Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

Church bells. Now?

He didn’t know if they were ringing for a funeral or christening, only that the sound made him shudder. And at that moment he saw something in the dense darkness ahead of him. A pair of yellow, glowing eyes, moving. Animal’s eyes. Hyena’s eyes. And a low growl that grew in strength. It was getting closer fast.

Harry raised his hand in front of him but was still blinded by the headlights of the snowmobile as it stopped ahead of him.

‘Where are you heading?’ a voice asked from behind the light.

Harry took his phone out, opened the app and gave it to the snowmobile driver. ‘There.’

60.148083, 10.777245.

There was forest on either side of the main road. No cars. A blue sign.

Harry found the tree precisely one hundred metres into the forest from the sign.

He waded over to the charred, splintered black trunk, where the snow wasn’t as deep as elsewhere. He crouched down and saw a paler scar in the wood, lit up by the lights of the snowmobile. Rope. A chain, perhaps. Which meant that Marte Ruud had been alive at that point.

‘They were here,’ he said, looking round. ‘Valentin and Lenny, they were both here. Perhaps they met?’

The trees stared back at him in silence, like reluctant witnesses.

Harry went back to the snowmobile and sat behind the police officer.

‘You’ll need to bring forensics back here so they can get hold of anything that’s left.’

The officer half turned round. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Back to the city with the bad news.’

‘You know Marte Ruud’s family have already been informed?’

‘Mm. But not her family at Schrøder’s.’

From inside the forest a bird shrieked a lone warning, far too late.

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON

HARRY MOVED THE half-metre-high pile of written answers so that he could see the two boys who had sat down in front of his desk better.

‘Well, I’ve read your answers regarding the case of the devil’s star,’ he said. ‘And obviously you deserve praise for spending your free time on a task I set the final-year students …’

‘But?’ Oleg said.

‘No but.’

‘No, because our answers were better than any of theirs, weren’t they?’ Jesus had folded his hands behind his head, over his long black plait.

‘No,’ Harry said.

‘No? Which of theirs was better?’

‘Ann Grimset’s group, if I remember rightly.’

‘What?’ Oleg said. ‘They didn’t even get the prime suspect right!’

‘That’s correct, they actually declared that they didn’t have a prime suspect at all. And, based on the information that was made available, that was the correct conclusion. You identified the right person, but that’s because you couldn’t help yourselves and googled to find out who the real culprit was twelve years ago. As a result, you got hung up working to a template and drew several mistaken conclusions so that you could end up with the right result.’

‘So you set a task that has no solution?’ Oleg said.

‘Not using the information provided,’ Harry said. ‘A taste of the future, if you really want to become detectives.’

‘So what should we do, then?’

‘Look for fresh information,’ Harry said. ‘Or put what you already know together in a different way. Often the solution is hidden in the information you already have.’

‘What about the vampirist case?’ Jesus asked.

‘Some fresh information. And some that was already there.’

‘Did you see what VG said today?’ Oleg asked. ‘That Lenny Hell instructed Valentin Gjertsen to kill women Hell was jealous about. Just like in Othello .’

‘Mm. I seem to remember you saying that the motive for murder in Othello wasn’t primarily jealousy, but ambition.’

‘Othello syndrome , then. By the way, it wasn’t Mona Daa who wrote it. It’s funny, but I haven’t seen anything written by her in ages.’

‘Who’s Mona Daa?’ Jesus asked.

‘The only crime reporter who got the whole picture,’ Oleg said. ‘A strange girl from up north. Goes to the gym in the middle of the night and wears Old Spice. So, tell us, Harry!’

Harry looked at the two eager faces in front of him. Tried to remember if he’d been that keen on the course when he was at Police College. Hardly. He was usually hung-over and couldn’t wait to get drunk again. These two were better. He cleared his throat. ‘OK. In that case, this is a lecture, and I must remind you that as police students you are under an oath of confidentiality. Understood?’

The pair of them nodded and leaned forward.

Harry leaned back. He wanted a smoke, and knew that cigarette outside on the steps was going to taste good.

‘We’ve been through Hell’s computer, and it’s all there,’ he said. ‘Plans of action, notes, information about the victims, information about Valentin Gjertsen, alias Alexander Dreyer, about Hallstein Smith, about me—’

‘About you ?’ Jesus said.

‘Let him go on,’ Oleg said.

‘Hell wrote a manual about how to take impressions of the house keys of these women. He had discovered that on a Tinder date, eight out of ten women leave their bag at the table when they go to the toilet, and that most of them keep their keys in the little zipped compartment inside the bag. And that it takes on average fifteen seconds to make a wax impression of three keys, both sides, and that it’s easier to photograph the keys, but that for some types of keys a photograph isn’t enough to make a sufficiently accurate 3D file from which to produce copies using the 3D printer.’

‘Does that mean he knew he was going to feel jealous about them as early as the first date?’ Jesus asked.

‘In some cases, maybe,’ Harry said. ‘All he wrote was that when it was so simple, there was no reason not to make sure he had access to their homes.’

‘Creepy,’ Jesus whispered.

‘What made him pick Valentin, and how did he find him?’ Oleg asked.

‘Everything he needed was in the patient records he’d stolen from Smith. It said there that Alexander Dreyer was a man with such intense and detailed vampiristic fantasies of killing that Smith was considering trying to get him sectioned. The argument against was that Dreyer demonstrated a high degree of self-control, and lived such a well-ordered life. I assume that it was this combination of a desire to kill and self-control that made him the perfect candidate for Hell.’

‘But what did Hell have to offer Valentin Gjertsen?’ Jesus asked. ‘Money?’

‘Blood,’ Harry said. ‘Young, warm blood from female victims who couldn’t be linked to Alexander Dreyer.’

‘Murders in which there’s no obvious motive, and where the murderer hasn’t previously been in contact with the victims, are the worst ones to solve,’ Oleg said, as Jesus nodded. Harry recognised the quote from one of his own lectures.

‘Mm. The most important thing for Valentin was to keep his alias, Alexander Dreyer, away from the case. Together with his new face, it was that name which meant he was able to move about in public without being caught. He was less concerned about it coming out that Valentin Gjertsen was behind the murders. And of course in the end he was unable to resist the temptation to signal to us that he was the man behind the murders.’

‘To us,’ Oleg said. ‘Or to you?’

Harry shrugged. ‘Either way, it didn’t actually get us any closer to the man we’d been searching for all these years. He was able to just carry on following Hell’s directions, carry on killing. And it could be done safely, because Hell’s replica keys meant that Valentin could let himself into his victims’ homes.’