Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

‘Very well,’ Harry said, and took a deep breath.

No, Katrine thought, and held her breath.

‘Valentin Gjertsen didn’t have a revolver on him when he arrived. It was already in your office.’

‘What?’ Smith’s laughter sounded like the cry of a lone bird in the auditorium. ‘How on earth could it have got there?’

‘You took it there,’ Harry said.

‘Me? I’ve got nothing to do with that revolver.’

‘It was your revolver, Smith.’

‘Mine? I’ve never owned a revolver in my life, you only have to check the firearms register.’

‘In which this revolver is registered to a sailor from Farsund. Whom you treated. For schizophrenia.’

‘A sailor? What are you talking about, Harry? You said yourself that Valentin threatened you with the revolver in the bar, when he killed Mehmet Kalak.’

‘You got it back after that.’

A wave of anxiety spread around the auditorium, and there was a sound of low muttering and chairs being moved.

The chairman stood up, and looked like a cockerel spreading his feathers as he raised his gowned arms to appeal for calm. ‘Sorry, herr Hole, but this is a disputation. If you have information for the police, might I suggest that you address it to the correct authorities and not bring it into the world of academe.’

‘Herr Chairman, opponents,’ Harry said, ‘is it not of fundamental importance to the examination of this doctoral thesis if it is based upon a misinterpreted case study? Isn’t that the sort of thing that’s supposed to be illuminated in a disputation?’

‘Herr Hole—’ the chairman began, with thunder in his voice.

‘—is right,’ Ståle Aune said from the front row. ‘My dear chairman, as a member of the adjudication committee, I am very interested to hear what herr Hole wishes to say to the candidate.’

The chairman looked at Aune. Then at Harry. And finally at Smith, before sitting down again.

‘Well, then,’ Harry said. ‘I would like to ask the candidate if he held Lenny Hell hostage in his own house, and if it was him rather than Hell who was directing Valentin Gjertsen?’

An almost inaudible gasp ran round the auditorium, followed by a silence so complete that it seemed to suck all the air out of the room.

Smith shook his head in disbelief. ‘This is a joke, isn’t it, Harry? This is something you’ve cooked up in the boiler room to liven up the disputation, and now—’

‘I suggest you answer, Hallstein.’

Perhaps it was the use of his first name that made Smith realise that Harry was serious. Katrine at least thought she saw something sink in as he stood there at the podium.

‘Harry,’ he said quietly, ‘I had never been in Hell’s house before Sunday, when you took me there.’

‘Yes, you had,’ Harry said. ‘You were very careful to get rid of the evidence from anywhere you might have left fingerprints and DNA. But there was one place you forgot. The water pipe.’

‘The water pipe? We all left our DNA on that damn water pipe on Sunday, Harry!’

‘Not you.’

‘Yes, me too! Ask Bjørn Holm, he’s sitting right there!’

‘What Bjørn Holm can confirm is that your DNA was found on the water pipe, not that it got there on Sunday. Because on Sunday you came down to the cellar when I was already there. Silently, I didn’t hear you come, if you remember? Silently, because you didn’t hit your head on the water pipe. You ducked. Because your brain remembered.’

‘This is laughable, Harry. I hit that water pipe on Sunday, you just didn’t hear it.’

‘Perhaps because you were wearing this, which cushioned the blow …’ Harry pulled a black woollen hat from his pocket and put it on his head. On the front of the hat was a skull, and Katrine read the name St. Pauli. ‘But how can someone leave DNA, in the form of skin or blood or hair, when they’re wearing this pulled down over their forehead?’

Hallstein blinked hard.

‘The candidate isn’t answering,’ Harry said. ‘So let me answer for him. Hallstein Smith walked into that water pipe the first time he was there, which was a long time ago, before the vampirist set to work.’

In the silence that followed, Hallstein Smith’s low chuckle was the only sound.

‘Before I say anything,’ Smith said, ‘I think we should give former detective Harry Hole a generous round of applause for this fantastic story.’

Smith started to clap his hands, and a few others joined in before the applause died out.

‘But for this to be more than just a story, it requires the same thing as a doctoral thesis,’ Smith said. ‘Evidence! And you have none, Harry. Your entire deduction is based upon two highly dubious assumptions. That some very old scales in a barn shows exactly the right weight of a person who stands on it for barely a second, scales that I can tell you have a tendency to stick. And that because I was wearing a woollen hat I couldn’t have left DNA on the water pipe on Sunday. A hat that I can tell you I took off when I was going down those steps before I hit my head on the water pipe, and put on again seeing as it was colder down in the cellar. The fact that I have no scar on my forehead now is because I heal quickly. My wife can also confirm that I had a mark on my forehead when I returned home.’

Katrine saw the woman in the home-made, drab-coloured dress look at her husband with dark eyes in a blank face, as if she were suffering shock after a grenade explosion.

‘Isn’t that so, May?’

The woman’s mouth opened and closed. Then she nodded slowly.

‘You see, Harry?’ Smith tilted his head and looked at Harry with an expression of sad sympathy. ‘You see how easy it is to blow holes in your theory?’

‘Well,’ Harry said. ‘I respect your wife’s loyalty, but I’m afraid the DNA evidence is indisputable. The analysis from the Forensic Medical Institute not only proves that the organic matter matches your DNA profile, but also that it’s more than two months old, so couldn’t possibly have ended up there on Sunday.’

Katrine started in her chair and looked at Bjørn. He shook his head almost imperceptibly.

‘As a result, Smith, it isn’t a theory that you were in Hell’s cellar sometime last autumn. It is a fact. Just as it’s a fact that you had the Ruger revolver in your possession, and that it was in your office when you shot the unarmed Valentin Gjertsen. Besides, we also have stylometrical analysis.’

Katrine looked at the battered yellow folder Harry had pulled out of the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘A computer program that compares word choices, sentence structure, textual style and punctuation to identify the author. It was stylometry that gave fresh life to the debate about which of his plays Shakespeare actually wrote. The success rate for identifying the correct author is between eighty and ninety per cent. In other words, not high enough for it to count as evidence. But the success rate for ruling out a particular author, such as Shakespeare, is 99.9 per cent. Our IT expert, Tord Gren, used the program to compare the emails that were sent to Valentin with thousands of Lenny Hell’s earlier emails to other people. The conclusion is …’ Harry passed the file to Katrine. ‘… that Lenny Hell didn’t write the instructions which Valentin Gjertsen received by email.’

Smith looked at Harry. His fringe had fallen forward over his sweating brow.

‘We’ll discuss this further in a police interview,’ Harry said. ‘But this is a disputation. And you still have the chance to give the adjudication committee an explanation that will stop them refusing to award your doctorate. Isn’t that right, Aune?’

Ståle Aune cleared his throat. ‘That’s right. Ideally, science is blind to the morality of the age, and this wouldn’t be the first doctorate to have been achieved by morally questionable or even directly illegal methods. What we on the adjudication committee need to know before we can approve the dissertation is whether or not there was anyone actually steering Valentin. If that isn’t the case, I can’t see how this thesis can be accepted by the adjudication committee.’