by Jo Nesbo
‘It’s my day today, so I’ll pay,’ he said, catching hold of her right arm. ‘Stay with me.’
‘I need to go shopping,’ she said, and grimaced as he pulled her towards his still damp body. ‘Oleg and Helga are coming.’
He held her even tighter. ‘Are they? I thought you said we weren’t having visitors.’
‘Surely you can cope with a couple of hours with Oleg and—’
‘I’m joking. It’ll be nice. But shouldn’t we—?’
‘No, we’re not taking them to a restaurant. Helga hasn’t been here before, and I want to get a proper look at her.’
‘Poor Helga,’ Harry whispered, and was about to nip Rakel’s earlobe with his teeth when he saw something between her breast and her neck.
‘What’s that?’ He put the tip of his finger very gently on a red mark.
‘What?’ she asked, feeling for herself. ‘Oh, that. The doctor took a blood sample.’
‘From your neck?’
‘Don’t ask me why.’ She smiled. ‘You look so sweet when you’re worried.’
‘I’m not worried,’ Harry said. ‘I’m jealous. This is my neck, and of course we know you’ve got a weakness for doctors.’
She laughed, and he held her closer.
‘No,’ she said.
‘No?’ he said, and heard her breathing suddenly get deeper. Felt her body somehow give in.
‘Bastard,’ she groaned. Rakel was troubled by what she herself called a ‘very short sex fuse’, and swearing was the most obvious sign.
‘Maybe we should stop now,’ he whispered, letting go of her. ‘The garden calls.’
‘Too late,’ she hissed.
He unbuttoned her jeans and pushed them and her pants down to her knees, just above her boots. She leaned forward and grabbed hold of the windowsill with one hand, and was about to take the sun hat off with the other.
‘No,’ he whispered, leaning forward so that his head was next to hers. ‘Leave it on.’
Her low, burbling laugh tickled his ear. God, how he loved that laugh. Another sound merged into the laughter. The buzz of a vibrating phone that was lying next to her hand on the windowsill.
‘Throw it on the bed,’ he whispered, averting his eyes from the screen.
‘It’s Katrine Bratt,’ she said.
Rakel pulled her trousers up as she watched him.
There was a look of intense concentration on his face.
‘How long?’ he asked. ‘I see.’
She saw him disappear from her at the sound of the other woman’s voice on the phone. She wanted to reach out to him, but it was too late, he was already gone. The thin, naked body with muscles that twined like roots beneath his pale skin, it was still there, right in front of her. The blue eyes, their colour almost washed out after years of alcohol abuse, were still fixed on her. But he was no longer seeing her, his gaze was focused somewhere inside himself. He had told her why he had had to take the case the previous evening. She hadn’t protested. Because if Oleg was thrown out of Police College he might lose his footing again. And if it came to a choice between losing Harry or Oleg, she would rather lose Harry. She’d had several years’ training at losing Harry, she knew she could survive without him. She didn’t know if she could survive without her son. But while he had been explaining that it was for Oleg’s sake, an echo of something he had said recently drifted through her head: There may come a day when I really need to lie, and then it might be handy if you think I’m honest.
‘I’ll come now,’ Harry said. ‘What’s the address?’
Harry ended the call and started to get dressed. Quickly, efficiently, each movement carefully measured. Like a machine that’s finally doing what it was built for. Rakel studied him, memorising everything, the way you memorise a lover you’re not going to be seeing for a while.
He walked quickly past Rakel without looking at her, without a word of farewell. She was already sidelined, pushed from his consciousness by one of his two lovers. Alcohol and murder. And this was the one she feared the most.
Harry was standing outside the orange-and-white police cordon when a window on the first floor of the building in front of him opened. Katrine Bratt stuck her head out.
‘Let him through,’ she called to the young uniformed officer who was blocking his way.
‘He hasn’t got any ID,’ the officer protested.
‘That’s Harry Hole!’ Katrine shouted.
‘Is it?’ The policeman quickly looked him up and down before raising the cordon tape. ‘I thought he was a myth,’ he said.
