Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

Her eyes scanned the comments as they appeared.

But it was the usual stuff.

The sympathetic, expressing pity for the victims.

The self-appointed guardians of truth, explaining how a particular political party bore responsibility for a society that had produced a particular type of undesirable person, in this instance a vampirist.

The executioners, shrieking for the death penalty and castration the moment they got a chance.

And then there were the wannabe stand-up comedians whose role models had popularised the idea that anything could be joked about. ‘New band, Wampire.’ ‘Sell Tinder shares now!’

And if she did see a comment that looked suspicious, what was she going to do? Report it to Katrine Bratt & co.? Maybe. She owed Truls Berntsen that much. Or she could call the blond one, Wyller. Make him indebted to her. Even if you’re not on Tinder, you still swipe left and right.

She yawned. Walked over to her desk and picked up her bag.

‘I’m going to the gym,’ she said.

‘Now? It’s practically the middle of the night!’

‘Call me if anything happens.’

‘Your shift ended an hour ago, Daa, other people can—’

‘This is my story, so you call me, OK?’

She heard someone laugh as the door closed behind her. Maybe they were laughing at her walk, maybe at her provocative clever-girl-can-do-it-all-herself attitude. She didn’t care. She did have a funny walk. And she could do it all herself.

Lift, airlock, swing doors, then she was outside the building, its glass facade lit up by the moonlight. Mona breathed in. Something big was going on, she just knew it. And she knew that she was going to be part of it.

Truls Berntsen had parked the car beside the steep, winding road. The brick buildings below him lay silent in the darkness: Oslo’s abandoned industrial district, railway tracks with grass growing between the sleepers. And, further away, the architects’ new toy building blocks, Barcode, the playground of the new business world, in marked contrast to the sombre seriousness of the working life of the past, where minimalism was a matter of cost-saving practicality, not an aesthetic ideal.

Truls looked up at the house bathed in moonlight, up on the crest of the hill.

There were lights in the windows and he knew that Ulla was in there. Maybe she was sitting in her usual place, on the sofa with her legs tucked beneath her, reading a book. If he took his binoculars in among the trees further up the hill he’d find out. And if she was doing that, he’d see her brush her blonde hair behind one ear, as if she were listening out for something. In case the children woke up. In case Mikael wanted something. Or perhaps just listening out for predators, like a gazelle at a watering hole.

There was a buzz and a crackle and voices relaying short messages before disappearing again. The sounds of the city conveyed through a police radio soothed him more than music.

Truls looked at the glove compartment he’d just opened. The binoculars were tucked behind his service pistol. He had promised himself that he was going to stop. That it was time, that he didn’t need this any more, not now he’d found out there were other fish in the sea. OK. Monkfish, sculpins and weevers. Truls heard himself grunt. It was his laugh that had earned him the nickname Beavis. That, and his heavy lower jaw. And there she was, up there, imprisoned in that oversized, overpriced house with a terrace that Truls had helped construct, and where he had buried the corpse of a drug dealer in wet cement, a corpse that only Truls knew about, and which had never given him so much as one sleepless night.

A scraping sound on the radio. The voice from Emergency Control.

‘Have we got any cars near Hovseter?’

‘Car 31, in Skøyen.’

‘Hovseterveien 44, doorway B. We got a pretty hysterical resident saying there’s a madman in the stairwell assaulting a woman there, but that they daren’t intervene because he’s smashed the light on the stairs and it’s pitch-black.’

‘Assaulting with a weapon?’

‘They don’t know. They say they saw him bite her before it went dark. The caller’s name was Amundsen.’

Truls reacted instantly and pressed the ‘speak’ button on the radio. ‘Detective Constable Truls Berntsen here, I’m closer, I’ll take it.’

He had already started the engine, and revved it hard as he pulled out onto the road, hearing a car coming round the bend behind him blow its horn angrily.

‘Copy,’ Emergency Control said. ‘And where are you, Berntsen?’

‘Just round the corner, I said. 31, I want you as backup, so wait if you get there first. Suspect that the assailant is armed. Repeat, armed.’

Saturday night, almost no traffic. If he drove through the Opera Tunnel at full speed, cutting straight through the centre beneath the fjord, he wouldn’t be more than seven or eight minutes behind car 31. Those minutes could , of course, be critical, both for the victim and for the perpetrator to get away, but Detective Constable Truls Berntsen could also be the officer who arrested the vampirist. And who knew what VG would be willing to pay for a report from the first man on the scene. He blew the car’s horn repeatedly and a Volvo swerved out of his way. Dual carriageway now. Three lanes. Foot on the floor. His heart was pounding against his ribs. A speed camera in the tunnel flashed. Police officer on duty, a licence to tell everyone in this whole damn city to fuck off. On duty. His blood was pulsing through his veins, brilliant, as if he was about to get a hard-on.

‘Ace of space!’ Truls roared. ‘Ace of space!’

‘Yes, we’re car 31. We’ve been waiting!’ The man and woman were standing behind the patrol car parked in front of doorway B.

‘Slow lorry that wouldn’t let me pass,’ Truls said, checking that his pistol was loaded and the cartridge full. ‘Heard anything?’

‘It’s all quiet in there. No one’s entered or left.’

‘Let’s go.’ Truls pointed to the male officer. ‘You come with me, and bring a torch.’ He nodded to the woman. ‘You stay here.’

The two men walked up to the entrance. Truls peered through the window at the darkened stairwell. He pressed the button beside the name Amundsen.

‘Yes?’ a voice whispered.

‘Police. Have you heard anything since you called?’

‘No, but he could still be out there.’

‘OK. Open the door.’

The lock clicked and Truls pulled the door open. ‘You go first with the torch.’

Truls heard the officer swallow. ‘I thought you said backup, not up front.’

‘Just be grateful you’re not here on your own,’ Truls whispered. ‘Come on.’

Rakel looked at Harry.

Two murders. A new serial killer. His type of hunt.

He was sitting there eating, making out that he was following the conversation around the table, was polite towards Helga, listened with apparent interest to Oleg. Perhaps she was wrong, perhaps he really was interested. Perhaps he wasn’t completely enchained by it after all, perhaps he had changed.

‘Gun licences are pointless when people will soon be able to buy a 3D printer and make their own pistols,’ Oleg said.

‘I thought 3D printers could only make things out of plastic?’ Harry said.

‘Home printers, yes. But plastic is durable enough if you just want a weapon and you’re only going to use it once to murder someone.’ Oleg leaned across the dining table. ‘You don’t even need an original pistol as the template, you just borrow one for five minutes, dismantle it, take wax copies of the pieces, then use those to make a 3D model that you feed into the computer that controls the printer. Once the murder has been committed, you just melt the whole plastic pistol down. And if anyone did work out that that was the murder weapon, it wouldn’t be registered to anyone.’