Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

‘Vanished?’

‘We got a text saying she was taking a few days off and that her phone would be switched off. Probably a good move, that girl’s worked bloody hard over the past year, but the editor was pissed off she didn’t ask, just sent that short message and pretty much disappeared. Kids these days, eh, Harry? Anything I can help you with?’

‘No, thanks,’ Harry said, and hung up. He looked at his phone for a moment before slipping it into his pocket.

By quarter past eleven Bjørn Holm had got hold of the name of the man who had imported the Ruger Redhawk into Norway, a sailor from Farsund. And at half past eleven Harry spoke to his daughter on the phone. She remembered the Redhawk because she had dropped the heavy revolver, which weighed more than a kilo, on her father’s big toe when she was little. But she couldn’t say where it had gone.

‘Dad moved to Oslo when he retired, to be closer to us children. But he was ill towards the end, and did a lot of peculiar things. He started giving away lots of his possessions, as we discovered afterwards when we were trying to sort out his will. I never saw the revolver again, so he could have given it away.’

‘But you don’t know who to?’

‘No.’

‘You said he was ill. I presume that was what led to his death?’

‘No, he died of pneumonia. It was fast and relatively painless, thank goodness.’

‘I see. So what was the other illness, and who was his doctor?’

‘That was just it, we realised he wasn’t very well, but Dad always thought of himself as a big, strong sailor. I suppose he thought it was embarrassing, so he kept it secret, both what was wrong with him and who he saw about it. It wasn’t until his funeral that I heard about it from an old friend he’d confided in.’

‘Would that friend know who your father’s doctor was, do you think?’

‘Hardly, Dad just mentioned the illness, no details.’

‘And what was the illness?’

Harry wrote it down. Looked at the word. A rather lonely Greek term among all the Latin names in the world of medicine.

‘Thanks,’ he said.

THURSDAY NIGHT

‘I’M SURE,’ HARRY said into the darkness of the bedroom.

‘Motive?’ Rakel said, curling up beside him.

‘Othello. Oleg was right. First and foremost, it’s not about jealousy. It’s about ambition.’

‘Are you still talking about Othello? Are you sure you don’t want to close the window, it’s supposed to be minus fifteen tonight.’

‘No.’

‘You’re not sure if the window should be closed, but you’re quite sure who the architect behind the vampirist murders is?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re just missing that silly little thing called evidence.’

‘Yes.’ Harry pulled her closer to him. ‘That’s why I need a confession.’

‘So ask Katrine Bratt to call him in for questioning.’

‘Like I said, Bellman won’t let anyone touch the case.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

Harry stared at the ceiling. Felt the heat of her body. Would that be enough? Should they close the window?

‘I’m going to question him myself. Without him knowing that that’s what’s going on.’

‘Just let me remind you, as a lawyer, that an informal confession to you, one to one, has zero value.’

‘So we’ll have to make sure I’m not the only one who hears it, then.’

Ståle Aune rolled over in bed and picked up the phone. Saw who was calling and pressed the button to answer. ‘Yes?’

‘I thought you’d be asleep.’ Harry’s gruff voice.

‘And you still called?’

‘You’ve got to help me with something.’

‘Still you rather than us ?’

‘Still humanity. Do you remember we talked about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ?’

‘Yes.’

‘I need you to set a monkey trap during Hallstein’s disputation.’

‘Really? You, me, Hallstein and who else?’

Ståle Aune heard Harry take a deep breath.

‘A doctor.’

‘And this is a person you’ve managed to link to the case?’

‘More or less.’

Ståle felt the hairs on his arms stand up. ‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that I found a hair in Rakel’s room, and in a fit of paranoia I sent it for analysis. It turned out that there was nothing suspicious about the fact that it was there, because it came from this doctor. But then it turned out that the DNA profile of the hair ties him to the scenes of the vampirist murders.’

‘What?’

‘And that there’s a link between this doctor and a young detective who’s been among us the whole time.’

‘What are you saying? You’ve got proof that this doctor and the detective are involved in the vampirist murders?’

