which had read 74.7 kilos when he arrived, now read 73.2 kilos. Which meant that he had left one and a half kilos of blood on the office floor. It was all just basic maths, and the calculation worked now. Valentin Gjertsen plus Lenny Hell. And the answer was two.

  ‘So the case has to be reopened,’ Oleg said.

  ‘That’s not going to happen,’ Gunnar Hagen said, looking at his watch.

  ‘Why not?’ Harry said, signalling to Rita for the bill.

  The head of Crime Squad sighed. ‘Because the case has been solved, Harry, and because what you’re presenting me with feels too much like a conspiracy theory. Random coincidences, such as this Lenny Hell being in touch with two of the victims, and psychological guesswork based on the fact that it looks like Valentin knows that he ought to turn right? That’s the sort of thing journalists and authors use to conclude that Kennedy was shot by the CIA and the real Paul McCartney is dead. The vampirist case is still high profile, and we’d be making high-profile clowns of ourselves if we reopened the case on that sort of evidence.’

  ‘Is that what’s worrying you, boss? Looking like a clown?’

  Gunnar Hagen smiled. ‘You always used to call me “boss” in a way that made me feel like a clown, Harry. Because everyone knew that you were really the boss. But that was fine, I could accept that, you were given free rein to make fun of us because you got results. But the lid’s already on this case. And it’s been screwed down very tightly.’

  ‘Mikael Bellman,’ Harry said. ‘He doesn’t want anyone to spoil his image before he becomes Minister of Justice.’

  Hagen shrugged. ‘Thanks for inviting me for coffee late on a Saturday evening, Harry. How’s everything at home?’

  ‘Fine,’ Harry said. ‘Rakel’s fit and strong. Oleg’s making dinner with his girlfriend. How about you?’

  ‘Oh, fine, too. Katrine and Bjørn have just bought themselves a house, but you probably know that.’

  ‘No, I didn’t know.’

  ‘They had that little break, of course, but now they’ve decided to go for it. Katrine’s pregnant.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, due in June. The world moves on.’

  ‘For some,’ Harry said, handing a 200-krone note to Rita, who started counting out his change. ‘Not for others. Here at Schrøder’s things are standing still.’

  ‘So I see,’ Gunnar Hagen said. ‘I didn’t think cash was legal tender any more.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. Thanks, Rita.’

  Hagen waited until the waitress had gone. ‘So that’s why you wanted to meet here? To remind me. Did you think I’d have forgotten?’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ Harry said. ‘But until we know what happened to Marte Ruud, this case isn’t solved. Not for her family, not for the people who work here, not for me. And not for you either, I can tell. And you know that if Mikael Bellman has screwed the lid on so tightly that it can’t be opened, then I’m going to smash the glass.’

  ‘Harry …’

  ‘Look, all I need is a search warrant and authorisation from you to investigate this single loose end. I promise to stop after that. Just this one favour, Gunnar. Then I’ll stop.’

  Hagen raised one bushy eyebrow. ‘Gunnar?’

  Harry shrugged. ‘You said it yourself, you’re not my boss any more. Come on, you’ve always been on the side of good, thorough police work, Gunnar.’

  ‘You know that sounds like flattery, Harry?’

  ‘So?’

  Hagen let out a deep sigh. ‘I’m not making any promises, but I’ll think about it. OK?’ The head of Crime Squad stood up and buttoned his coat. ‘I remember some advice I was given when I first started working on cases, Harry. That if you want to survive, you have to learn when to let go.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s good advice,’ Harry said, lifting his coffee cup to his lips and looking up at Hagen. ‘If you think survival’s so bloody important.’

  35

  SUNDAY MORNING

  ‘THERE THEY ARE,’ Harry said to Hallstein Smith, who braked and stopped the
car in front of the two men who were standing in the middle of the forest track, arms folded.

  ‘Brr,’ Smith said, sticking his hands in the pockets of his multicoloured blazer. ‘You’re right, I should have worn more clothes.’

  ‘Take this,’ Harry said, pulling off his black woolly hat with its embroidered skull and crossbones and the name ‘St. Pauli’ underneath.

  ‘Thanks,’ Smith said, pulling it down over his ears.

