Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

‘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.

‘Yes.’ Smith went over to the bookcase and pulled out one of the folders. ‘They’re mine. These are my records. The ones that were stolen.’

‘This too, I presume,’ Harry said, holding up the folder so that Hallstein Smith could read the label.

‘Alexander Dreyer. That’s my handwriting, yes.’

‘I don’t understand all the terminology here, but I can see that Dreyer was obsessed with Dark Side of the Moon . And women. And blood. You wrote that he might go on to develop vampirism and noted that if this happened you would have to consider breaking your oath of confidentiality and telling the police about your concerns.’

‘Like I said, Dreyer stopped coming to see me.’

Harry heard the sound of a door being opened and looked out of the window, just in time to see the policeman stick his head over the railing of the veranda and throw up in the snow.

‘Where did they go to look for the fuse box?’

‘The cellar,’ Smith said.

‘Wait here,’ Harry said.

He went downstairs. There was a light on in the hall now, and the door to the cellar was open. He crouched down as he descended the narrow, dark cellar steps but still managed to hit his head on something and felt the skin break. The edge of a water pipe. Then he felt the solid floor beneath his feet, and saw a single light bulb outside a storeroom, where Jimmy was standing with his hands hanging limply by his sides, staring in.

Harry walked towards him. The cold in the living room had hidden the smell, even though the corpse showed signs of decomposition. But it was damp down here, and even if it did get cold, it was never as far below zero as above ground. And as Harry approached, he realised that what he had thought was the smell of rotten potatoes was actually another body.

‘Jimmy,’ he said quietly, and the sheriff started and turned round. His eyes were wide open and he had a little cut on his forehead that made Harry jump before he realised it was the result of another encounter with the water pipe above the stairs.

The sheriff stepped aside and Harry looked in the storeroom.

It was a cage. Three metres by two. Iron mesh, and a door with an open padlock on it. But it wasn’t holding anyone captive now. Because whatever had been in that empty shell had long since departed. Soulless, again. But Harry could see why the young policeman had reacted so strongly.

Even if the level of decay indicated that she had been dead a long time, the mice and rats hadn’t been able to reach the naked woman who was hanging from the mesh roof of the cage. And the fact that the body was intact meant that Harry could see in detail what had been done to her. Knives. Mostly knives. Harry had seen so many, mutilated in so many different ways. You might think that would harden you. And it did. You got used to seeing the results of random violence, of vicious fights, fatal and efficient stabbings, of ritual madness. But it didn’t prepare you for this. For a type of mutilation where you could see what it was trying to achieve. The physical pain and desperate terror of the victim when she realised what was in the process of happening. The sexual pleasure and creative satisfaction of the murderer. The shock, the helpless desolation of those who found the body. Had the murderer got what he wanted here?

The sheriff began to cough behind him.

‘Not here,’ Harry said. ‘Go outside.’

He heard the sheriff’s stumbling steps behind him as he opened the door to the cage and went inside. The girl hanging there was thin and her skin as white as the snow outside, with red marks on it. Not blood. Freckles. And a black hole at the top of her stomach, from a bullet.

Harry doubted she had escaped her suffering by hanging herself. The cause of death could of course have been the bullet hole in her stomach, but the shot could also have been fired in frustration after she was dead, when she no longer worked, the way children go on destroying a broken toy.

Harry brushed aside the red hair hanging in front of her face. No doubt at all. The girl’s face expressed nothing. Fortunately. When, before too long, her ghost came to him at night, Harry would rather it did so with a blank expression on its face.

‘W-who’s that?’

Harry turned round. Hallstein Smith still had the St. Pauli hat pulled down to his eyes as if he was freezing, but Harry doubted that his trembling was caused by the cold.

‘It’s Marte Ruud.’

SUNDAY EVENING

HARRY SAT WITH his head in his hands, listening to the voices and heavy steps from the floor above. They were in the living room. The kitchen. The hall. Setting up cordons, placing little white flags, taking photographs.

Then he forced himself to raise his head and look again.

He had explained to the sheriff that they mustn’t cut Marte Ruud down until the crime-scene investigators had been. Of course, you could tell yourself that she had bled to death in the boot of Valentin’s car, there had been enough of her blood there for that. But there was a mattress on the floor in the left-hand side of the cage that told a different story. It was black, had over time become saturated with the sort of thing the human body rids itself of. And immediately above the mattress, attached to the mesh, hung a pair of handcuffs.

There was the sound of footsteps on the stairs. A familiar voice cursed loudly, then Bjørn Holm appeared, with a bleeding cut on his forehead. He stopped next to Harry and looked at the cage before turning towards him. ‘Now I understand why our two colleagues have identical wounds on their heads. You too, I see. But none of you felt like telling me, eh?’ He turned quickly and called towards the stairs: ‘Look out for the water p—’

‘Ow!’ a muffled voice exclaimed.

‘Why would anyone build a set of stairs so that you have to hit your head on—?’

‘You don’t want to look at her,’ Harry said quietly.

‘What?’

‘I don’t want to either, Bjørn. I’ve been here almost an hour, and it doesn’t get any damn easier.’

‘So why are you sitting here?’

Harry stood up. ‘She’s been alone for so long. I thought …’ Harry heard the telltale vibrato in his voice. He walked quickly towards the stairs and nodded to the forensics officer who was standing there rubbing his forehead.

The sheriff was in the hall talking on his phone.

‘Smith?’ Harry asked.

The sheriff pointed upstairs.

Hallstein Smith was sitting in front of the computer reading the folder with Alexander Dreyer’s name on it when Harry walked in.

He looked up. ‘Down there, Harry, that’s Alexander Dreyer’s work.’

‘Let’s call him Valentin. Are you sure?’

‘It’s all in my own notes. The cuts. He described it to me, told me his fantasies about torturing and then killing a woman. He described it as if he were planning a work of art.’

‘And you still didn’t tell the police?’

‘I thought about it, of course, but if we were to report all the grotesque crimes our clients commit in their imaginations, then neither we nor the police would do much else, Harry.’ Smith put his head in his hands. ‘Just think of all the lives that could have been saved if I’d only …’

‘Don’t be too hard on yourself, Hallstein, it isn’t even clear that the police would have done anything. Anyway, it’s possible that Lenny Hell used your stolen notes to copy Valentin’s fantasy.’