Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

‘Hi.’

Katrine jumped. There was a man standing in the doorway.

‘I’ve ticked the last of mine off the list,’ Anders Wyller said. ‘So if there’s nothing else, I’ll head home and get some sleep.’

‘Of course. Are you the only one left?’

‘Looks like it.’

‘Berntsen?’

‘He finished early. He must just be more efficient.’

‘Right,’ Katrine said, and felt like laughing, but couldn’t be bothered. ‘I’m sorry to ask you this, Wyller, but would you mind double-checking his list? I’ve a feeling—’

‘I’ve just done it. It seemed OK.’

‘It was all OK?’ Katrine had asked Wyller and Berntsen to contact the various telephone companies to get hold of lists of numbers and names of people the victim had spoken to in the past six months, then divide them up and check their alibis.

‘Yes. There was one guy in Åneby up in Nittedal, first name ending in “y”. He called Elise a few too many times early in the summer, so I double-checked his alibi.’

‘Ending in “y”?’

‘Lenny Hell. Yes, really.’

‘Wow. So do you suspect people based on the letters in their names?’

‘Among other things. It’s a fact that “-y” names are over-represented in crime statistics.’

‘And?’

‘So when I saw that Berntsen had made a note that Lenny’s alibi was that he had been with a friend at Åneby Pizza & Grill at the time Elise Hermansen was murdered, and that this could only be confirmed by the owner of the pizzeria, I called the local sheriff to hear for myself.’

‘Because the guy’s name is Lenny?’

‘Because the owner of the pizzeria’s name is Tommy.’

‘And what did the sheriff say?’

‘That Lenny and Tommy were extremely law-abiding and trustworthy citizens.’

‘So you were wrong.’

‘That remains to be seen. The sheriff’s name is Jimmy.’

Katrine laughed out loud. Realised that she needed that. Anders Wyller smiled back. Maybe she needed that smile too. Everyone tries to make a good first impression, but she had a feeling that if she hadn’t asked, Wyller wouldn’t have told her he was doing Berntsen’s work as well. And that showed that Wyller – like her – didn’t trust Truls Berntsen. There was one thought that Katrine had been trying to ignore since it first appeared, but now she changed her mind.

‘Come in and close the door behind you.’

Wyller did as she asked.

‘There’s something else I’m sorry to have to ask you to do, Wyller. The leak to VG . You’re the one who’s going to be working most closely with Berntsen. Can you …?’

‘Keep my eyes and ears open?’

Katrine sighed. ‘Something like that. This stays between us, and if you do discover something, you only talk to me about it. Understood?’

‘Understood.’

Wyller left, and Katrine waited a few moments before picking up her phone from the desk. Looked up Bjørn. She had added a photograph of him that popped up in conjunction with his number. He was smiling. Bjørn Holm was no oil painting. His face was pale, slightly puffy, his red hair eclipsed by a shining white moon. But it was Bjørn. The antidote to all these other pictures. What had she really been so scared of? If Harry Hole could manage to live with someone else, why couldn’t she? Her forefinger was getting close to the call button beside the number when the warning popped into her head again. The warning from Harry Hole and Hallstein Smith. The next one.

She put the phone down and concentrated on the pictures again.

The next one.

What if the murderer was already thinking about the next one?

‘You need to t-try harder, Ewa,’ he whispered.

He hated it when they didn’t make an effort.

When they didn’t clean their flats. When they didn’t look after their bodies. When they didn’t manage to keep hold of the man whose child they had given birth to. When they didn’t give the child any supper and locked it in the wardrobe and said it needed to be really quiet, and then it would get chocolate afterwards, while they received visits from men who were given supper, and all the chocolate, and all the things they played with, shrieking with joy, the way the mother never played with the child.

Oh no.

So the child would have to play with the mother instead. And others like the mother.

And he had played. Played hard. Up until the day when they had taken him away and locked him in another wardrobe, at Jøssingveien 33: Ila Prison and Detention Centre. The statutes said it was a facility for male prisoners from all around the country who had ‘specific intervention requirements’.

One of the faggot psychiatrists there had told him that both the rapes and his stammer were the consequence of psychological trauma while he was growing up. Idiot. He had inherited the stammer from a father he had never met. The stammer and a filthy suit. And he had dreamt of raping women for as long as he could remember. And then he had done what these women never managed. He had tried harder. He had almost stopped stammering. He had raped the female prison dentist. And he had escaped from Ila. And he had gone on playing. Harder than ever. The fact that the police were after him only gave an edge to the game. Right up to the day when he had stood face-to-face with that policeman and had seen the determination and hatred in his eyes, and had realised that this man was capable of catching him. Was capable of sending him back to the darkness of his childhood in the closed wardrobe where he tried to hold his breath so as not to have to breathe in the stench of sweat and tobacco from his father’s thick, greasy woollen suit that was hanging up in front of him, and which his mother said she was keeping in case his father showed up again one day. He knew he couldn’t handle being locked up again. So he had hidden. Had hidden from the policeman with murder in his eyes. Had sat still for three years. Three years without playing. Until that too had started to become a wardrobe. Then he had been presented with this opportunity. A chance to play safely. It shouldn’t be too safe, obviously. He needed to be able to detect the smell of fear in order to get properly turned on. Both his own and theirs. It didn’t matter how old they were, what they looked like, if they were big or small. As long as they were women. Or potential mothers, as one of the idiot psychiatrists had said. He tilted his head and looked at her. The walls of the flat may have been thin, but that no longer bothered him. Only now, when she was so close and in this light, did he notice that Ewa with a ‘w’ had little pimples around her open mouth. She was evidently trying to scream, but there was no way she was going to manage that, no matter how hard she tried. Because beneath her open mouth she had a new one. A bleeding, gaping hole in her throat where her larynx had been. He was holding her tightly against the living-room wall, and there was a gurgling sound as pink bubbles of blood burst where her severed airway protruded. Her neck muscles tensed and relaxed as she tried desperately to get air. And because her lungs were still working, she would live a few more seconds. But that wasn’t what fascinated him most right now. It was the fact that he had managed to put a conclusive stop to her insufferable chatter by biting through her vocal cords with his iron teeth.

And as the light in her eyes dimmed, he tried to find something in them that betrayed a fear of dying, a desire to live another second. But he found nothing. She ought to have tried harder. Maybe she didn’t have enough imagination. Didn’t love life enough. He hated it when they gave up on life so easily.

SATURDAY MORNING