Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

Pink Floyd moved on to ‘On the Run’. Agitated drums, pulsing synthesisers, the sound of feet running, fleeing. Fleeing from the police. From Harry Hole’s handcuffs. Wretched pervert .

He picked up the glass of lemonade from the table. Took a little sip, looked at it. Then he threw it at the wall. The glass shattered and the yellow liquid ran down the white wallpaper. He heard swearing from the neighbouring flat.

Then he went into the bedroom. Checked her ankles and wrists were securely tied to the bedposts. He looked down at the freckled waitress as she lay asleep in his bed. She was breathing evenly. The drug was working the way it should. Was she dreaming? About the blue-black man? Or was he the only one who did that? One of the psychologists had suggested that this recurring nightmare was a half-forgotten childhood memory, that it was his own father he had seen sitting on top of his mother. That was rubbish, obviously, he had never seen his father; according to his mother he had raped her once and then vanished. A bit like the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit. Which made him the Messiah. Why not? The one who would return in judgement.

He stroked Marte’s cheek. It had been a long time since he’d had a real, live woman in his bed. And he definitely preferred Harry Hole’s waitress to his own usual, dead Japanese girlfriend. So yes, it was a great shame that he was going to have to give her up. A shame that he couldn’t follow the demon’s instincts and had to listen to the other’s voice instead, the voice of reason. The voice of reason had been angry. Its instructions detailed. A forest beside a deserted road to the north-east of the city.

He went back to the living room, sat down on the chair. The smooth leather felt good against his naked skin, which was still tingling with pain from the boiling hot shower. He switched on the new phone, into which he had already inserted the SIM card he had been given. Tinder and the VG app were next to each other. He clicked on VG first. Waited. Having to wait was part of the excitement. Was he still the lead story? He could understand the B-list celebrities who’d do anything to be seen. A singer preparing food with some clown of a television cook because – as she doubtless believed – she needed to stay current .

Harry Hole stared gloomily at him.

Elise Hermansen’s bartender exploited by police.

He clicked on ‘Read more’ below the picture. Scrolled down.

Sources say that that bartender was stationed in a Turkish bathhouse to spy for the police …

The guy in the hararet . Working for the police. For Harry Hole.

… because he’s the only person who can identify Valentin Gjertsen with any certainty.

He stood up, felt the leather let go of his skin with a slurping sound, and went back to the bedroom.

He looked in the mirror. Who are you? Who are you? You’re the only one. The only one who’s seen and knows the face I’m looking at now.

There wasn’t any name or picture of the man. And he hadn’t looked at the bartender that evening in the Jealousy Bar. Because eye contact makes people remember. But now they had had eye contact. And he remembered. He ran his finger across the demon’s face. The face that wanted to get out, that had to get out.

In the living room ‘On the Run’ came to an end with the roar of an aeroplane and a madman’s laughter, before the plane crashed in a violent, drawn-out explosion.

Valentin Gjertsen closed his eyes and saw the flames in his mind’s eye.

‘What are the risks in waking her?’ Harry said, looking at the crucifix hanging above Dr Steffens’s head.

‘There are various answers to that,’ Steffens said. ‘And one that’s true.’

‘And that is?’

‘That we don’t know.’

‘Like you don’t know what’s wrong with her.’

‘Yes.’

‘Hm. What do you know, really?’

‘If you’re asking in general terms, we know quite a lot. But if people knew how much we don’t know, they’d be scared, Harry. Needlessly scared. So we try to keep quiet about that.’

‘Really?’

‘We say we’re in the repair business, but we’re actually in the consolation business.’

‘So why are you telling me this, Steffens? Why aren’t you consoling me?’

‘Because I’m pretty sure you know that consolation is an illusion. As a murder detective you’re also selling something more than you say you are. You give people a feeling of comforting justice, of order and security. But there’s no perfect, objective truth, and no true justice.’

‘Is she in any pain?’

‘No.’

Harry nodded. ‘Can I smoke in here?’

‘In a doctor’s office in a public hospital?’

‘Sounds comforting, if smoking’s as dangerous as they say.’

Steffens smiled. ‘A nurse told me that the cleaner found ash on the floor under the bed in room 301. I’d rather you did that outside. How’s your son dealing with this, by the way?’

Harry shrugged. ‘Upset. Scared. Angry.’

‘I saw him earlier. His name’s Oleg, isn’t it? Has he stayed in 301 because he doesn’t want to be here?’

‘He didn’t want to come in with me. Or talk to me. He thinks I’m letting her down by continuing to work on the case while she’s lying here.’

Steffens nodded. ‘Young people have always had an enviable confidence in their own moral judgements. But he may have a point, in that increased efforts by the police aren’t always the most effective way to fight crime.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Do you know what made crime rates go down in the USA in the nineties?’

Harry shook his head, put his hands on the armrests and looked at the door.

‘Think of it as a break from all the other things going on in your mind,’ Steffens said. ‘Guess.’

‘I don’t know about guessing,’ Harry said. ‘It’s generally accepted that it was Mayor Giuliani’s zero-tolerance policy, and an increased police presence.’

‘And that’s wrong. Because crime rates didn’t just fall in New York, but right across the USA. The answer is actually the more liberal abortion laws that were introduced in the 1970s.’ Steffens leaned back in his chair and paused, as if to let Harry think it through for himself. ‘Single, dissolute women having sex with men who vanish the next morning, or at least as soon as they realise she’s pregnant. Pregnancies like that have been a conveyor belt producing criminal offspring for centuries. Children without fathers, without boundaries, without a mother with the money to give them an education or moral backbone or to teach them the ways of the Lord. These women would happily have taken their embryonic children’s lives if they hadn’t risked being punished for it. And then, in the 1970s, they got what they wanted. The USA harvested the fruits of the holocaust that was the result of liberal abortion laws fifteen, twenty years later.’

‘Hm. And what do the Mormons say about that? Unless you’re not a Mormon?’

Steffens smiled and steepled his fingers. ‘I support the Church in much of what it says, Hole, but not in its opposition to abortion. In that instance I support the heathens. In the 1990s ordinary people could walk down the streets of American towns without having to be afraid of being robbed, raped and murdered. Because the man who would have murdered them had been scraped out of his mother’s womb, Harry. But where I don’t support liberal heathens is in their demands for so-called free abortions. A foetus’s potential for good or evil will, twenty years later, benefit or damage a society so much that the decision to abort ought to be taken by that society, not by an irresponsible woman roaming the streets for someone to sleep with that night.’