The Thirst: Harry Hole 11

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Paraphilia. That’s not impossible. Like I said, I’m pretty sure we’re dealing with an intelligent vampirist who’s aware of his own illness. Either way, this makes the fact that my patient records were stolen even more annoying.’

  ‘You don’t remember what this patient said his name was, where he worked, where he lived?’

  Smith sighed deeply. ‘I’m afraid my memory isn’t what it used to be.’

  Katrine nodded. ‘We can always hope that he’s seen other psychologists and that they remember something. And that they’re not too Catholic when it comes to the oath of confidentiality.’

  ‘A bit of Catholicism isn’t to be sniffed at.’

  Katrine raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  Smith screwed his eyes shut in frustration and looked like he was trying not to swear. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Come on, Smith.’

  The psychologist threw his hands out. ‘I’m putting two and two together here, Bratt. Your reaction when the presenter asked if you were crazy, combined with what you said to me about getting drenched in Sandviken. We often communicate non-verbally, and what you were communicating was the fact that you had been treated in the psychiatric unit in Sandviken. And for you as a lead detective at Crime Squad, it’s probably a good idea for us to keep an oath of confidentiality that’s in part designed to protect people seeking help for problems from having it come back to haunt them later in their careers.’

  Katrine Bratt felt her mouth hang open as she tried in vain to think of something to say.

  ‘You don’t actually have to respond to my idiotic guesses,’ Smith said. ‘I’m actually under an oath of confidentiality when it comes to them too. Goodnight, Bratt.’

  Katrine watched Hallstein trudge off along the corridor, as knock-kneed as the Eiffel Tower. Her phone rang.

  It was Bellman.

  He was naked, locked into an impenetrable, burning fog that stung the parts of his skin where he had scrubbed through it, making the blood run onto the wooden bench beneath him. He closed his eyes, felt a sob rising, and visualised how it would happen. The fucking rules. They limited the enjoyment, limited the pain, stopped him from expressing himself the way he would like to. But things would change. The police had received his message, and were after him now. Right now. Trying to sniff him out, but they couldn’t. Because he was clean.

  He started when he heard someone clear their throat in the fog and realised that he was no longer alone.

  ‘Kapatiyoruz.’

  ‘Yes,’ Valentin Gjertsen replied in a thick voice, but remained seated, trying to stifle the sob.

  Closing time.

  He touched his genitals carefully. He knew exactly where she was. How she should be played with. He was ready. Valentin breathed moist air into his lungs. And there was Harry Hole, thinking he was the hunter.

  Valentin Gjertsen stood up suddenly and walked towards the door.

  16

  SUNDAY NIGHT

  AURORA GOT OUT of bed and crept into the hall. Went past her mum and dad’s bedroom and the stairs that led down to the living room. She couldn’t help listening to the rumbling, silent darkness down there as she crept into the bathroom and turned the light on. She locked the door, pulled her pyjamas down and sat on the toilet. Waited, but nothing happened. She had been so desperate to pee that she couldn’t sleep, so why couldn’t she go now? Was it because she didn’t really need to, and had just persuaded herself that she did because she couldn’t sleep? And because it was so quiet and safe in here? She had locked the door. When she was a child, her parents had told her she wasn’t allowed to do that unless they had guests. Said they needed to be able to get in if anything happened to her.

  Aurora closed her eyes. Listened. What if they had guests? Because it had been a sound that had woken her, she remembered that now. The sound of creaking shoes. No, boots. Long, pointed boots that creaked and bent as he crept forward. Stopped and waited outside the bathroom door. Waiting for her. Aurora felt that she couldn’t breathe and looked automatically at the bottom of the door. But it was hidden by the threshold, so she couldn’t see if anything outside was casting a shadow. Anyway, it was pitch-black out there. The first time she saw him she had been sitting on the swing in the garden. He’d asked for a glass of water, and had almost followed Aurora into the house, then vanished when they’d heard her mum’s car coming. The second time had been in the ladies’ toilet during the handball tournament.

  Aurora listened. She knew he was there. In the darkness outside the door. He had told her he would come back. If she said anything. So she had stopped talking. That was the safest option. And she knew why she couldn’t pee now. Because then he’d know she was sitting here. She closed her eyes and listened as hard as she could. No. Nothing. And she could breathe again. He had gone.

