The Thirst Read online

  ‘Yes,’ Harry said.

  Mehmet laughed. ‘Make me an offer.’

  ‘Four hundred and thirty-five thousand.’

  Mehmet frowned. ‘Where did you get that number from?’

  ‘From Danial Banks. I had a meeting with him this morning.’

  ‘This morning? But it’s only …’

  ‘I got up early. And so did he. That’s to say, I had to wake him up and drag him out of bed.’

  Mehmet looked into the policeman’s bloodshot eyes.

  ‘Figuratively speaking,’ Harry said. ‘I know where he lives. I paid him a visit and made him an offer.’

  ‘What sort of offer?’

  ‘The other sort. The sort you can’t turn down.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I bought the debt on the Jealousy Bar at face value in return for not setting Financial Crime on him for breaking paragraph 295 about usury.’

  ‘You’re kidding?’

  Harry shrugged. ‘It’s possible that I’m exaggerating, it’s possible that he could have turned it down. Because he was able to tell me that paragraph 295 was repealed a couple of years ago sadly. What’s the world coming to when criminals keep up with changes to the law better than cops? Either way, the loan agreement with you didn’t seem to be worth all the problems I promised to make for him elsewhere. So this document –’ the detective put a handwritten sheet of paper on the bar – ‘confirms that Danial Banks has received his money, and that I, Harry Hole, am the proud owner of a debt of 435,000 kroner owed by Mehmet Kalak, with the Jealousy Bar, its contents and lease as collateral.’

  Mehmet read the few lines and shook his head. ‘Bloody hell. So you had almost half a million that you could give Banks there and then?’

  ‘I worked as a debt collector in Hong Kong for a while. It was … well paid. So I built up a bit of capital. Banks received a cheque and a bank statement.’

  Mehmet laughed. ‘So you’re going to be the one demanding extortionate repayments now, Harry?’

  ‘Not if you agree to my offer.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘That we turn the debt into working capital.’

  ‘You take over the bar?’

  ‘I buy a share. You’d be my partner, and could buy me out whenever you like.’

  ‘In return for what?’

  ‘You go to a Turkish bathhouse while a friend of mine watches the bar.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I want you to sweat until you turn into a raisin at the Cagaloglu Hamam while you wait for Valentin Gjertsen to show up.’

  ‘Me? Why me?’

  ‘Because Penelope Rasch died, and you and a fifteen-year-old girl are the only living people I’m aware of who know what Valentin Gjertsen looks like these days.’

  ‘I do …?’

  ‘You’ll recognise him.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘I read the report. You said, quote: “I didn’t really look at him long enough or carefully enough to be able to describe him.”’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I had a colleague who could recognise every human face she had ever seen. She told me that the ability to differentiate and recognise a million faces is located in part of the brain called the fusiform gyrus, and that without that ability we would hardly have survived as a species. Can you describe the last customer who was in here yesterday?’

  ‘Er …no.’

  ‘Yet you’d still recognise him in a fraction of a second if he walked in here now.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘That’s what I’m counting on.’

  ‘You’re staking 435,000 of your own money on that? What if I don’t recognise him?’

  Harry stuck his bottom lip out. ‘Then at least I’ll own a bar.’

  At 7.45 Mona Daa shoved open the door to VG’s newsroom and rolled in. It had been a bad night. Even though she had gone straight to Gain from the container terminal, and exercised so hard that her entire body ached, she had hardly slept a wink. In the end she decided to raise it with the editor, without going into detail. Ask him if a source had the right to anonymity if they had completely deceived a journalist. In other words: could she go to the police with this now? Or would the smart response be to wait and see if he got in touch again? After all, there could be a good explanation for why he hadn’t showed up.

  ‘You look tired, Daa,’ the head of the newsroom said. ‘Party last night?’

  ‘I wish,’ Mona said quietly, dropping her gym bag by her desk and switching her computer on.

  ‘Of the more experimental variety, perhaps?’

  ‘I wish,’ Mona repeated, more loudly. She looked up and saw a number of faces sticking up above computer screens around the open-plan office. Grinning, inquisitive faces.

