Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

‘I’ll come now,’ Harry said. ‘What’s the address?’

Harry ended the call and started to get dressed. Quickly, efficiently, each movement carefully measured. Like a machine that’s finally doing what it was built for. Rakel studied him, memorising everything, the way you memorise a lover you’re not going to be seeing for a while.

He walked quickly past Rakel without looking at her, without a word of farewell. She was already sidelined, pushed from his consciousness by one of his two lovers. Alcohol and murder. And this was the one she feared the most.

Harry was standing outside the orange-and-white police cordon when a window on the first floor of the building in front of him opened. Katrine Bratt stuck her head out.

‘Let him through,’ she called to the young uniformed officer who was blocking his way.

‘He hasn’t got any ID,’ the officer protested.

‘That’s Harry Hole!’ Katrine shouted.

‘Is it?’ The policeman quickly looked him up and down before raising the cordon tape. ‘I thought he was a myth,’ he said.

Harry went up the steps to the open door of the flat. Inside, he followed the path between the crime-scene investigators’ little white flags, marking where they had found something. Two forensics officers were on their knees picking at a gap in the wooden floor.

‘Where …?’

‘In there,’ one of them said.

Harry stopped outside the door indicated by the officer. Took a deep breath and emptied his mind of thoughts. Then he went in.

‘Good morning, Harry,’ Bjørn Holm said.

‘Can you move?’ Harry said in a low voice.

Bjørn took one step away from the sofa he had been leaning over, revealing the body. Instead of moving closer, Harry took a step back. The scene. The composition. The whole. Then he went closer and started to note the details. The woman was sitting on the sofa, with her legs spread in such a way that her skirt had slid up to show her black underwear. Her head was resting against the back of the sofa, so that her long, bleached blonde hair hung down behind it. Some of her throat was missing.

‘She was killed over there,’ Bjørn said, pointing at the wall beside the window. Harry’s eyes slid across the wallpaper and bare wooden floor.

‘Less blood,’ Harry said. ‘He didn’t bite through the carotid artery this time.’

‘Maybe he missed it,’ Katrine said, coming in from the kitchen.

‘If he bit her, he’s got strong jaws,’ Bjørn said. ‘The average force of a human bite is seventy kilos, but he seems to have removed her larynx and part of her windpipe in one bite. Even with sharpened metal teeth, that would take a lot of strength.’

‘Or a lot of rage,’ Harry said. ‘Can you see any rust or paint in the wound?’

‘No, but perhaps anything that was loose came off when he bit Elise Hermansen.’

‘Hm. Possibly, unless he didn’t use the iron teeth this time, but something else. The body wasn’t moved to the bed either.’

‘I see what you’re getting at, Harry, but it is the same perpetrator,’ Katrine said. ‘Come and see.’

Harry followed her back to the kitchen. One of the forensics officers was taking samples from the inside of the glass jug from a blender that was standing in the sink.

‘He made a smoothie,’ Katrine said.

Harry swallowed and looked at the jug. The inside of it was red.

‘Using blood. And some lemons he found in the fridge, from the looks of it.’ She pointed at the yellow strips of peel on the worktop.

Harry felt nausea rising. And thought that it was like your first drink, the one that made you sick. Two more drinks and it was impossible to stop. He nodded and walked out again. He took a quick look at the bathroom and bedroom before going back into the living room. He closed his eyes and listened. The woman, the position of the body, the way she had been displayed. The way Elise Hermansen had been displayed. And there it was, the echo. It was him. It had to be him.

When he opened his eyes again, he found himself looking directly into the face of a fair-haired young man he thought he recognised.

‘Anders Wyller,’ the young man said. ‘Detective.’

‘Of course,’ Harry said. ‘You graduated from Police College a year ago? Two years?’

‘Two years ago.’

‘Congratulations on getting top marks.’

‘Thanks. That’s impressive, remembering what marks I got.’

‘I don’t remember a thing, it was a deduction. You’re working at Crime Squad as a detective after just two years of service.’

Anders Wyller smiled. ‘Just say if I’m in the way, and I’ll go. The thing is, I’ve only been here two and a half days, and if this is a double murder, no one’s going to have time to teach me anything for a while. So I was wondering about asking if I could shadow you for a bit. But only if it’s OK?’

Harry looked at the young man. Remembered him coming to his office, full of questions. So many questions, sometimes so irrelevant that you might have thought he was a Holehead. Holehead was college slang for students who had fallen for the myth of Harry Hole, which in a few extreme cases was the main reason why they had enrolled. Harry avoided them like the plague. But, Holehead or not, Harry realised that with those grades, as well as his ambition, smile and unforced social skills, Anders Wyller was going to go far. And before Anders Wyller went far, a talented young man like him might have time to do a bit of good, such as helping to solve a few murders.

‘OK,’ Harry said. ‘The first lesson is that you’re going to be disappointed in your colleagues.’

‘Disappointed?’

‘You’re standing there all drilled and proud because you think you’ve made it to the top of the police food chain. So the first lesson is that murder detectives are pretty much the same as everyone else. We aren’t especially intelligent, some of us are even a bit stupid. We make mistakes, a lot of mistakes, and we don’t learn a great deal from them. When we get tired, sometimes we choose to sleep instead of carrying on with the hunt, even though we know that the solution could be just around the next corner. So if you think we’re going to open your eyes, inspire you and show you a whole new world of ingenious investigative skills, you’re going to be disappointed.’

‘I know all that already.’

‘Really?’

‘I’ve spent two days working with Truls Berntsen. I just want to know how you work.’

‘You took my course in murder investigation.’

‘And I know you don’t work like that. What were you thinking?’

‘Thinking?’

‘Yes, when you stood there with your eyes closed. I don’t think that was part of the course.’

Harry saw that Bjørn had straightened up. That Katrine was standing in the doorway with her arms folded, nodding in encouragement.

‘OK,’ Harry said. ‘Everyone has their own method. Mine is to try to get in touch with the thoughts that go through your brain the first time you enter a crime scene. All the apparently insignificant connections the brain makes automatically when we absorb impressions the first time we visit a place. Thoughts that we forget so quickly because we don’t have time to attach meaning to them before our attention is grabbed by something else, like a dream that vanishes when you wake up and start to take in all the other things around you. Nine times out of ten those thoughts are useless. But you always hope that the tenth one might mean something.’

‘What about now?’ Wyller said. ‘Do any of the thoughts mean anything?’

Harry paused. Saw the absorbed look on Katrine’s face. ‘I don’t know. But I can’t help thinking that the murderer has a thing about cleanliness.’