  Aurora pulled her pyjamas up, unlocked the door and hurried out. She ran past the top of the stairs to the door of her mum and dad’s room. She cautiously pushed it open and peered in. A strip of moonlight coming through a gap in the curtains lay across her dad’s face. She couldn’t see if he was breathing, but his face was so white, just like her grandmother’s when Aurora had seen her in the coffin. She crept closer to the bed. Her mum’s breathing reminded Aurora of the rubber pump they used to blow up the inflatable mattresses at the cottage. She went over to her dad and put her ear as close to his mouth as she dared. And felt her heart skip with joy when she felt his warm breath on her skin.

  When she was lying in bed again it was as if it had never happened. As if it was all just a nightmare she could escape by closing her eyes and falling asleep.

  Rakel opened her eyes.

  She had been having a nightmare. But that wasn’t what had woken her. Someone had opened the front door downstairs. She looked at the space beside her. Harry wasn’t there. Presumably he had just got home. She heard his footsteps on the stairs, and listened automatically for their familiar sound. But no, these sounded different. And they didn’t sound like Oleg’s either, if he had decided to drop in for some reason.

  She stared at the closed bedroom door.

  The footsteps came closer.

  The door opened.

  A huge, dark silhouette filled the opening.

  And Rakel remembered what she had been dreaming about. It was a full moon, and he had chained himself to the bed and the sheet had been torn to shreds. He had been twisting in agony, tugging at the chain, howling at the night sky as if he’d been hurt, before finally tearing off his own skin. And from beneath it his other self emerged. A werewolf with claws and teeth, with hunting and death in his crazed, ice-blue eyes.

  ‘Harry?’ she whispered.

  ‘Did I wake you?’ His deep, calm voice was the same as always.

  ‘I was dreaming about you.’

  He slipped into the room without turning the light on as he undid his belt and pulled his T-shirt over his head. ‘About me? That’s a waste of a dream, I’m already yours.’

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘At a bar.’

  The unfamiliar rhythm of his steps. ‘Have you been drinking?’

  He slid into bed beside her. ‘Yes, I’ve been drinking. And you’ve gone to bed early.’

  She held her breath. ‘What have you been drinking, Harry? And how much?’

  ‘Turkish coffee. Two cups.’

  ‘Harry!’ She hit him with the pillow.

  ‘Sorry,’ he laughed. ‘Did you know that Turkish coffee isn’t supposed to boil? And that Istanbul has three big football clubs that have hated each other like the plague for a hundred years but everyone’s forgotten why? Apart from the fact that it’s probably very human to hate someone because they hate you.’

  She curled up next to him and put her arm round his chest. ‘All this is news to me, Harry.’

  ‘I know you like getting regular updates about how the world actually works.’

  ‘I don’t know how I’d survive without.’

  ‘You didn’t s
ay why you’ve gone to bed so early?’

  ‘You didn’t ask.’

  ‘I’m asking now.’

  ‘I was so tired. And I’ve got an early appointment at Ullevål before work tomorrow.’

  ‘You haven’t mentioned that.’

  ‘No, I only heard today. Dr Steffens called in person.’

  ‘Sure it’s an appointment and not just an excuse?’

  Rakel laughed quietly, turned away from him and pushed back into his embrace. ‘Sure you’re not just pretending to be jealous to make me happy?’

  He bit her gently on the back of her neck. Rakel closed her eyes and hoped that her headache would soon be drowned out by lust, wonderful, pain-relieving lust. But it didn’t come. And perhaps Harry could feel it, because he lay there quietly, just holding her. His breathing was deep and even, but she knew he wasn’t asleep. He was somewhere else. With his other love.

  Mona Daa was running on the treadmill. Because of her damaged hip, her running style looked like a crab’s, so she never used the treadmill until she was completely sure she was alone. But she liked jogging a few kilometres after a hard session in the gym, feeling the lactic acid drain from her muscles while she looked out across the darkness of Frognerparken. The Rubinoos, a power-pop group from the seventies who had written a song for one of her favourite films, The Revenge of the Nerds, were singing bitter-sweet pop songs through the earphones that were connected to her phone. Until they were interrupted by a call.

  She realised that she had been half expecting it.

  It wasn’t that she wanted him to strike again. She didn’t want anything. She merely reported what happened. That was what she told herself, anyway.

  The screen said ‘Unknown number’. So it wasn’t the newsroom. She hesitated. A lot of weird types popped up during big murder cases like this one, but curiosity got the better of her and she clicked ‘answer’.