  ‘Good morning, Hole,’ the sheriff said. Behind him, where the track was no longer driveable, stood two snowmobiles.

  ‘Good morning,’ Harry said, taking off his sunglasses. The sunlight reflecting off the snow stung his eyes. ‘And thanks for agreeing to help at such short notice. This is Hallstein Smith.’

  ‘You don’t have to thank us for doing our job,’ the sheriff said, and nodded towards a man who was dressed the same way as him, in blue-and-white overalls that made them look like overgrown toddlers. ‘Artur, can you take the guy in the blazer?’

  Harry looked on as the snowmobile carrying Smith and the police officer disappeared along the track. The noise cut through the cold, clear air like a chainsaw.

  Jimmy straddled the oblong seat of the snowmobile and coughed before turning the ignition key. ‘If you’ll permit the local sheriff to drive a snowmobile?’

  Harry put his sunglasses back on and got on behind him.

  Their conversation the previous evening had been short.

  ‘Jimmy.’

  ‘Harry Hole here. I’ve got what I need – can you arrange snowmobiles, and show us the way to the house tomorrow morning?’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘There’ll be two of us.’

  ‘How the hell did you get—?’

  ‘Half eleven?’

  Pause.

  ‘OK.’

  The snowmobile followed the trail left by the first one. In the scattered community below them in the valley the sunlight glinted off windows and the church spire. The temperature fell rapidly when they entered dense pine forest that shut out the sun, and plummeted when they headed into a depression in the landscape where the ice-covered river ran.

  The journey only took three or four minutes, but Harry’s teeth were still chattering when they stopped next to Smith and the officer beside an overgrown, ice-covered fence. In front of them was a wrought-iron gate, cemented in snow.

  ‘And there you have the Pig House,’ the sheriff said.

  Thirty metres from the gate a large, ramshackle, elaborate three-storey house loomed up, guarded by tall pines on all sides. If the planks lining the walls had ever been painted, the paint was now all gone, and the house was varying shades of grey and silver. The curtains behind the windows looked like they were made of rough sheets and canvas.

  ‘Dark place to build a house,’ Harry said.

  ‘Three floors of old-school Gothic,’ Smith said. ‘That must break building regulations here, doesn’t it?’

  ‘The Hell family broke all sorts of regulations,’ the sheriff said. ‘But never the law.’

  ‘Hm. Could I ask you to bring some tools, Sheriff?’

  ‘Artur, have you got the crowbar? Come on, let’s get this over with.’

  Harry got off the snowmobile and sank into the snow halfway up his thighs, but he managed to reach the gate and climb over. The other three followed.

  There was a covered veranda along the front of the house. It faced south, so perhaps the house got a bit of sunlight in the middle of the day in the summer. Why else would you have a veranda? As a place where the midges could drain you of blood? Harry went over to the door and tried to see something behind the frosted glass before pressing the rust-red button of an old-fashioned doorbell.

  It worked, at least, because a bell rang deep inside the house.

  The other three came and stood beside him as Harry rang the bell again.

  ‘If he was home he’d have been standing in the doorway waiting for us,’ the sheriff said. ‘You can hear those snowmobiles from two kilometres away, and the road only leads here.’

  Harry tried again.

  ‘Lenny Hell can’t hear that in Thailand,’ the sheriff said. ‘My family are waiting to go skiing, so let’s get this glass smashed, Artur.’

  The policeman swung the crowbar and the window beside the door shattered crisply. He pulled one of his gloves off, stuck his hand through and fumbled for a while with a look of concentration before Harry heard the sound of a lock turning.

  ‘After you,’ Jimmy said, opening the door and holding his hand out.

  Harry stepped inside.

  It seemed uninhabited, that was the first thing that struck him. Maybe it was the lack of modern comforts that made him think of the houses of famous people that had been turned into museums. Like the time when he was fourteen and his parents took him and Sis to Moscow, where they visited the house where Fyodor Dostoevsky once lived. It had been the most soulless house Harry had ever seen, which may go some way to explaining why Crime and Punishment came as such a shock when he read it three years later.

