Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

And that was why he felt obliged to take a decision he really didn’t want to have to take. For so many reasons. But there was no way round it.

He had to bring him in.

FRIDAY MORNING

HARRY WOKE UP. The echo of a dream, a scream, died away. He lit a cigarette and reflected. Upon what sort of awakening this was. There were basically five different types. The first was waking up to work. For a long time that had been the best sort. When he could slip straight into the case he was investigating. Sometimes sleep and dreams had done something to his way of seeing things and he could lie there going through what they had revealed, piece by piece, from this new perspective. If he was lucky he might be able to catch a glimpse of something new, see part of the dark side of the moon. Not because the moon had moved, but because he had.

The second sort was waking up alone. That was characterised by an awareness that he was alone in bed, alone in life, alone in the world, and it could sometimes fill him with a sweet sensation of freedom, and at other times with a melancholy that could perhaps be called loneliness, but which was perhaps just a glimpse of what anyone’s life really is: a journey from the attachment of the umbilical cord to a death where we are finally separated from everything and everyone. A brief glimpse at the moment of awakening before all our defence mechanisms and comforting illusions slot into place again and we can face life in all its unreal glory.

Then there was waking up full of angst. That usually happened if he’d been drunk for more than three days in a row. There were different gradations of angst, but it was always there instantly. It was hard to identify a specific external danger or threat, it was more a sense of panic at being awake at all, being alive, being here . But every so often he could sense an internal threat. A fear of never feeling afraid again. Of finally and irrevocably going mad.

The fourth was similar to waking up full of angst: the there-are-other-people-here awakening. That set his mind working in two directions. One backwards: how the hell did this happen? One forwards: how do I get out of here? Sometimes this fight-or-flight impulse would settle down, but that always came later and therefore fell outside the frame of waking up.

And then there was the fifth. Which was a new type of waking up for Harry Hole. Waking up content. At first he had been surprised that it was possible to wake up happy, and had automatically thought through all the parameters, what this ridiculous ‘happiness’ actually consisted of, and if it was just an echo of some wonderful, stupid dream. But that night he hadn’t had any nice dreams, and the echo of the scream had come from the demon, the face on his retina which belonged to the murderer who got away. Even so, Harry had woken up happy. Hadn’t he? Yes. And when this variety of awakening had been repeated, morning after morning, he had begun to get used to the idea that he might actually be a relatively content man who had found happiness somewhere towards the end of his forties, and actually seemed capable of clinging on to this newly conquered territory.

The main reason for this lay less than an arm’s length away from him, and was breathing calmly and evenly. Her hair lay spread out on the pillow, like the rays of a raven-black sun.

What is happiness? Harry had read an article about research into happiness which had shown that if you take the happiness of blood, its serotonin level, as your starting point, then there are relatively few external factors that can either reduce or increase that level. You can lose a foot, you can find out you’re infertile, your house can burn down. Your serotonin level sinks at first, but six months later you’re pretty much as happy or unhappy as you were to start with. Same thing if you buy a bigger house or a more expensive car.

But the researchers had discovered that there were a few things that were important in feeling happiness. One of the most important was a good marriage.

And that was just what he had. It sounded so banal that he couldn’t help smiling sometimes when he told himself or – very occasionally – the tiny number of people he called friends yet still hardly ever saw: ‘My wife and I are very happy together.’

Yes, he was in control of his own happiness. If he could have, he would have been more than happy to copy and paste the three years that had passed since the wedding and relive those days over and over again. But obviously that wasn’t an option, and perhaps that was the cause of the tiny trace of anxiety he still felt? That time couldn’t be stopped, that things happened, that life was like the smoke from a cigarette, moving even in the most airtight of rooms, changing in the most unpredictable ways. And seeing as everything was perfect now, any change could only be for the worse. Yes, that was it. Happiness was like moving on thin ice, it was better to crack the ice and swim in cold water and freeze and struggle to get out than simply to wait until you plunged into it. That was why he had started to programme himself to wake up earlier than he had to. Like today, when his lecture on murder investigation didn’t start until eleven o’clock. Waking up just to have more time to lie and experience this peculiar happiness, for as long as it lasted. He suppressed the image of the man who had got away. That wasn’t Harry’s responsibility. Wasn’t Harry’s hunting ground. And the man with the demon’s face was appearing in his dreams less and less frequently.

Harry crept out of bed as quietly as he could, even though her breathing was no longer as regular and he suspected she might be pretending to still be asleep because she didn’t want to spoil things. He pulled on a pair of trousers and went downstairs, put her favourite capsule in the espresso machine, added water, and opened the little glass jar of instant coffee for himself. He bought small jars because fresh, newly opened instant coffee tasted so much better. He switched the kettle on, stuck his bare feet in a pair of shoes and went outside onto the steps.

He breathed in the biting autumn air. The nights had already started to get colder here on Holmenkollveien, up in the hills of Besserud. He looked down towards the city and the fjord, where there were still a few sailing boats, standing out as tiny white triangles against the blue water. In two months, maybe just a matter of weeks, the first snow would be falling up here. But that was fine, the big house with its brown timber walls was built for winter rather than summer.

He lit his second cigarette of the day and walked down the steep gravel drive. He picked his feet up carefully to avoid treading on the untied laces. He could have put on a jacket, or at least a T-shirt, but that was part of the pleasure of having a warm house to come back to: freezing, just a little bit. He stopped by the mailbox. Took out the copy of Aftenposten .

‘Good morning, neighbour.’

Harry hadn’t heard the Tesla pull out onto his neighbour’s tarmacked drive. The driver’s window slid open and he saw the always immaculately blonde fru Syvertsen. She was what Harry – who came from the east of the city and had only been here in the west a relatively short time – thought of as a typical Holmenkollen wife. A housewife with two children and two home helps, and no plans to get a job even though the Norwegian state had invested five years of university education in her. To put it another way, what other people saw as a leisure activity, she saw as her job: keeping herself in shape (Harry could only see her tracksuit top, but knew she was wearing tight-fitting gym gear underneath, and yes, she looked bloody good considering that she was well past forty), logistics (when which of the home helps should take care of the children, and when the family should go on holiday, and where: the house outside Nice, the skiing cabin in Hemsedal, the summer cottage in Sørlandet?), and networking (lunch with friends, dinners with potentially advantageous contacts). And her most important task was already done. Securing herself a husband with enough money to finance this so-called job of hers.