  ‘Good evening, Mona.’ A man’s voice. ‘I think we’re alone now.’

  Mona looked round instinctively. The girl on reception was immersed in her own phone. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve got the whole of the gym to yourself, I’ve got the whole of Frognerparken. Actually, it feels like we’ve got the whole of Oslo to ourselves, Mona. You with your unusually well-informed articles, me as the main character in those articles.’

  Mona looked at the pulse monitor on her wrist. Her pulse rate had gone up, but not by much. All her friends knew she spent her evenings at the gym, and that she had a view of the park. This wasn’t the first time someone had tried to fool her, and it probably wasn’t the last either.

  ‘I don’t know who you are or what you want. You’ve got ten seconds to convince me not to hang up.’

  ‘I’m not entirely happy with the coverage, a lot of the detail of my work seems to be passing you by completely. I’m offering you a meeting where I shall tell you what I’m trying to show you. And what’s going to happen in the near future.’

  Her pulse rate rose a bit further.

  ‘Tempting, I must say. Apart from the fact that you probably don’t want to be arrested, and I don’t want to be bitten.’

  ‘There’s an old abandoned cage from the zoo at Kristiansand down at the container port at Ormøya. There’s no lock on it, so take a padlock with you, lock yourself in, and I’ll come and talk to you from outside. That means I’ve got control of you at the same time as you’re safe. You can take a weapon to defend yourself with if you like.’

  ‘Like a harpoon, you mean?’

  ‘A harpoon?’

  ‘Yes, seeing as we’re going to be playing great-white-shark-and-diver-in-a-cage.’

  ‘You’re not taking me seriously.’

  ‘Would you take you seriously if you were me?’

  ‘If I were you, I would – before I made up my mind – ask for information about the killings that only the person who committed them could know.’

  ‘Go ahead, then.’

  ‘I used Ewa Dolmen’s blender to mix myself a cocktail, a Bloody Ewa, if you will. You can check that with your police source, because I didn’t wash up after me.’

  Mona was thinking hard. This was mad. And it could be the scoop of the century, the story that would define her journalistic career for all time.

  ‘OK, I’m going to contact my source now, can I call you back in five minutes?’

  Low laughter. ‘You don’t build trust by trying cheap tricks like that, Mona. I’ll call you back in five minutes.’

  ‘Fine.’

  It took a while for Truls Berntsen to answer. He sounded sleepy.

  ‘I thought you were all working?’ Mona said.

  ‘Someone has to have some time off.’

  ‘I’ve just got one question.’

  ‘There’s a discount for bulk if you’ve got more.’

  When Mona hung up she knew she’d struck gold. Or, to be more accurate, that gold had struck her.

  When the unknown number called again, she had two questions. Where, and when.

  ‘Havnegate 3. Tomorrow evening, eight o’clock. And, Mona?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Don’t tell a soul until it’s over.’

  ‘Any reason why we can’t just do this over the phone?’

  ‘Because I want to see you the whole time. And you want to see me. Sleep well. If you’re done on that treadmill.’

  Harry lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. Obviously he could blame those two cups of Mehmet’s bitumen-strength coffee, but knew that wasn’t the cause. He knew he was there again, unable to switch his brain off until it was over. It just went on working and working until the perpetrator was caught, and sometimes far beyond that. Four years. Four years without so much as a sign of life. Or a sign of death. But now Valentin Gjertsen had shown himself. And not just a glimpse of his devil’s tail – he had voluntarily stepped out into the spotlight, like a self-obsessed actor, scriptwriter and director rolled into one. Because this was being directed, it wasn’t simply the actions of a raving psychotic. This wasn’t someone they were going to catch by chance. They just had to wait until he made his next move, and pray to God that he made a mistake. In the meantime, they had to keep looking in the hope of unearthing the tiny mistakes he had already made. Because everyone makes mistakes. Almost everyone.

  Harry listened to Rakel’s regular breathing, then slipped out from under the covers, crept to the door and downstairs to the living room.

  His call was answered on the second ring.

  ‘I thought you’d be asleep,’ Harry said.

  ‘And you still called?’ Ståle Aune said in a sleepy voice.

  ‘You have to help me find Valentin Gjertsen.’

  ‘Help me? Or help us?’

  ‘Me. Us. The city. Humanity, for fuck’s sake. He has to be stopped.’

