The Thirst

1

WEDNESDAY EVENING

THE JEALOUSY BAR was almost empty, but even so it was hard to breathe.

Mehmet Kalak looked at the man and woman standing at the bar as he poured wine into their glasses. Four customers. The third was a guy sitting on his own at a table, taking tiny little sips of beer, and the fourth was just a pair of cowboy boots sticking out from one of the booths, where the darkness occasionally gave way to the glow from the screen of a phone. Four customers at half past eleven on a September evening in the best bar district in Grünerløkka. Terrible, and it couldn’t go on like this. Sometimes he asked himself why he’d left his job as bar manager at the hippest hotel in the city to go it alone and take over this rundown bar with its pissed-up clientele. Possibly because he thought that by jacking up the prices he could replace the old customers with the ones everyone wanted: the neighbourhood’s affluent, trouble-free young adults. Possibly because he needed somewhere to work himself to death after breaking up with his girlfriend. Possibly because the offer from loan shark Danial Banks had looked favourable after the bank rejected his application. Or possibly just because at the Jealousy Bar he was the one who picked the music, not some damn hotel manager who only knew one tune: the ringing of the cash register. Getting rid of the old clientele had been easy – they had long since settled in at a cheap bar three blocks away. But it turned out to be a whole lot harder to attract new customers. Maybe he would have to reconsider the whole concept. Maybe one big television screen on which he showed Turkish football wasn’t enough to merit the description ‘sports bar’. And maybe he’d have to change the music and go for reliable classics like U2 and Springsteen for the guys, Coldplay for the girls.

‘Well, I haven’t been on that many Tinder dates,’ Geir said, putting his glass of white wine back down on the bar. ‘But I’ve worked out that there’s a lot of strange people out there.’

‘Have you?’ the woman said, stifling a yawn. She had short fair hair. Slim. Mid-thirties, Mehmet thought. Quick, slightly stressed movements. Tired eyes. Works too hard and goes to the gym in the hope that it will give her the advantage she’s never had. Mehmet watched Geir raise his glass with three fingers round the stem, the same way as the woman. On his countless Tinder hook-ups he had always ordered the same thing as his dates, regardless of whether it was whiskey or green tea. Keen to signal that they were a match on that point too.

Geir coughed. Six minutes had passed since she had walked into the bar, and Mehmet knew that this was when he would make his move.

‘You’re more beautiful than your profile picture, Elise,’ Geir said.

‘So you said, but thanks again.’

Mehmet polished a glass and pretended not to listen.

‘So tell me, Elise, what do you want from life?’

She gave a rather resigned little smile. ‘A man who doesn’t just judge by appearances.’

‘I couldn’t agree more, Elise, it’s what’s inside that counts.’

‘That was a joke. I look better in my profile picture, and, to be honest, so do you, Geir.’

‘Ha ha,’ Geir said, and stared down into his wine glass, slightly deflated. ‘I suppose most people pick a flattering picture. So you’re looking for a man. What sort of man?’

‘One who’d like to stay at home with three kids.’ She glanced at the time.

‘Ha ha.’ Sweat hadn’t just broken out on Geir’s forehead, but all over his large, close-shaven head. And soon rings of sweat would appear under the arms of his black slim-fit shirt, an odd choice given that Geir was neither slim nor fit. He toyed with his glass. ‘That’s exactly my kind of humour, Elise. A dog is family enough for me for the time being. Do you like animals?’

Tanrim, Mehmet thought. Why doesn’t he just give up?

‘If I meet the right person, I can feel it, here … and here.’ He grinned, lowered his voice and pointed towards his crotch. ‘But obviously you have to find out if that’s right. What do you say, Elise?’

Mehmet shuddered. Geir had gone all-in, and his self-esteem was about to take another beating.

The woman pushed her wine glass aside, leaned forward slightly, and Mehmet had to strain to hear. ‘Can you promise me something, Geir?’

‘Of course.’ His voice and the look in his eyes were as eager as a dog’s.

‘That when I walk out of here in a moment, you’ll never try to contact me again?’

Mehmet had to admire Geir for managing to summon up a smile. ‘Of course.’

The woman leaned back again. ‘It’s not that you seem like a stalker, Geir, but I’ve had a couple of bad experiences. One guy started following me. He threatened the people I was with as well. I hope you can understand my being a bit cautious.’

‘I understand.’ Geir raised his glass and emptied it. ‘Like I said, there’s a lot of strange people out there. But don’t worry, you’re pretty safe. Statistically speaking, the chances of getting murdered are four times greater for a man than a woman.’

‘Thanks for the wine, Geir.’

‘If one of the three of us –’

Mehmet hurried to look away when Geir pointed to him.

‘– was going to get murdered tonight, the likelihood of it being you is one in eight. No, hang on, you have to divide that by …’

She stood up. ‘I hope you figure it out. Have a good life.’

Geir stared at her wine glass for a while after she left, nodded in time to ‘Fix You’, as if to convince Mehmet and anyone else watching that he had already shaken the experience off, she had been nothing more than a three-minute-long pop song, and just as forgettable. Then he stood up and left. Mehmet looked round. The cowboy boots and the guy who had been dragging out his beer were both gone too. He was alone. And the oxygen was back. He used his mobile phone to change the playlist. To his playlist. Bad Company. Given that the group contained members of Free, Mott the Hoople and King Crimson, there was no way it was ever going to be bad. And with Paul Rodgers on vocals, there was no way it could fail. Mehmet turned the volume up until the glasses behind the bar started to rattle against each other.

Elise walked down Thorvald Meyers gate, past plain four-storey buildings that had once housed the working classes in a poor part of a poor city, but where one square metre now cost as much as in London or Stockholm. September in Oslo. The darkness was back at last, and the drawn-out, annoyingly light summer nights were long gone, with all the hysterical, cheerful, stupid self-expression of summer. In September Oslo reverted to its true self: melancholic, reserved, efficient. A solid facade, but not without its dark corners and secrets. Much like her, apparently. She quickened her pace; there was rain in the air, mist, the spray when God sneezed, as one of her dates had put it in an attempt to be poetic. She was going to give up Tinder. Tomorrow. Enough was enough. Enough randy men whose way of looking at her made her feel like a whore when she met them in bars. Enough crazy psychopaths and stalkers who stuck like mud, sucking time, energy and security from her. Enough pathetic losers who made her feel like she was one of them.

They said Internet dating was the cool way to meet new people, that it was nothing to be ashamed of any more, that everyone was doing it. But that wasn’t true. People met each other at work, in classrooms, through friends, at the gym, in cafes, on planes, buses, trains. They met each other the way they were supposed to meet each other, when they were relaxed, no pressure, and afterwards they could cling to the romantic illusion of innocence, purity and quirks of fate. She wanted that illusion. She was going to delete her profile. She’d told herself that before, but this time it was definitely going to happen, that very night.

She crossed Sofienberggata and fished out the key to unlock the gate next to the greengrocer’s. She pushed the gate open and stepped into the darkness of the archway. And stopped dead.

There were two of them.

It took a moment or two for her eyes to get used to the darkness, and for her to see what they were holding in their hands. Both men had undone their trousers and had their cocks out.

She jerked back. Didn’t look round, just prayed that there was no one standing behind her.

‘Fucksorry.’ The combination of oath and apology was uttered by a young voice. Nineteen, twenty, Elise guessed. Not sober.

‘Duh,’ the other one said, ‘you’re pissing all over my shoes!’

‘I was startled!’

Elise pulled her coat more tightly around her and walked past the young men, who had turned back to face the wall again. ‘This isn’t a public toilet,’ she said.

‘Sorry, we were desperate. It won’t happen again.’

Geir hurried over Schleppegrells gate. Thinking hard. It was wrong that two men and one woman gave the woman a one in eight chance of being murdered, the calculation was much more complicated than that. Everything was always much more complicated.

He had just passed Romsdalsgata when something made him turn round. There was a man walking fifty metres behind him. He wasn’t sure, but wasn’t it the same guy who had been standing on the other side of the street looking at a window display when Geir emerged from the Jealousy Bar? Geir sped up, heading east, towards Dælenenga and the chocolate factory; there was no one out on the streets here, just a bus which was evidently running ahead of schedule and was waiting at a bus stop. Geir glanced back. The man was still there, still the same distance. Geir was frightened of dark-skinned people, always had been, but he couldn’t see this guy properly. They were on their way out of the white, gentrified neighbourhood, heading towards an area with far more social housing and immigrants. Geir could see the door of his own apartment block one hundred metres away. But when he looked back he saw that the guy had started running, and the thought that he had a Somali, thoroughly traumatised from Mogadishu, on his heels made him break into a run. Geir hadn’t run for years, and each time his heels hit the tarmac a jolt ran through his brain and jogged his sight. He reached the door, got the key in the lock at the first attempt, threw himself inside and slammed the heavy wooden door behind him. He leaned against the damp wood and stared out through the glass in the top part of the door. He couldn’t see anyone out in the street. Perhaps it wasn’t a Somali. Geir couldn’t help laughing. It was ridiculous how jumpy you got just because you’d been talking about murder. And what had Elise said about that stalker?

Geir was still out of breath when he unlocked the door to his flat. He got a beer from the fridge, noticed that the kitchen window facing the street was open, and closed it. Then he went into the study and switched the lamp on.

He pressed one of the keys of the PC in front of him, and the twenty-inch screen lit up.

He typed in ‘Pornhub’, then ‘french’ in the search box. He looked through the thumbnails until he found a woman who at least had the same hairstyle and colouring as Elise. The walls of the flat were thin, so he plugged his headphones into the PC before double-clicking the picture, undoing his trousers and pushing them down his thighs. The woman actually resembled Elise so little that Geir shut his eyes instead and concentrated on her groaning while he tried to conjure up the image of Elise’s small, tight little mouth, the scornful look in her eyes, her sober but still sexy blouse. There was no way he could ever have had her. Never. Except this way.

Geir stopped. Opened his eyes. Let go of his cock as the hairs on the back of his neck stood up in the cold breeze from behind. From the door he knew he had closed properly. He raised his hand to pull off the headphones, but knew it was already too late.

Elise put the security chain on the door, kicked her shoes off in the hallway and, as always, ran her hand over the photograph of herself and her niece Ingvild that was stuck to one side of the mirror. It was a ritual she didn’t quite understand, except that it clearly fulfilled some deep-rooted human need, the same way as stories about what happens to us after death. She went into the living room and lay down on the sofa in her small but cosy two-room flat; at least she owned it. She checked her phone. One text from work – tomorrow morning’s meeting had been cancelled. She hadn’t told the guy she had met this evening that she worked as a lawyer, specialising in rape cases. And that his statistics about men being more likely to be murdered only told half the story. In sexually motivated murders, the victim was four times more likely to be a woman. That was one of the reasons why the first thing she did when she bought the flat was change the locks and have a security chain fitted, a rare concept in Norway, and one she still fumbled with every time she used it. She went onto Tinder. She had matched with three of the men she had right-swiped earlier that evening. Oh, this was what was so nice about it. Not meeting them, but knowing that they were out there, and that they wanted her. Should she allow herself one last flirtation by message, one last virtual threesome with her last two strangers before deleting her account and the app for good?

No. Delete it at once.

She went into the menu, clicked the relevant option and was asked if she was really sure she wanted to delete her account?

Elise looked at her index finger. It was trembling. God, had she become addicted? Addicted to being told that someone – someone who had no real idea of who she was or what she was like, but still someone – wanted her, just the way she was? Well, the way she was in her profile picture, anyway. Completely addicted, or only a bit? Presumably she’d find out if she just deleted her account and promised to go a month without Tinder. One month, and if she couldn’t manage that, then there was something seriously wrong with her. The trembling finger moved closer to the delete button. But, if she was addicted, was that such a bad thing? We all need to feel that we’ve got someone, that someone’s got us. She had read that babies could die if they didn’t get a minimum of skin-to-skin contact. She doubted that was true, but, on the other hand, what was the point of living if it was just her, doing a job that was eating her up and with friends she socialised with mostly out of a sense of duty, if she was honest, because her fear of loneliness worried her more than their tedious moaning about their children and husbands, or the absence of one or other of these? And perhaps the right man for her was on Tinder right now? So, OK, one last go. The first picture popped up and she swiped left. Onto the scrapheap, to I-don’t-want-you. Same thing with the second one. And the third.

Her mind started to wander. She had attended a lecture where a psychologist who had been in close contact with some of the worst criminals in the country had said that men killed for sex, money and power, and women as a result of jealousy and fear.

She stopped swiping left. There was something vaguely familiar about the thin face in the picture, even though it was dark and slightly out of focus. That had happened before, seeing as Tinder matched people who were geographically close to each other. And, according to Tinder, this man was less than a kilometre away, so for all she knew he could be in the same block. The fact that the picture was out of focus meant that he hadn’t studied the online advice about Tinder tactics, and that in itself was a plus. The message was a very basic ‘hi’. No attempt to stand out. It may not have been particularly imaginative, but it did at least display a certain confidence. Yes, she would definitely have been pleased if a man came up to her at a party and just said ‘hi’ with a calm, steady gaze that said ‘shall we take this any further?’ She swiped right. To I’m-curious-about-you.

And heard the happy bleep from her iPhone that told her she had another match.

Geir was breathing hard through his nose.

He pulled his trousers up and slowly spun his chair round.

The light from the computer screen was the only one in the room, and illuminated just the torso and hands of the person who was standing behind him. He couldn’t see a face, just the white hands holding something out towards him. A black leather strap. With a loop at one end.

The figure took a step closer and Geir pulled back automatically.

‘Do you know what the only thing I find more disgusting than you is?’ the voice whispered in the darkness as the hands pulled at the leather strap.

Geir swallowed.

‘The dog,’ the voice said. ‘That bloody dog, which you promised you’d do everything to look after. Which shits on the kitchen floor because no one can be bothered to take it outside.’

Geir coughed. ‘Kari, please …’

‘Take it out. And don’t touch me when you come to bed.’

Geir took the dog leash, and the door slammed behind her.

He was left sitting in the darkness, blinking.

Nine, he thought. Two men and one woman, one murder. The chances of the woman being the murder victim is one in nine, not one in eight.

