Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

‘Fingerprints,’ Bjørn Holm said. ‘The tattoo of the demon face. The DNA on the handcuffs.’

‘Right.’ Harry took another sip. ‘The perpetrator could have planted the fingerprints by cutting off one of Valentin’s fingers and taking it with him to Hovseter. The tattoo could be a copy that can be washed off. The hairs on the handcuffs could come from Valentin Gjertsen’s corpse, and the handcuffs left there on purpose.’

The silence in the boiler room was only broken by a last rattle from the coffee machine.

‘Bloody hell,’ Anders Wyller laughed.

‘That could have gone straight into my top ten of paranoid patients’ conspiracy theories,’ Smith said. ‘That’s, er … meant as a compliment.’

‘And that’s why we’re here,’ Harry said, leaning forward on his chair. ‘We’re supposed to think differently, look at possibilities that Katrine’s investigative team don’t touch. Because they’ve created a scenario of what happened, and the bigger the group is, the harder it is to break free from prevailing ideas and assumptions. They work a bit like a religion, because you automatically think that so many other people around you can’t be wrong. Well.’ Harry raised his unnamed mug. ‘They can. And they are. All the time.’

‘Amen,’ Smith said.

‘So let’s move on to the next bad theory,’ Harry said. ‘Wyller?’

Anders Wyller looked down into his mug. Took a deep breath and began. ‘Smith, you described on television how a vampirist develops, from one phase to the next. Here in Scandinavia young people are monitored so closely that if they showed such extreme tendencies, it would be picked up by the health service before they reached the final phase. The vampirist isn’t Norwegian, he’s from some other country. That’s my theory.’ He looked up.

‘Thanks,’ Harry said. ‘I can add that in the recorded criminal history of serial killers, there isn’t a single blood-drinking Scandinavian.’

‘The Atlas Murder in Stockholm, 1932,’ Smith said.

‘Hm. I don’t know about that one.’

‘That’s probably because the vampirist was never found, and it was never ascertained that he was a serial killer.’

‘Interesting. And the victim was a woman, as in this case?’

‘Lilly Lindeström, a thirty-two-year-old prostitute. And I’d eat the straw hat I’ve got at home if she was the only one. More recently it’s become known as the Vampire Murder.’

‘Details?’

Smith blinked a couple of times, his eyes almost closed and he began to speak as if he were reciting from memory, word for word: ‘4 May, Walpurgis Eve, Sankt Eriksplan 11, one-room flat. Lilly had received a man there. She had been down to see her friend on the first floor and asked to borrow a condom. When the police broke into Lilly’s flat they found her dead, lying on an ottoman. No fingerprints or other clues. It was obvious that the murderer had cleaned up after him, even Lilly’s clothes were neatly folded. In the kitchen sink they found a sauce ladle covered in blood.’

Bjørn exchanged a glance with Harry before Smith went on.

‘None of the names in her address book, which admittedly only contained a load of first names, led the police to any suspects. They never came close to finding the vampirist.’

‘But if it was a vampirist, surely he would have struck again?’ Wyller said.

‘Yes,’ Smith said. ‘And who’s to say he didn’t? And cleaned up after himself even better.’

‘Smith’s right,’ Harry said. ‘The number of people who go missing each year is greater than the number of recorded murders. But might Wyller have a point in that a vampirist in the making would be identified at an early stage?’

‘What I described on television was the typical development,’ Smith said. ‘There are people who discover their inner vampirist later in life, just like it can take time for ordinary people to discover their true sexual orientation. One of the most famous vampirists in history, Peter Kürten, the so-called ‘Vampire of Düsseldorf’, was forty-five years old the first time he drank the blood of an animal, a swan he killed outside the city in December 1929. Less than two years later he had killed nine people and tried to kill another seven.’

‘So you don’t think it strange that Valentin Gjertsen’s otherwise pretty horrifying track record has never included blood-drinking or cannibalism?’

‘No.’

‘OK. What are your thoughts, Bjørn?’

Bjørn Holm straightened up on his chair and rubbed his eyes. ‘The same as you, Harry.’

‘Which is?’

‘That Ewa Dolmen’s murder is a copy of the killing in Stockholm. The sofa, the fact that the place had been tidied up, that the blender he used to drink the blood from was left in the sink.’

‘Does that sound plausible, Smith?’ Harry asked.

‘A copycat? If so, it would be something new. Er, paradox not intended. There have, certainly, been vampirists who have regarded themselves as the reincarnation of Count Dracula, but the notion that a vampirist would take it upon himself to recreate the Atlas Murder seems a little unlikely. A more plausible explanation would be that there are certain personality traits that are typical of vampirists.’

‘Harry thinks our vampirist seems to be obsessed with cleanliness,’ Wyller said.

‘I understand that,’ Smith said. ‘The vampirist John George Haigh was obsessed with clean hands, and wore gloves all year round. He hated dirt and only drank his victims’ blood from freshly washed glasses.’

‘How about you, Smith?’ Harry said. ‘Who do you think our vampirist is?’

Smith put two fingers between his lips and moved them up and down, making a flapping sound as he breathed in and out.

‘I think that like a lot of vampirists he’s an intelligent person who has tortured animals and possibly people since he was young, that he comes from a well-adapted family where he was the only one who didn’t fit in. He’ll soon want blood again, and I think he gets sexual satisfaction not only from drinking blood, but from seeing blood. That he is seeking the perfect orgasm he thinks a combination of rape and blood can give him. Peter Kürten – the swan killer from Düsseldorf – said that the number of times he stabbed his victims with a knife depended on how much blood came out, which in turn determined how quickly he reached orgasm.’

A gloomy silence settled on the room.

‘And where and how do we find a person like that?’ Harry asked.

‘Maybe Katrine was right last night on television,’ Bjørn said. ‘Perhaps Valentin has fled the country. Taken a trip to Red Square, maybe.’

‘Moscow?’ Smith said in surprise.

‘Copenhagen,’ Harry said. ‘Multicultural Nørrebro. There’s a park there that’s frequented by people engaged in human trafficking. Mostly import, a bit of export. You sit down on one of the benches or swings and hold up a ticket – a bus ticket, plane ticket, anything. A guy comes over and asks where you’re going. Then he asks more, nothing that would give him away, while a colleague sitting elsewhere in the park takes your picture without you noticing, and checks online that you’re who you say you are and not a detective. This travel agency is discreet and expensive, but even so, no one gets to travel business class. The cheapest seats are in a shipping container.’

Smith shook his head. ‘But vampirists don’t calculate risk as rationally as we do, so I don’t think he’s gone.’

‘Nor do I,’ Harry said. ‘So where is he? Is he hiding in a crowd, or does he live alone in some secluded place? Has he got friends? Can we imagine him having a partner?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Everyone here understands that no one can know, Smith, whether or not they’re a psychologist. All I’m asking for is your hunch.’