Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

He was standing by the window. Noticed two greasy marks left by fingers on the glass. He had a view across the city, but couldn’t see anything, just heard the sirens. No cause for alarm, you heard sirens all the time. People got caught in house fires, slipped on the bathroom floor, tortured their partners, and that’s when you heard sirens. Irritating, nagging sirens telling people to get out of the way.

On the other side of the wall someone was having sex. In the middle of the working day. Infidelity. To spouses, to employers, probably both.

The sirens rose and fell over the buzzing sound of radio voices behind him. They were on their way, people with uniforms and authority, but without purpose or meaning. All they knew was that it was urgent, that if they didn’t get there in time something terrible would happen.

The air-raid siren. Now, there was a siren that meant something. The sound of doomsday. A wonderful sound that could make your hair stand on end. Hearing that sound, looking at the time, seeing that it wasn’t noon precisely and realising that it wasn’t a test. That was when he would have bombed Oslo, twelve noon. Not a soul would have run for the shelters, they’d just have stood there, staring up at the sky in surprise and wondering what sort of weather it was. Or they’d have lain there fucking with a guilty conscience, unable to act any differently. Because we can’t. We do what we have to because we are who we are. The idea of willpower allowing us to act differently from what’s dictated by who we are, that’s a misunderstanding. It’s the opposite, the only thing willpower does is follow our nature, even when circumstances make that difficult. Raping a woman, breaking down or outsmarting her resistance, running from the police, taking revenge, hiding night and day, doesn’t all this entail defying the obstacles in order to make love to this woman?

The sirens were further away now. The lovers had finished.

He tried to remember how it sounded, the alarm that meant important message, listen to the radio . Did they still use that one? When he was a boy there was one radio station, but which one should you listen to in order to hear that message, which must be incredibly important, yet not quite dramatic enough to mean that you had to run to the shelters. Maybe the plan made provision for them to take over all radio stations, for a voice to announce … what? That it was already too late. That the shelters were closed, because they couldn’t save you, nothing could. That what mattered now was to gather your loved ones around you, say your goodbyes, and then die. Because he had learned this much. That many people organise their entire lives to facilitate one single goal: not to die alone. Few succeed, but the lengths people were prepared to go to because of this desperate fear of crossing that threshold without having someone to hold their hand. Ha. He’d held their hands. How many? Twenty? Thirty? And they hadn’t looked any less terrified or alone as a result. Not even the ones he had loved. Now, they obviously hadn’t had time to love him back, but they had been surrounded by love all the same. He thought about Marte Ruud. He should have treated her better, not let himself get dragged along. He hoped she was dead now, and that it had happened quickly and painlessly.

He heard the shower on the other side of the wall, and the radio voices on his phone.

‘… when the vampirist in some sections of academic literature is described as intelligent and showing no signs of mental illness or social pathology, that creates an impression that we are dealing with a strong and dangerous enemy. But the so-called “Sacramento Vampire”, the vampirist Richard Chase, is probably a more typical comparison when it comes to Valentin Gjertsen’s case. Both demonstrated mental disorders from an early age, bed-wetting, a fascination with fire, impotence. They were both diagnosed with paranoia and schizophrenia. Chase, admittedly, had taken the more common path of drinking animal blood. He also injected himself with chicken blood and made himself ill. Whereas Valentin as a boy was more interested in torturing cats. At his grandfather’s farm, Valentin hid newborn kittens, he kept them in a secret cage so that he could torment them without any of the adults knowing. But both Valentin Gjertsen and Chase become obsessional after they carry out their first vampirist attack. Chase kills all seven of his victims within the space of just a few weeks. And, just like Gjertsen, he kills most of them in their own homes, he goes round Sacramento in December 1977 trying doors, and if they’re open, he takes that as an invitation and goes in, as he explains later under questioning. One of his victims, Teresa Wallin, was three months pregnant, and when Chase found her home alone, he shot her three times and raped her corpse while stabbing her with a butcher’s knife and drinking her blood. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?’

Yes, he thought. But what you daren’t mention is that Richard Trenton Chase removed several of her internal organs, cut off one of her nipples, and collected dog shit from the backyard which he forced into her mouth. Or that he used one victim’s penis as a straw to drink the blood of another of his victims.

‘And the similarities don’t end there. Just like Chase, Valentin Gjertsen is coming to the end of the road. I can’t see him killing more people now.’

‘What makes you so sure of that, herr Smith? You’re working with the police, have you got any specific leads?’

‘What makes me so sure has nothing to do with the investigation, which I naturally can’t comment on, either directly or indirectly.’

‘So why?’

He heard Smith take a deep breath. He could see the absent-minded psychologist in front of him, sitting there taking notes. Eagerly asking about childhood, bed-wetting, early sexual experiences, the forest he set light to, and particularly the cat-fishing, as he called it, which involved getting his grandfather’s fishing rod, throwing the line over the beam in the barn, attaching the hook under the chin of one of the kittens, winding the line back until it was hanging in mid-air, then watching the kitten’s hopeless attempts to climb up and free itself.

‘Because Valentin Gjertsen isn’t anything special, apart from being extremely evil. He’s not stupid, but he’s not particularly intelligent. He hasn’t achieved anything special. Creating something requires imagination, vision, but destruction requires nothing, only blindness. What’s saved Gjertsen from being caught in the past few days isn’t skill, but pure luck. Until he is caught, which will be soon, naturally Valentin Gjertsen remains a dangerous man to get too close to, the way you should watch out for dogs that are frothing at the mouth. But a dog with rabies is dying, and, despite all his evil, Valentin Gjertsen is – to use Harry Hole’s vernacular – just a wretched pervert who’s now so out of control that he’s going to make a big mistake very soon.’

‘So you want to reassure Oslo’s inhabitants by …’

He heard a sound and switched the podcast off. Listened. It was the sound of shuffling feet right outside the door. Someone concentrating on something.

Four men dressed in Delta’s dark uniform were standing at Alexander Dreyer’s door. Katrine Bratt was watching from the corridor, twenty metres away.

One of the men was holding a one-and-a-half-metre battering ram shaped like a giant tube of Pringles with two handles on it.

It was impossible to tell the four of them apart behind their helmets and visors. But she assumed that the man holding up three gloved fingers was Sivert Falkeid.

During the silent countdown she could hear music from the flat. Pink Floyd? She hated Pink Floyd. No, that wasn’t true, she just felt deeply suspicious of people who liked Pink Floyd. Bjørn had said he only liked one Pink Floyd track, then had pulled out an album with a picture of something that looked like a hairy ear on it, said it was from before they became big, and played an ordinary blues track with a howling dog on it. The sort of thing they use on television programmes that have run out of ideas. Bjørn had said he gave any track featuring a bit of decent bottleneck guitar a full amnesty, and the fact that this one featured double bass drums, rough vocals and tributes to dark powers and rotting corpses – just the way Katrine liked it – was also a plus. She missed Bjørn. And now, as Falkeid lowered his last finger to form a clenched fist, and as they swung the battering ram that was about to smash in the door of the man who in the past seven days had murdered at least four, and probably five, people, she thought about the man she had left.