Mehmet drove the old BMW out of the streets of the city centre, up towards Kjelsås, towards the villas, fjord views and fresher air. He turned into his silent, sleeping street. Discovered that there was a black Audi R8 parked in front of the garage by the house. Mehmet slowed down. Briefly considered accelerating and just driving on. He knew that would only be putting it off. On the other hand, that was exactly what he needed. A delay. But Banks would find him again, and perhaps now was the right time. It was dark and quiet, no witnesses. Mehmet pulled up by the pavement. Opened the glove compartment. Looked at what he had been keeping in there for the past few days, specifically in case this situation arose. Mehmet put it in his jacket pocket and took a deep breath. Then he got out of the car and started to walk towards the house.

The door of the Audi opened and Danial Banks got out. When Mehmet had met him at the Pearl of India restaurant, he knew that the Pakistani first name and English surname were probably just as fake as the signature on the dubious contract they had signed. But the cash in the case he had pushed across the table had been real enough.

The gravel in front of the garage crunched beneath Mehmet’s shoes.

‘Nice house,’ Danial Banks said, leaning against the R8 with his arms folded. ‘Wasn’t your bank prepared to take it as collateral?’

‘I’m only renting,’ Mehmet said. ‘The basement.’

‘That’s bad news for me,’ Banks said. He was much shorter than Mehmet, but it didn’t feel like it as he stood there squeezing the biceps inside his smart jacket. ‘Because burning it down won’t help either of us if you don’t get anything from the insurance to repay your debt, will it?’

‘No, I don’t suppose it would.’

‘Bad news for you, too, because that means I’m going to have to use the more painful methods instead. Do you want to know what they are?’

‘Don’t you want to know if I can pay first?’

Banks shook his head and pulled something from his pocket. ‘The instalment was due three days ago, and I told you punctuality was crucial. And so that all my clients, not just you, know that that sort of thing isn’t tolerated, I can’t make any exceptions.’ He held the object up in the light of the lamp on the garage. Mehmet gasped for breath.

‘I know it isn’t very original,’ Banks said, tilting his head and looking at the pliers. ‘But it works.’

‘But—’

‘You can choose which finger. Most people prefer the left little finger.’

Mehmet felt it coming. The anger. And he felt his chest expand as he filled his lungs with air. ‘I’ve got a better solution, Banks.’

‘Oh?’

‘I know it isn’t very original,’ Mehmet said, sticking his right hand in his jacket pocket. Pulled it out. Held it out towards Banks, clutching it with both hands. ‘But it works.’

Banks stared at him in surprise. Nodded slowly.

‘You’re right there,’ Banks said, taking the bundle of notes Mehmet was holding out to him and pulling the elastic band off.

‘That covers the repayment and the interest, down to the last krone,’ Mehmet said. ‘But feel free to count it.’

Ping.

A match on Tinder.

The triumphant sound your phone makes when someone you’ve already swiped right on swipes your picture right as well.

Elise’s head was spinning, her heart was racing.

She knew it was the familiar response to the sound of Tinder’s matchmaking: increased heart rate as a consequence of excitement. That it released a whole load of happy chemicals that you could become addicted to. But that wasn’t why her heart was galloping. It was because the ping hadn’t come from her phone.

But the ping had rung out at the very moment she’d swiped right on a picture. The picture of a person who, according to Tinder, was less than a kilometre away from her.

She stared at the closed bedroom door. Swallowed.

The sound must have come from one of the neighbouring apartments. There were lots of single people living in the block, lots of potential Tinder users. And everything was quiet now, even on the floor below where the girls had been having a party when she went out earlier that evening. But there was only one way to get rid of imaginary monsters. By checking.

Elise got up from the sofa and walked the four steps over to the bedroom door. Hesitated. A couple of assault cases from work swirled through her head.

Then she pulled herself together and opened the door.

She found herself standing in the doorway gasping for air. Because there wasn’t any. None that she could breathe.

The light above the bed was switched on, and the first thing she saw was the soles of a pair of cowboy boots sticking off the end of the bed. Jeans and a pair of long legs, crossed. The man lying there was like the photograph, half in darkness, half out of focus. But he had unbuttoned his shirt to reveal his bare chest. And on his chest was a drawing or a tattoo of a face. That was what caught her eye now. The silently screaming face. As if it were held tight and was trying to pull free. Elise couldn’t bring herself to scream either.

As the person on the bed sat up, the light from his mobile phone fell across his face.

‘So we meet again, Elise,’ he whispered.

And the voice made her realise why the profile picture had seemed familiar to her. His hair was a different colour. And his face must have been operated on – she could see the scars left by stitches.

He raised his hand and shoved something into his mouth.

Elise stared at him as she backed away. Then she spun round, got some air into her lungs, and knew she had to use it to run, not scream. The front door was only five steps away, six at most. She heard the bed creak, but he had further to run. If she could just get out into the stairwell she’d be able to scream and get some help. She made it to the hallway and reached the door, tugged the handle down and pushed, but the door wouldn’t open properly.

The security chain. She tried to pull the door closed, to grab the chain, but it was all taking too long, like a bad dream, and she knew it was too late. Something was pressed over her mouth and she was dragged backwards. In desperation she stuck her hand through the opening above the security chain, grabbed hold of the door frame outside, tried to scream, but the huge nicotine-stinking hand was clamped tightly over her mouth. Then she was yanked free and the door slammed shut in front of her. The voice whispered in her ear: ‘Didn’t you like me? You don’t look as good as your profile picture either, baby. We just need to get to know each other better, we didn’t have a chance for that last t-time.’

The voice. And that last, solitary stammer. She’d heard it once before. She tried to kick and tear herself free, but he had her in a vice-like grip. He dragged her over to the hall mirror. Rested his head on her shoulder.

‘It wasn’t your fault I was found guilty, Elise, the evidence was overwhelming. That’s not why I’m here. Would you believe me if I said it is a coincidence?’ Then he grinned. Elise stared into his mouth. His teeth looked like they were made of iron, black and rusty, with sharp spikes in both upper and lower jaw, like a bear trap.

It creaked gently when he opened his mouth – was it spring-loaded?

She remembered the details of the case now. The photographs from the scene. And knew she would soon be dead.

Then he bit.

Elise Hermansen tried to scream into his hand as she saw the blood spraying from her own throat.

He raised his head again. Looked into the mirror. Her blood was running from his eyebrows, from his hair and down over his chin.

‘I’d call that a m-match, baby,’ he whispered. Then he bit again.

She felt dizzy. He wasn’t holding her so tightly now, he didn’t need to, because a paralysing chill, an alien darkness was moving slowly over her, into her. She pulled one hand free and reached towards the photograph on the side of the mirror. Tried to touch it, but her fingertips couldn’t reach.

2

THURSDAY MORNING

THE SHARP AFTERNOON light reached through the living-room windows and out into the hallway.

Detective Inspector Katrine Bratt was standing in front of the mirror, silent and thoughtful, looking at the photograph that was stuck to the frame. It showed a woman and a young girl sitting on a rock hugging each other, both with wet hair and wrapped in big towels. As if they had just gone swimming in a rather too chilly Norwegian summer and were trying to keep warm by clinging to one another. But now there was something separating them. A dark streak of blood had run down the mirror and across the photograph, right between the two smiling faces. Katrine Bratt didn’t have children. She may have wished that she had in the past, but not now. Now she was a newly single career woman, and she was happy with that. Wasn’t she?

She heard a low cough and looked up. Met the gaze of a deeply scarred face with a prominent brow and a remarkably high hairline. Truls Berntsen.

‘What is it, Constable?’ she said. Saw his face cloud over at her deliberate reminder that he was still a constable after fifteen years in the force, and for that and several other reasons would never have been allowed to apply to become a detective with Crime Squad if it hadn’t been for the fact that Truls Berntsen had been transferred there by his childhood friend, Police Chief Mikael Bellman.

Berntsen shrugged. ‘Nothing much, you’re in charge of the investigation.’ He looked at her with a cold, doggy look that was simultaneously submissive and hostile.

‘Talk to the neighbours,’ Bratt said. ‘Start with the floor below. We’re especially interested in anything they heard or saw yesterday and last night. But seeing as Elise Hermansen lived alone, we also want to know what sort of men she used to hang out with.’

‘So you think it was a man, and that they already knew each other?’ Only now did she see the young man, the lad standing next to Berntsen. An open face. Fair hair. Handsome. ‘Anders Wyller. This is my first day.’ His voice was high, and he was smiling with his eyes, which Katrine took to mean that he was confident of charming those around him. His references from his boss at Tromsø Police Station had looked pretty much like a declaration of love. But, to be fair, he had the CV to match. Top grades from Police College two years ago, and good results as a detective constable in Tromsø.

‘Go and make a start, Berntsen,’ Katrine said.

She took his shuffling feet to be a passive protest at being ordered about by a younger, female boss.

‘Welcome,’ she said, holding her hand out toWyller. ‘Sorry we weren’t there to say hello on your first day.’

‘The dead take priority over the living,’ the young man said. Katrine recognised the quote as one of Harry Hole’s, saw that Wyller was looking at her hand, and realised that she was still wearing a pair of latex gloves.

‘I haven’t touched anything disgusting,’ she said.

He smiled. White teeth. Ten bonus points.

‘I’m allergic to latex,’ he said

Twenty penalty points.

‘OK, Wyller,’ Katrine Bratt said, still holding her hand out. ‘These gloves are powder-free and low in allergens and endotoxins, and if you’re going to work in Crime Squad, you’re going to be wearing them pretty often. But obviously we could always get you a transfer to Financial Crime or …’

‘I’d rather not,’ he laughed and grasped her hand. She could feel the warmth through the latex.

‘My name’s Katrine Bratt, and I’m lead detective on this case.’

‘I know. You worked in the Harry Hole group.’

‘The Harry Hole group?’

‘The boiler room.’

Katrine nodded. She had never thought of it as the Harry Hole group, the little gang of three detectives who had been thrown together to work on the cop murder cases … But the name was fitting enough. Since then Harry had withdrawn to lecture at Police College, Bjørn had moved to work in Forensics out at Bryn, and she had come to Crime Squad where she was now a detective inspector.

Wyller’s eyes were shining, and he was still smiling. ‘Shame Harry Hole isn’t—’

‘Shame we haven’t got time to talk right now, Wyller, but we’ve got a murder to investigate. Go with Berntsen, and listen and learn.’

Anders Wyller gave her a wry smile. ‘You’re saying Constable Berntsen has a lot to teach me?’

Bratt raised an eyebrow. Young, self-assured, fearless. All good, but she hoped to God that he wasn’t another Harry Hole wannabe.

Truls Berntsen pressed the doorbell with his thumb and heard it ring inside the flat, noted that he ought to stop biting his nails, and let go.

When he had gone to see Mikael and asked to be transferred to Crime Squad, Mikael had asked why. And Truls had given an honest answer: he wanted to sit a bit higher up the food chain, but without having to wear himself out making an effort. Any other police chief would have thrown Truls out on his ear, but this one couldn’t. They had too much dirt on each other. When they were young they were connected by something approaching friendship, then a sort of symbiotic relationship, like a suckerfish and a shark. But now they were bound together by their sins and a mutual assurance of silence. That meant Truls Berntsen didn’t even have to try to pretend when he presented his request.

But he had started to wonder how sensible that request had been. Crime Squad had two categories of job: detectives and analysts. And when the head of Crime Squad, Gunnar Hagen, had told Truls he could choose for himself what he wanted to be, Truls had realised that he was hardly going to be expected to shoulder much responsibility. Which in and of itself suited him fine. But he had to admit that it had stung when Detective Inspector Katrine Bratt had shown him round the unit, all the time addressing him as ‘Constable’, and taking extra care to explain to him how the coffee machine worked.

The door opened. Three young girls were standing there looking at him with horrified expressions on their faces. They had evidently heard what had happened.

‘Police,’ he said, holding up his ID. ‘I’ve got some questions. Did you hear anything between—’

‘—questions we wondered if you could help us with,’ a voice said behind him. The new guy. Wyller. Truls saw some of the horror fall away from the girls’ faces, and they almost brightened up.

‘Of course,’ the one who had opened the door said. ‘Do you know who … who did … it?’

‘Obviously we can’t say anything about that,’ Truls said.

‘But what we can say,’ Wyller said, ‘is that there are no grounds for you to be scared. Am I right in thinking that you’re students sharing this flat?’

‘Yes,’ they replied in chorus, as if they all wanted to be first.

‘May we come in?’ Wyller said, with a smile as white as Mikael Bellman’s, Truls noted.

The girls led them into the living room, and two of them began quickly clearing beer bottles and glasses from the table and left the room.

‘We had a bit of a party here last night,’ the door-opener said sheepishly. ‘It’s terrible.’

Truls wasn’t sure if she meant the fact that their neighbour had been murdered, or that they had been having a party when it happened.

‘Did you hear anything last night between ten o’clock and midnight?’ Truls asked.

The girl shook her head.

‘Did Else—’

‘Elise,’ Wyller corrected as he pulled out a notepad and pen. It occurred to Truls that perhaps he ought to have done the same.

Truls cleared his throat. ‘Did your neighbour have a boyfriend, someone who used to spend much time here?’

‘I don’t know,’ the girl said.

‘Thanks, that’s all,’ Truls said, turning towards the door as the other two girls came back.

‘Perhaps we should hear what you have to say as well,’ Wyller said. ‘Your friend says she didn’t hear anything yesterday, and that she isn’t aware of anyone Elise Hermansen saw regularly, or even recently. Do either of you have anything to add to that?’

The two girls looked at each other before turning towards him and shaking their blonde heads at the same time. Truls could see the way all their attention was focused on the young detective. It didn’t bother him, he’d had a lot of training in being overlooked. He was used to that little pang in his chest, like the time in high school in Manglerud when Ulla finally looked at him, but only to ask if he knew where Mikael was. And – seeing as this was before the days of mobile phones – if he could give Mikael a message. On one occasion Truls replied that that might be difficult seeing as Mikael had gone camping with a girlfriend. Not that the bit about camping was true, but because just for once he wanted to see the same pain, his own pain, reflected in her eyes.

‘When did you last see Elise?’ Wyller asked.

The three girls looked at each other again. ‘We didn’t see her, but …’

One of them giggled, then clapped her hand to her mouth when she realised how inappropriate that was. The girl who had opened the door to them cleared her throat. ‘Enrique rang this morning and said he and Alfa stopped for a pee down in the archway on their way home.’

‘They’re, like, really stupid,’ the tallest of them said.

‘They were just a bit drunk,’ the third one said. She giggled again.

