Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

HARRY WAS RUNNING. Harry didn’t like running. Some people ran because they liked it. Haruki Murakami liked it. Harry liked Murakami’s books, apart from the one about running – he had given up on that one. Harry ran because he liked stopping. He liked having run. He liked weight training: a more concrete pain that was limited by the performance of his muscles, rather than a desire to have more pain. That probably said something about the weakness of his character, his inclination to flee, to look for an end to the pain even before it had started.

A skinny dog, the sort the wealthy people of Holmenkollen kept even if they didn’t go hunting more than one weekend every other year, leapt away from the path. Its owner came jogging along a hundred metres behind it. That year’s Under Armour collection. Harry had time to notice his running technique as they approached each other like passing trains. It was a shame they weren’t running in the same direction. Harry would have tucked in behind him, breathing down his neck, then pretended to lose ground only to crush him on the climb up towards Tryvann. Would have let him see the soles of his twenty-year-old Adidas trainers.

Oleg said Harry was incredibly childish when they ran, that even though they had promised to jog calmly all the way, it would end with Harry suggesting they race up the last hill. In Harry’s defence, it should be pointed out that he was asking for a thrashing, because Oleg had inherited his mother’s unfairly high oxygen absorption rate.

Two overweight women who were more walking than running were talking and panting so loudly that they didn’t hear Harry approaching, so he turned off onto a narrower path. And suddenly he was in unknown territory. The trees grew more densely there, shutting out the morning light, and Harry had a fleeting taste of something from his childhood. The fear of getting lost and never being able to find his way back home again. Then he was out in open country again, andt he knew exactly where he was now, where home was.

Some people liked the fresh air up here, the gently rolling forest paths, the silence and smell of pine needles. Harry liked the view of the city. Liked the sound and smell of it. The feeling of being able to touch it. The certainty that you could drown in it, sink to the bottom of it. Oleg had recently asked Harry how he’d like to die. Harry had replied that he wanted to go peacefully in his sleep. Oleg had chosen suddenly and relatively painlessly. Harry had been lying. He wanted to drink himself to death in a bar in the city below them. And he knew that Oleg had also been lying – he would have chosen his former heaven and hell and taken a heroin overdose. Alcohol and heroin. Infatuations they could leave but never forget, no matter how much time passed.

Harry put in a final spurt on the driveway, heard the gravel kick up behind his trainers, caught a glimpse of fru Syvertsen behind the curtain of the house next door.

Harry showered. He liked showering. Someone ought to write a book about showering.

When he was finished he went into the bedroom, where Rakel was standing by the window in her gardening clothes: wellington boots, thick gloves, a pair of tatty jeans and a faded sun hat. She half turned towards him and brushed aside a few strands of hair sticking out from under the hat. Harry wondered if she knew how good she looked in that outfit. Probably.

‘Eek!’ she said quietly, with a smile. ‘A naked man!’

Harry went and stood behind her, put his hands on her shoulders and massaged her gently. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Looking at the windows. Should we do something about them before Emilia arrives, do you think?’

‘Emilia?’

Rakel laughed.

‘What?’

‘You stopped that massage very abruptly, darling. Relax, we’re not having visitors. Just a storm.’

‘Oh, that Emilia. I reckon this fortress could cope with a natural disaster or two.’

‘That’s what we think, living up here on the hill, isn’t it?’

‘What do we think?’

‘That our lives are like fortresses. Impregnable.’ She sighed. ‘I need to go shopping.’

‘Dinner at home? We haven’t tried that Peruvian place on Badstugata yet. It’s not that expensive.’

That was one of Harry’s bachelor habits that he’d tried to get her to adopt: not cooking dinner for themselves. She had more or less bought his argument that restaurants are one of civilisation’s better ideas. That even back in the Stone Age they had figured out that cooking and eating together was smarter than the entire population spending three hours every day planning, buying, cooking and washing-up. When she objected that it felt a bit decadent, he had replied that ordinary families installing kitchens that cost a million kroner, that was decadent. That the most healthy, un-decadent use of resources was to pay trained cooks what they deserved to prepare food in large kitchens, so that they could pay for Rakel’s help as a lawyer, or Harry’s work training police officers.

‘It’s my day today, so I’ll pay,’ he said, catching hold of her right arm. ‘Stay with me.’

‘I need to go shopping,’ she said, and grimaced as he pulled her towards his still damp body. ‘Oleg and Helga are coming.’

He held her even tighter. ‘Are they? I thought you said we weren’t having visitors.’

‘Surely you can cope with a couple of hours with Oleg and—’

‘I’m joking. It’ll be nice. But shouldn’t we—?’

‘No, we’re not taking them to a restaurant. Helga hasn’t been here before, and I want to get a proper look at her.’

‘Poor Helga,’ Harry whispered, and was about to nip Rakel’s earlobe with his teeth when he saw something between her breast and her neck.

‘What’s that?’ He put the tip of his finger very gently on a red mark.

‘What?’ she asked, feeling for herself. ‘Oh, that. The doctor took a blood sample.’

‘From your neck?’

‘Don’t ask me why.’ She smiled. ‘You look so sweet when you’re worried.’

‘I’m not worried,’ Harry said. ‘I’m jealous. This is my neck, and of course we know you’ve got a weakness for doctors.’

She laughed, and he held her closer.

‘No,’ she said.

‘No?’ he said, and heard her breathing suddenly get deeper. Felt her body somehow give in.

‘Bastard,’ she groaned. Rakel was troubled by what she herself called a ‘very short sex fuse’, and swearing was the most obvious sign.

‘Maybe we should stop now,’ he whispered, letting go of her. ‘The garden calls.’

‘Too late,’ she hissed.

He unbuttoned her jeans and pushed them and her pants down to her knees, just above her boots. She leaned forward and grabbed hold of the windowsill with one hand, and was about to take the sun hat off with the other.

‘No,’ he whispered, leaning forward so that his head was next to hers. ‘Leave it on.’

Her low, burbling laugh tickled his ear. God, how he loved that laugh. Another sound merged into the laughter. The buzz of a vibrating phone that was lying next to her hand on the windowsill.

‘Throw it on the bed,’ he whispered, averting his eyes from the screen.

‘It’s Katrine Bratt,’ she said.

Rakel pulled her trousers up as she watched him.

There was a look of intense concentration on his face.

‘How long?’ he asked. ‘I see.’

She saw him disappear from her at the sound of the other woman’s voice on the phone. She wanted to reach out to him, but it was too late, he was already gone. The thin, naked body with muscles that twined like roots beneath his pale skin, it was still there, right in front of her. The blue eyes, their colour almost washed out after years of alcohol abuse, were still fixed on her. But he was no longer seeing her, his gaze was focused somewhere inside himself. He had told her why he had had to take the case the previous evening. She hadn’t protested. Because if Oleg was thrown out of Police College he might lose his footing again. And if it came to a choice between losing Harry or Oleg, she would rather lose Harry. She’d had several years’ training at losing Harry, she knew she could survive without him. She didn’t know if she could survive without her son. But while he had been explaining that it was for Oleg’s sake, an echo of something he had said recently drifted through her head: There may come a day when I really need to lie, and then it might be handy if you think I’m honest .