The Thirst Page 7

  ‘Get los—’ she began, but the ‘t’ at the end vanished in a shortness of breath. Was she coming down with something? Had one single day heading up what she already knew was going to be a big murder investigation turned her into a nervous wreck who could hardly breathe? Christ …

  She heard the door to the men’s open and two squawking man-boys came in.

  ‘It’s, like, so fucking sick, man!’

  ‘Totally sick!’

  The pointed boots disappeared from below the door. Katrine listened, but couldn’t hear any footsteps. She finished off, opened the door and went over to the washbasins. The conversation between the man-boys at the urinals tailed off as she turned the tap.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ one of them asked.

  ‘Having a piss and washing my hands,’ she said. ‘Try to do it in that order.’

  She shook her hands and walked out.

  Ulrich was waiting by the door. He reminded her of a dog wagging its tail with a stick in its mouth as he stood there holding her jacket. She pushed the image aside.

  Truls was driving home. He turned the radio up when he heard them playing the Motörhead song he had always thought was called ‘Ace of Space’ until Mikael yelled out at a high-school party: ‘Beavis here thinks Lemmy’s singing Ace of … Space!’ He could still hear the roars of laughter drowning out the music, and see the twinkle in Ulla’s beautiful, laughing eyes.

  That was fine, Truls still thought ‘Ace of Space’ was a better title than ‘Ace of Spades’. One day when Truls had taken the risk of sitting down at the same table as the others in the cafeteria, Bjørn Holm had been in the middle of explaining – in that ridiculous Toten dialect of his – that he thought it would have been more poetic if Lemmy had lived till he was seventy-two. When Truls asked why, Bjørn replied: ‘Seven and two, two and seven, right? Morrison, Hendrix, Joplin, Cobain, Winehouse, the whole lot.’

  Truls had merely nodded when he saw the others nodding. He still didn’t know what it meant. Only that he had felt excluded.

  Still, excluded or not, this evening Truls had become thirty thousand kroner richer than Bjørn fucking Holm and all his nodding cafeteria buddies.

  Mona had brightened up considerably when Truls told her about the teeth, or iron dentures, as Holm had put it. She had called her editor and got him to agree that it was precisely what Truls had said: a three-course meal. The starter was the fact that Elise Hermansen had been on a Tinder date. The main course that the killer was probably already inside her flat when she got home. And the dessert that he had murdered her by biting her throat with teeth made of iron. Ten thousand for each course. Thirty. Three and zero, zero and three, right?

  ‘Ace of space, the ace of space!’ Truls and Lemmy roared.

  ‘Not going to happen,’ Katrine said, pulling her trousers back up. ‘If you haven’t got a condom, you can forget it.’

  ‘But I got checked out two weeks ago,’ Ulrich said, sitting up in bed. ‘Cross my heart, hope to die.’

  ‘Try that on someone else …’ Katrine had to take a deep breath before buttoning her trousers. ‘Anyway, that’s hardly going to stop me getting pregnant.’

  ‘Don’t you use anything, then, girl?’

  Girl? Oh, she did like Ulrich. It wasn’t that. It was … God knows what it was.

  She went out into the hall and put her shoes on. She’d made a note of where he’d hung her leather jacket, and had checked that there was just an ordinary lock on the inside of the door. Yep, she was good at planning her escape. She walked out and went down the stairs. When she emerged onto Gyldenløves gate the fresh autumn air tasted of freedom and a sense of having had a narrow escape. She laughed. Walked down the path that ran between the trees in the middle of the wide, empty street. God, how stupid. But if she was really so good at escaping, if she had already made sure she had a way out when she and Bjørn moved in together, why hadn’t she had a coil fitted, or at least gone on the pill? She remembered a conversation in which she explained to Bjørn that her already brittle psyche didn’t need the mood swings that were the inevitable consequence of that sort of hormone manipulation. And it was true, she had stopped taking the pill when she got together with Bjørn. Her thoughts were interrupted when her phone rang, the opening riff of ‘O My Soul’ by Big Star, installed by Bjørn, of course, who had gone to great lengths to explain the significance of the largely forgotten Southern States band from the seventies to her, and complained that the Netflix documentary had deprived him of his mission in life. ‘Fuck them! Half the pleasure of secret bands is the fact that they are secret!’ There wasn’t much chance of him growing up any time soon.

