Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

He fastened the last button on the jacket. Then he left.

FRIDAY AFTERNOON

‘HOW DID BELLMAN manage to persuade you?’ Gunnar Hagen was standing by the window.

‘Well,’ the unmistakable voice said behind him, ‘he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.’ There was a bit more gravel to it now than when he had last heard it, but it had the same depth and calmness. Hagen had heard one of his female colleagues say that the only beautiful thing about Harry Hole was his voice.

‘And what was the offer?’

‘Fifty per cent extra for overtime and double pension contributions.’

The head of Crime Squad smiled briefly. ‘And you don’t have any conditions?’

‘Just that I’m allowed to pick the members of my group myself. I only want three.’

Gunnar Hagen turned round. Harry was slouched in the chair in front of Hagen’s desk with his long legs stretched out in front of him. His thin face had gained some more lines, and his thick, short blond hair had started to turn grey at the temples. But he was no longer as thin as the last time Hagen had seen him. The whites around his intense blue irises may not have been clear, but they weren’t marbled with red the way they had been when things had been at their worst.

‘Are you still dry, Harry?’

‘As a Norwegian oil well, boss.’

‘Hm. You do know that Norwegian oil wells aren’t dry, don’t you? They’ve just been shut down until the price of oil rises again.’

‘That was the image I was trying to convey, yes.’

Hagen shook his head. ‘And there was me thinking that you’d get more mature with age.’

‘Disappointing, isn’t it? We don’t get wiser, just older. Still nothing from Katrine?’

Hagen looked at his phone. ‘Not a thing.’

‘Shall we try calling her again?’

‘Hallstein!’ The call came from the living room. ‘The kids want you to be the hawk again!’

Hallstein Smith let out a resigned but happy sigh and put his book, Francesca Twinn’s Miscellany of Sex , down on the kitchen table. It was interesting enough to read that biting off a woman’s eyelashes is regarded as an act of passion in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea, but he hadn’t found anything he could use in his PhD, and making his kids happier was certainly more fun. It didn’t matter that he was still tired from the last game, because birthdays only came round once a year. Well, four times a year when you had four children. Six, if they insisted on their parents having birthday parties too. Twelve, if you celebrate half birthdays as well. He was on his way to the living room, where he could already hear the children cooing like doves, when the doorbell rang.

The woman standing outside on the step stared openly at Hallstein Smith’s head when he opened the door.

‘I managed to eat something with nuts in the day before yesterday,’ he said, scratching the irritating outbreak of livid red hives on his forehead.

He looked at her and realised that she wasn’t staring at the hives.

‘Oh, that,’ he said, taking off his hat. ‘It’s supposed to be a hawk’s head.’

‘Looks more like a chicken,’ the woman said.

‘It is actually an Easter chicken, so we call it a chickenhawk.’

‘My name is Katrine Bratt, I’m from Crime Squad, Oslo Police.’

Smith tilted his head. ‘Of course, I saw you on the news last night. Is this about what I said on Twitter? The phone hasn’t stopped ringing. It wasn’t my intention to cause such a fuss.’

‘Can I come in?’

‘Of course, but I hope you don’t mind slightly, er … boisterous children.’

Smith explained to the children that they were going to have to come up with their own hawk for a while, then led the policewoman into the kitchen.

‘You look like you could do with some coffee,’ Smith said, pouring a cup without waiting for an answer.

‘It ended up being a late night,’ the woman said. ‘I overslept, so I’ve come straight from bed. And I managed to leave my mobile at home, so I was wondering if I could borrow yours to call the office?’

Smith passed her his mobile and watched as she gazed helplessly at the ancient Ericsson. ‘The kids call it a stupid-phone. Do you want me to show you?’

‘I think I remember,’ Katrine said. ‘Tell me, what do you make of this picture?’

As she tapped at the phone, Smith studied the photograph she had handed him.

‘Iron dentures,’ he said. ‘From Turkey?’

‘No, Caracas.’

‘Right. There are similar sets of iron teeth in the Museum of Archaeology in Istanbul. They’re supposed to have been used by soldiers in Alexander the Great’s army, but historians doubt that, and think instead that the upper classes used them in some sort of sadomasochistic games.’ Smith scratched his hives. ‘So he used something like this?’

‘We’re not sure. We’re just working from the bite marks on the victim, some rust and a few flakes of black paint.’

‘Aha!’ Smith exclaimed. ‘Then we need to go to Japan!’

‘We do?’ Bratt put the phone to her ear.

‘You might have seen Japanese women with their teeth dyed black? No? Well, it’s a tradition known as ohaguro . It means “the darkness after the sun has gone down”, and first appeared during the Heian period, around the year AD 800. And … er, shall I go on?’

Bratt gestured impatiently.

‘It’s said that in the Middle Ages there was a shogun in the north who made his soldiers use iron teeth that were painted black. They were mostly to scare people, but could also be used in close combat. If the fighting got so crowded that the soldiers couldn’t use weapons or punch and kick their adversaries, they could use the teeth to bite through their enemies’ throats.’

The detective indicated that her call had been answered. ‘Hi, Gunnar, this is Katrine. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve come straight from home to talk to Professor Smith … yes, the one who sent the tweet. And that I left my phone at home, so if anyone’s been trying to get hold of me …’ She listened. ‘Harry? You’re kidding.’ She listened for a few more seconds. ‘He just walked in and said he’d do it? Let’s talk about it later.’ She handed the phone back to Smith. ‘So, tell me, what’s vampirism?’

‘For that,’ Smith said, ‘I think we should go for a walk.’

Katrine walked alongside Hallstein Smith down the gravel track that led from the house to the barn. He was explaining that his wife had inherited the farm and almost a hectare of land, and that only two generations ago there were cows and horses grazing here in Grini, just a few kilometres from the centre of Oslo. Even so, a smaller plot containing a boathouse on Nesøya that had also formed part of the inheritance was worth more. At least if you were to believe the offers they had received from their filthy rich neighbours.

‘Nesøya’s really too far away to be practical, but we don’t want to sell for the time being. We’ve only got a cheap aluminium boat with a twenty-five horsepower engine, but I love it. Don’t tell my wife, but I prefer the sea to this bit of farmland.’

‘I come from the coast too,’ Katrine said.

‘Bergen, right? I love the dialect. I spent a year working in a psychiatric ward in Sandviken. Beautiful, but so much rain.’

Katrine nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I’ve got drenched in Sandviken before.’

They reached the barn. Smith pulled out a key and undid the padlock.

‘Big lock for a barn,’ Katrine said.

‘The last one was too small,’ Smith said, and Katrine could hear the bitterness in his voice. She stepped through the doorway and let out a small yelp when she put her foot on something that moved. She looked down and saw a rectangular metal plate, one metre by one and a half, set into the cement floor. It felt like it was on springs as it swayed and knocked against the cement edge before settling again.