  ‘What?’ she called out.

  ‘Just stripping, or bestiality?’ cried a deep voice that she didn’t have time to identify before a couple of the girls burst out laughing uncontrollably.

  ‘Check your email,’ the head of the newsroom said. ‘Some of us were copied in.’

  Mona turned cold. Felt a shiver of foreboding as she more hit than tapped her keyboard.

  The sender was [email protected].

  No text, just an image. Presumably taken with a light-sensitive camera, seeing as she hadn’t noticed a flash. And probably a telephoto lens. In the foreground was the dog pissing on the cage, and there she was, in the middle of the cage, standing stiffly and staring like a wild animal. She’d been tricked. It wasn’t the vampirist who had called her.

  At 8.15 Smith, Wyller, Holm and Harry were gathered in the boiler room.

  ‘We’ve got a disappearance that may be the work of the vampirist,’ Harry said. ‘Marte Ruud, twenty-four years old, disappeared from Schrøder’s Restaurant last night, just before midnight. Katrine is briefing the investigative team at the moment.’

  ‘The crime-scene group are there,’ Bjørn Holm said. ‘Nothing so far. Apart from what you mentioned.’

  ‘Which is?’ Wyller wondered.

  ‘A “v” written on a tablecloth with lipstick. The angle between the lines matches the one on Ewa Dolmen’s door.’ He was interrupted by a steel guitar Harry recognised as Don Helms, playing the intro to Hank Williams’s ‘Your Cheating Heart’.

  ‘Wow, we’ve got a signal,’ Bjørn Holm said, pulling his phone from his pocket. ‘Holm. What? I can’t hear. Hang on.’

  Bjørn Holm vanished through the door out into the culvert.

  ‘It looks like this kidnapping could be about me,’ Harry said. ‘That’s my restaurant, my usual table.’

  ‘That’s not good,’ Smith said, shaking his head. ‘He’s lost his grip.’

  ‘Isn’t it good that he’s lost his grip?’ Wyller asked. ‘Doesn’t that mean he’s going to be less careful?’

  ‘That part might be good news,’ Smith said. ‘But now that he’s experienced how it feels to have power and control, no one’s going to be allowed to take that away from him. You’re right, he’s after you, Harry. And do you know why?’

  ‘That article in VG,’ Wyller said.

  ‘You called him a wretched pervert, who … what was it?’

  ‘You were looking forward to slapping a pair of handcuffs on him,’ Wyller said.

  ‘So you describe him as wretched and threaten to take his power and control away.’

  ‘Isabelle Skøyen called him that, not me, but it doesn’t really matter now,’ Harry said, rubbing the back of his neck. ‘Do you think he’s going to use the girl to get hold of me, Smith?’

  Smith shook his head. ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘He doesn’t want confrontation, he just wants to show you and everyone else that he’s in control. That he can go to your place and take one of yours.’

  Harry stopped rubbing his neck. ‘One of mine?’

  Smith didn’t answer.

  Bjørn Holm returned. ‘That was Ullevål. Just before Penelope Rasch died,
a man came to reception and identified himself as someone she’d listed as a friend, a Roar Wiik, her former fiancé.’

  ‘The guy who gave her the engagement ring Valentin stole from her flat,’ Harry said.

  ‘They contacted him to see if he’d noticed anything about her condition,’ Bjørn Holm said. ‘But Roar Wiik says he hasn’t been to the hospital.’

  Silence spread round the boiler room.

  ‘Not the fiancé …’ Smith said. ‘So …’

  The wheels of Harry’s chair shrieked, but it was already empty and heading at speed towards the wall.

  Harry himself was already at the door. ‘Wyller, with me!’

  Harry ran.

  The hospital corridor stretched out and seemed to grow, growing faster than he could run, like an expanding universe which light and even thought couldn’t get through.

  He only just managed to avoid running into a man who came out of a doorway clutching a drip stand with his hand.

  One of yours.