  She answered. ‘Yes, Gunnar.’

  ‘Murdered with iron teeth?’ Her otherwise placid boss sounded upset.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘That’s the lead story on VG’s website. It says the murderer was already inside Elise Hermansen’s flat, and that he bit through her carotid artery. From a reliable source in the police, it says.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bellman has already called. He’s … what’s the word I’m looking for? Livid.’

  Katrine stopped walking. Tried to think. ‘To start with, we don’t know that he was already there, and we don’t know that he bit her, or that it was a he.’

  ‘Unreliable source in the police, then! I don’t give a damn about that! We need to get to the bottom of this. Who’s the leak?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I know that VG will protect the identity of its source as a matter of principle.’

  ‘Principles be damned – they want to protect their source because they want more inside information. We need to plug this leak, Bratt.’

  Katrine was more focused now. ‘So Bellman’s worried the leak might harm the investigation?’

  ‘He’s worried it’ll make the whole force look bad.’

  ‘I thought as much.’

  ‘You thought what?’

  ‘You know what, and you’re thinking the same.’

  ‘We’ll deal with this first thing tomorrow,’ Hagen said.

  Katrine Bratt put her phone in her jacket pocket and looked ahead along the path. One of the shadows had moved. Probably just a gust of wind in the trees.

  For a moment she considered crossing the road to the well-lit pavement, before deciding against it and walking on, quicker than before.

  Mikael Bellman was standing by the living-room window. From their house in Høyenhall he could see the whole of the centre of Oslo, stretching out westward towards the low hills below Holmenkollen. And tonight the city was sparkling like a diamond in the moonlight. His diamond.

  His children were sleeping soundly. His city was sleeping relatively soundly.

  ‘What is it?’ Ulla wondered, looking up from her book.

  ‘This latest murder, it needs solving.’

  ‘So do all murders, surely?’

  ‘This one’s a big case now.’

  ‘It’s one single woman.’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘Is it because VG is running so hard with it?’

  He could hear the trace of derision in her voice, but it didn’t bother him. She had calmed down, she was back in her place. Because, deep down, Ulla knew her place. And she wasn’t the sort of person who looked for conflict. What his wife liked more than anything was looking after the family, fussing over the children and reading her books. So the tacit criticism in her voice didn’t really demand an answer. And she would hardly have understood it anyway – that if you want to be remembered as a good king, you have two choices. Either you are a king in good times, with the good fortune to sit on the throne during years of plenty. Or you’re the king who leads the country out of a time of crisis. And if it isn’t a time of crisis, you can pretend, start a war and show how deep a crisis the country would be in if it didn’t go to war, and make out that things are really terrible. It didn’t matter if it was only a small war, the important thing was winning it. Mikael Bellman had opted for the
latter when he had appeared in the media and in front of the City Council, exaggerating the amount of crime committed by migrants from the Baltic States and Romania, and making dire predictions about the future. And he had been granted extra resources to win what was actually a very small war, albeit a big one in the media. And with the latest figures he had provided twelve months later, he had been able indirectly to declare himself the triumphant victor.

