Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

Hallstein used the break to mingle in the vestibule, to talk to people who weren’t invited to the dinner. He saw Harry Hole standing with a dark-haired woman, and made his way over to them.

‘Harry!’ he said, shaking the policeman’s hand, which was as hard and cold as marble. ‘This must be Rakel.’

‘It is,’ Harry said.

Hallstein shook her hand as he saw Harry look at his watch, then over at the door.

‘Are we expecting someone?’

‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘And here he is at last.’

Hallstein saw two people coming through the door at the other end of the room. A tall, dark young man, and a man in his fifties with fair hair and thin, rectangular, frameless glasses. It struck him that the young man looked like Rakel, but there was also something familiar about the other man.

‘Where have I seen that man in the glasses?’ Hallstein wondered.

‘I don’t know. He’s a haematologist, John D. Steffens.’

‘And what’s he doing here?’

Hallstein saw Harry take a deep breath. ‘He’s here to put an end to this story. He just doesn’t know it yet.’

At that moment the chair rang a bell and announced in a booming voice that it was time to go back into the auditorium.

John D. Steffens was making his way between two rows of seats with Oleg Fauke behind him. Steffens glanced around the room, trying to locate Harry Hole. And felt his heart stop when he caught sight of the fair-haired young man in the back row. At the same moment Anders caught sight of him, and Steffens saw the fear in the young man’s face. Steffens turned to Oleg to say he had forgotten a meeting and had to leave.

‘I know,’ Oleg said, and showed no sign of moving out of the way. Steffens noted that the boy was almost as tall as his pseudo-father, Hole. ‘But we’re going to let this run its course now, Steffens.’

The boy gently put his hand on Steffens’s shoulder, but it still felt to the senior consultant that he was being pushed onto the chair behind him. Steffens sat and felt his pulse slow down. Dignity. Yes, dignity. Oleg Fauke knew. Which meant that Harry knew. And hadn’t given him any chance to escape. And it was obvious from Anders’s reaction that he hadn’t known about this either. They had been fooled. Fooled into being here together. What now?

Katrine Bratt sat down between Harry and Bjørn just as the chair began to speak up at the podium.

‘The candidate has received a question ex auditorio . Harry Hole, please go ahead.’

Katrine looked at Harry in surprise as he stood up. ‘Thank you.’

She could see the looks of surprise on other people’s faces too, some of them with a smile on their lips, as if they were expecting a joke. Even Hallstein Smith seemed amused as he took over at the podium.

‘Congratulations,’ Harry said. ‘You’re very close to achieving your goal, and I must also thank you for your contribution to solving the vampirist case.’

‘I should be thanking you,’ Smith said with a small bow.

‘Yes, maybe,’ Harry said. ‘Because of course we found the person who was pulling the strings and directing Valentin. And, as Aune pointed out, your entire dissertation is based upon that. So you were lucky there.’

‘I was.’

‘But there are a couple of other things I think we’d all like answers to.’

‘I’ll do my best, Harry.’

‘I remember when I saw the recording of Valentin entering your barn. He knew exactly where he was going, but he didn’t know about the scales inside the door. He marched in, unconcerned, convinced he had firm ground under his feet. And he almost lost his balance. Why does that happen?’

‘We take some things for granted,’ Smith said. ‘In psychology we call it rationalising, which basically means that we simplify things. Without rationalisation, the world would be unmanageable, our brains would become overloaded by all the uncertainties we have to deal with.’

‘That would also explain why we go down a flight of cellar steps without concern, without thinking that we might hit our heads on a water pipe.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But after we’ve done it once, we remember – or at least most of us do – the next time. That’s why Katrine Bratt takes care when she walks across those scales in your barn on only her second visit. So it’s no mystery that we found blood and skin on that water pipe in Hell’s cellar belonging to you and me, but not from Lenny Hell. He must have learned to duck as long ago as … well, when he was a child. Otherwise we would have found Hell’s DNA, because DNA can often be traced years after it ends up on something like that water pipe.’

‘I’m sure that’s correct, Harry.’

‘I’ll come back to that, but let me first deal with something that is a mystery.’

Katrine sat up in her chair. She didn’t yet know what was going on, but she knew Harry, could feel the vibration of the inaudible, low-frequency growl that lay beneath his voice.

‘When Valentin Gjertsen goes into your barn at midnight, he weighs 74.7 kilos,’ Harry said. ‘But when he leaves, he weighs 73.2 kilos, according to the security camera footage. Exactly one and a half kilos lighter.’ Harry gestured with his hand. ‘The obvious explanation is, of course, that the weight difference is the result of the blood he lost in your office.’

Katrine heard the chairman’s discreet but impatient cough.

‘But then I realised something,’ Harry said. ‘We’d forgotten the revolver! The one Valentin had brought with him, and which was still in the office when he left. A Ruger Redhawk weighs around 1.2 kilos. So, for the sums to add up, Valentin had only lost 0.3 kilos of blood …’

‘Hole,’ the chairman said. ‘If there is a question to the candidate here …’

‘First a question to an expert in blood,’ Harry said, and turned to face the audience. ‘Senior Consultant John Steffens, you’re a haematologist, and you happened to be on duty when Penelope Rasch was taken to hospital …’

John Steffens felt sweat break out on his forehead when all eyes turned to look at him. Just as they had looked at him when he had been on the witness stand explaining how his wife had died. How she had been stabbed, how she had literally bled to death in his arms. All eyes, then as now. Anders’s eyes, then as now.

He swallowed.

‘Yes, I was.’

‘You demonstrated then that you have a good eye for estimating blood quantities. Based on a photograph from the crime scene, you estimated the amount of blood she had lost at one and a half litres.’

‘Yes.’

Harry took a photograph out of his jacket pocket and held it up. ‘And based on this picture from Hallstein Smith’s office, which was shown to you by one of the paramedics, you estimated the amount of blood here also to be one and a half litres. In other words, one and a half kilos. Is that correct?’

Steffens swallowed. Knew that Anders was staring at him from behind. ‘That’s correct. Give or take a decilitre or two.’

‘Just to be clear, is it possible for someone to get to their feet and escape even if they’ve lost a litre and a half of blood?’

‘It differs from individual to individual, but yes, if the person has the physique and determination.’

‘Which brings me to my very simple question,’ Harry said.

Steffens felt a bead of sweat trickle down his forehead.

Harry turned back to the podium.

‘How come, Smith?’

Katrine gasped. The silence that followed felt like a physical weight in the room.

‘I’ll have to pass on that, Harry, I don’t know,’ Smith said. ‘I hope that doesn’t mean that my doctorate is at risk, but in my defence I would like to point out that this question is outside the frame of my dissertation.’ He smiled, but garnered no laughter this time. ‘But it’s within the parameters of the police investigation, so perhaps you ought to answer that yourself, Harry?’