The girl who had opened the door shot the other two a pull-yourselves-together look. ‘Whatever. A woman walked in while they were standing there, and they called to say sorry in case their behaviour made us look bad.’

‘Which was pretty considerate of them,’ Wyller said. ‘And they think this woman was …?’

‘They know. They read online that ‘a woman in her thirties’ had been murdered, and saw the picture of the front of our building, so they googled and found a photo of her in one of the online papers.’

Truls grunted. He hated journalists. Fucking scavengers, the lot of them. He went over to the window and looked down at the street. And there they were, on the other side of the police cordon, with the long lenses of their cameras that made Truls think of vultures’ beaks when they held them in front of their faces in the hope of getting a glimpse of the body when it was carried out. Beside the waiting ambulance stood a guy in a Rasta hat with green, yellow and red stripes, talking to his white-clad colleagues. Bjørn Holm, from the Criminal Forensics Unit. He nodded to his people, then disappeared back inside the building again. There was something hunched, huddled about Holm’s posture, as if he had stomach ache, and Truls wondered if it had anything to do with the rumours that the fish-eyed, moon-faced bumpkin had recently been dumped by Katrine Bratt. Good. Someone else could experience what it felt like to be ripped to shreds. Wyller’s high-pitched voice buzzed in the background: ‘So their names are Enrique and …?’

‘No, no!’ The girls laughed. ‘Henrik. And Alf.’

Truls caught Wyller’s eye and nodded towards the door.

‘Thanks a lot, girls, that’s all,’ Wyller said. ‘By the way, I’d better get some phone numbers.’

The girls looked at him with a mixture of fear and delight.

‘For Henrik and Alf,’ he added with a wry smile.

Katrine was standing in the bedroom behind the forensics medical officer, who was crouched by the bed. Elise Hermansen was lying on her back on top of the duvet. But the blood on her blouse was distributed in a way that showed she had been standing upright when the blood gushed out. She had probably been standing in front of the mirror in the hallway, where the rug was so drenched in blood that it had stuck to the parquet floor underneath. The trail of blood between the hall and the bedroom, and its limited quantity, indicated that her heart had probably stopped beating out in the hallway. Based on body temperature and rigor mortis, the forensics officer had estimated the time of death at between 2300 hours and one o’clock in the morning, and that the cause of death was probably loss of blood after her carotid artery was punctured by one or more of the incisions on the side of her throat, just above the left shoulder.

Her trousers and knickers were pulled down to her ankles.

‘I’ve scraped and cut her nails, but I can’t see any traces of skin with the naked eye,’ the forensics officer said.

‘When did you lot start doing Forensics’ work for them?’ Katrine asked.

‘When Bjørn told us to,’ she replied. ‘He asked so nicely.’

‘Really? Any other injuries?’

‘She’s got a scratch on her lower left arm, and a splinter of wood on the inside of her left middle finger.’

‘Any signs of sexual assault?’

‘No visible sign of violence to the genitals, but there’s this …’ She held a magnifying glass above the body’s stomach. Katrine looked through it and saw a thin, shiny line. ‘Could be saliva, her own or someone else’s, but it looks more like precum or semen.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ Katrine said.

‘Let’s hope she was sexually assaulted?’ Bjørn Holm had walked in and was standing behind her.

‘If she was, all the evidence suggests that it happened post-mortem,’ Katrine said without turning round. ‘So she was already gone by then. And I’d really like some semen.’

‘I was joking,’ Bjørn said quietly in his amiable Toten dialect.

Katrine closed her eyes. Of course he knew that semen was the ultimate ‘open sesame’ in a case like this. And of course he was only joking, trying to lighten the weird, wounded atmosphere that had existed between them in the three months that had passed since she had moved out. She was trying, too. She just couldn’t quite manage it.

The forensics officer looked up at them. ‘I’m done here,’ she said, adjusting her hijab.

‘The ambulance is here – I’ll get my people to take the body down,’ Bjørn said. ‘Thanks for your help, Zahra.’

The forensics officer nodded and hurried out, as if she had also noticed the strained atmosphere.

‘Well?’ Katrine said, forcing herself to look at Bjørn. Forcing herself to ignore the sombre look in his eyes that was more sad than pleading.

‘There’s not much to say,’ he said, scratching the bushy red beard that stuck out below his Rasta hat.

Katrine waited, hoping that they were still talking about the murder.

‘She doesn’t seem to have been particularly bothered about housework. We’ve found hairs from a whole load of people – mainly men – and it’s hardly likely that they were all here last night.’

‘She was a lawyer,’ Katrine said. ‘A single woman with a demanding job like that might not prioritise cleaning as highly as you.’

He smiled briefly without responding. And Katrine recognised the pang of the guilty conscience he always managed to give her. Obviously they had never argued about cleaning, Bjørn had always been too quick to deal with the washing-up, sweeping the steps, putting the clothes in the machine, cleaning the bath and airing the sheets, without any reproach or discussion. Like everything else. Not one single damn argument during the whole year they had lived together, he always wriggled out of them. And whenever she let him down or just couldn’t be bothered, he was there, attentive, sacrificial, inexhaustible, like some fucking irritating robot who made her feel more like a pea-brained princess the higher he built her pedestal.

‘How do you know that the hairs come from men?’ she sighed.

‘A single woman with a demanding job …’ Bjørn said without looking at her.

Katrine folded her arms. ‘What are you trying to say, Bjørn?’

‘What?’ His pale face flushed lightly and his eyes bulged more than usual.

‘That I’m easy? OK, if you really want to know, I—’

‘No!’ Bjørn held his hands up as if to defend himself. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. It was just a bad joke.’

Katrine knew she ought to feel pity. And she did, to an extent. Just not the sort of pity that makes you want to give someone a hug. This particular type of pity was more like derision, the sort of derision that made her want to slap him, humiliate him. And that was why she had walked out on him – because she didn’t want to see Bjørn Holm, a perfectly good man, humiliated. Katrine Bratt took a deep breath.

‘So, men?’

‘Most of the hairs are short,’ Bjørn said. ‘We’ll have to wait and see if the analysis confirms that. We’ve certainly got enough DNA to keep the National Forensic Lab busy for a while.’

‘OK,’ Katrine said, turning back towards the body. ‘Any ideas about what he could have stabbed her with? Or hacked, seeing as there’s a whole load of incisions close together.’

‘It’s not very easy to see, but they form a pattern,’ he said. ‘Two patterns, in fact.’

‘Oh?’

Bjørn went over to the body and pointed towards the woman’s neck, beneath her short blonde hair. ‘Do you see that the incisions form two small, overlapping ovals, one here – and one here?’

Katrine tilted her head. ‘Now that you mention it …’

‘Like bite marks.’

‘Oh, fuck,’ Katrine blurted out. ‘An animal?’

‘Who knows? But imagine a fold of skin being pulled out and pressed together when upper and lower jaws meet. That would leave a mark like this …’ Bjørn pulled a piece of semi-transparent paper from his pocket and Katrine instantly recognised it as the wrapper of the packed lunch he took to work each day. ‘Looks like it matches the bite of someone from Toten, anyway.’

‘Human teeth can’t have done that to her neck.’

‘Agreed. But the pattern is human.’

Katrine moistened her lips. ‘There are people who file their teeth to make them sharper.’

‘If it was teeth, we may find saliva around the wounds. Either way, if they were standing on the rug in the hallway when he bit her, the bite marks indicate that he was standing behind her, and that he’s taller than her.’

‘The forensics officer didn’t find anything under her nails, so I reckon he was holding her tight,’ Katrine said. ‘A strong man of average or above average height, with the teeth of a predator.’

They stood in silence, looking at the body. Like a young couple in an art gallery contemplating opinions with which to impress other people, Katrine thought. The only difference was that Bjørn never tried to impress people. She was the one who did that.

Katrine heard steps in the hall. ‘No more people in here now!’ she called.

‘Just wanted to let you know there were only people at home in two of the flats, and none of them saw or heard anything.’ Wyller’s high-pitched voice. ‘But I’ve just spoken to two lads who saw Elise Hermansen when she came home. They say she was alone.’

‘And these lads are …?’

‘No criminal record, and they had a taxi receipt to prove that they left here just after 11.30. They said she walked in on them while they were urinating in the archway. Shall I bring them in for questioning?’

‘It wasn’t them, but yes.’

‘OK.’

Wyller’s steps receded.

‘She returned home alone and there are no signs of a break-in,’ Bjørn said. ‘Do you think she let him in voluntarily?’

‘Not unless she knew him well.’

‘No?’

‘Elise was a lawyer, she knew the risks, and that security chain on the door looks pretty new. I think she was a careful young woman.’ Katrine crouched down beside the body. Looked at the splinter of wood sticking out of Elise’s middle finger. And the scratch on her lower arm.

‘A lawyer,’ Bjørn said. ‘Where?’

‘Hollumsen & Skiri. They were the ones who called the police when she didn’t show up at a hearing and wasn’t answering her phone. It’s not exactly unusual for lawyers to be the victims of attacks.’

‘Do you think …?’

‘No, like I said, I don’t think she let anyone in. But …’ Katrine frowned. ‘Do you agree that this splinter looks pinkish white?’

Bjørn leaned over her. ‘White, certainly.’

‘Pinkish white,’ Katrine said, standing up. ‘Come with me.’

They went out into the hall, where Katrine opened the door and pointed at the splintered door frame outside. ‘Pinkish white.’

‘If you say so,’ Bjørn said.

‘Don’t you see it?’ she asked incredulously.

‘Research has shown that women usually see more nuances of colour than men.’

‘You do see this, though?’ Katrine asked, holding up the security chain that was hanging down the inside of the door.

Bjørn leaned closer. His scent came as a shock to her. Maybe it was just discomfort at the sudden intimacy.

‘Scraped skin,’ he said.

‘The scratch on her lower arm. Do you see?’

He nodded slowly. ‘She scratched herself on the security chain, so it must have been on. So he wasn’t trying to push past her, she was fighting to get out.’

‘We don’t usually use security chains in Norway, we rely on locks, that’s the general rule. And if she did let him in, if this strong man was someone she knew, for instance …’

‘… she wouldn’t have fiddled about putting the chain back on after she’d opened the door to let him in. Because she would have felt safe. Ergo …’

‘Ergo,’ she took over, ‘he was already in the flat when she got home.’

‘Without her knowing,’ he said.

‘That’s why she put the security chain on, she thought anything dangerous was outside.’ Katrine shuddered. This was what the expression ‘horrified delight’ was for. The feeling a homicide detective gets when they suddenly see and understand.

‘Harry would have been pleased with you now,’ Bjørn said. And laughed.

‘What?’

‘You’re blushing.’

I’m so fucked up, Katrine thought.

3

THURSDAY AFTERNOON

KATRINE HAD TROUBLE concentrating during the press conference, where they gave a brief account of the victim’s identity, age, where and when she was found, but that was about it. The first press conferences immediately after a murder were almost always a matter of saying as little as possible and simply going through the motions, in the name of modern, open democracy.

Alongside her sat the head of Crime Squad, Gunnar Hagen. The flashlights reflected off the shiny bald patch above his ring of dark hair as he read out the short sentences they had composed together. Katrine was happy to let Hagen do the talking. Not that she didn’t like the spotlight, but that could come later. At the moment she was so new to the role of lead detective that it felt reassuring to let Hagen deal with the talking until she learned the right way to say things, and watch as an accomplished senior police officer used body language and tone of voice rather than actual content to convince the general public that the police were in control.

She sat there, looking out over the heads of the thirty or so journalists who had gathered in the Parole Hall on the fourth floor, at the large painting that covered the whole of the back wall. It showed naked people swimming, most of them skinny young boys. A beautiful, innocent scene from a time before everything became loaded and interpreted in the worst possible way. And she was no different: she assumed the artist was a paedophile. Hagen was repeating his mantra in response to the journalists’ questions: ‘We aren’t in a position to answer that at present,’ with simple variations to stop the replies sounding arrogant or directly comical. ‘At this moment in time we can’t comment on that.’ Or a more benevolent: ‘We’ll have to come back to that.’

She heard their scratching pens and keyboards write questions that were obviously more elaborate than the answers: ‘Was the body badly damaged?’, ‘Was there any evidence of sexual assault?’, ‘Do you have a suspect, and, if so, is it someone close to her?’ Speculative questions that could lend a certain tremulous subtext to the reply ‘No comment’, if nothing else.

In the doorway at the back of the room she could make out a familiar figure. He had a black patch over one eye, and had put on the Police Chief’s uniform that she knew always hung, freshly pressed, in the cupboard in his office. Mikael Bellman. He didn’t come all the way inside, just stood there as an observer. She noted that Hagen had also spotted him, and he sat up a little straighter in his chair under the gaze of the rather younger Police Chief.

‘We’ll leave it there,’ the head of communications said.

Katrine saw Bellman indicate that he wanted to talk to her.

‘When’s the next press conference?’ asked Mona Daa, VG’s crime correspondent.

‘We’ll get—’

‘When we’ve got something new,’ Hagen interrupted the head of communications.

When, Katrine noted. Not if. It was tiny but important choices of words like that which signalled that the servants of the state were working tirelessly, that the wheels of justice were turning, and that it was only a matter of time before the perpetrator was caught.

‘Anything new?’ Bellman asked as they strode across the floor of the atrium of Police HQ. In the past his almost girlish prettiness, emphasised by his long eyelashes, neat, slightly too long hair and tanned skin with its characteristic white pigmentless marks, could give an impression almost of affectation, of weakness. But the eyepatch, which of course could have made him look theatrical, had the opposite effect. It implied strength, a man who wasn’t going to let even losing an eye stop him.

‘Forensics have found something in the bite marks,’ Katrine said as she followed Bellman through the airlock in front of reception.

‘Saliva?’

‘Rust.’

‘Rust?’

‘Yes.’

‘As in …?’ Bellman pressed the lift button in front of them.

‘We don’t know,’ Katrine said, stopping beside him.

‘And you still don’t know how the perpetrator got into the flat?’

‘No. The lock is impossible to pick, and neither the door nor any of the windows has been forced. It’s still a possibility that she let him in, but we don’t believe that.’

‘Perhaps he had a key.’

‘The housing association uses locks where the same key will open both the main entrance to the building and one of the flats. And according to the association’s key register, there was only one key to Elise Hermansen’s flat. The one that she had. Berntsen and Wyller have spoken to two guys who were by the entrance when she got home, and they’re both certain she used her key to get in – she didn’t use the entryphone to call someone who was already in the flat to open the front door from there.’

