Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

Now Rakel was lying in bed. Silent. And he had to decide.

Somewhere you can be useful.

Harry lifted the bar from the cradle and lowered it to his chest. Took a deep breath. Tensed his muscles. And roared.

TUESDAY MORNING

IT WAS SEVEN thirty. There was fine rain hanging in the air and Mehmet was about to cross the street when he noticed the man in front of Jealousy. He had made his hands into binoculars and was holding them against the window to see inside better. The first thing Mehmet thought was that Danial Banks was early asking for the next instalment, but as he got closer he realised that the man was taller, and blond. And it struck him that it must be one of the old, alcoholic customers who had come back, and hoped the bar still opened at seven o’clock in the morning.

But when the man turned to face the street again, sucking at the cigarette between his lips, he saw it was that policeman. Harry.

‘Good morning,’ Mehmet said, getting his keys out. ‘Thirsty?’

‘That too. But I’ve got an offer for you.’

‘What sort of offer?’

‘The sort you can turn down.’

‘In that case I’m interested,’ Mehmet said, and let the policeman in. He followed, then locked the door. Switched the lights on from behind the counter.

‘This is actually a good bar,’ Harry said, putting his elbows on the counter and breathing in deeply.

‘Do you want to buy it?’ Mehmet said drily, pouring water into a cezve , the special Turkish coffee pot.

‘Yes,’ Harry said.

Mehmet laughed. ‘Make me an offer.’

‘Four hundred and thirty-five thousand.’

Mehmet frowned. ‘Where did you get that number from?’

‘From Danial Banks. I had a meeting with him this morning.’

‘This morning? But it’s only …’

‘I got up early. And so did he. That’s to say, I had to wake him up and drag him out of bed.’

Mehmet looked into the policeman’s bloodshot eyes.

‘Figuratively speaking,’ Harry said. ‘I know where he lives. I paid him a visit and made him an offer.’

‘What sort of offer?’

‘The other sort. The sort you can’t turn down.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I bought the debt on the Jealousy Bar at face value in return for not setting Financial Crime on him for breaking paragraph 295 about usury.’

‘You’re kidding?’

Harry shrugged. ‘It’s possible that I’m exaggerating, it’s possible that he could have turned it down. Because he was able to tell me that paragraph 295 was repealed a couple of years ago sadly. What’s the world coming to when criminals keep up with changes to the law better than cops? Either way, the loan agreement with you didn’t seem to be worth all the problems I promised to make for him elsewhere. So this document –’ the detective put a handwritten sheet of paper on the bar – ‘confirms that Danial Banks has received his money, and that I, Harry Hole, am the proud owner of a debt of 435,000 kroner owed by Mehmet Kalak, with the Jealousy Bar, its contents and lease as collateral.’

Mehmet read the few lines and shook his head. ‘Bloody hell. So you had almost half a million that you could give Banks there and then?’

‘I worked as a debt collector in Hong Kong for a while. It was … well paid. So I built up a bit of capital. Banks received a cheque and a bank statement.’

Mehmet laughed. ‘So you’re going to be the one demanding extortionate repayments now, Harry?’

‘Not if you agree to my offer.’

‘Which is?’

‘That we turn the debt into working capital.’

‘You take over the bar?’

‘I buy a share. You’d be my partner, and could buy me out whenever you like.’

‘In return for what?’

‘You go to a Turkish bathhouse while a friend of mine watches the bar.’

‘What?’

‘I want you to sweat until you turn into a raisin at the Cagaloglu Hamam while you wait for Valentin Gjertsen to show up.’

‘Me? Why me?’

‘Because Penelope Rasch died, and you and a fifteen-year-old girl are the only living people I’m aware of who know what Valentin Gjertsen looks like these days.’

‘I do …?’

‘You’ll recognise him.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘I read the report. You said, quote: “I didn’t really look at him long enough or carefully enough to be able to describe him.”’

‘Exactly.’

‘I had a colleague who could recognise every human face she had ever seen. She told me that the ability to differentiate and recognise a million faces is located in part of the brain called the fusiform gyrus, and that without that ability we would hardly have survived as a species. Can you describe the last customer who was in here yesterday?’

‘Er …no.’

‘Yet you’d still recognise him in a fraction of a second if he walked in here now.’

‘Probably.’

‘That’s what I’m counting on.’

‘You’re staking 435,000 of your own money on that? What if I don’t recognise him?’

Harry stuck his bottom lip out. ‘Then at least I’ll own a bar.’

At 7.45 Mona Daa shoved open the door to VG ’s newsroom and rolled in. It had been a bad night. Even though she had gone straight to Gain from the container terminal, and exercised so hard that her entire body ached, she had hardly slept a wink. In the end she decided to raise it with the editor, without going into detail. Ask him if a source had the right to anonymity if they had completely deceived a journalist. In other words: could she go to the police with this now? Or would the smart response be to wait and see if he got in touch again? After all, there could be a good explanation for why he hadn’t showed up.

‘You look tired, Daa,’ the head of the newsroom said. ‘Party last night?’

‘I wish,’ Mona said quietly, dropping her gym bag by her desk and switching her computer on.

‘Of the more experimental variety, perhaps?’

‘I wish,’ Mona repeated, more loudly. She looked up and saw a number of faces sticking up above computer screens around the open-plan office. Grinning, inquisitive faces.

‘What?’ she called out.

‘Just stripping, or bestiality?’ cried a deep voice that she didn’t have time to identify before a couple of the girls burst out laughing uncontrollably.

‘Check your email,’ the head of the newsroom said. ‘Some of us were copied in.’

Mona turned cold. Felt a shiver of foreboding as she more hit than tapped her keyboard.

The sender was violentcrime@olsopol.no.

No text, just an image. Presumably taken with a light-sensitive camera, seeing as she hadn’t noticed a flash. And probably a telephoto lens. In the foreground was the dog pissing on the cage, and there she was, in the middle of the cage, standing stiffly and staring like a wild animal. She’d been tricked. It wasn’t the vampirist who had called her.

At 8.15 Smith, Wyller, Holm and Harry were gathered in the boiler room.

‘We’ve got a disappearance that may be the work of the vampirist,’ Harry said. ‘Marte Ruud, twenty-four years old, disappeared from Schrøder’s Restaurant last night, just before midnight. Katrine is briefing the investigative team at the moment.’

‘The crime-scene group are there,’ Bjørn Holm said. ‘Nothing so far. Apart from what you mentioned.’

‘Which is?’ Wyller wondered.

‘A “v” written on a tablecloth with lipstick. The angle between the lines matches the one on Ewa Dolmen’s door.’ He was interrupted by a steel guitar Harry recognised as Don Helms, playing the intro to Hank Williams’s ‘Your Cheating Heart’.

‘Wow, we’ve got a signal,’ Bjørn Holm said, pulling his phone from his pocket. ‘Holm. What? I can’t hear. Hang on.’