  But this new murder case was a war he wasn’t in charge of, and – judging from VG’s coverage that evening – he knew it was no longer a small war. Because they all danced to the media’s tune. He remembered a landslide on Svalbard which had left two people dead and many more homeless. A few months before there had been a fire in Nedre Eiker, in which three people had died and far more been left homeless. The latter story had received the usual modest coverage granted to house fires and road accidents. But a landslide on a distant island was a far more media-friendly story, just like these iron jaws, meaning that the media had leapt into action as if it was a national disaster. And the Prime Minister – who jumps whenever the media says jump – had addressed the country in a live broadcast. And the viewers and residents of Nedre Eiker might well have wondered where she was when their homes were burning. Mikael Bellman knew where she had been. She and her advisers had, as usual, had their ears to the ground, listening out for tremors in the media. And there hadn’t been any.

  But Mikael Bellman could feel the ground shaking now.

  And now – just as he, as victorious Chief of Police, had a chance to enter the corridors of power – this was already starting to turn into a war he couldn’t afford to lose. He needed to prioritise this single murder as if it were an entire crime wave, simply because Elise Hermansen was a wealthy, well-educated, ethnically Norwegian woman in her thirties, and because the murder weapon wasn’t a steel bar, a knife or a pistol, but a set of teeth made out of iron.

  And that was why he felt obliged to take a decision he really didn’t want to have to take. For so many reasons. But there was no way round it.

  He had to bring him in.

  6

  FRIDAY MORNING

  HARRY WOKE UP. The echo of a dream, a scream, died away. He lit a cigarette and reflected. Upon what sort of awakening this was. There were basically five different types. The first was waking up to work. For a long time that had been the best sort. When he could slip straight into the case he was investigating. Sometimes sleep and dreams had done something to his way of seeing things and he could lie there going through what they had revealed, piece by piece, from this new perspective. If he was lucky he might be able to catch a glimpse of something new, see part of the dark side of the moon. Not because the moon had moved, but because he had.

  The second sort was waking up alone. That was characterised by an awareness that he was alone in bed, alone in life, alone in the world, and it could sometimes fill him with a sweet sensation of freedom, and at other times with a melancholy that could perhaps be called loneliness, but which was perhaps just a glimpse of what anyone’s life really is: a journey from the attachment of the umbilical cord to a death where we are finally separated from everything and everyone. A brief glimpse at the moment of awakening before all our defence mechanisms and comforting illusions slot into place again and we can face life in all its unreal glory.

  Then there was waking up full of angst. That usually happened if he’d been drunk for more than three days in a row. There were different gradations of angst, but it was always there instantly. It was hard to identify a specific external danger or threat, it was more a sense of panic at being awake at all, being alive, being here. But every so often he could sense an internal threat. A fear of never feeling afraid again. Of finally and irrevocably going mad.

  The fourth was similar to waking up full of angst: the there-are-other-people-here awakening. That set his mind working in two directions. One backwards: how the hell did this happen? One forwards: how do I get out of here? Sometimes this fight-or-flight impulse would settle down, but that always came later and therefore fell outside the frame of waking up.

  And then there was the fifth. Which was a new type of waking up for Harry Hole. Waking up content. At first he had been surprised that it was possible to wake up happy, and had automatically thought through all the parameters, what this ridiculous ‘happiness’ actually consisted of, and if it was just an echo of some wonderful, stupid dream. But that night he hadn’t had any nice dreams, and the echo of the scream had come from the demon, the face on his retina which belonged to the murderer who got away. Even so, Harry had woken up happy. Hadn’t he? Yes. And when this variety of awakening had been repeated, morning after morning, he had begun to get used to the idea that he might actually be a relatively content man who had found happiness somewhere towards the end of his forties, and actually seemed capable of clinging on to this newly conquered territory.

  The main reason for this lay less than an arm’s length away from him, and was breathing calmly and evenly. Her hair lay spread out on the pillow, like the rays of a raven-black sun.

  What is happiness? Harry had read an article about research into happiness which had shown that if you take the happiness of blood, its serotonin level, as your starting point, then there are relatively few external factors that can either reduce or increase that level. You can lose a foot, you can find out you’re infertile, your house can burn down. Your serotonin level sinks at first, but six months later you’re pretty much as happy or unhappy as you were to start with. Same thing if you buy a bigger house or a more expensive car.