  ‘I’ve told you, my watch is over, Harry.’

  ‘He’s awake, and he’s out there right now, Ståle. While we’re lying asleep.’

  ‘And with a guilty conscience. But we’re sleeping. Because we’re tired. I’m tired, Harry. Too tired.’

  ‘I need someone who understands him, who can predict his next move, Ståle. See where he’s going to make mistakes. Identify his weakness.’

  ‘I can’t—’

  ‘Hallstein Smith,’ Harry said. ‘What do you make of him?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘You didn’t actually call to persuade me,’ Ståle said, and Harry could hear that he felt a bit hurt.

  ‘This is plan B,’ Harry said. ‘Hallstein Smith was the first person to say that this was the work of a vampirist, and that he’d strike again. He was right about Valentin Gjertsen sticking to the method that had worked, Tinder dating. Right about him taking the risk of leaving evidence. Right about Valentin’s ambivalence towards being identified. And he said early on that the police should be looking for a sex offender. Smith has hit the target pretty well so far. The fact that he goes against the flow is good, because I’m thinking of recruiting him to
my little against-the-flow team. But, most importantly of all, you told me he was a smart psychologist.’

  ‘He’s that all right. Yes, Hallstein Smith could be a good choice.’

  ‘There’s just one thing I’m wondering about. That nickname of his …’

  ‘The Monkey?’

  ‘You said it was connected to the fact that he’s still struggling for credibility among his colleagues.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Harry, it’s more than half a lifetime ago.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  It sounded like Ståle was thinking. Then he mumbled quietly into the phone: ‘That nickname was partly my fault, I’m afraid. And his too, of course. While he was a student here in Oslo we discovered that there was money missing from the little safe in the psychology department bar. Hallstein was our prime suspect because he was suddenly able to afford to come on a study trip to Vienna that he hadn’t initially signed up to because he didn’t have the cash. The problem was that it was impossible to prove that Hallstein had got hold of the code to the safe, which was the only way he could have got the money. So I set a monkey trap.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Daddy!’ Harry heard a high-pitched girl’s voice at the other end of the phone. ‘Is everything OK?’

  Harry heard Ståle’s hand scrape against the microphone. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you, Aurora. I’m talking to Harry.’

  Then her mother, Ingrid’s voice: ‘Oh, sweetie, you look terrified. A nightmare? Come with me and I’ll tuck you in. Or perhaps we could make some tea?’ Footsteps moved off across the floor.

  ‘Where were we?’ Ståle Aune said.

  ‘The monkey trap.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Have you read Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?’

  ‘All I know is that it’s not really about motorcycle maintenance.’

  ‘True. First and foremost it’s a book about philosophy, but also philosophy and the struggle between feelings and the intellect. Like the monkey trap. You make a hole in a coconut, big enough for the monkey to stick its hand in. You fill the coconut with food and fix it to a pole. Then you hide and wait. The monkey picks up the smell of food, comes and sticks its hand in the hole, grabs the food, and that’s when you jump out. The monkey wants to get away, but realises that it can’t get its hand out without letting go of the food. The interesting thing is that even though the monkey ought to be intelligent enough to realise that if it gets caught it’s unlikely to be able to enjoy the food, it still refuses to let go. Instinct, starvation, desire are stronger than the intellect. And that’s the monkey’s downfall. Every time. So I and the manager of the bar arranged a psychology quiz and invited everyone in the department. It was a large gathering, with a lot at stake, a lot of tension. Once the bar manager and I had been through the results, I announced that it was a dead heat between the two second-best minds in the department, Smith and a guy called Olavsen, and that the winner would be decided by testing the students’ skill at detecting lies. So I introduced a young woman as being one of the bar staff, sat her down on a chair, and asked the two finalists to find out as much as they could about the code to the safe. Smith and Olavsen had to sit opposite her while she was asked about the first number in the four-digit code, from one to nine in a random order. Then the second one, and so on. The young woman had been told to reply “No, that’s not the right number” each time, while Smith and Olavsen studied her body language, the dilation of her pupils, signs of increased heart rate, changes in the modulation of her voice, perspiration, involuntary eye movement, everything an ambitious psychologist takes pride in being able to interpret correctly. The winner would be the one who guessed the most digits correctly. The two of them sat there making notes, concentrating hard while I asked the forty questions. Because remember what was at stake: the title of second-smartest psychologist in the department.’