‘I see. But couldn’t he just have got a copy of the key?’

‘In that case he would have had to get hold of the original key, and find a key-cutter who had the technical ability to cut that type of key, and was unscrupulous enough to make a copy without the written permission of the housing association. That probably isn’t very likely.’

‘OK. Well, that wasn’t actually what I wanted to talk to you about …’ The lift door in front of them slid open and two officers who were on their way out stopped laughing automatically when they caught sight of the Police Chief.

‘It’s about Truls,’ Bellman said, after gallantly letting Katrine get into the empty lift before him. ‘Berntsen, I mean.’

‘OK?’ Katrine said, detecting a faint scent of aftershave. She’d always assumed men had given up wet shaving and the dowsing with spirits that followed it. Bjørn had used an electric razor and didn’t bother with any added flavourings, and the men she had met since … well, on a couple of occasions she would have preferred heavy perfume to their natural smell.

‘How is he getting on?’

‘Berntsen? Fine.’

They were standing side by side, facing the lift doors, but from the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of his crooked smile in the silence that followed.

‘Fine?’ he eventually repeated.

‘Berntsen carries out the orders he’s given.’

‘Which aren’t too demanding, I imagine?’

Katrine shrugged. ‘He has no background as a detective. And he’s been posted to the biggest crime squad in the country, outside of Kripos. That means you don’t get to sit in the driver’s seat, if I can put it like that.’

Bellman nodded and rubbed his chin. ‘I really just wanted to know that he’s behaving himself. That he isn’t … That he’s following the rules.’

‘As far as I’m aware.’ The lift slowed down. ‘What rules are we actually talking about here?’

‘I just want you to keep an eye on him, Bratt. Truls Berntsen hasn’t had it easy.’

‘You mean the injuries he received from the explosion?’

‘I mean his life, Bratt. He’s a bit … what’s the word I’m looking for?’

‘Fucked up?’

Bellman let out a brief laugh and nodded towards the open doors. ‘Your floor, Bratt.’

Bellman studied Katrine Bratt’s well-shaped rear as she walked off down the corridor towards the Crime Squad Unit, and let his imagination run loose in the seconds it took the lift doors to close again. Then he refocused his thoughts on the problem. Which wasn’t a problem, of course, but an opportunity. Though it was a dilemma. He had received a speculative and highly unofficial enquiry from the Prime Minister’s office. It was rumoured that there was going to be a government reshuffle, and, among others, the position of Justice Minister was up for grabs. The enquiry concerned what Bellman – purely hypothetically – would say if he were to be asked. He had been astonished at first. But on closer consideration he realised that the choice was logical. As Chief of Police he had not only been responsible for the unmasking of the now internationally renowned ‘cop killer’, but had also lost an eye in the heat of battle, thereby becoming in some ways both a national and an international hero. A forty-year-old, articulate Chief of Police with legal training who had already successfully defended the capital against murder, narcotics and criminality: surely it was about time they gave him a greater challenge? And did it do any harm that he was good-looking? That was hardly going to attract fewer women to the party. So he had replied that he – hypothetically – would accept.

Bellman got out at the seventh – the top – floor, and walked past the row of photographs of previous chiefs of police.

But until they made their minds up he would have to make sure he didn’t get any scratches on his paintwork. Such as Truls doing something stupid and it rebounding on him. Bellman shuddered at the thought of the newspaper headlines: POLICE CHIEF PROTECTED CORRUPT COP AND FRIEND. When Truls had come to his office, he had put his feet up on the desk and said straight out that if he got fired from the police, he would at least have the consolation of dragging an equally tainted chief of police with him. So it had been an easy decision to grant Truls’s request to work at Crime Squad. Particularly since – as Bratt had just confirmed – he wasn’t going to be given enough responsibility to enable him to fuck things up again any time soon.

‘Your lovely wife is sitting in there,’ Lena said when Mikael Bellman reached the outer office. Lena was well over sixty, and when Bellman was appointed four years ago, the first thing she had said was that she didn’t want to be known as his PA, in the way of modern job descriptions. She was and would remain his secretary.

Ulla was sitting on the sofa by the window. Lena was right, his wife was lovely. She was vivacious, sensitive, and giving birth to three children hadn’t changed that. But more importantly, she had backed him up, had realised that his career required nurturing, support, elbow room. And that the occasional misstep in his private life was only human when you had to live with the pressure that went with such a demanding position.

And there was something unspoiled, almost naive about her that meant you could read everything in her face. And right now he could read despair. The first thing Bellman thought was that it was something to do with the children. He was on the point of asking when he detected a hint of bitterness. And he realised that she had found something out. Again. Damn.

‘You look very serious, darling,’ he said calmly, walking towards the cupboard as he unbuttoned the jacket of his uniform. ‘Has something happened to the children?’

She shook her head. He breathed out in feigned relief. ‘Not that I’m not pleased to see you, but I always get a bit worried when you turn up unannounced.’ He hung up his jacket and then sat down in the armchair facing her. ‘So?’

‘You’ve been seeing her again,’ Ulla said. He could hear that she had been practising how to say it. Worked out how to say it without crying. But now there were already tears in her blue eyes.

He shook his head.

‘Don’t deny it,’ she said in a muffled voice. ‘I’ve checked your phone. You’ve called her three times this week alone, Mikael. You promised …’

‘Ulla.’ He leaned forward and took her hand over the table but she pulled away. ‘I’ve spoken to her because I need advice. Isabelle Skøyen is currently working as a communications adviser for a company that specialises in politics and lobbying. She’s familiar with the workings of power, because she’s been there herself. And she knows me, too.’

‘Knows?’ Ulla’s face contorted in a grimace.

‘If I – if we are going to do this, I need to make the most of anything that can give me an advantage, anything that can help me cross the line ahead of everyone else who wants the job. The government, Ulla. There’s nothing bigger than that.’

‘Not even your family?’ she sniffed.

‘You know very well that I’d never let our family down—’

‘Never let us down?’ she yelped. ‘You’ve already—’

‘—and I hope you’re not thinking of doing that either, Ulla. Not on the grounds of some unwarranted jealousy towards a woman I’ve spoken to on the phone for purely professional reasons.’

‘That woman was only a local politician for a very brief time, Mikael. What could she possibly have to tell you?’

‘Among other things, what not to do if you want to survive in politics. That was the experience they were buying when they employed her. For instance, you shouldn’t betray your ideals. Or those closest to you. Or your responsibilities and obligations. And, if you get it wrong, you apologise and try to get it right next time. It’s OK to make mistakes. But betrayal isn’t OK. And I don’t want to do that, Ulla.’ He took her hand again, and this time she didn’t pull away. ‘I know I don’t have the right to ask for much after what happened, but if I’m going to do this, I’m going to need your trust and support. You have to believe me.’

‘How can I …?’

‘Come.’ He stood up without letting go of her hand and pulled her over to the window. He positioned her so she was facing the city. Stood behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. Because Police Headquarters was at the top of a hill they could see half of Oslo, which lay bathed in sunshine below them. ‘Do you want to help make a difference, Ulla? Do you want to help me create a safer future for our children? For our neighbours? For this city? For our country?’

He could feel that his words were having an effect on her. Christ, they were having an effect on him too – he actually felt pretty moved by them. Even if they were more or less lifted straight from notes he had made when he was thinking about what to say to the media. It wouldn’t be many more hours before he was officially offered the ministerial post, and said yes, and the newspapers, television, radio all started phoning for a comment.

Truls Berntsen was stopped by a short woman when he and Wyller emerged into the atrium after the press conference.

‘Mona Daa, VG. I’ve seen you before.’ She turned away from Truls. ‘But you seem to be a new arrival at Crime Squad?’

‘Correct,’ Wyller said. Truls studied Mona Daa from the side. She had a fairly attractive face. Wide – Sami heritage, perhaps. But he had never really made sense of her body. The colourful, loose-fitting outfits she wore made her look more like an old-school opera reviewer than a tough crime reporter. Even though she couldn’t be much over thirty, Truls couldn’t help thinking that she’d been around for an eternity: strong, persistent and robust, it would take a lot to shake Mona Daa. And she smelled like a man. Rumour had it that she used Old Spice aftershave.

‘You didn’t exactly give us much to go on in the press conference.’ Mona Daa smiled. The way journalists smile when they want something. Only this time it looked like she wasn’t just after information. Her eyes were glued to Wyller.

‘I dare say we didn’t have much more,’ Wyller said, smiling back.

‘I’ll quote you on that,’ Mona Daa said, making notes. ‘Name?’

‘Quote me on what?’

‘That the police really don’t know anything beyond what Hagen and Bratt said during the press conference.’

Truls saw a brief look of panic in Wyller’s eyes. ‘No, no, that’s not what I meant … I … don’t write that, please.’

Mona went on writing as she replied: ‘I introduced myself as a journalist, and it ought to be pretty obvious that I’m here because of my job.’

Wyller looked to Truls for help, but Truls said nothing. The young dude certainly wasn’t as cocky now as when he was charming those student girls.

Wyller squirmed and tried to make his voice sound lower. ‘I refuse to let you use that quote.’

‘I see,’ Daa said. ‘Then I’ll quote you on that as well, to show that the police are trying to muzzle the press.’

‘I … no, that’s …’ Wyller was blushing furiously now, and Truls had to make a real effort not to laugh.

‘Relax, I’m only kidding,’ Mona Daa said.

Anders Wyller stared at her for a moment before breathing out again.

‘Welcome to the game. We play tough but fair. And if we can, we help each other out. Isn’t that right, Berntsen?’

Truls grunted something in response and left them to decide how to interpret it.

Daa leafed through her notebook. ‘I won’t bother repeating the question of whether you’ve identified a suspect, your boss can deal with that one, but let me just ask more generally about the investigation.’

‘Fire away,’ Wyller said with a smile, looking like he was already back in the saddle.

‘Isn’t it the case in a murder investigation like this that the spotlight is always aimed at previous partners or lovers?’

Anders Wyller was about to answer when Truls put a hand on his shoulder and interjected: ‘I can already see it in front of me, Daa: “Detectives are unwilling to say if they have a suspect, but a source in the police has told VG that the investigation is focusing on previous partners and lovers.”’

‘Bloody hell,’ Mona Daa said, still taking notes. ‘I didn’t know you were that smart, Berntsen.’

‘And I didn’t know you knew my name.’

‘Oh, all police officers have a reputation, you know. And Crime Squad isn’t so big that I can’t keep up to date. But I’ve got nothing on you, the new kid on the block.’

Anders Wyller smiled weakly.

‘I see you’ve decided to keep quiet, but you can at least tell me your name.’

‘Anders Wyller.’

‘This is how you can get hold of me, Wyller.’ She handed him a business card and – after an almost imperceptible hesitation – another to Truls. ‘Like I said, it’s traditional for us to help each other. And we pay well if the tip-off’s good.’

‘You surely don’t pay police officers?’ Wyller said, tucking her card into his jeans pocket.

‘Why not?’ she said, and her eyes very briefly met Truls’s. ‘A tip-off is a tip-off. So if you come up with anything, just call. Or pop into the Gain Gym, I’m there around nine o’clock most evenings. We could sweat it out together …’

‘I prefer to do my sweating outdoors,’ Wyller said.

Mona Daa nodded. ‘Running with a dog. You look like a dog person. I like that.’

‘Why?’

‘Allergic to cats. OK, guys, in the spirit of collaboration I promise to call if I find out anything I think might help you.’

‘Thanks,’ Truls said.

‘But I’ll need a phone number to call.’ Mona Daa kept her eyes fixed on Wyller.

‘Sure,’ he said.

‘I’ll write it down.’

Wyller recited several digits until Mona Daa looked up. ‘That’s the number to reception here in Police HQ.’

‘This is where I work,’ Anders Wyller said. ‘And by the way, I’ve got a cat.’

Mona Daa closed her notebook. ‘We’ll be in touch.’

Truls watched her as she waddled like a penguin towards the exit and the weirdly heavy metal door with its staring porthole.

‘The meeting starts in three minutes,’ Wyller said.

Truls looked at his watch. The afternoon meeting of the investigative team. Crime Squad would have been great if it weren’t for the murders. Murders were shit. Murders meant long hours, writing reports, endless meetings and loads of stressed-out people. But at least they got free food from the cafeteria when they worked overtime. He sighed and turned to walk towards the airlock, but stiffened.

There she was.

Ulla.

She was on her way out, and her eyes swept over him as she passed, without letting on that she had seen him. She did that sometimes. Possibly because it had occasionally been a bit awkward when the two of them met without Mikael being present. In truth, they probably both tried to avoid that, even when they were younger. Him because he would start to sweat and his heart would beat too quickly and because he would always torment himself afterwards with the stupid things he had said and the smart, genuine things he hadn’t said. Her because … well, probably because he would start to sweat, his heart would beat too quickly, and because he either didn’t speak or said stupid things.

Even so, he almost called out her name in the atrium.

But she had already reached the door. In a moment she would be outside and the sunshine would kiss her fine blonde hair.

So he whispered her name silently to himself instead.

Ulla.

4

THURSDAY, LATE AFTERNOON

KATRINE BRATT LOOKED out across the conference room.

Eight detectives, four analysts, one forensics expert. They were all at her disposal. And they were all watching her like hawks. The new, female lead detective. And Katrine knew that the biggest sceptics in the room were her female colleagues. She had often wondered if she was fundamentally different to other women. They had a testosterone level somewhere between five and ten per cent of their male colleagues, whereas hers was closer to twenty-five per cent. That hadn’t yet turned her into a hairy lump of muscle with a clitoris the size of a penis, but as far back as she could remember it had made her far hornier than any of her female friends had ever admitted to being. Or ‘angry horny’, as Bjørn used to say when things got really bad, and she would break off from work to drive out to Bryn just so he could fuck her in the deserted storeroom behind the laboratory, making the boxes of flasks and test tubes rattle.

Katrine coughed, switched on the recording function of her phone, and began. ‘1600 hours on Thursday, 22 September, conference room 1 in the Crime Squad Unit, and this is the first meeting of the preliminary investigation into the murder of Elise Hermansen.’

Katrine saw Truls Berntsen come lumbering in, and sit down at the back.