  Valentin had taken Aurora because she was Ståle Aune’s daughter.

  Marte Ruud because she worked at Harry’s regular bar.

  Penelope Rasch to show them that he could.

  One of yours.

  301.

  Harry grabbed the pistol from his jacket pocket. A Glock 17 which had spent almost a year and a half lying untouched and locked away in a second-floor drawer. This morning he had taken it with him. Not because he imagined he would be using it, but because for the first time in four years he wasn’t entirely sure that he wouldn’t be using it.

  He pushed the door open with his left hand as he pointed the pistol in front of him.

  The room was empty. Had been emptied.

  Rakel was gone. The bed was gone.

  Harry gasped for air.

  Went over to where the bed had been.

  ‘Sorry, she’s gone,’ a voice behind him said.

  Harry spun round. Dr Steffens was standing in the doorway with his hands in the pockets of his white coat. He raised an eyebrow when he caught sight of the pistol.

  ‘Where is she?’ Harry panted.

  ‘I’ll tell you if you put that away.’

  Harry lowered the pistol.

  ‘Tests,’ Steffens said.

  ‘Is she … is she OK?’

  ‘Her condition is the same as before, stable but unstable. But she’s going to survive the day, if that’s what you’re worrying about. Why the drama?’

  ‘She needs to be watched.’

  ‘Right now she’s being watched by five members of hospital staff.’

  ‘We’ll be placing an armed police guard outside her door. Any objections?’

  ‘No, but that isn’t up to me. Are you worried the murderer will come here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because she’s the wife of the man hunting him? We don’t give out room numbers to anyone who isn’t a relative.’

  ‘That didn’t stop someone pretending to be Penelope Rasch’s fiancé from getting hold of her room number.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I’ll wait here until the officer is in place.’

  ‘In that case, maybe you’d like a cup of coffee.’

  ‘You don’t have to—’

  ‘No, but you need it. Just a moment, we’ve got some intriguingly bad coffee in the staffroom.’

  Steffens left the room and Harry looked around. The chairs he and Oleg had sat in were still where they had left them the day before, on either side of the bed that was no longer there. Harry sat down on one of them and stared at the grey floor. Felt his pulse slow. Even so, he still felt there wasn’t enough air in the room. A strip of sunlight was falling through a gap in the curtains, reaching across the floor between the chairs, and he noticed a strand of fair hair curled on the floor. He picked it up. Could Valentin have been here looking for her, but got here too late? Harry swallowed. There was no reason to think about that now, she was safe.

  Steffens came in and handed Harry a paper cup, took a sip of his own coffee and sat down on the other chair. The two men sat there opposite each other with a metre of empty space between them.

  ‘Your boy was here,’ Steffens said.

  ‘Oleg? He wasn’t going to come until after college.’

  ‘He asked after you. He seemed upset that you’d left his mother on her own.’

  Harry nodded and drank some coffee.

  ‘They often get angry and full of moral indignation at that age,’ Steffens said. ‘They shift the blame for anything that goes wrong onto their father, and the man they once wanted to become suddenly represents everything they don’t want to become.’

  ‘Are you speaking from experience?’

  ‘Of course, we do that all the time.’ Steffens’s smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

  ‘Hm. Can I ask a personal question, Steffens?’

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘Does it end up positive?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The joy of saving lives minus the despair at losing people you could have saved.’

  Steffens looked Harry in the eye. Perhaps it was the situation, two men sitting opposite each other in a largely darkened room, that made it a natural question. Ships passing in the night. Steffens took his glasses off and ran his hands over his face as if to wipe the tiredness away. He shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘But you still do it.’

  ‘It’s a calling.’

  ‘Yes, I saw the crucifix in your office. You believe in callings.’

  ‘I think you do too, Hole. I’ve seen you. Maybe not a calling from God, but you still feel it all the same.’

  Harry looked down at his cup. Steffens was right about the coffee being intriguingly bad. ‘Does that mean you don’t like your job?’

  ‘I hate my job,’ the senior consultant smiled. ‘If it had been up to me, I’d have chosen to be a concert pianist.’