Harry went up the steps to the open door of the flat. Inside, he followed the path between the crime-scene investigators’ little white flags, marking where they had found something. Two forensics officers were on their knees picking at a gap in the wooden floor.
‘Where …?’
‘In there,’ one of them said.
Harry stopped outside the door indicated by the officer. Took a deep breath and emptied his mind of thoughts. Then he went in.
‘Good morning, Harry,’ Bjørn Holm said.
‘Can you move?’ Harry said in a low voice.
Bjørn took one step away from the sofa he had been leaning over, revealing the body. Instead of moving closer, Harry took a step back. The scene. The composition. The whole. Then he went closer and started to note the details. The woman was sitting on the sofa, with her legs spread in such a way that her skirt had slid up to show her black underwear. Her head was resting against the back of the sofa, so that her long, bleached blonde hair hung down behind it. Some of her throat was missing.
‘She was killed over there,’ Bjørn said, pointing at the wall beside the window. Harry’s eyes slid across the wallpaper and bare wooden floor.
‘Less blood,’ Harry said. ‘He didn’t bite through the carotid artery this time.’
‘Maybe he missed it,’ Katrine said, coming in from the kitchen.
‘If he bit her, he’s got strong jaws,’ Bjørn said. ‘The average force of a human bite is seventy kilos, but he seems to have removed her larynx and part of her windpipe in one bite. Even with sharpened metal teeth, that would take a lot of strength.’
‘Or a lot of rage,’ Harry said. ‘Can you see any rust or paint in the wound?’
‘No, but perhaps anything that was loose came off when he bit Elise Hermansen.’
‘Hm. Possibly, unless he didn’t use the iron teeth this time, but something else. The body wasn’t moved to the bed either.’
‘I see what you’re getting at, Harry, but it is the same perpetrator,’ Katrine said. ‘Come and see.’
Harry followed her back to the kitchen. One of the forensics officers was taking samples from the inside of the glass jug from a blender that was standing in the sink.
‘He made a smoothie,’ Katrine said.
Harry swallowed and looked at the jug. The inside of it was red.
‘Using blood. And some lemons he found in the fridge, from the looks of it.’ She pointed at the yellow strips of peel on the worktop.
Harry felt nausea rising. And thought that it was like your first drink, the one that made you sick. Two more drinks and it was impossible to stop. He nodded and walked out again. He took a quick look at the bathroom and bedroom before going back into the living room. He closed his eyes and listened. The woman, the position of the body, the way she had been displayed. The way Elise Hermansen had been displayed. And there it was, the echo. It was him. It had to be him.
When he opened his eyes again, he found himself looking directly into the face of a fair-haired young man he thought he recognised.
‘Anders Wyller,’ the young man said. ‘Detective.’
‘Of course,’ Harry said. ‘You graduated from Police College a year ago? Two years?’
‘Two years ago.’
‘Congratulations on getting top marks.’
‘Thanks. That’s impressive, remembering what marks I got.’
‘I don’t remember a thing, it was
a deduction. You’re working at Crime Squad as a detective after just two years of service.’
Anders Wyller smiled. ‘Just say if I’m in the way, and I’ll go. The thing is, I’ve only been here two and a half days, and if this is a double murder, no one’s going to have time to teach me anything for a while. So I was wondering about asking if I could shadow you for a bit. But only if it’s OK?’
Harry looked at the young man. Remembered him coming to his office, full of questions. So many questions, sometimes so irrelevant that you might have thought he was a Holehead. Holehead was college slang for students who had fallen for the myth of Harry Hole, which in a few extreme cases was the main reason why they had enrolled. Harry avoided them like the plague. But, Holehead or not, Harry realised that with those grades, as well as his ambition, smile and unforced social skills, Anders Wyller was going to go far. And before Anders Wyller went far, a talented young man like him might have time to do a bit of good, such as helping to solve a few murders.
‘OK,’ Harry said. ‘The first lesson is that you’re going to be disappointed in your colleagues.’
