Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

There was an empty cage in one corner of the living room. The sort people keep rabbits in. Hang on, though. Harry remembered the meeting where Skarre had pressurised Wyller about the leak to VG , when Wyller said he had told VG that he had a cat. So where was the cat? And did you keep cats in cages? Harry’s gaze moved on to the end wall, where there was a narrow bookcase containing a few textbooks from Police College, including Bjerknes and Hoff Johansen’s Investigative Methods . But there were some that weren’t on the syllabus, like Ressler, Burgess and Douglas’s Sexual Homicide – Patterns and Motives , a book about serial killings that he had referred to in recent lectures because it contained information about the FBI’s newly established ViCAP unit. Harry looked at the other shelves. There were what looked like family photographs, two adults and Anders Wyller as a young boy. There were more books on the shelf below: Haematology at a Glance , Atul B. Mehta, A. Victor Hoffbrand. And Basic Haematology by John D. Steffens. A young man who was interested in blood disorders? Why not? Harry moved closer and looked more carefully at the family photograph. The boy looked happy. The parents less so. ‘Why did you sign out Valentin’s things?’ Harry said, and saw Wyller’s back stiffen. ‘Katrine Bratt didn’t ask you to. Physical evidence isn’t the sort of thing you normally take home with you, even if the case has been solved.’

Wyller turned round and Harry saw his eyes dart automatically to the right. Towards the bedroom.

‘I’m a detective with Crime Squad and you’re a lecturer at Police College, Harry, so strictly speaking I should be asking you what you want the serial number for.’

Harry looked at Wyller. Realised that he wasn’t going to get an answer. ‘The serial number was never checked in order to trace its original owner. And that could hardly have been Valentin Gjertsen, seeing as he didn’t exactly have a firearms licence, to put it mildly.’

‘Is that important?’

‘Don’t you think it is?’

Wyller shrugged his bare shoulders. ‘As far as we know, the revolver was never used to kill anyone, not even Marte Ruud, because the post-mortem showed she was dead before she was shot. We’ve got the ballistic data for the revolver, and it doesn’t match any of the other cases in our database. So no, I don’t think it’s important to check the serial number, not while there are other things crying out for our attention.’

‘I see,’ Harry said. ‘Well, maybe this lecturer can make himself useful by seeing where the serial number leads.’

‘Of course,’ Wyller said, tearing the sheet from the notepad and giving it to Harry.

‘Thanks,’ Harry said, looking at the blood on his shoulder.

Wyller followed him to the door, and when Harry turned round on the landing he saw that Wyller had spread himself out in the doorway, the way bouncers do.

‘Just out of curiosity,’ Harry said. ‘That cage in the living room, what do you keep in it?’

Wyller blinked a couple of times. ‘Nothing,’ he said. Then he quietly closed the door.

‘Did you find him?’ Bjørn asked as he pulled out into the road.

‘Yes,’ Harry said, tearing a page out of his own notebook. ‘And here’s the serial number. Ruger’s an American company, can you check with the ATF?’

‘You don’t seriously think they’ll be able to trace that revolver?’

‘Why not?’

‘Because the Americans are pretty half-hearted when it comes to registering the owners of firearms. And there are more than three hundred million weapons in the USA. More guns than people, in other words.’

‘Frightening.’

‘What is frightening,’ Bjørn Holm said, putting his foot down harder on the accelerator to get a controlled slide as they turned to go down the hill towards Pilestredet, ‘is that even the ones who aren’t criminals and say they’ve got guns for self-defence use their guns to shoot the wrong people. There was an article in the Los Angeles Times saying that in 2012 more than twice as many people were killed in accidental shootings as in self-defence. And almost forty times as many shot themselves. And that’s before you even start to look at the statistics for murder.’

‘You read the Los Angeles Times ?’

‘Well, mostly because Robert Hilburn used to write about music in it. Have you read his biography of Johnny Cash?’

‘Nope. Hilburn – is he the one who wrote about the Sex Pistols’ tour of the USA?’

‘Yep.’

They stopped at a red light in front of Blitz, once the bridgehead of punk in Norway, where you could still see the occasional Mohawk. Bjørn Holm grinned at Harry. He was happy now. Happy about becoming a father, happy the vampirist case was over, happy to be able to slide a car that smelt of the 1970s and talk about music that was almost as old.

‘It would be great if you could let me have an answer before twelve o’clock, Bjørn.’

‘If I’m not mistaken, the ATF is based in Washington DC, where it’s the middle of the night.’

‘They’ve got an office with Interpol in The Hague, try there.’

‘OK. Did you find out why Wyller had signed out those things?’

Harry stared at the traffic light. ‘No. Have you got Lenny Hell’s computer?’

‘Tord’s got it, he should be waiting for us in the boiler room.’

‘Good.’ Harry tried impatiently to stare the red light green.

‘Harry?’

‘Yes?’

‘Did it ever occur to you that it looked as if Valentin had left his flat very quickly, just before Katrine and Delta got there? As if someone had warned him?’

‘No,’ Harry lied.

The light turned green.

Tord was pointing and explaining things to Harry as the coffee machine spluttered and groaned behind them.

‘Here are Lenny Hell’s emails to Valentin before the murders of Elise, Ewa and Penelope.’

The emails were short. Just the victim’s name, address and a date. The date of the murder. And they all ended with the same line. Instructions and keys in agreed location. Instructions to be burned after reading .

‘They don’t say much,’ Tord said. ‘But enough.’

‘Hm.’

‘What?’

‘Why do the instructions have to be burned?’

‘Isn’t it obvious? There were things in them that could lead people to Lenny.’

‘But he didn’t delete the emails from his computer. Is that because he knew that IT experts like you could reconstruct the correspondence anyway?’

Tord shook his head. ‘Nowadays it isn’t that simple. Not if both sender and recipient delete the emails thoroughly.’

‘Lenny would have known how to delete emails thoroughly. So why didn’t he?’

Tord shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘Because he knew that by the time we had his computer, the game would already be up.’

Harry nodded slowly. ‘Maybe Lenny knew that from the start. That one day the war he was waging from his bunker would be lost. And that it would then be time for a bullet to the head.’

‘Maybe.’ Tord looked at his watch. ‘Was there anything else?’

‘Do you know what stylometry is?’

‘Yes. The analysis of variations in writing style. There was a lot of research into stylometry after the Enron scandal. Several hundred thousand emails were made public so that researchers could see if they could identify their senders. They got a hit rate of between eighty and ninety per cent.’

After Tord had left Harry rang the number of VG ’s crime desk.

‘Harry Hole. Can I speak to Mona Daa?’

‘Long time, Harry.’ Harry recognised the voice of one of the older crime reporters. ‘You could have done, but Mona vanished a few days ago.’