Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

But Eikeland was Harry’s trusted choice, so he just had to hope that nothing too bad happened. A week at most, Harry had said. Then he could go back to his bar. Harry had performed a little bow when he was given the key, on a key ring with a broken plastic heart, the logo of the Jealousy Bar, and told Mehmet that they needed to discuss the music. That there were people over thirty who don’t get dandruff from new music, and that there was even hope for someone bogged down in the Bad Company swamp. The thought of that discussion alone was worth at least a week of tedium, Mehmet thought as he scrolled down VG ’s website, even though he must have read the same headlines ten times now.

FAMOUS VAMPIRISTS IN HISTORY. And while he stared at the screen and waited for the rest of the article to load, something odd happened. It was as if he couldn’t breathe for a moment. He looked up. The door to the baths swung shut. He looked around. The other three men in the changing room were the same ones as before. Someone had entered and walked through the room. Mehmet locked his phone in his locker, got up and followed.

The boilers in the next room were rumbling. Harry looked at the time. Five past four. He pushed his chair back, folded his hands behind his head and leaned against the brick wall. Smith, Bjørn and Wyller looked at him.

‘It’s been sixteen hours since Marte Ruud went missing,’ Harry said. ‘Anything new?’

‘Hair,’ Bjørn Holm said. ‘The team at the scene found strands of hair by the main entrance at Schrøder’s. They look like they could be a match for the hairs we got from Valentin Gjertsen off the handcuffs. They’ve been sent for analysis. Hair suggests a struggle, and also that he didn’t clean up after himself this time. And that also means that there couldn’t have been too much blood, so there’s reason to hope that she was alive when they left.’

‘OK,’ Smith said. ‘There’s a chance she’s alive, and that he’s using her as a cow.’

‘Cow?’ Wyller asked.

The boiler room fell silent. Harry grimaced. ‘You mean he … he’s milking her?’

‘The body takes twenty-four hours to reproduce one per cent of the body’s red blood cells,’ Smith said. ‘At best, it might quench his thirst for blood for a while. At worst, it might mean that he’s even more focused on regaining power and control. And that he’s going to try again to find the people who’ve humiliated him. Which means you and yours, Harry.’

‘My wife is under police guard, round the clock, and I’ve left a message for my son telling him to be careful.’

‘So it’s possible that he might attack men as well?’ Wyller asked.

‘Absolutely,’ Smith said.

Harry felt his trouser pocket vibrate. He pulled out his phone. ‘Yes?’

‘It’s Øystein. How do you make a daiquiri? I’ve got a difficult customer and Mehmet isn’t answering.’

‘How should I know? Doesn’t the customer know?’

‘No.’

‘Something to do with rum and lime. Ever heard of Google?’

‘Of course, I’m not an idiot. That’s on the Internet, isn’t it?’

‘Try it, you might like it. I’m hanging up now.’ Harry ended the call. ‘Sorry. Anything else?’

‘Witness statements from people in the vicinity of Schrøder’s,’ Wyller said. ‘No one saw or heard anything. Odd, on such a busy street.’

‘It can be pretty deserted there around midnight on a Monday night,’ Harry said. ‘But getting someone, conscious or unconscious, away from there without being seen? Hardly. He might have been parked right outside.’

‘There’s no vehicle registered to Valentin Gjertsen, and no vehicle was leased under that name yesterday,’ Wyller said.

Harry spun towards him.

Wyller looked back quizzically. ‘I know the chances of him using his real name are pretty much zero, but I checked anyway. Isn’t that …?’

‘Yeah, that’s absolutely fine,’ Harry said. ‘Send the photofit picture to the car-rental companies. And there’s a twenty-four-hour Deli de Luca next to Schrøder’s—’

‘I was at the morning meeting of the investigative team and they’ve checked the security cameras there,’ Bjørn said. ‘Nothing.’

‘OK, anything else I should know about?’

‘They’re working in the USA to get access to the victims’ IP addresses on Facebook using a subpoena rather than going via a court,’ Wyller said. ‘That means we wouldn’t get the contents, but all the addresses of people they’ve sent and received messages to and from. It could be a matter of weeks rather than months.’

Mehmet was standing outside the door of the hararet . He had seen the door close as he emerged into the baths from the changing room. And it was in the hararet that the man with the tattoo had been seen. Mehmet knew it wasn’t very likely that Valentin would show up as soon as this, on the first day. Unless he came several times a week, of course. So why stand there hesitating?

Mehmet swallowed.

Then he pulled the door of the hararet open and went inside. The thick steam moved, swirled around, disappeared out through the door, opening a corridor into the room. And for a moment Mehmet found himself staring at the face of a man sitting on the second bench up. Then the corridor closed again and the face was gone. But Mehmet had seen enough.

It was him. The man who had come into the bar that evening.

Should he run out straight away or sit down for a while first? After all, the man had seen Mehmet staring at him, and if he walked out at once surely he’d get suspicious?

Mehmet stood where he was by the door.

It felt like the steam he was breathing in was making his airways tighter. He couldn’t wait any longer, he had to get out. Mehmet nudged the door gently and slipped out. Ran across the slippery tiles with short, careful steps so as not to fall, and reached the changing room. He swore as he struggled with the code on his padlock. Four digits. 1683. The Battle of Vienna. The year when the Ottoman Empire ruled the world, or at least the part of the world that was worth ruling. When the empire couldn’t expand any further, and the decline began. Defeat after defeat. Was that why he had picked that year, because it somehow reflected his own story, a story of having everything and losing it? Eventually he managed to open the lock. He grabbed his phone, tapped at it and held it to his ear. Stared at the door to the baths, which had swung shut again, every moment expecting the man to come rushing in and attack him.

‘Yes?’

‘He’s here,’ Mehmet whispered.

‘Sure?’

‘Yes. In the hararet .’

‘Keep an eye on it, we’ll be there in fifteen minutes.’

‘You’ve done what ?’ Bjørn Holm said, taking his foot off the clutch as the lights turned green on Hausmannsgate.

‘I hired a civilian volunteer to watch the Turkish baths in Sagene,’ Harry said, looking in the wing mirror of Bjørn Holm’s legendary 1970 Volvo Amazon. Originally white, later painted black, with a chequered rally stripe across the roof and boot. The car behind disappeared in a cloud of black exhaust fumes.

‘Without asking us?’ Bjørn blew his horn and overtook an Audi on the inside.

‘It’s not entirely by the book, so there was no reason to make any of you accomplices.’

‘There are fewer traffic lights if you take Maridalsveien,’ Wyller said from the back seat.

Bjørn changed into a lower gear and wrenched the car to the right. Harry felt the pressure of the three-point seat belt that Volvo had been the first to install, but they had no slack which meant you could hardly move.

‘How are you doing, Smith?’ Harry called over the roar of the engine. He wouldn’t usually have brought an external adviser on an active operation like this, but at the last moment he decided to take Smith in case they found themselves in a hostage situation, when the psychologist’s ability to read Valentin could come in handy. The way he had read Aurora. The way he had read Harry.