‘Disappointed?’
‘You’re standing there all drilled and proud because you think you’ve made it to the top of the police food chain. So the first lesson is that murder detectives are pretty much the same as everyone else. We aren’t especially intelligent, some of us are even a bit stupid. We make mistakes, a lot of mistakes, and we don’t learn a great deal from them. When we get tired, sometimes we choose to sleep instead of carrying on with the hunt, even though we know that the solution could be just around the next corner. So if you think we’re going to open your eyes, inspire you and show you a whole new world of ingenious investigative skills, you’re going to be disappointed.’
‘I know all that already.’
‘Really?’
‘I’ve spent two days working with Truls Berntsen. I just want to know how you work.’
‘You took my course in murder investigation.’
‘And I know you don’t work like that. What were you thinking?’
‘Thinking?’
‘Yes, when you stood there with your eyes closed. I don’t think that was part of the course.’
Harry saw that Bjørn had straightened up. That Katrine was standing in the doorway with her arms folded, nodding in encouragement.
‘OK,’ Harry said. ‘Everyone has their own method. Mine is to try to get in touch with the thoughts that go through your brain the first time you enter a crime scene. All the apparently insignificant connections the brain makes automatically when we absorb impressions the first time we visit a place. Thoughts that we forget so quickly because we don’t have time to attach meaning to them before our attention is grabbed by something else, like a dream that vanishes when you wake up and start to take in all the other things around you. Nine times out of ten those thoughts are useless. But you always hope that the tenth one might mean something.’
‘What about now?’ Wyller said. ‘Do any of the thoughts mean anything?’
Harry paused. Saw the absorbed look on Katrine’s face. ‘I don’t know. But I can’t help thinking that the murderer has a thing about cleanliness.’
‘Cleanliness?’
‘He moved his last victim from the place where he killed her to the bed. Serial killers usually do things in roughly the same way, so why did he leave this woman in the living room? The only difference between this bedroom and Elise Hermansen’s is that here the bedclothes are dirty. I inspected Hermansen’s flat yesterday when Forensics picked up the sheets. It smelt of lavender.’
‘So he committed necrophilia with this woman in the living room because he can’t deal with dirty sheets?’
‘We’re coming to that,’ Harry said. ‘Have you seen the blender in the kitchen? OK, so you saw that he put it in the sink after he used it?’
‘What?’
‘The sink,’ Katrine said. ‘Youngsters don’t know about washing up by hand, Harry.’
‘The sink,’ Harry said. ‘He didn’t have to put it there, he wasn’t going to do any washing-up. So maybe it was a compulsive act, maybe he has an obsession with cleanliness? A phobia of bacteria? People who commit serial killings often suffer from a whole host of phobias. But he didn’t finish the job, he didn’t do the washing-up, he didn’t even run the tap and fill the jug with water so that the remnants of his blood-and-lemon smoothie would be easier to wash off later. Why not?’
Anders Wyller shook his head.
‘OK, we’ll come back to that, too,’ Harry said, then nodded towards the body. ‘As you can see, this woman—’
‘A neighbour has identified her as Ewa Dolmen,’ Katrine said. ‘Ewa with a “w”.’
‘Thanks. Ewa is, as you can see, still wearing her knickers, unlike Elise, whom he undressed. There are empty tampon wrappers at the top of the bin in the bathroom, so I assume that Ewa was on her period. Katrine, can you take a look?’
‘The forensics officer is on her way.’
‘Just to see if I’m right, and the tampon is still there.’
Katrine frowned. Then did as Harry asked while the three men looked away.
‘Yes, I can see the string from a tampon.’
Harry pulled a pack of Camels from his pocket. ‘Which means that the murderer – assuming he didn’t insert the tampon himself – didn’t rape her vaginally. Because he’s …’ Harry pointed at Anders Wyller with a cigarette.
‘Obsessed with cleanliness,’ Wyller said.
‘That’s one possibility, anyway,’ Harry went on. ‘The other is that he doesn’t like blood.’