  Harry walked through the hall and into the large living room. He pressed the light switch on the wall but nothing happened. The daylight filtering in through the greyish-white curtains, though, was enough for him to see the steam from his own breath, and the few pieces of old-fashioned furniture scattered randomly around the room, as if matching tables and chairs had been split up after an acrimonious inheritance dispute. He could see heavy paintings hanging crookedly on the walls, probably as a result of changes in temperature. And he could see that Lenny Hell wasn’t in Thailand.

  Soulless.

  Lenny Hell – or at least someone who resembled the picture Harry had seen of Lenny Hell – was sitting in a wing-backed chair in the same majestic posture in which Harry’s grandfather used to fall asleep when he was sufficiently drunk. With the difference that his right foot was slightly raised from the floor, and his lower right arm was hovering a few centimetres above the arm of the chair. In other words, the body had tipped slightly to its left after rigor mortis had set in. And that was a long time ago. Five months, perhaps.

  The head made Harry think of an Easter egg. Brittle, dry, empty of content. It looked as if the head had shrunk, forcing the mouth open and revealing the dry, grey gums holding the teeth. There was a black hole in his forehead, bloodless seeing as Lenny Hell was sitting with his head tilted backwards, gawping and staring stiffly at the ceiling.

  When Harry went round the chair he saw that the bolt had gone right through the tall chair-back. A black metal object, the shape of a pocket torch, was lying on the floor beside the chair. He recognised it. When Harry was about ten years old his grandfather decided it would do the boy good to see where the pork ribs for Christmas dinner came from, and took him with him behind the barn where he placed a contraption he called the slaughtering mask, even though it wasn’t a mask, over the forehead of Heidrun, the big sow. Then he pressed something, there was a sharp bang, and Heidrun jerked as if taken by surprise and fell to the ground. Then he had drained her of blood, but what Harry remembered most was the smell of powder and the way Heidrun’s legs started to twitch after a while. His grandfather had explained that that was how the body worked, that Heidrun was long since dead, but Harry had nightmares about twitching pigs’ legs for ages afterwards.

  The floorboards behind Harry creaked and he heard breathing that quickly became very heavy.

  ‘Lenny Hell?’ Harry asked without turning round.

  The sheriff had to clear his throat twice before he managed to say ‘Yes’.

  ‘Don’t come any closer,’ Harry said, crouching down and looking round the room.

  It wasn’t speaking to him. This crime scene was silent. Possibly because it was too old, possibly because it wasn’t a crime scene, but a room in which the man who lived there had decided he didn’t want to live any more.

  Harry took his phone out and called Bjørn Holm.

  ‘I’ve got a dead body in Åneby, in Nittedal. A
man called Artur is going to call and tell you where to meet him.’

  Harry hung up and went out into the kitchen. He tried the light switch, but this one didn’t work either. It was tidy, though there was a plate with stiff, mould-covered sauce on it in the sink. There was a dam of ice in front of the fridge.

  Harry went out into the hall.

  ‘See if you can find the fuse box,’ he said to Artur.

  ‘The electricity may have been cut off,’ the sheriff said.

  ‘The doorbell worked,’ Harry said, then went up the stairs that curved away from the hall.

  On the first floor he looked in three bedrooms. They had all been carefully cleaned, but in one the covers were folded back and there were clothes hanging over the chair.

  On the second floor he went into a room that had evidently functioned as an office. There were books and files on the shelves and, in front of the window, on one of the rectangular tables, stood a computer with three large screens. Harry turned round. On the table by the door was a box, maybe seventy-five centimetres square, with a black metal frame and glass sides, with a small white plastic key on a frame inside. A 3D printer.

  There was the sound of bells ringing in the distance. Harry went over to the window. From there he could see the church, presumably they were ringing the bells for the Sunday service. The Hell house was taller than it was wide, like a tower in the middle of the forest, as if they had wanted a place where they could see but without being seen. His eyes landed on a folder on the table in front of him. The name on the front of it. He opened it and read the first page. Then he looked up at the identical folders on the bookcase. He went over to the top of the stairs.

  ‘Smith!’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Come up here!’

  When the psychologist stepped into the room thirty seconds later, he didn’t immediately go over to the desk where Harry was leafing through the folder, but stopped in the doorway with a surprised expression on his face.

  ‘Recognise them?’ Harry asked.