She began explaining what most people in the room already knew: that Elise Hermansen had been found murdered that morning, that the probable cause of death was loss of blood as a result of injuries to her neck. That no witnesses had come forward so far. They had no suspect, and no conclusive physical evidence. The organic matter they had found in the flat, which might be human in origin, had been sent for DNA analysis, and they would hopefully be getting the results back within the space of a week. Other potential physical evidence was being examined by Forensics and the forensics officer. In other words: they had nothing.

She saw a couple of them fold their arms and breathe out heavily, on the brink of yawning. And she knew what they were thinking: that this was all obvious, repetitive, there was nothing for them to sink their teeth into, not enough to make them drop everything else they were working on. She explained how she had deduced that the murderer was already in the flat by the time Elise got home, but could hear for herself that it just sounded boastful. A new boss’s plea for respect. She started to feel desperate, and thought about what Harry had said when she had called to ask for advice.

‘Catch the murderer,’ he had replied.

‘Harry, that’s not what I asked. I asked how to lead an investigative team that doesn’t trust you.’

‘And I gave you the answer.’

‘Catching the odd murderer won’t solve—’

‘It will solve everything.’

‘Everything? So exactly what has it solved for you, Harry? In purely personal terms?’

‘Nothing. But you asked about leadership.’

Katrine looked out at the room, came to the end of yet another superfluous sentence, took a deep breath and noticed a hand drumming gently on the arm of a chair.

‘Unless Elise Hermansen let this individual into her flat earlier yesterday evening and left him there when she went out, we’re looking for someone she knows. So we’ve been examining her phone and computer. Tord?’

Tord Gren got to his feet. He had been given the nickname Wader, presumably because he resembled a wading bird with his unusually long neck, narrow beak-like nose and a wingspan far greater than his height. His old-fashioned round glasses and curly hair hanging down on both sides of his thin face made him look like something from the 1970s.

‘We’ve got into her iPhone and have checked the lists of texts and calls made and received in the last three days,’ Tord said, without taking his eyes from his tablet, as if he wasn’t big on eye contact in general. ‘Nothing but work-related calls. Colleagues and clients.’

‘No friends?’ This from Magnus Skarre, a tactical analyst. ‘Parents?’

‘I believe that’s what I said,’ Tord replied. Not unfriendly, just precise. ‘The same applies to her emails. Work-related.’

‘The law firm has confirmed that Elise did a lot of overtime,’ Katrine added.

‘Single women tend to,’ Skarre said.

Katrine looked in resignation at the thickset little detective, even though she knew the comment wasn’t directed at her. Skarre was neither malicious nor quick-witted enough for that.

‘Her PC wasn’t password-protected, but there wasn’t much to find on there,’ Tord went on. ‘The log shows that she mostly used it to watch the news or to google information. She visited a few porn sites, just the ordinary sort of thing, and there’s no sign that she ever contacted anyone via those websites. The only dodgy thing she seems to have done in the past two years is streaming The Notebook on Popcorn Time.’

Given that Katrine didn’t know the IT expert well enough, she wasn’t sure if by ‘dodgy’ he meant the use of a pirate server or the choice of film. She would have said the latter if it was up to her. She missed Popcorn Time.

‘I tried a couple of obvious passwords for her Facebook account,’ Tord continued. ‘No joy, so I’ve sent a freeze request to Kripos.’

‘A freeze request?’ Anders Wyller asked from the front row.

‘An application to the court,’ Katrine said. ‘Any request to access a Facebook account has to go through Kripos and the courts, and even with their approval it has to go to a court in the USA, and only then to Facebook. At best it will take several weeks, but more likely months.’

‘That’s all,’ Tord Gren said.

‘Just one more question from a rookie,’ Wyller said. ‘How did you get into the phone? Fingerprints from the body?’

Tord glanced up at Wyller, then looked away and shook his head.

‘How, then? Older iPhones have four-digit codes. That means 10,000 different—’

‘Microscope,’ Tord interrupted, typing something on his tablet

Katrine was familiar with Tord’s method, but she waited. Tord Gren hadn’t trained to become a police officer. He hadn’t trained to become much at all, really. A few years in information technology in Denmark, but no qualifications. Even so, he had soon been pulled out of Police HQ’s IT department and given a job as an analyst, with a particular focus on anything relating to technological evidence. Purely because he was so much better than everyone else.

‘Even the toughest glass acquires microscopic indentations where it’s touched most often by someone’s fingertips,’ Tord said. ‘I just have to find out where on the screen the deepest indentations are, and that’s the code. Well, the four digits give twenty-four possible combinations.’

‘The phone locks after three failed attempts, though,’ Anders said. ‘So you’d have to be lucky …’

‘I got the right code on the second attempt,’ Tord said with a smile, but Katrine couldn’t tell if he was smiling because of what he’d just said or something on his tablet.

‘Bloody hell,’ Skarre said. ‘Talk about luck.’

‘On the contrary, I was unlucky not to get it on my first attempt. When the number contains the numerals 1 and 9, as in this instance, that usually means a year, and then there are only two possible combinations.’

‘Enough of that,’ Katrine said. ‘We’ve spoken to Elise’s sister, and she says she hadn’t had a regular boyfriend for years. And that she probably didn’t want one either.’

‘Tinder,’ Wyller said.

‘Sorry?’

‘Did she have the Tinder app on her phone?’

‘Yes,’ Tord said.

‘The guys who saw Elise in the archway said she looked a bit dressed up. So she wasn’t coming home from the gym, or work, and presumably not from seeing a female friend. And if she didn’t want a boyfriend.’

‘Good,’ Katrine said. ‘Tord?’

‘We did check the app, and there were plenty of matches, to put it mildly. But Tinder is linked to Facebook, so we can’t yet access any further information about people she may have had contact with on there.’

‘Tinder people meet in bars,’ a voice said.

Katrine looked up in surprise. It was Truls Berntsen.

‘If she had her phone with her, it’s just a matter of checking the base stations, then going round the bars in the areas she was in.’

‘Thanks, Truls,’ Katrine said. ‘We’ve already checked the base stations. Stine?’

One of the analysts sat up in her chair and cleared her throat. ‘According to the printout from Telenor’s operations centre, Elise Hermansen left work at Youngstorget sometime between 6.30 and 7 p.m. She went to an area in the vicinity of Bentsebrua. Then—’

‘Her sister told us Elise used the gym at Myrens Verksted,’ Katrine interrupted. ‘And they’ve confirmed that she checked in at 19.32, and left at 21.14, Sorry, Stine.’

Stine gave her a brief, slightly stiff smile. ‘Then Elise moved to the area around her home address, where she – or at least her phone – remained until she was found. That’s to say, its signal was picked up by a few overlapping base stations, which confirms that she went out, but no further than a few hundred metres from her home in Grünerløkka.’

‘Great, so we get to go on a bar crawl,’ Katrine said.

She was rewarded with a chuckle from Truls, a broad smile from Anders Wyller, but otherwise total silence.

Could be worse, she thought.

Her phone, which was on the table in front of her, began to move.

She saw from the screen that it was Bjørn.

It could be something about forensic evidence, in which case it would be good to hear it straight away. But, on the other hand, if that was the case he ought to have called his colleague from Forensics who was attending the meeting, not her. So it could be something personal.

She was about to click ‘Reject call’ when she realised that Bjørn would be well aware that she was in a meeting. He was good at keeping track of that sort of thing.

She raised the phone to her ear. ‘We’re in the middle of a meeting of the investigative team, Bjørn.’

She regretted saying that the moment she felt all eyes on her.

‘I’m at the Forensic Medical Institute,’ Bjørn said. ‘We’ve just had the results of the preliminary tests on the shiny substance she had on her stomach. There’s no human DNA in it.’

‘Damn,’ Katrine blurted out. It had been in the back of her mind the whole time: that if the substance was semen, the case could probably be solved within the magical limit of the first forty-eight hours. All experience indicated that it would be harder after that.

‘But it could suggest that he had intercourse with her after all,’ Bjørn said.

‘What makes you think that?’

‘It was lubricating gel. Probably from a condom.’

Katrine swore again. And she could tell from the way the others were looking at her that she hadn’t yet said anything to prove that this wasn’t just a private conversation. ‘So you’re saying the perpetrator used a condom?’ she said, loudly and clearly.

‘Him, or someone else she met yesterday evening.’

‘OK, thanks.’ She was keen to end the conversation, but heard Bjørn say her name before she had time to hang up.

‘Yes?’ she said.

‘That wasn’t actually why I called.’

She swallowed. ‘Bjørn, we’re in the middle—’

‘The murder weapon,’ he said. ‘I think I might have figured out what it was. Can you keep the group there for another twenty minutes?’

He was lying in bed in the flat, reading on his phone. He’d been through all the newspapers now. It was disappointing, they’d left out all the details, they’d neglected to report everything that was of artistic value. Either because the lead detective, Katrine Bratt, didn’t want to reveal them, or because she simply lacked the capacity to see the beauty in it. But he, the policeman with murder in his eyes, he would have seen it. Maybe like Bratt he would have kept it to himself, but at least he would have appreciated it.

He looked more closely at the picture of Katrine Bratt in the newspaper.

She was beautiful.

Wasn’t there some sort of regulation about them having to wear uniform for press conferences? If there was, she was breaking it. He liked her. Imagined her wearing her police uniform.

Very beautiful.

Sadly she wasn’t on the agenda.

He put the newspaper down. Ran his hand across the tattoo. Sometimes it felt like it was real, that it was bursting, that the skin over his chest was stretched tight and about to split.

To hell with regulations.

He tensed his stomach muscles and used them to get up from the bed. Looked at his reflection in the mirror on the sliding door of the wardrobe. He had got into shape in prison. Not in the gym. Lying on benches and mats soaked in other people’s sweat was out of the question. No, in his cell. Not to get muscles, but to acquire real strength. Stamina. Tautness. Balance. The capacity to bear pain.

His mother had been solidly built. A big backside. She’d let herself go towards the end. Weak. He must have got his body and metabolism from his father. And his strength.

He pushed the wardrobe door aside.

There was a uniform hanging there. He ran his hand over it. Soon it would come into use.

He thought about Katrine Bratt. In her uniform.

That evening he would go to a bar. A popular, busy bar, not like the Jealousy Bar. It was against the rules to go out among people for anything but food, the baths and the agenda, but he would glide about in tantalising anonymity and isolation. Because he needed to. Needed to, to stop himself going mad. He let out a quiet laugh. Mad. The counsellors said he needed to see a psychiatrist. And of course he knew what they meant by that: that he needed someone who could prescribe medication.

He took a pair of freshly polished cowboy boots from the shoe rack, and looked for a moment at the woman at the back of the wardrobe. She was hung up on the pegs in the wall behind her, and her eyes stared out between the suits. She smelt faintly of the lavender perfume he had rubbed on her chest. He closed the door again.

Mad? They were incompetent idiots, the whole lot of them. He had read the definition of personality disorder in a dictionary, that it was a mental illness that leads to ‘discomfort and difficulties for the individual concerned and those around them’. Fine. In his case that merely applied to those around him. He had just the personality he wanted. Because when you have access to drink, what could be more pleasant, more rational and more normal than feeling thirsty?

He looked at the time. In half an hour it would be dark enough outside.

‘This is what we found around the injuries to her neck,’ Bjørn Holm said, pointing to the image on the screen. ‘The three fragments on the left are rusted iron, and on the right, black paint.’

Katrine had sat down with the others in the conference room. Bjørn had been out of breath when he arrived, and his pale cheeks were still glistening with sweat.

He tapped on his laptop and a close-up of the neck appeared.

‘As you can see, the places where the skin has been punctured form a pattern, as if she’d been bitten by someone, but if that was the case, the teeth must have been razor-sharp.’

‘A satanist,’ Skarre said.

‘Katrine wondered if it was someone who had sharpened his teeth, but we’ve checked, and where the teeth have almost gone through the other side of the fold of skin, we can see that the teeth don’t actually meet, but have slotted in perfectly between the other set of teeth. So this could hardly be an ordinary human bite, where the lower and upper teeth are positioned so that they meet each other, tooth for tooth. The fact that we found rust therefore leads me to think that the perpetrator used some sort of iron dentures.’

Bjørn tapped at the computer.

Katrine felt a quiet gasp go through the room.

The screen showed an object which at first put Katrine in mind of an old, rusty animal trap she had once seen at her grandfather’s in Bergen, something he called a bear trap. The sharp teeth formed a zigzag pattern, and the upper and lower jaws were fixed together by what looked to be a spring-loaded mechanism.

‘This picture is taken from a private collection in Caracas, and is said to date from the days of slavery, when they used to bet on slaves fighting each other. Two slaves would each be given a set of dentures, their hands would be tied behind their backs, and then they would be put in the ring. The one who survived went through to the next round. I assume. But to get back to the point—’

‘Please,’ Katrine said.

‘I’ve tried to find out where you could get hold of a set of iron teeth like these. And it isn’t exactly the sort of thing you can get through mail order. So if we were able to find someone who’s sold contraptions like this in Oslo or elsewhere in Norway, and who to, I’d say we’d be looking at a very limited number of people.’

Katrine realised that Bjørn had gone far beyond the usual duties of a forensics officer, but decided not to comment on the fact.

‘One more thing,’ Bjørn said. ‘There’s not enough blood.’

‘Not enough?’

‘The blood contained in an adult human body makes up, on average, seven per cent of bodyweight. It differs slightly from person to person, but even if she was at the low end of the scale, there’s almost half a litre missing when we add up what was left in the body, on the carpet in the hallway, on the wooden floor and the small quantity on the bed. So, unless the murderer took the missing blood away with him in a bucket …’

‘… he drank it,’ Katrine concluded, giving voice to what they were all thinking.

For three seconds there was total silence in the conference room.

Wyller cleared his throat. ‘What about the black paint?’

‘There’s rust on the inside of the flakes of paint, so it came from the same source,’ Bjørn said, disconnecting his laptop from the projector. ‘But the paint isn’t that old. I’m going to analyse that tonight.’

Katrine could see that the others hadn’t really absorbed the bit about the paint, they were still thinking about the blood.

‘Thanks, Bjørn,’ Katrine said, standing up and looking at her watch. ‘OK, about that bar crawl. It’s bedtime, so how about we send the people with kids home while us poor barren souls stay behind and split into teams?’

No response, no laughter, not so much as a smile.