  But the researchers had discovered that there were a few things that were important in feeling happiness. One of the most important was a good marriage.

  And that was just what he had. It sounded so banal that he couldn’t help smiling sometimes when he told himself or – very occasionally – the tiny number of people he called friends yet still hardly ever saw: ‘My wife and I are very happy together.’

  Yes, he was in control of his own happiness. If he could have, he would have been more than happy to copy and paste the three years that had passed since the wedding and relive those days over and over again. But obviously that wasn’t an option, and perhaps that was the cause of the tiny trace of anxiety he still felt? That time couldn’t be stopped, that things happened, that life was like the smoke from a cigarette, moving even in the most airtight of rooms, changing in the most unpredictable ways. And seeing as everything was perfect now, any change could only be for the worse. Yes, that was it. Happiness was like moving on thin ice, it was better to crack the ice and swim in cold water and freeze and struggle to get out than simply to wait until you plunged into it. That was why he had started to programme himself to wake up earlier than he had to. Like today, when his lecture on murder investigation didn’t start until eleven o’clock. Waking up just to have more time to lie and experience this peculiar happiness, for as long as it lasted. He suppressed the image of the man who had got away. That wasn’t Harry’s responsibility. Wasn’t Harry’s hunting ground. And the man with the demon’s face was appearing in his dreams less and less frequently.

  Harry crept out of bed as quietly as he could, even though her breathing was no longer as regular and he suspected she might be pretending to still be asleep because she didn’t want to spoil things. He pulled on a pair of trousers and went downstairs, put her favourite capsule in the espresso machine, added water, and opened the little glass jar of instant coffee for himself. He bought small jars because fresh, newly opened instant coffee tasted so much better. He switched the kettle on, stuck his bare feet in a pair of shoes and went outside onto the steps.

  He breathed in the biting autumn air. The nights had already started to get colder here on Holmenkollveien, up in the hills of Besserud. He looked down towards the city and the fjord, where there were still a few sailing boats, standing out as tiny white triangles against the blue water. In two months, maybe just a matter of weeks, the first snow would be falling up here
. But that was fine, the big house with its brown timber walls was built for winter rather than summer.

  He lit his second cigarette of the day and walked down the steep gravel drive. He picked his feet up carefully to avoid treading on the untied laces. He could have put on a jacket, or at least a T-shirt, but that was part of the pleasure of having a warm house to come back to: freezing, just a little bit. He stopped by the mailbox. Took out the copy of Aftenposten.

  ‘Good morning, neighbour.’

  Harry hadn’t heard the Tesla pull out onto his neighbour’s tarmacked drive. The driver’s window slid open and he saw the always immaculately blonde fru Syvertsen. She was what Harry – who came from the east of the city and had only been here in the west a relatively short time – thought of as a typical Holmenkollen wife. A housewife with two children and two home helps, and no plans to get a job even though the Norwegian state had invested five years of university education in her. To put it another way, what other people saw as a leisure activity, she saw as her job: keeping herself in shape (Harry could only see her tracksuit top, but knew she was wearing tight-fitting gym gear underneath, and yes, she looked bloody good considering that she was well past forty), logistics (when which of the home helps should take care of the children, and when the family should go on holiday, and where: the house outside Nice, the skiing cabin in Hemsedal, the summer cottage in Sørlandet?), and networking (lunch with friends, dinners with potentially advantageous contacts). And her most important task was already done. Securing herself a husband with enough money to finance this so-called job of hers.

  That was where Rakel had failed so miserably. Even though she had grown up in the big wooden house in Besserud, where children were taught how to manoeuvre through society at a young age, and even though she was smart and attractive enough to get anyone she wanted, she had ended up with an alcoholic murder detective on a low salary, who was currently a sober lecturer at Police College on an even lower salary.