Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

The journey only took three or four minutes, but Harry’s teeth were still chattering when they stopped next to Smith and the officer beside an overgrown, ice-covered fence. In front of them was a wrought-iron gate, cemented in snow.

‘And there you have the Pig House,’ the sheriff said.

Thirty metres from the gate a large, ramshackle, elaborate three-storey house loomed up, guarded by tall pines on all sides. If the planks lining the walls had ever been painted, the paint was now all gone, and the house was varying shades of grey and silver. The curtains behind the windows looked like they were made of rough sheets and canvas.

‘Dark place to build a house,’ Harry said.

‘Three floors of old-school Gothic,’ Smith said. ‘That must break building regulations here, doesn’t it?’

‘The Hell family broke all sorts of regulations,’ the sheriff said. ‘But never the law.’

‘Hm. Could I ask you to bring some tools, Sheriff?’

‘Artur, have you got the crowbar? Come on, let’s get this over with.’

Harry got off the snowmobile and sank into the snow halfway up his thighs, but he managed to reach the gate and climb over. The other three followed.

There was a covered veranda along the front of the house. It faced south, so perhaps the house got a bit of sunlight in the middle of the day in the summer. Why else would you have a veranda? As a place where the midges could drain you of blood? Harry went over to the door and tried to see something behind the frosted glass before pressing the rust-red button of an old-fashioned doorbell.

It worked, at least, because a bell rang deep inside the house.

The other three came and stood beside him as Harry rang the bell again.

‘If he was home he’d have been standing in the doorway waiting for us,’ the sheriff said. ‘You can hear those snowmobiles from two kilometres away, and the road only leads here.’

Harry tried again.

‘Lenny Hell can’t hear that in Thailand,’ the sheriff said. ‘My family are waiting to go skiing, so let’s get this glass smashed, Artur.’

The policeman swung the crowbar and the window beside the door shattered crisply. He pulled one of his gloves off, stuck his hand through and fumbled for a while with a look of concentration before Harry heard the sound of a lock turning.

‘After you,’ Jimmy said, opening the door and holding his hand out.

Harry stepped inside.

It seemed uninhabited, that was the first thing that struck him. Maybe it was the lack of modern comforts that made him think of the houses of famous people that had been turned into museums. Like the time when he was fourteen and his parents took him and Sis to Moscow, where they visited the house where Fyodor Dostoevsky once lived. It had been the most soulless house Harry had ever seen, which may go some way to explaining why Crime and Punishment came as such a shock when he read it three years later.

Harry walked through the hall and into the large living room. He pressed the light switch on the wall but nothing happened. The daylight filtering in through the greyish-white curtains, though, was enough for him to see the steam from his own breath, and the few pieces of old-fashioned furniture scattered randomly around the room, as if matching tables and chairs had been split up after an acrimonious inheritance dispute. He could see heavy paintings hanging crookedly on the walls, probably as a result of changes in temperature. And he could see that Lenny Hell wasn’t in Thailand.

Soulless.

Lenny Hell – or at least someone who resembled the picture Harry had seen of Lenny Hell – was sitting in a wing-backed chair in the same majestic posture in which Harry’s grandfather used to fall asleep when he was sufficiently drunk. With the difference that his right foot was slightly raised from the floor, and his lower right arm was hovering a few centimetres above the arm of the chair. In other words, the body had tipped slightly to its left after rigor mortis had set in. And that was a long time ago. Five months, perhaps.

The head made Harry think of an Easter egg. Brittle, dry, empty of content. It looked as if the head had shrunk, forcing the mouth open and revealing the dry, grey gums holding the teeth. There was a black hole in his forehead, bloodless seeing as Lenny Hell was sitting with his head tilted backwards, gawping and staring stiffly at the ceiling.

When Harry went round the chair he saw that the bolt had gone right through the tall chair-back. A black metal object, the shape of a pocket torch, was lying on the floor beside the chair. He recognised it. When Harry was about ten years old his grandfather decided it would do the boy good to see where the pork ribs for Christmas dinner came from, and took him with him behind the barn where he placed a contraption he called the slaughtering mask, even though it wasn’t a mask, over the forehead of Heidrun, the big sow. Then he pressed something, there was a sharp bang, and Heidrun jerked as if taken by surprise and fell to the ground. Then he had drained her of blood, but what Harry remembered most was the smell of powder and the way Heidrun’s legs started to twitch after a while. His grandfather had explained that that was how the body worked, that Heidrun was long since dead, but Harry had nightmares about twitching pigs’ legs for ages afterwards.

The floorboards behind Harry creaked and he heard breathing that quickly became very heavy.

‘Lenny Hell?’ Harry asked without turning round.

The sheriff had to clear his throat twice before he managed to say ‘Yes’.

‘Don’t come any closer,’ Harry said, crouching down and looking round the room.

It wasn’t speaking to him. This crime scene was silent. Possibly because it was too old, possibly because it wasn’t a crime scene, but a room in which the man who lived there had decided he didn’t want to live any more.

Harry took his phone out and called Bjørn Holm.

‘I’ve got a dead body in Åneby, in Nittedal. A man called Artur is going to call and tell you where to meet him.’

Harry hung up and went out into the kitchen. He tried the light switch, but this one didn’t work either. It was tidy, though there was a plate with stiff, mould-covered sauce on it in the sink. There was a dam of ice in front of the fridge.

Harry went out into the hall.

‘See if you can find the fuse box,’ he said to Artur.

‘The electricity may have been cut off,’ the sheriff said.

‘The doorbell worked,’ Harry said, then went up the stairs that curved away from the hall.

On the first floor he looked in three bedrooms. They had all been carefully cleaned, but in one the covers were folded back and there were clothes hanging over the chair.

On the second floor he went into a room that had evidently functioned as an office. There were books and files on the shelves and, in front of the window, on one of the rectangular tables, stood a computer with three large screens. Harry turned round. On the table by the door was a box, maybe seventy-five centimetres square, with a black metal frame and glass sides, with a small white plastic key on a frame inside. A 3D printer.

There was the sound of bells ringing in the distance. Harry went over to the window. From there he could see the church, presumably they were ringing the bells for the Sunday service. The Hell house was taller than it was wide, like a tower in the middle of the forest, as if they had wanted a place where they could see but without being seen. His eyes landed on a folder on the table in front of him. The name on the front of it. He opened it and read the first page. Then he looked up at the identical folders on the bookcase. He went over to the top of the stairs.

‘Smith!’

‘Yes?’