Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

‘I hear you.’

‘Good,’ Harry said.

‘When he says he’ll come back and marry her, do you think that’s …?’

‘Meant as a metaphor? Yes. He’s going to haunt her dreams.’

‘But that means he …’

‘Deliberately didn’t kill her.’

‘You lied to her.’

‘I lied.’ Harry pushed the door open and they got in the car that was waiting for them right outside. Katrine in the front, Harry in the back.

‘Police HQ?’ Anders Wyller asked from the driver’s seat.

‘Yes,’ Katrine said, picking up the mobile that she’d left charging. ‘Bjørn’s texted to say that those bloody footprints on the stairs were probably left by cowboy boots.’

‘Cowboy boots,’ Harry repeated from the back seat.

‘Those ones with a narrow high heel and—’

‘I know what cowboy boots look like. They were mentioned in one of the witness statements.’

‘Which one?’ Katrine said, skimming through the other texts she’d received while she was inside the hospital.

‘The bartender at the Jealousy Bar. Mehmet Something.’

‘I must say, your memory is still intact. It says here that they want me as a guest on The Sunday Magazine , to talk about the vampirist.’ She tapped at her phone.

‘And?’

‘No, obviously. Bellman has said loud and clear that he wants the least possible publicity for this case.’

‘Even if it’s been solved?’

Katrine turned to Harry. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Firstly: the Chief of Police can boast on national television about having solved the case in three days. And secondly: we might need the publicity to catch him.’

‘Have we solved the case?’ Wyller’s eyes met Harry’s in the rear-view mirror.

‘Solved,’ Harry said. ‘Not finished.’

Wyller turned to Katrine. ‘What does he mean?’

‘That we know who the perpetrator is, but that the investigation isn’t over until the long arm of the law has caught him. And in his case, that arm has turned out to be too short. This individual has been wanted across the whole world for almost four years.’

‘Who is he?’

Katrine gave a deep sigh. ‘I can’t even say his name. Harry, you tell him.’

Harry looked out through the window. Katrine was right, of course. He could deny it, but he was here for one single selfish reason. Not for the victims, not for the good of the city, not for the reputation of the force. Not even for his own reputation. Not for anything but this one single thing: that he had got away. Oh, Harry certainly felt guilty at not having been able to stop him before, for all the murder victims, for every day that this man had gone free. Even so, this was the only thing he could think about: that he had to catch him. That he, Harry, had to catch him. He didn’t know why. Did he really need the worst serial killer and offender in order to validate his own life? God alone knew. And God alone knew if it was the other way round as well. That this man had emerged from his hiding place because of Harry. He had drawn the V on Ewa Dolmen’s door, and shown Penelope Rasch the demon tattoo. Penelope had asked why he hadn’t killed her. And Harry had lied. The reason the man hadn’t killed her was because he wanted her to talk. Talk about what she’d seen. Tell Harry what he already knew. That he needed to come out and play.

‘OK,’ Harry said. ‘Do you want the long version or the short one?’

SUNDAY MORNING

‘VALENTIN GJERTSEN,’ HARRY hole said, pointing at the face staring out at the investigative team from the huge screen.

Katrine looked intently at the thin face. Brown hair, deep-set eyes. Unless it just appeared that way because he was jutting his forehead forward, meaning that the light fell in a particular way. Katrine couldn’t help thinking it was odd that the police photographer had let Valentin get away with it. And then there was his expression. Custody pictures usually showed fear, confusion or resignation. But he looked contented. As if Valentin Gjertsen knew something they didn’t know. Didn’t know yet .

Harry let the face sink in for a few seconds before he went on. ‘At the age of sixteen he was charged with molesting a nine-year-old girl he’d lured onto a rowing boat. At seventeen a neighbour reported him for trying to rape her in the basement laundry room. When Valentin Gjertsen was twenty-six and serving time for assaulting a minor, he had an appointment to see the dentist at Ila Prison. He used one of the dentist’s own drills to force her to take off her nylon stockings and put them over her head. First he raped her in the dentist’s chair, then he set fire to the stockings.’

Harry tapped at the computer and the image changed. A muffled groan ran through the group, and Katrine saw that even some of the most experienced detectives looked down at their laps.

‘I’m not showing this for fun, but so that you know what sort of individual we’re dealing with. He let the dentist live. Just like Penelope Rasch. And I don’t think that’s workplace negligence. I think Valentin Gjertsen is playing a game with us.’

Harry clicked again, and the same picture of Valentin appeared, this time taken from Interpol’s website. ‘Valentin escaped from Ila almost four years ago, in a quite spectacular fashion. He beat another prisoner, Judas Johansen, until he was unrecognisable, then had a copy of the demon’s face he has tattooed on his own chest tattooed onto the chest of the corpse, and hid the body in the library where he worked, so that Judas was reported missing when he didn’t report for inspection. On the night that Valentin himself escaped, he dressed the corpse in his own clothes and laid it on the floor of his cell. The prison guards who discovered the unrecognisable body, and naturally assumed that it was Valentin, weren’t particularly surprised. Like any inmate convicted of paedophilia, Valentin Gjertsen was hated by the other prisoners. No one thought to check fingerprints or conduct a DNA test on the body. And so for a long time we assumed that Valentin Gjertsen was history. Until he showed up again in connection with another murder. Obviously we don’t know exactly how many people he killed or assaulted, but it’s definitely more than he’s been suspected or found guilty of. We do know that his last victim before he disappeared for good was his former landlady, Irja Jacobsen.’ Another click. ‘This picture is from the commune where she had gone into hiding from Valentin. Unless I’m mistaken, it was you, Berntsen, who was first on the scene where we found her strangled beneath a pile of children’s surfboards, with, as you can see, pictures of sharks on them.’

A grunt of laughter from the back of the conference room. ‘Correct. The surfboards were stolen goods that the poor junkies hadn’t managed to sell.’

‘Irja Jacobsen was probably murdered because she could have passed information about Valentin to the police. That may explain why it’s been so hard to get anyone to say a word about where he might be. Anyone who knows him simply doesn’t dare talk.’ Harry cleared his throat. ‘Another reason why Valentin has been impossible to find is that he’s undergone several rounds of extensive plastic surgery since his escape. The person you see in this picture doesn’t look like the person we observed later in a grainy surveillance picture from a football match at Ullevål Stadium. And he intentionally let us see that surveillance picture. So, because we haven’t managed to find him, we suspect that he may have had further operations after that, probably abroad seeing as we’ve checked anything that moves in Scandinavia as far as plastic surgery is concerned. Our suspicion that his face has changed again is reinforced by the fact that Penelope Rasch doesn’t recognise Valentin from the pictures we’ve shown her. Unfortunately she isn’t able to give a good alternative description of him, and the Tinder profile picture of this so-called Vidar on her phone is unlikely to be him.’