Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

‘I’m pleased you’ve responded positively to us bringing in Harry Hole, Bratt.’

‘Why wouldn’t I? Harry’s our most experienced murder detective.’

‘Some detectives might regard it as – what’s the word I’m looking for? – challenging , to have such a big name from the past looking over their shoulder.’

‘Not a problem – I always play with my cards on the table, sir.’ Katrine gave a brief smile.

‘Good. Anyway, Harry’s going to be leading his own small, independent team, so you needn’t worry about him taking over. Just a bit of healthy competition.’ Bellman put his fingertips together. She noticed that one of the white patches formed a band around his wedding ring. ‘And naturally, I’ll be cheering on the female participant. I hope we can count on a quick result, Bratt.’

‘I see,’ Katrine Bratt said, and glanced at her watch.

‘I see, what?’

She heard the irritation in his voice. ‘I see: you’re hoping for a quick result.’

She knew she was provoking the Chief of Police. Not because she wanted to. Because she couldn’t help it.

‘And you should be hoping for the same thing, Detective Inspector Bratt. Positive discrimination or not, jobs like yours don’t grow on trees.’

‘I’ll have to do my best to prove that I deserve it, then.’

She kept her eyes fixed on his. It was as if the eyepatch emphasised his uninjured eye, its intensity and beauty. And the hard, ruthless glint in it.

She held her breath.

Then he suddenly laughed. ‘I like you, Katrine. But let me give you a piece of advice.’

She waited, ready for anything.

‘At the next press conference, you should do the talking, not Hagen. I want you to underline the fact that this is an extremely difficult case, that we have no leads, and that we need to be prepared for a lengthy investigation. That will make the media less impatient and they’ll give us more room for manoeuvre.’

Katrine folded her arms. ‘It might also embolden the killer and make him more likely to strike again.’

‘I don’t think the killer is governed by what the papers say, Bratt.’

‘If you say so. Well, I have to prepare the next meeting of the investigative team.’

Katrine saw the note of warning in the way he looked at her.

‘Go ahead. And do as I say. Tell the media that this case is the most difficult you’ve had.’

‘I …’

‘In your own words, obviously. When’s the next press conference?’

‘We’ve cancelled today’s seeing as we haven’t got anything new.’

‘OK. Remember, if the case is presented as difficult, the glory will be all the greater when we solve it. And we won’t be lying, because we haven’t actually got anything, have we? Besides, the media love a big, horrifying mystery. See it as a win-win situation, Bratt.’

Win-fucking-win, Katrine thought as she walked down the stairs to Crime Squad on the sixth floor.

At 6 p.m., Katrine opened the meeting of the investigative team by stressing the importance of reports being written and registered in the system promptly, because this hadn’t been done after the first interview with Geir Sølle, Elise Hermansen’s Tinder date the night she was murdered, with the result that a second detective had contacted Geir Sølle.

‘For one thing, it makes extra work, as well as giving the public the impression that the police are disorganised, and that our right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.’

‘There must be something wrong with the computers, or the system,’ Truls Berntsen said, even though Katrine hadn’t mentioned him by name. ‘I know I sent it.’

‘Tord?’

‘There haven’t been any system failures reported in the last twenty-four hours,’ Tord Gren said, adjusting his glasses and noting the look in Katrine’s eye, which he interpreted correctly. ‘But of course there may be something wrong with your computer, Berntsen – I’ll take a look at it.’

‘Seeing as you’ve started, Tord, could you take us through your latest strokes of genius?’

The IT expert blushed, nodded, and went on in a stiff, unnatural tone of voice, as if he were reading from a script. ‘Location services. Most people who have a mobile phone permit one or more of the apps on their device to collect data on where they are at all times, many of them without knowing that they’ve allowed this.’

Pause. Tord swallowed. And Katrine realised that he was doing precisely that: reading from a script he had written and learned off by heart after Katrine had said she would be asking him to give a presentation to the group.

‘Many of the apps demand, as part of their terms and conditions, the right to be able to send details of the phone’s location to third parties, but not to the police. One such commercial third party is Geopard. They gather location data, and have no clause in their own contract prohibiting them from selling the information to the public sector or, in other words, to the police. When people who have served prison sentences for sexual offences are released, we gather contact details – address, mobile number, email address – because we routinely want to be able to get hold of these individuals in the event of further offences similar to those for which they were convicted. Because it used to be generally assumed that sex offenders are the most likely to reoffend. New research has shown this to be completely wrong: rape actually has one of the lowest reoffending rates. BBC Radio 4 recently reported that the chance of offenders being rearrested is sixty per cent in the USA and fifty per cent in the UK. And often for the same offence. But not for rape. Statistics from the US Justice Department show that 78.8 per cent of those convicted of stealing a motor vehicle are rearrested for the same offence within three years, for those convicted of trading in stolen goods the figure is 77.4 per cent, and so on. But the same thing only applies to 2.5 per cent of convicted rapists.’ Tord paused again. Katrine presumed he had noticed that the group had limited patience for this sort of discursive presentation. He cleared his throat. ‘Anyway, when we send our batch of contact data to Geopard, they can map the movements of these people’s phones, assuming they use location-tracking apps, at any given time and at any given place. On Wednesday evening, for instance.’

‘How precisely?’ Magnus Skarre called.

‘Down to a few square metres,’ Katrine said. ‘But the GPS is only two-dimensional, so we can’t see elevation. In other words, we don’t know what floor the phone is on.’

‘Is this actually legal?’ wondered Gina, one of the analysts. ‘I mean, privacy legislation—’

‘—is struggling to keep up with technology,’ Katrine interrupted. ‘I’ve spoken to our legal department, and they say it’s a grey area, but that it isn’t covered by existing legislation. And, as we know, if something isn’t illegal, then …’ She held her hands out, but no one in the room was willing to finish the sentence for her. ‘Go on, Tord.’

‘Once we received authorisation from our lawyers and financial authorisation from Gunnar Hagen, we bought a set of location data. The maps from the night of the murder give us GPS positions for ninety-one per cent of people who have previously been convicted of sex offences.’ Tord stopped, and seemed to think.

Katrine realised that he had reached the end of his script. She didn’t understand why a gasp of delight hadn’t gone round the room.

‘Don’t you understand how much work this has saved us? If we used the old method to write off this many potential suspects from a case—’

She heard a low cough. Wolff, the oldest of the detectives. Should have been pensioned off by now. ‘Seeing as you said “write off”, presumably that means the map didn’t show a match for Elise Hermansen’s address?’