Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

Harry rubbed his unshaven top lip with his thumb and forefinger as he nodded slowly. ‘Mm. Of course.’

‘Well, I’ll be off,’ Aune said, reaching for his briefcase and picking up a pile of photographs. ‘These are the pictures from the crime scene that Katrine sent. Like I said, they’re no use to me.’

‘Why would I want them?’ Harry wondered, looking down at a woman’s body on a bloodstained bed.

‘For one of your classes, maybe. I heard you mention the devil’s star case, so you obviously use real murder cases, and real documents.’

‘In that instance it works as a template,’ Harry said, trying to tear his eyes away from the woman’s picture. There was something familiar about it. Like an echo. Had he seen her before? ‘What’s the victim’s name?’

‘Elise Hermansen.’

The name didn’t ring any bells. Harry looked at the next picture. ‘These wounds on her neck, what are they?’

‘You really haven’t read a thing about the case? It’s on all the front pages, it’s hardly surprising that Bellman’s trying to pressgang you. Iron teeth, Harry.’

‘ Iron teeth ? A satanist?’

‘If you read VG , you’ll see that they refer to my colleague Hallstein Smith’s tweet about it being the work of a vampirist.’

‘A vampirist? A vampire, then?’

‘If only,’ Aune said, taking a page torn out of VG from his case. ‘A vampire does at least have some basis in zoology and fiction. According to Smith and a few other psychologists around the world, a vampirist is someone who takes pleasure from drinking blood. Read this …’

Harry read the tweet Aune held up in front of him. He stopped at the last sentence. The vampirist will strike again .

‘Mm. Just because there are only a few of them doesn’t mean that they’re not right.’

‘Are you mad? I’m all for going against the flow, and I like ambitious people like Smith. He made a big mistake when he was a student and landed himself with his nickname, “the Monkey”, and I’m afraid that means he still doesn’t have much credibility among other psychologists. But he was actually a very promising psychologist until he got into this business with vampirism. His articles weren’t bad either, but obviously he couldn’t get them published in any peer-reviewed journals. Now he’s got something printed at last. In VG .’

‘So why don’t you believe in vampirism?’ Harry said. ‘You yourself have said that if you can think of any form of deviancy, there’ll be someone out there who’s got it.’

‘Oh yes, it’s all out there. Or will be. Our sexuality is all about what we’re capable of thinking and feeling. And that’s pretty much unlimited. Dendrophilia means being sexually excited by trees. Kakorrhaphiophilia means finding failure sexually arousing. But before you can define something as a -philia or an -ism, it has to have reached a degree of prevalence, and have a certain number of common denominators. Smith and his group of mythomaniac psychologists have invented their own -ism. They’re wrong, there isn’t a group of so-called vampirists who follow any predictable pattern of behaviour for them or anyone else to analyse.’ Aune buttoned up his coat and walked towards the door. ‘Whereas the fact that you suffer from a fear of intimacy, and are incapable of giving your best friend a hug before he leaves, is decent material for a psychological theory. Give Rakel my love, and tell her I’ll magic those headaches away. Harry?’

‘What? Yes, of course. I’ll tell her. Hope things work out OK with Aurora.’

Harry was left staring into space after Aune had gone. The previous evening he had walked into the living room while Rakel was watching a film. He had glanced at the screen and asked if it was a James Gray film. It was a perfectly neutral picture of a street with no actors in it, without any specific cars or camera angles, two seconds of a film Harry had never seen. OK, a picture can never be completely neutral, but Harry still had no idea what made him think of that particular director. Apart from the fact that he had watched a James Gray film a few months ago. That could be all it was, an automatic and trivial connection. A film he had seen, then a two-second clip that contained one or two details that swirled through his brain so quickly that he couldn’t identify what the points of recognition were.

Harry took out his mobile phone.

Hesitated. Then he pulled up Katrine Bratt’s number. It had been over six months since the last time they were in touch, when she had sent him a text on his birthday. He had replied with ‘thanks’, no capital letter or full stop. He knew she knew that didn’t mean he didn’t care, just that he didn’t care about long text messages.

His call went unanswered.

When he rang her internal number at Crime Squad, Magnus Skarre picked up. ‘So, Harry Hole himself.’ The sarcasm was so heavy that Harry was left in no doubt. Harry hadn’t had many fans at Crime Squad, and Skarre certainly hadn’t been one of them. ‘No, I haven’t seen Bratt today. Which is pretty odd for a new lead detective, because we’ve got a hell of a lot to do here.’

‘Hm. Can you tell her I—?’

‘Better to call back, Hole, we’ve got enough to think about.’

Harry hung up. Drummed his fingers on the desk and looked at the pile of essays at one end of it. And at the sheaf of photographs at the other. He thought about Bellman’s analogy about predators. A lion? OK, why not? He’d read that lions that hunt alone have a success rate of only fifteen per cent or so. And that when lions kill large prey, they don’t have the strength to rip their throats open, so they have to suffocate them. They clamp their jaws around the animal’s neck and squeeze the windpipe. And that can take time. If it’s a big animal, a water buffalo for instance, the lion sometimes has to hang there, tormenting itself and the water buffalo for hours, yet still has to let go in the end. And that’s one way of looking at a murder investigation. Hard work and no reward. He had promised Rakel that he wouldn’t go back. Had promised himself.

Harry looked at the bundle of photographs again. Looked at the picture of Elise Hermansen. Her name had stuck in his mind automatically. As had the details of the photograph of her lying on the bed. But it wasn’t the details. It was the whole. The film Rakel had been watching the night before had been called The Drop . And the director wasn’t James Gray. Harry had been wrong. Fifteen per cent. All the same …

There was something about the way she was lying. Or had been lain out. The arrangement. It was like an echo from a forgotten dream. A cry in the forest. The voice of a man he was trying not to remember. The one who got away.

Harry remembered something he had once thought. That when he fell, when he pulled the cork from the bottle and took the first swig, it wasn’t the way he imagined, because that wasn’t the decisive moment. The decision had already been taken long before. And from that moment on, the only question was what the trigger would be. It was bound to come. At some point the bottle would be standing there in front of him. And it would have been waiting for him. And he for it. The rest was just opposite charges, magnetism, the inevitability of the laws of physics.

Shit. Shit.

Harry stood up quickly, grabbed his leather jacket and hurried out.

He looked in the mirror, checked that the jacket was sitting the way it should. He had read the description of her one last time. He disliked her already. A ‘w’ in a name that should be spelled with a ‘v’, like his, was a good enough reason for punishment on its own. He would have preferred a different victim, one more to his own taste. Like Katrine Bratt. But the decision had already been taken for him. The woman with a ‘w’ in her name was waiting for him.