‘Good, we’ll do that, then,’ Katrine said. She could feel how tired she was. And thrust her weariness aside. Because she had a nagging sense that this was only the beginning. Iron dentures and no DNA. Half a litre of missing blood.

The sound of scraping chairs.

She gathered her papers, glanced up and saw Bjørn disappearing through the door. Recognised the peculiar feeling of relief, guilty conscience and self-loathing. And thought that she felt … wrong.

5

THURSDAY EVENING AND NIGHT

MEHMET KALAK LOOKED at the two people in front of him. The woman had an attractive face, an intense look in her eyes, tight hipster clothes and such a finely proportioned body that it didn’t seem unlikely that she might have picked up the handsome young man who had to be ten years her junior. They were just the sort of clientele he was after, which was why he had given them an extra generous smile when they walked through the door of the Jealousy Bar.

‘What do you think?’ the woman said. She spoke with a Bergen accent. He had only managed to see the surname on her ID card. Bratt.

Mehmet lowered his eyes again and looked at the photograph they had put down on the bar in front of him.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘Yes, she was here. Yesterday evening.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘She was sitting right where you’re standing now.’

‘Here? Alone?’

Mehmet could see that she was trying to hide her excitement. Why did people bother? What was so dangerous about showing what you felt? He wasn’t particularly keen on selling out the only regular he had, but they had police ID.

‘She was with a guy who’s here a fair bit. What’s happened?’

‘Don’t you read the papers?’ her blond colleague asked in a high voice.

‘No, I prefer something with news in it,’ Mehmet said.

Bratt smiled. ‘She was found murdered this morning. Tell us about the man. What were they doing here?’

Mehmet felt as if someone had emptied a bucket of ice-cold water over him. Murdered? The woman who had been standing here right in front of him less than twenty-four hours ago was now a corpse? He pulled himself together. And felt ashamed of the next thought that automatically popped into his head: if the bar got mentioned in the papers, would that be good or bad for business? After all, there was a limit to how much worse it could get.

‘A Tinder date,’ he said. ‘He usually meets his dates here. Calls himself Geir.’

‘Calls himself?’

‘I’d say it’s his real name.’

‘Does he pay by card?’

‘Yes.’

She nodded towards the till. ‘Do you think you could find the receipt for his payment last night?’

‘That should be possible, yes.’ Mehmet smiled sadly.

‘Did they leave together?’

‘Definitely not.’

‘Meaning?’

‘That Geir had set his sights too high, as usual. He’d basically been dumped before I’d even had time to pour their drinks. Speaking of which, can I get you something …?’

‘No, thanks,’ Bratt said. ‘We’re on duty. So she left here alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you didn’t see anyone follow her?’

Mehmet shook his head, got two glasses out, and picked up a bottle of apple juice. ‘This is on the house, freshly pressed, local. Come back another night and have a beer, on the house. The first one’s free, you know. Same thing applies if you want to bring any police colleagues. Do you like the music?’

‘Yes,’ the blond policeman said. ‘U2 are—’

‘No,’ Bratt said. ‘Did you hear the woman say anything you think might be of interest to us?’

‘No. Actually, now you come to mention it, she did say something about someone stalking her.’ Mehmet looked up from pouring. ‘The music was on low and she was talking loudly.’

‘I see. Was anyone else here showing any interest in her?’

Mehmet shook his head. ‘It was a quiet night.’

‘Like tonight, then?’

Mehmet shrugged. ‘The other two customers who were here had gone by the time Geir left.’

‘So it might not be too difficult to get their card details as well?’

‘One of them paid cash, I remember. The other one didn’t buy anything.’

‘OK. And where were you between 10 p.m. and one o’clock this morning?’

‘Me? I was here. Then at home.’

‘Anyone who can confirm that? Just so we can get it out of the way at the start.’

‘Yes. Or no.’

‘Yes or no?’

Mehmet thought hard. Getting a loan shark with previous convictions mixed up in this could mean more trouble. He should hold on to that card in case he needed it later.

‘No. I live alone.’

‘Thanks.’ Bratt raised her glass, and Mehmet thought at first she was drinking a toast, until he realised she was gesturing towards the till with it. ‘We’ll sample these local apples while you look, OK?’

Truls had quickly worked his way through his bars and restaurants. Had shown the photograph to bartenders and waiters, and moved on as soon as he got the answer he expected, ‘No’ or ‘Don’t know’. If you don’t know, you don’t know, and the day had already been more than long enough. Besides, he had one final item on his agenda.

Truls typed the last sentence on the keyboard and looked at the brief but, in his opinion, concise report. ‘See attached list of licensed premises visited by the undersigned at the times specified. None of the staff reported having seen Elise Hermansen on the evening of the murder.’ He pressed Send and stood up.

He heard a low buzz and saw a light flash on the desk telephone. He could tell from the number on the screen that it was the duty officer. They dealt with any tip-offs and only forwarded the ones that seemed relevant. Damn, he didn’t have time for any more chat right now. He could pretend he hadn’t seen it. But, on the other hand, if it was a tip-off, he might end up with more to pass on than he had thought.

He picked up.

‘Berntsen.’

‘At last! No one’s answering, where is everyone?’

‘Out at bars.’

‘Haven’t you got a murder to—?’

‘What is it?’

‘We’ve got a guy who says he was with Elise Hermansen last night.’

‘Put him through.’

There was a click and Truls heard a man who was breathing so hard it could only mean he was frightened.

‘DC Berntsen, Crime Squad. What’s this about?’

‘My name is Geir Sølle. I saw the picture of Elise Hermansen on VG’s website. I’m phoning because I had a very short encounter yesterday with a lady who looked a lot like her. And she said her name was Elise.’

It took Geir Sølle five minutes to give an account of his date at the Jealousy Bar, and how he had gone straight home afterwards, and was home before midnight. Truls vaguely remembered that the pissing boys had seen Elise alive after 11.30.

‘Can anyone confirm when you got home?’

‘The log on my computer. And Kari.’

‘Kari?’

‘My wife.’

‘You’ve got family?’

‘Wife and dog.’ Truls heard him swallow audibly.

‘Why didn’t you call earlier?’

‘I’ve only just seen the picture.’

Truls made a note, swearing silently to himself. This wasn’t the murderer, just someone they needed to rule out, but it still meant writing a full report, and now it was going to be ten o’clock before he managed to get away.

Katrine was walking down Markveien. She had sent Anders Wyller home from his first day at work. She smiled at the thought that he was bound to remember it for the rest of his life. First the office, then straight to the scene of a murder – and a serious one at that. Not the sort of boring drug-related murder that people forgot the next day, but what Harry called a could-have-been-me murder. Which was the murder of a so-called ordinary person in ordinary circumstances, the sort that led to packed press conferences and guaranteed front pages. Because familiarity made it easier for the public to empathise. That was why a terrorist attack in Paris got more media coverage than one in Beirut. And the media was the media. That was why Police Chief Bellman was taking the effort to keep himself informed. He was going to have to deal with questions. Not right away, but if the murder of a young, well-educated, hard-working female citizen wasn’t cleared up within the next few days, he would have to make a statement.

It would take her half an hour to walk from here to her flat in Frogner, but that was fine, she needed to clear her head. And her body. She pulled her phone out of her jacket pocket and opened the Tinder app. She walked on with one eye on the pavement and the other on the phone as she swiped to right and left.

They had guessed right. Elise Hermansen had got home from a Tinder date. The man the bartender had described to them sounded harmless enough, but she knew from experience that some men had the strange idea that a quick shag gave them the right to more. An old-fashioned attitude that the act itself constituted a form of female submission which could be taken as purely sexual, perhaps. But for all she knew, there might be just as many women out there with equally old-fashioned ideas that men were automatically under some sort of moral obligation the moment they kindly consented to penetrate them. But enough of that – she’d just got a match.

I’m 10 minutes from Nox on Solli plass, she tapped.

OK, I’ll be waiting, came the reply from Ulrich, who from his profile picture and description seemed to be a very straightforward man.

Truls Berntsen stopped and looked at Mona Daa looking at herself.

She no longer reminded him of a penguin. Well, she actually reminded him of a penguin that was being tightly squeezed around the middle.

Truls had detected a certain reluctance when he had asked the girl in gym gear behind the counter at Gain Gym to let him in so he could take a look at the facilities. Possibly because she didn’t buy the idea that he was considering joining, and possibly because they didn’t want people like him as members. Because a long life as someone who aroused other people’s disapproval – often on good grounds, he had to admit – had taught Truls Berntsen to perceive disapproval in most faces he encountered. Either way, after passing machines that were supposed to tighten stomachs and buttocks, rooms for Pilates, rooms for spinning and rooms containing hysterical aerobics instructors (Truls had a vague idea it wasn’t called aerobics any more), he found her in the boys’ area. The weights room. She was doing deadlifts. Her squat, splayed legs were still a bit penguiny. But the combination of broad backside and the wide leather belt that was squeezing her waist and making her bulge out both above and below made her look more like a number 8.

She let out a hoarse, almost frightening roar as she straightened her back and took the strain, staring at her own red face in the mirror. The weights clanked against each other as they left the floor. The bar didn’t bend as much as he’d seen them do on television, but he could see that it was heavy from the two grunting Paki types who were doing curls to get biceps that were big enough for their pathetic gang tattoos. Christ, how he hated them. Christ, how they hated him.

Mona Daa lowered the weights. Roared and raised them again. Down. Up. Four times.

She stood there trembling afterwards. Smiled the way that crazy woman out in Lier did when she’d had an orgasm. If she hadn’t been quite so fat and lived quite so far away, maybe something could have come of that. She said she’d dumped him because she was starting to like him. That once a week wasn’t enough. At the time he had been relieved, but Truls still found himself thinking about her from time to time. Not the way he thought about Ulla, of course, but she had been nice, no question.

Mona Daa caught sight of him in the mirror. Pulled out her earphones. ‘Berntsen? I thought you had a gym in Police HQ?’

‘We have,’ he said, going closer. Gave the Paki types an I’m-a-cop-so-get-lost look, but they didn’t seem to understand. Perhaps he’d been wrong about them. Some of those kids were even in Police College these days.

‘So what brings you here?’ She loosened the belt and Truls couldn’t help staring to see if she was going to balloon back out and become an ordinary penguin again.

‘I thought we might be able to help each other.’

‘With what?’ She squatted down in front of the weights and undid the nuts holding them on each side.

He crouched down beside her and lowered his voice. ‘You said you paid well for tip-offs.’

‘We do,’ she said, without lowering hers. ‘What have you got?’

‘It’ll cost fifty thousand.’

Mona Daa laughed out loud. ‘We pay well, Berntsen, but not that well. Ten thousand is the maximum. And then we’re talking a really tasty morsel.’

Truls nodded slowly as he moistened his lips. ‘This isn’t a tasty morsel.’

‘What did you say?’

Truls raised his voice a bit more. ‘I said: this isn’t a tasty morsel.’

‘What is it, then?’

‘It’s a three-course meal.’

‘Not going to happen,’ Katrine cried over the cacophony of voices and took a sip of her White Russian. ‘I’ve got a partner and he’s at home. Where do you live?’

‘Gyldenløves gate. But there’s nothing to drink, it’s a real mess, and—’

‘Clean sheets?’

Ulrich shrugged.

‘You change the sheets while I take a shower,’ she said. ‘I’ve come straight from work.’

‘What do you—?’

‘Let’s just say that all you need to know about my job is that I have to be up early tomorrow, so shall we …?’ She nodded towards the door.

‘OK, but maybe we could finish our drinks first?’

She looked at the cocktail. The only reason she’d started drinking White Russians was because that’s what Jeff Bridges drinks in The Big Lebowski.

‘That depends,’ she said.

‘On what?’

‘On what effect alcohol has … on you.’

Ulrich smiled. ‘Are you trying to give me performance anxiety, Katrine?’

She shivered at the sound of her own name in this stranger’s mouth. ‘Do you get performance anxiety, then, Ul-rich?’

‘No,’ he grinned. ‘But do you know what these drinks cost?’

Now she smiled. Ulrich was OK. Thin enough. That was the first and really the only thing she looked for in a profile. Weight. And height. She could calculate their BMI as quickly as a poker player figured out the odds. 26.5 was OK. Before she met Bjørn she’d never have believed she’d accept anyone over 25.

‘I need to go to the toilet,’ she said. ‘Here’s my cloakroom ticket, black leather jacket, wait by the door.’

Katrine stood up and walked across the floor, assuming – seeing as this was his first chance to look at her from behind – that he was checking out what people where she came from usually called her arse. And knew that he’d be happy.

The back of the bar was more crowded and she had to push her way through, seeing as ‘Excuse me!’ didn’t have the open-sesame effect it had in what she considered to be the more civilised parts of the world. Bergen, for instance. And she must have been getting squeezed harder than she thought between the sweaty bodies, because suddenly she couldn’t breathe. She broke free, and the giddy feeling of a lack of oxygen disappeared after a few steps.

In the corridor beyond there was the usual queue for the women’s toilet and no one waiting for the men’s. She looked at her watch again. Lead detective. She wanted to get to work first tomorrow. What the hell. She yanked open the door to the men’s toilet, marched in and walked past the row of urinals, unnoticed by two men standing there, and locked herself in one of the cubicles. Her few female friends had always said they’d never set foot in a men’s toilet, that they were much dirtier than the ladies’. That wasn’t Katrine’s experience.

She had pulled her trousers down and was sitting on the toilet when she heard a cautious knock on the door. That struck her as odd – it ought to be obvious from the outside that the cubicle was occupied, and, if you thought it was empty, why knock? She looked down. In the gap between the bottom of the door and the floor she saw the toes of a pair of pointed snakeskin boots. Her next thought was that someone must have seen her go into the men’s toilet and had followed her to see if she was the more adventurous sort.

‘Get los—’ she began, but the ‘t’ at the end vanished in a shortness of breath. Was she coming down with something? Had one single day heading up what she already knew was going to be a big murder investigation turned her into a nervous wreck who could hardly breathe? Christ …

She heard the door to the men’s open and two squawking man-boys came in.

‘It’s, like, so fucking sick, man!’

‘Totally sick!’

The pointed boots disappeared from below the door. Katrine listened, but couldn’t hear any footsteps. She finished off, opened the door and went over to the washbasins. The conversation between the man-boys at the urinals tailed off as she turned the tap.

‘What are you doing here?’ one of them asked.

‘Having a piss and washing my hands,’ she said. ‘Try to do it in that order.’