  ‘You’re a good pianist?’

  ‘That’s the curse, isn’t it? When you’re not good at what you love, and good at something you hate.’

  Harry nodded. ‘That’s the curse. We do jobs where we can be useful.’

  ‘And the lie is that there’s a reward for someone who follows a calling.’

  ‘Perhaps sometimes the work in itself is reward enough.’

  ‘Only for the concert pianist who loves music, or the executioner who loves blood.’ Steffens pointed to the name badge on his white coat. ‘I was born and raised a Mormon in Salt Lake City, and I’m named after John Doyle Lee, a God-fearing, peace-loving man who in 1857 was ordered by the elders of his parish to massacre a group of ungodly immigrants who had strayed into their territory. He wrote about his torments in his diary, about the terrible calling that fate had dealt him, but that he simply had to accept it.’

  ‘The Mountain Meadows massacre.’

  ‘So, you know your history, Hole.’

  ‘I studied serial murders at the FBI, and we went through the most famous mass killings as well. I have to confess that I don’t remember what happened to your namesake.’

  Steffens looked at his watch. ‘Hopefully his reward was waiting in heaven, because on earth everyone betrayed John Doyle Lee, including our spiritual leader, Brigham Young. John Doyle was sentenced to death. But my father still thought he had set an example worth following, abandoning the cheap love of your fellows in favour of following a calling you hate.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t hate it as much as he claimed.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  Harry shrugged. ‘An alcoholic hates and curses drink because it ruins his life. But at the same time it is his life.’

  ‘Interesting analogy.’ Steffens stood up, went over to the window and pulled the curtains open. ‘What about you, Hole? Is your calling still ruining your life, even though it is your life?’

  Harry shaded his eyes and tried to look at Steffens, but was blinded by the sudden light. ‘Are you still a Mormon?’

  ‘Are you still working on
the case?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘We don’t have a choice, do we? I need to get back to work, Harry.’

  When Steffens had gone Harry called Gunnar Hagen’s number.

  ‘Hello, boss, I need a police guard at Ullevål Hospital,’ he said. ‘Immediately.’

  Wyller was standing where he had been told to, beside the bonnet of the car, which was parked untidily in front of the main entrance.

  ‘I saw a police officer arrive,’ he said. ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘We’re putting a guard outside her door,’ Harry said, getting in the passenger seat.

  Wyller tucked his pistol back in his holster and got in behind the wheel. ‘And Valentin?’

  ‘God knows.’

  Harry took the strand of hair from his pocket. ‘This is probably just paranoia, but get Forensics to do an urgent analysis of this, just to rule out the possibility that it matches anything from the crime scenes, OK?’

  They glided through the streets. It was like spooling back a slow-motion replay of their frantic drive twenty minutes earlier.

  ‘Do Mormons actually use crucifixes?’ Harry asked.

  ‘No,’ Wyller said. ‘They believe the cross symbolises death and is heathen. They believe in the resurrection.’

  ‘Hm. So a Mormon with a crucifix on his wall would be like …’

  ‘A Muslim with a drawing of Muhammad.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Harry turned the radio up. The White Stripes. ‘Blue Orchid’. Guitars and drums. Sparseness. Clarity.

  He turned it up even louder, without knowing what it was he was trying to drown out.

  Hallstein Smith was twiddling his thumbs. He was alone in the boiler room, and without the others there wasn’t a great deal he could do. He had completed his concise profile of the vampirist, and had surfed the Net reading the most recent articles about the vampirist murders. Then he had gone back and read what the media had written during the five days that had passed since the first murder. Hallstein Smith was wondering if he should make the most of the time to work on his PhD thesis when his phone rang.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Smith?’ a woman’s voice said. ‘This is Mona Daa from VG.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You sound surprised.’

  ‘Only because I didn’t think we had any coverage down here.’

  ‘Speaking of coverage, can you confirm that the vampirist is probably responsible for the disappearance of a female member of staff from Schrøder’s Restaurant last night?’