‘Doesn’t like blood?’ Katrine said. ‘He drinks it, for God’s sake.’
‘With lemon,’ Harry said, putting the unlit cigarette to his lips.
‘What?’
‘I’m asking myself the same question,’ Harry said. ‘What? What does that mean? That the blood was too sweet?’
‘Are you trying to be funny?’ Katrine asked.
‘No, I just think it’s odd that a man we think seeks sexual gratification by drinking blood doesn’t take his favourite drink neat. People add lemon to gin, and to fish, because they claim it makes the taste more pronounced. But that’s wrong, lemon paralyses the taste buds and drowns everything else. We add lemon to hide the taste of something we don’t actually like. Cod liver oil started to sell much better when they began to add lemon. So maybe our vampirist doesn’t like the taste of blood, maybe his consumption of blood is also a compulsion.’
‘Maybe he’s superstitious and drinks to absorb his victims’ strength,’ Wyller said.
‘He certainly seems to be driven by sexual depravity, yet appears able to refrain from touching this woman’s genitals. And that could be because she’s bleeding.’
‘A vampirist who can’t bear menstrual blood,’ Katrine said. ‘The tangled pathways of the human mind …’
‘Which brings us back to the glass jug,’ Harry said. ‘Have we got any other physical evidence left by the perpetrator, apart from that?’
‘The front door,’ Bjørn said.
‘The door?’ Harry said. ‘I took a look at the lock when I arrived, and it looked untouched.’
‘Not a break-in. You haven’t seen the outside of it.’
The other three were standing out in the stairwell, looking on as Bjørn untied the rope that had been holding the door open, back against the wall. It swung slowly shut, revealing its front.
Harry looked. Felt his heart beating hard in his chest as his mouth went dry.
‘I tied the door back so that none of you touched it when you arrived,’ Bjørn said.
On the door the letter ‘v’ was written in blood, about a metre high. It was uneven at the bottom where the blood had run.
The four of them stared at the door.
Bjørn was the first to break the silence. ‘V for victory?’
‘V for vampirist,’ Katrine said.
‘Unless he was just ticking off another victim,’
Wyller suggested.
They looked at Harry.
‘Well?’ Katrine said impatiently.
‘I don’t know,’ Harry said.
The sharp look returned to her eyes. ‘Come on, I can see that you’re thinking something.’
‘Mm. V for vampirist might not be a bad suggestion. It could fit with the fact that he’s putting a lot of effort into telling us precisely this.’
‘Precisely what?’
‘That he’s something special. The iron teeth, the blender, this letter. He regards himself as unique, and is giving us the pieces of the puzzle so that we too will appreciate that. He wants us to get closer.’
Katrine nodded.
Wyller hesitated, as if he realised that his time to speak had passed, but still ventured: ‘You mean that deep down the murderer wants to reveal who he is?’
Harry didn’t answer.
‘Not who he is, but what,’ Katrine said. ‘He’s raising a flag.’
‘Can I ask what that means?’
‘Of course,’ Katrine said. ‘Ask our expert on serial killers.’
Harry was looking at the letter. It was no longer an echo of a scream, it was the scream itself. The scream of a demon.
‘It means …’ Harry flicked his lighter and held it to his cigarette, then inhaled deeply. He let the smoke out again. ‘He wants to play.’
‘You think the V stands for something else,’ Katrine said when she and Harry left the flat an hour later.
‘Do I?’ Harry said, looking along the street. Tøyen. The immigrant district. Narrow streets, Pakistani carpet shops, cobblestones, Norwegian-language teachers on bikes, Turkish cafes, swaying mothers in hijabs, youngsters getting by on student loans, a tiny record shop pushing vinyl and hard rock. Harry loved Tøyen. So much so that he couldn’t help wondering what he was doing up in the hills with the bourgeoisie.
‘You just didn’t want to say it out loud,’ Katrine said.
‘Do you know what my grandfather used to say when he caught me swearing? “If you call for the devil, he’ll come.” So …’