She shook her hands and walked out.

Ulrich was waiting by the door. He reminded her of a dog wagging its tail with a stick in its mouth as he stood there holding her jacket. She pushed the image aside.

Truls was driving home. He turned the radio up when he heard them playing the Motörhead song he had always thought was called ‘Ace of Space’ until Mikael yelled out at a high-school party: ‘Beavis here thinks Lemmy’s singing Ace of … Space!’ He could still hear the roars of laughter drowning out the music, and see the twinkle in Ulla’s beautiful, laughing eyes.

That was fine, Truls still thought ‘Ace of Space’ was a better title than ‘Ace of Spades’. One day when Truls had taken the risk of sitting down at the same table as the others in the cafeteria, Bjørn Holm had been in the middle of explaining – in that ridiculous Toten dialect of his – that he thought it would have been more poetic if Lemmy had lived till he was seventy-two. When Truls asked why, Bjørn replied: ‘Seven and two, two and seven, right? Morrison, Hendrix, Joplin, Cobain, Winehouse, the whole lot.’

Truls had merely nodded when he saw the others nodding. He still didn’t know what it meant. Only that he had felt excluded.

Still, excluded or not, this evening Truls had become thirty thousand kroner richer than Bjørn fucking Holm and all his nodding cafeteria buddies.

Mona had brightened up considerably when Truls told her about the teeth, or iron dentures, as Holm had put it. She had called her editor and got him to agree that it was precisely what Truls had said: a three-course meal. The starter was the fact that Elise Hermansen had been on a Tinder date. The main course that the killer was probably already inside her flat when she got home. And the dessert that he had murdered her by biting her throat with teeth made of iron. Ten thousand for each course. Thirty. Three and zero, zero and three, right?

‘Ace of space, the ace of space!’ Truls and Lemmy roared.

‘Not going to happen,’ Katrine said, pulling her trousers back up. ‘If you haven’t got a condom, you can forget it.’

‘But I got checked out two weeks ago,’ Ulrich said, sitting up in bed. ‘Cross my heart, hope to die.’

‘Try that on someone else …’ Katrine had to take a deep breath before buttoning her trousers. ‘Anyway, that’s hardly going to stop me getting pregnant.’

‘Don’t you use anything, then, girl?’

Girl? Oh, she did like Ulrich. It wasn’t that. It was … God knows what it was.

She went out into the hall and put her shoes on. She’d made a note of where he’d hung her leather jacket, and had checked that there was just an ordinary lock on the inside of the door. Yep, she was good at planning her escape. She walked out and went down the stairs. When she emerged onto Gyldenløves gate the fresh autumn air tasted of freedom and a sense of having had a narrow escape. She laughed. Walked down the path that ran between the trees in the middle of the wide, empty street. God, how stupid. But if she was really so good at escaping, if she had already made sure she had a way out when she and Bjørn moved in together, why hadn’t she had a coil fitted, or at least gone on the pill? She remembered a conversation in which she explained to Bjørn that her already brittle psyche didn’t need the mood swings that were the inevitable consequence of that sort of hormone manipulation. And it was true, she had stopped taking the pill when she got together with Bjørn. Her thoughts were interrupted when her phone rang, the opening riff of ‘O My Soul’ by Big Star, installed by Bjørn, of course, who had gone to great lengths to explain the significance of the largely forgotten Southern States band from the seventies to her, and complained that the Netflix documentary had deprived him of his mission in life. ‘Fuck them! Half the pleasure of secret bands is the fact that they are secret!’ There wasn’t much chance of him growing up any time soon.

She answered. ‘Yes, Gunnar.’

‘Murdered with iron teeth?’ Her otherwise placid boss sounded upset.

‘Sorry?’

‘That’s the lead story on VG’s website. It says the murderer was already inside Elise Hermansen’s flat, and that he bit through her carotid artery. From a reliable source in the police, it says.’

‘What?’

‘Bellman has already called. He’s … what’s the word I’m looking for? Livid.’

Katrine stopped walking. Tried to think. ‘To start with, we don’t know that he was already there, and we don’t know that he bit her, or that it was a he.’

‘Unreliable source in the police, then! I don’t give a damn about that! We need to get to the bottom of this. Who’s the leak?’

‘I don’t know, but I know that VG will protect the identity of its source as a matter of principle.’

‘Principles be damned – they want to protect their source because they want more inside information. We need to plug this leak, Bratt.’

Katrine was more focused now. ‘So Bellman’s worried the leak might harm the investigation?’

‘He’s worried it’ll make the whole force look bad.’

‘I thought as much.’

‘You thought what?’

‘You know what, and you’re thinking the same.’

‘We’ll deal with this first thing tomorrow,’ Hagen said.

Katrine Bratt put her phone in her jacket pocket and looked ahead along the path. One of the shadows had moved. Probably just a gust of wind in the trees.

For a moment she considered crossing the road to the well-lit pavement, before deciding against it and walking on, quicker than before.

Mikael Bellman was standing by the living-room window. From their house in Høyenhall he could see the whole of the centre of Oslo, stretching out westward towards the low hills below Holmenkollen. And tonight the city was sparkling like a diamond in the moonlight. His diamond.

His children were sleeping soundly. His city was sleeping relatively soundly.

‘What is it?’ Ulla wondered, looking up from her book.

‘This latest murder, it needs solving.’

‘So do all murders, surely?’

‘This one’s a big case now.’

‘It’s one single woman.’

‘It’s not that.’

‘Is it because VG is running so hard with it?’

He could hear the trace of derision in her voice, but it didn’t bother him. She had calmed down, she was back in her place. Because, deep down, Ulla knew her place. And she wasn’t the sort of person who looked for conflict. What his wife liked more than anything was looking after the family, fussing over the children and reading her books. So the tacit criticism in her voice didn’t really demand an answer. And she would hardly have understood it anyway – that if you want to be remembered as a good king, you have two choices. Either you are a king in good times, with the good fortune to sit on the throne during years of plenty. Or you’re the king who leads the country out of a time of crisis. And if it isn’t a time of crisis, you can pretend, start a war and show how deep a crisis the country would be in if it didn’t go to war, and make out that things are really terrible. It didn’t matter if it was only a small war, the important thing was winning it. Mikael Bellman had opted for the latter when he had appeared in the media and in front of the City Council, exaggerating the amount of crime committed by migrants from the Baltic States and Romania, and making dire predictions about the future. And he had been granted extra resources to win what was actually a very small war, albeit a big one in the media. And with the latest figures he had provided twelve months later, he had been able indirectly to declare himself the triumphant victor.

But this new murder case was a war he wasn’t in charge of, and – judging from VG’s coverage that evening – he knew it was no longer a small war. Because they all danced to the media’s tune. He remembered a landslide on Svalbard which had left two people dead and many more homeless. A few months before there had been a fire in Nedre Eiker, in which three people had died and far more been left homeless. The latter story had received the usual modest coverage granted to house fires and road accidents. But a landslide on a distant island was a far more media-friendly story, just like these iron jaws, meaning that the media had leapt into action as if it was a national disaster. And the Prime Minister – who jumps whenever the media says jump – had addressed the country in a live broadcast. And the viewers and residents of Nedre Eiker might well have wondered where she was when their homes were burning. Mikael Bellman knew where she had been. She and her advisers had, as usual, had their ears to the ground, listening out for tremors in the media. And there hadn’t been any.

But Mikael Bellman could feel the ground shaking now.

And now – just as he, as victorious Chief of Police, had a chance to enter the corridors of power – this was already starting to turn into a war he couldn’t afford to lose. He needed to prioritise this single murder as if it were an entire crime wave, simply because Elise Hermansen was a wealthy, well-educated, ethnically Norwegian woman in her thirties, and because the murder weapon wasn’t a steel bar, a knife or a pistol, but a set of teeth made out of iron.

And that was why he felt obliged to take a decision he really didn’t want to have to take. For so many reasons. But there was no way round it.

He had to bring him in.

6

FRIDAY MORNING

HARRY WOKE UP. The echo of a dream, a scream, died away. He lit a cigarette and reflected. Upon what sort of awakening this was. There were basically five different types. The first was waking up to work. For a long time that had been the best sort. When he could slip straight into the case he was investigating. Sometimes sleep and dreams had done something to his way of seeing things and he could lie there going through what they had revealed, piece by piece, from this new perspective. If he was lucky he might be able to catch a glimpse of something new, see part of the dark side of the moon. Not because the moon had moved, but because he had.

The second sort was waking up alone. That was characterised by an awareness that he was alone in bed, alone in life, alone in the world, and it could sometimes fill him with a sweet sensation of freedom, and at other times with a melancholy that could perhaps be called loneliness, but which was perhaps just a glimpse of what anyone’s life really is: a journey from the attachment of the umbilical cord to a death where we are finally separated from everything and everyone. A brief glimpse at the moment of awakening before all our defence mechanisms and comforting illusions slot into place again and we can face life in all its unreal glory.

Then there was waking up full of angst. That usually happened if he’d been drunk for more than three days in a row. There were different gradations of angst, but it was always there instantly. It was hard to identify a specific external danger or threat, it was more a sense of panic at being awake at all, being alive, being here. But every so often he could sense an internal threat. A fear of never feeling afraid again. Of finally and irrevocably going mad.

The fourth was similar to waking up full of angst: the there-are-other-people-here awakening. That set his mind working in two directions. One backwards: how the hell did this happen? One forwards: how do I get out of here? Sometimes this fight-or-flight impulse would settle down, but that always came later and therefore fell outside the frame of waking up.

And then there was the fifth. Which was a new type of waking up for Harry Hole. Waking up content. At first he had been surprised that it was possible to wake up happy, and had automatically thought through all the parameters, what this ridiculous ‘happiness’ actually consisted of, and if it was just an echo of some wonderful, stupid dream. But that night he hadn’t had any nice dreams, and the echo of the scream had come from the demon, the face on his retina which belonged to the murderer who got away. Even so, Harry had woken up happy. Hadn’t he? Yes. And when this variety of awakening had been repeated, morning after morning, he had begun to get used to the idea that he might actually be a relatively content man who had found happiness somewhere towards the end of his forties, and actually seemed capable of clinging on to this newly conquered territory.

The main reason for this lay less than an arm’s length away from him, and was breathing calmly and evenly. Her hair lay spread out on the pillow, like the rays of a raven-black sun.

What is happiness? Harry had read an article about research into happiness which had shown that if you take the happiness of blood, its serotonin level, as your starting point, then there are relatively few external factors that can either reduce or increase that level. You can lose a foot, you can find out you’re infertile, your house can burn down. Your serotonin level sinks at first, but six months later you’re pretty much as happy or unhappy as you were to start with. Same thing if you buy a bigger house or a more expensive car.

But the researchers had discovered that there were a few things that were important in feeling happiness. One of the most important was a good marriage.

And that was just what he had. It sounded so banal that he couldn’t help smiling sometimes when he told himself or – very occasionally – the tiny number of people he called friends yet still hardly ever saw: ‘My wife and I are very happy together.’

Yes, he was in control of his own happiness. If he could have, he would have been more than happy to copy and paste the three years that had passed since the wedding and relive those days over and over again. But obviously that wasn’t an option, and perhaps that was the cause of the tiny trace of anxiety he still felt? That time couldn’t be stopped, that things happened, that life was like the smoke from a cigarette, moving even in the most airtight of rooms, changing in the most unpredictable ways. And seeing as everything was perfect now, any change could only be for the worse. Yes, that was it. Happiness was like moving on thin ice, it was better to crack the ice and swim in cold water and freeze and struggle to get out than simply to wait until you plunged into it. That was why he had started to programme himself to wake up earlier than he had to. Like today, when his lecture on murder investigation didn’t start until eleven o’clock. Waking up just to have more time to lie and experience this peculiar happiness, for as long as it lasted. He suppressed the image of the man who had got away. That wasn’t Harry’s responsibility. Wasn’t Harry’s hunting ground. And the man with the demon’s face was appearing in his dreams less and less frequently.

Harry crept out of bed as quietly as he could, even though her breathing was no longer as regular and he suspected she might be pretending to still be asleep because she didn’t want to spoil things. He pulled on a pair of trousers and went downstairs, put her favourite capsule in the espresso machine, added water, and opened the little glass jar of instant coffee for himself. He bought small jars because fresh, newly opened instant coffee tasted so much better. He switched the kettle on, stuck his bare feet in a pair of shoes and went outside onto the steps.

He breathed in the biting autumn air. The nights had already started to get colder here on Holmenkollveien, up in the hills of Besserud. He looked down towards the city and the fjord, where there were still a few sailing boats, standing out as tiny white triangles against the blue water. In two months, maybe just a matter of weeks, the first snow would be falling up here. But that was fine, the big house with its brown timber walls was built for winter rather than summer.

He lit his second cigarette of the day and walked down the steep gravel drive. He picked his feet up carefully to avoid treading on the untied laces. He could have put on a jacket, or at least a T-shirt, but that was part of the pleasure of having a warm house to come back to: freezing, just a little bit. He stopped by the mailbox. Took out the copy of Aftenposten.

‘Good morning, neighbour.’

Harry hadn’t heard the Tesla pull out onto his neighbour’s tarmacked drive. The driver’s window slid open and he saw the always immaculately blonde fru Syvertsen. She was what Harry – who came from the east of the city and had only been here in the west a relatively short time – thought of as a typical Holmenkollen wife. A housewife with two children and two home helps, and no plans to get a job even though the Norwegian state had invested five years of university education in her. To put it another way, what other people saw as a leisure activity, she saw as her job: keeping herself in shape (Harry could only see her tracksuit top, but knew she was wearing tight-fitting gym gear underneath, and yes, she looked bloody good considering that she was well past forty), logistics (when which of the home helps should take care of the children, and when the family should go on holiday, and where: the house outside Nice, the skiing cabin in Hemsedal, the summer cottage in Sørlandet?), and networking (lunch with friends, dinners with potentially advantageous contacts). And her most important task was already done. Securing herself a husband with enough money to finance this so-called job of hers.

That was where Rakel had failed so miserably. Even though she had grown up in the big wooden house in Besserud, where children were taught how to manoeuvre through society at a young age, and even though she was smart and attractive enough to get anyone she wanted, she had ended up with an alcoholic murder detective on a low salary, who was currently a sober lecturer at Police College on an even lower salary.