‘No,’ Harry sighed.

‘No? Explain.’

When Ståle Aune hung up twenty minutes later, he listened to the silence in the house. The calm. Everyone was asleep. But he knew he wasn’t going to get any more sleep.

FRIDAY MORNING

WENCHE SYVERTSEN LOOKED out across Frognerparken as she used the step machine. One of her friends had advised her against it, saying it made your backside bigger. She evidently hadn’t understood the point: Wenche wanted a bigger backside. Wenche had read online that exercise only gave you a more muscular backside rather than one that was bigger and more perfectly formed, and that the solution was oestrogen supplements, eating more, or – simplest of all – implants. But Wenche had ruled out the last, because one of her principles was keeping her body natural, and she had never – never – submitted to the knife. Apart from getting her bust fixed, of course, but that didn’t count. And she was a woman of principle. That was why she had never been unfaithful to herr Syvertsen, in spite of all the offers she got, particularly in gyms like this. It was often young men, who took her for a cougar on the prowl. But Wenche had always preferred men who were more mature. Not as old as the wrinkled, battered old man on the cycle beside her, but like her neighbour. Harry Hole. Men who were inferior to her intellectually and in terms of maturity were actually a turn-off, she needed men who could stimulate her, entertain her, spiritually as well as in material terms. It really was that simple, there was no point pretending otherwise. And herr Syvertsen had done a good job of the last of these. But Harry was unavailable, apparently. And then there was that business of her principles, too. Besides, herr Syvertsen had become unreasonably jealous and had threatened to interfere with her privileges and lifestyle on the few occasions he had found out that she had been unfaithful. Which of course was before she had established the principle of not being unfaithful.

‘Why isn’t a beautiful woman like you married?’

The words sounded like they were being ground out, and Wenche turned to face the old man on the bicycle. He smiled at her. His face was thin, with wrinkles like deep valleys, big lips and long, thick, greasy hair. He was thin, but broad-shouldered. A bit like Mick Jagger. Apart from his red bandanna and truck driver’s moustache.

Wenche smiled and raised her ringless right hand. ‘Married. But I take it off when I exercise.’

‘Shame,’ the old man smiled. ‘Because I’m not married, and I could have offered a b-betrothal on the spot.’

He raised his own right hand. Wenche started. She thought for a moment that she was seeing things. Was that really a big hole , right through his hand?

‘Oleg Fauke is here,’ the voice said over the intercom.

‘Send him in,’ John D. Steffens said, pushing his chair away from his desk and looking out of the window at the laboratory building, the department of transfusion medicine. He had already seen young Fauke get out of the little Japanese car that was still in the car park with its engine running. Another young man was sitting behind the wheel, presumably with the heater at full blast. It was a sparklingly cold, sunny day. For many people it was a paradox that a cloudless sky in July promised heat but cold in January. Because many people couldn’t be bothered to understand the basics of physics, meteorology and the nature of the world. It no longer irritated Steffens that people thought that cold was a thing, and didn’t understand that it was merely the absence of heat. Cold was the natural, dominant state. Heat the exception. The way murder and cruelty were natural, logical, and mercy an anomaly, a result of the human herd’s intricate way of promoting the survival of the species. Because mercy stopped there, within the species, and it was humanity’s boundless cruelty towards other species that allowed it to survive. For instance, the growth of human beings as a species meant that meat wasn’t just hunted, but produced . The very words, meat production , the very idea! People kept animals in cages, stripping them of all their happiness and pleasure in life, inseminating them so that they involuntarily produced milk and tender young flesh, took their offspring away as soon as they were born, while the mothers bellowed with pain, and then made them pregnant again as soon as possible. People got furious if certain species were eaten, dogs, whales, dolphins, cats. But mercy, for unfathomable reasons, stopped there. The far more intelligent pigs could and would be humiliated and eaten, and we had been doing it for so long human beings no longer even thought about the calculated cruelty that was part and parcel of modern food production. Brainwashing!