Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

Truls Berntsen grinned. He was off the hook. And repeated: ‘Nothing’s happened at all.’

Mikael turned round, slammed his hand down on the desk and snarled: ‘Do you think we’re idiots?’

Truls studied the way the patches on Mikael’s face switched between white and red, as if the blood was sloshing back and forth inside. The patches had grown bigger over the years, like a snake shedding its skin.

‘Let’s hear what you think you know,’ Truls said, and sat down without asking.

Mikael looked at him in surprise. Then he sat down on his own chair. Because perhaps he had seen it in Truls’s eyes. That he wasn’t frightened. That if Truls was thrown overboard, he’d take Bellman with him. All the way down.

‘What I know,’ Mikael said, ‘is that Katrine Bratt showed up in my office early this morning to tell me that because I’d asked her to keep a close eye on you, she’d asked one of her detectives to keep you under surveillance. You were evidently already suspected of being the source of the leaks, Truls.’

‘Who was the detective?’

‘She didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.’

Of course not, Truls thought. In case you find yourself in a tricky situation, where it would be useful to be able to deny all knowledge. Truls might not be the smartest guy in the world, but he wasn’t as stupid as those around him thought, and he had gradually started to work out how Mikael and the others up at the top of the hierarchy reasoned.

‘Bratt’s detective was proactive,’ Mikael said. ‘He discovered that you’d been in telephone contact with Mona Daa at least twice in the past week.’

A detective checking phone calls, Truls thought. Who had been in touch with telecoms companies. Anders Wyller. Little Truls wasn’t stupid. Oh no.

‘To confirm that you were Mona Daa’s source, he called her. He pretended to be the vampirist, and to prove it he asked her to call her source to check a detail that only the perpetrator and the police could know.’

‘The smoothie mixer.’

‘So you admit it?’

‘That Mona Daa called me, yes.’

‘Good. Because the detective woke Katrine Bratt last night to say he had a list of calls from the telecom company showing that Mona Daa called you right after he made his hoax call to her. This is going to be very hard to explain away, Truls.’

Truls shrugged. ‘There’s nothing to explain. Mona Daa called me, asked about a smoothie mixer, and naturally I refused to comment and referred her to the lead detective. The conversation lasted ten, maybe twenty seconds, as the list of calls no doubt confirms. Maybe Mona Daa already suspected that it was a bluff to try to uncover her source. So she called me instead of her source.’

‘According to the detective, she later went to the agreed location out in the container terminal to meet the vampirist. The detective even photographed the whole thing. So someone must have given her confirmation about the smoothie maker.’

‘Perhaps Mona Daa arranged to meet first, and then went to her source and got confirmation face-to-face. Police officers and journalists both know how easy it is to get hold of information showing who called who, and when.’

‘Speaking of which, you had two other telephone conversations with Mona Daa, one of which lasted several minutes.’

‘Check the list. Mona Daa called me, I’ve never called her. The fact that it takes a pit bull like Daa several minutes of banging on before she realises that she’s not going to get anything, and that she still tries again later to lance the boil, is her problem. I have quite a bit of time during the day.’

Truls leaned back in his chair. Folded his hands and looked at Mikael, who was sitting there nodding as if he was absorbing what Truls had said, thinking through possible holes that they might have missed. A little smile, a degree of warmth in those brown eyes, seemed to indicate that he had come to the conclusion that this might work, that they might be able to get Truls off the hook.

‘Good,’ Mikael said. ‘But now that it turns out you aren’t the leak, Truls, who could it be?’

Truls pouted his lips, the way his slightly plump French online date had taught him to do every time she asked him the complicated question ‘When are we going to meet again?’

‘You tell me. No one wants to be seen talking to a journalist like Daa in a case like this. No, the only person I’ve seen doing that is Wyller. Hang on – unless I’m remembering wrong, he gave her a number she could call him on. Actually, yes, she told him where he could get hold of her too, at that gym, Gain.’

Mikael Bellman looked at Truls. With a surprised little smile, like someone discovering after many years that their spouse can sing, has blue blood or a university degree.

‘So what you’re implying, Truls, is that our leak is probably someone who’s new here.’ Bellman stroked his chin thoughtfully with his forefinger and thumb. ‘A natural assumption seeing as the problem of the leak has only recently emerged, one which doesn’t – what’s the word I’m looking for? – reflect the culture we’ve nurtured within the Oslo Police in recent years. But I don’t suppose we shall ever know who it is or isn’t, seeing as the journalist is legally obliged to protect the identity of her source.’

Truls laughed his grunting laugh. ‘Good, Mikael.’

Mikael nodded. Leaned forward and, before Truls had time to react, grabbed him by the shirt collar and pulled him towards him.

‘How much did the bitch pay you, Beavis?’

TUESDAY AFTERNOON

MEHMET PULLED THE bathrobe tighter around him. He stared at the screen of his phone and pretended not to see the men coming and going in the rudimentary changing room. The entrance fee to the Cagaloglu Hamam gave no time limit on how long you could spend in the baths. But obviously, if a man were to sit in a changing room for hours looking at other naked men, there was a risk he might become unpopular. That’s why he kept moving about at regular intervals, between the sauna and the perpetually fog-clouded steam room as well as the pools of varying temperatures, from steaming hot to cold. And there was a practical reason, too: the rooms were connected by a number of doors, so he risked not seeing everyone if he didn’t move around. But right now the changing room was so cold that he wanted to get back into the warm. Mehmet looked at the time. Four o’clock. The Turkish tattooist thought he had seen the man with the demon tattoo at the baths early in the afternoon, and there probably wasn’t anything to say that serial killers couldn’t be creatures of habit too.

Harry Hole had explained that Mehmet was the perfect spy. Firstly, he was one of only two people who stood any chance of recognising Valentin Gjertsen’s face. Secondly, as a Turk he wouldn’t stand out in a bathhouse that was mostly frequented by his compatriots. Thirdly, because Valentin, according to Harry, would have spotted a police officer instantly. Besides, they had a mole at Crime Squad who was leaking everything to VG and God knows who else. So Harry and Mehmet were the only two people who knew about this operation. But the moment Mehmet let Harry know he had seen Valentin, it would take less than fifteen minutes before he was on the scene with armed police officers.

And in return, Harry had promised Mehmet that Øystein Eikeland was the perfect stand-in at the Jealousy Bar. A guy who had looked like an old scarecrow when he walked through the door, with the smell of a hard but enjoyable hippie lifestyle clinging to his shabby denim clothes. And when Mehmet asked if he’d stood behind a bar before, Eikeland had stuck a roll-up between his lips and sighed: ‘I’ve spent years in bars, lad. Standing, kneeling and lying down. Never on that side of the counter, though.’