‘You should stop smoking,’ fru Syvertsen said, studying him. ‘That’s all I’ve got to say. Which gym do you go to?’

‘The cellar,’ Harry said.

‘Have you installed a gym? Who’s your trainer?’

‘I am,’ Harry said, taking a deep drag and looking at his reflection in the window in the back door of the car. Thin, but not as skinny as a few years ago. Three kilos more muscle. Two kilos of stress-free days. And a healthier lifestyle. But the face looking back at him bore witness to the fact that this hadn’t always been the case. The deltas of thin red veins in the whites of his eyes and just under the skin of his face betrayed a past characterised by alcohol, chaos, lack of sleep and other bad habits. The scar running from one ear to the corner of his mouth spoke of desperate situations and a lack of control. And the fact that he was holding his cigarette between his index and ring fingers, and that he no longer had a middle finger, was yet further evidence of murder and mayhem written in flesh and blood.

He looked down at the newspaper. Saw the word ‘murder’ across the fold. And for a moment the echo of the scream was back again.

‘I’ve been thinking of installing a gym of my own,’ fru Syvertsen said. ‘Why don’t you pop round one morning next week and give me some advice?’

‘A mat, some weights, and a beam to hang from,’ Harry said. ‘That’s my advice.’

Fru Syvertsen gave him a wide smile. Nodded as if she understood. ‘Have a good day, Harry.’

The Tesla whistled off on its way, and he walked back towards the place he called home.

When he reached the shade of the big fir trees he stopped and looked at the house. It was solid. Not impregnable, nothing was impregnable, but it would take some effort. There were three locks in the heavy oak door, and there were iron bars over the windows. Herr Syvertsen had complained, said the fortified house looked like something out of Johannesburg, and that it made their safe area look dangerous and would depress property values. Rakel’s father had had the bars installed after the war. Harry’s work as a murder detective had once put Rakel and her son Oleg in danger. Oleg had grown up since then. He had moved out and was now living with his girlfriend, and had enrolled at Police College. It was up to Rakel to decide when the bars were removed. Because they were no longer needed. Harry was just an underpaid teacher now.

‘Oh, break-fuss,’ Rakel mumbled with a smile, did an exaggerated yawn and sat up in bed.

Harry put the tray down in front of her.

Break-fuss was their word for the hour they spent in bed every Friday morning when he started late and she had the whole day off from her job as a lawyer in the Foreign Ministry. He crept in under the covers and, as usual, gave her the section of Aftenposten containing the domestic news and sport, while he kept the international news section and culture. He put on the glasses he had belatedly accepted that he needed, and immersed himself in a review of Sufjan Stevens’s latest album while he thought about Oleg’s invitation to go with him to a Sleater-Kinney concert next week. Enervating, slightly neurotic rock, just the way Harry liked it. Oleg really preferred harder stuff, which only made Harry appreciate the gesture all the more.

‘Anything new?’ Harry asked as he turned the page.

He knew she was reading about the murder he had seen on the front page, but also that she wasn’t going to mention it to him. One of their silent agreements.

‘Over thirty per cent of American Tinder users are married,’ she said. ‘But Tinder are denying it. How about you?’

‘Sounds like the new Father John Misty album’s a bit crap. Either that or the reviewer’s just got old and grumpy. I’d guess the latter. It’s had good reviews in Mojo and Uncut.’

‘Harry?’

‘I prefer young and grumpy. Then slowly but surely getting more amenable over the years. Like me. Don’t you think?’

‘Would you be jealous if I was on Tinder?’

‘No.’

‘No?’ He noticed her sitting up in bed. ‘Why not?’

‘I suppose I’m just unimaginative. I’m stupid, and believe I’m more than enough for you. Being stupid isn’t all that stupid, you know.’

She sighed. ‘Don’t you ever get jealous?’

Harry turned another page. ‘I do get jealous, but Ståle Aune has recently given me a number of reasons to try to minimise it, darling. He’s actually giving a guest lecture about morbid jealousy to my students today.’

‘Harry?’ He could tell from the tone of her voice that she wasn’t going to give up.

‘Don’t start with my name, please, you know it makes me nervous.’

‘You’ve got good reason to be, because I’m thinking about asking if you ever fancy anyone apart from me.’

‘You’re thinking about it? Or you’re asking now?’

‘I’m asking now.’

‘OK.’ His eyes settled on a picture of Police Chief Mikael Bellman and his wife at a film premiere. Bellman suited the black eyepatch he had started to wear, and Harry knew that Bellman knew it. The young Police Chief had declared that the media and crime films such as the one in question created a false picture of Oslo, and that during his time as Chief of Police the city was safer than ever. The statistical risk of someone killing themselves was far greater than them being killed by someone else.

‘Well?’ Rakel said, and he felt her move closer. ‘Do you fancy other women?’

‘Yes,’ Harry said, stifling a yawn.

‘All the time?’ she asked.

He looked up from the paper. Stared in front of him with a frown. He considered the question. ‘No, not all the time.’ He resumed reading. The new Munch Museum and Public Library were starting to take shape next to the Opera House. In a country of fishermen and farmers, which had spent the past two hundred years sending any dodgy deviants with artistic ambitions to Copenhagen and Europe, the capital city would soon resemble a city of culture. Who would have believed it? Or, more pertinently: who did believe it?

‘If you could choose,’ Rakel teased playfully, ‘if it didn’t have any consequences at all, would you rather spend tonight with me or your dream woman?’

‘Haven’t you got a doctor’s appointment?’

‘Just one night. No consequences.’

‘Are you trying to get me to say that you’re my dream woman?’

‘Come on.’

‘You’ll have to help me with suggestions.’

‘Audrey Hepburn.’

‘Necrophilia?’

‘Don’t try to wriggle out of it, Harry.’

‘OK. I suspect you of suggesting a dead woman because you assume I’ll think you’d find it less of a threat if it’s a woman I can’t spend the night with, in purely practical terms. But fine, thanks to your manipulative help and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, my answer is a loud and clear yes.’

Rakel let out a half-stifled yelp. ‘In that case, why don’t you just do it? Why not have a fling?’

‘To start with, I don’t even know if my dream woman would say yes, and I’m no good at dealing with rejection. And secondly, because the bit about “no consequences” doesn’t apply.’

‘Really?’

Harry focused on the newspaper again. ‘You might leave me. Even if you don’t, you won’t look at me the same way any more.’

‘You could keep it secret.’

‘I wouldn’t have the energy.’ The former Councillor for Social Affairs, Isabelle Skøyen, had criticised the current City Council for not having a contingency plan in advance of the so-called tropical storm that was forecast to hit the west coast early next week, with a force the country had never before experienced. Even more unusual was the fact that the storm was predicted to hit Oslo at only a marginally diminished strength a few hours later. Skøyen claimed that the Council Leader’s response (‘We don’t live in the tropics, so we don’t set money aside for tropical storms’) betrayed an arrogance and irresponsibility bordering on lunacy. ‘Evidently he believes that climate change is something that only affects other countries,’ Skøyen had said, beside a photograph of her in a characteristic pose which told Harry she was planning to make a political comeback.

‘When you say you wouldn’t have the energy to keep an affair secret, do you mean “couldn’t keep up the pretence”?’ Rakel asked.

‘I mean “couldn’t be bothered”. Keeping secrets is exhausting. And I’d feel guilty.’ He turned the page. No more pages. ‘Having a guilty conscience is exhausting.’

‘Exhausting for you, sure. What about me, haven’t you thought about how hard it would be for me?’

Harry glanced at the crossword before putting the newspaper down on the duvet and turning towards her. ‘If you don’t know about the affair, then surely you won’t feel anything at all, darling?’

Rakel took hold of his chin and held it while her other hand fiddled with his eyebrows. ‘But what if I found out? Or you found out that I’d slept with another man. Wouldn’t that upset you?’

He felt a sudden flash of pain as she plucked a straggly grey hair from one eyebrow.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Hence the guilty conscience if it was the other way round.’

She let go of his chin. ‘Darn it, Harry, you talk as if you were trying to figure out a murder case. Don’t you feel anything?’

‘Darn it?’ Harry gave a crooked smile and peered at her over his glasses. ‘Do people still say “darn it”?’

‘Just answer, dar— oh, tarnation!’

Harry laughed. ‘I feel that I’m trying to answer your questions as honestly as I can. But in order to do that, I need to think about them, and be realistic. If I were to follow my initial emotional instinct, I’d have said what I thought you wanted to hear. So here’s a warning. I’m not honest, I’m a slippery sod. My honesty now is merely a long-term investment in my own plausibility. Because there may come a day when I really need to lie, and then it might be handy if you think I’m honest.’

‘Wipe that grin off your face, Harry. So what you’re actually saying is that you’d be an adulterous bastard if it wasn’t so much bother?’

‘Looks like it.’

Rakel gave him a shove, swung her legs out of bed and shuffled out through the doorway in her slippers with a derisive snort.

Harry heard her snort again on the stairs.

‘Can you put the kettle on?’ he called.

‘Cary Grant,’ she called back. ‘And Kurt Cobain. At the same time.’

He heard her moving about downstairs. The rumbling sound of the kettle. Harry moved the newspaper to the bedside table and put his hands behind his head. Smiled. Happy. As he got up he caught sight of her part of the paper, still on her pillow. He saw a picture, a crime scene behind a police cordon, closed his eyes and went over to the window. He opened them again and looked out at the fir trees. He felt he could manage it now. Could manage to forget the name of the one who got away.

He woke up. He had been dreaming about his mother again. And a man who claimed to be his father. He wondered what sort of awakening this was. He was rested. He was calm. He was content. The main reason lay less than an arm’s length away from him. He turned towards her. He had gone into hunting mode yesterday. That hadn’t been the intention, but when he saw her – the policewoman – in the bar, it was as if fate had grabbed the wheel for a moment. Oslo was a small city, people were always bumping into each other, but all the same. He hadn’t run amok, though, he had learned the art of self-control. He studied the lines on her face, her hair, the arm lying at a slightly unnatural angle. She was cold, and she wasn’t breathing; the smell of lavender was almost gone, but that was OK, she had done her job.

He threw the covers back and went over to the wardrobe, and took the uniform out. He brushed it down. He could already feel the blood pumping faster through his body. It was going to be another good day.

7

FRIDAY MORNING

HARRY HOLE WAS walking down the corridor in Police College with Ståle Aune. At 192cm tall, Harry was some twenty centimetres taller than his friend, who was twenty years older than him and a good deal fatter.

‘I’m surprised that you can’t solve such an obvious case,’ Aune said, checking that his spotted bow tie was in the right place. ‘There’s no mystery, you became a teacher because your parents were. Or, to be more accurate, because your father was. Even post-mortem, you’re still trying to get his approval, which you never got as a police officer, and never actually wanted as a police officer, seeing as your rebellion against your father was about not being the same as him, whom you saw as a feeble individual because he hadn’t been able to save your mother’s life. You projected your own inadequacies onto him. And joined the police to make up for the fact that you weren’t able to save your mother either. You wanted to save us all from death, or, more precisely, from being murdered.’

‘Hm. How much do people pay per appointment to listen to stuff like that?’

Aune laughed. ‘Speaking of appointments, how did Rakel get on about her headaches?’

‘The appointment’s today,’ Harry said. ‘Her dad suffered from migraines, and they only started later in life.’

‘Heredity. It’s like going to a fortune-teller and regretting it. As human beings, we tend not to like things we can’t avoid. Death, for instance.’

‘Heredity isn’t unavoidable. My grandfather said he became an alcoholic the first time he ever had a drink, just like his father. Whereas my father enjoyed – as in actually enjoyed – alcohol all his life without becoming a alcoholic.’

‘So alcoholism skipped a generation. That sort of thing happens.’

‘Unless me blaming my genes is just an easy excuse for my own weak character.’

‘OK, but then you ought to be allowed to blame your weak character on your genes as well.’

Harry smiled and a female student walking in the other direction misread it and smiled back.

‘Katrine’s sent me some photographs of the crime scene in Grünerløkka,’ Aune said. ‘What do you think about it?’

‘I don’t read about crime.’

The door to lecture theatre 2 stood open ahead of them. The lecture formed part of the syllabus for the final-year students, but Oleg had said that he and a couple of others in the first year were going to try to sneak in. Sure enough, the auditorium was packed. There were students and even a few of the other lecturers sitting on the steps and standing by the walls.

Harry walked up to the podium and switched the microphone on. Looked out at the audience. Found himself searching automatically for Oleg’s face. Conversation died away and silence settled on the room. The most peculiar thing wasn’t that he’d become a teacher, but that he liked it. That he, like most people usually regarded as taciturn and introverted, felt less inhibited in front of a gathering of demanding students than when the guy at the only open checkout in the 7-Eleven put a packet of Camel Lights down on the counter and Harry thought about repeating his request for ‘Camels’, before noticing the restlessness of the queue behind him. Sometimes, on bad days when his nerves were twitchy, he would actually walk out with the Camel Lights, smoke one and throw the rest of the pack away. But here he was in his comfort zone. Work. Murder. Harry cleared his throat. He hadn’t found Oleg’s face, always so serious, but he had spotted another one he knew well. One with a black patch over one eye. ‘I see that some of you must be here by mistake – this is a level-three course in detective work for final-year students.’

Laughter. No one showed any inclination to leave the room.

‘OK,’ Harry said. ‘I’m afraid anyone who’s here for yet another of my bone-dry lectures on how to investigate murders is going to be disappointed. Our guest lecturer today has been an adviser to the Crime Squad Unit in Police Headquarters for many years, and is Scandinavia’s foremost psychologist in the field of violence and murder. But before I give the floor to Ståle Aune, and because I know he won’t give it back voluntarily, can I remind you that there’s going to be a fresh cross-examination next Wednesday? ‘The devil’s star’ investigation. As usual, the case description, crime-scene reports and interview transcripts are all on the intranet. Ståle?’

Applause broke out and Harry walked towards the steps, as Aune swaggered up to the podium with his stomach out and a contented smile on his lips.

‘Othello syndrome!’ Aune declared, then lowered his voice when he reached the microphone. ‘Othello syndrome is another term for what we call morbid jealousy, and it’s the motive for most murders in this country. Just as jealousy is in William Shakespeare’s play Othello. Roderigo is in love with General Othello’s new bride, Desdemona, while the sly Iago hates Othello because he feels he was overlooked when the general didn’t appoint him as his new lieutenant. Iago sees a chance to advance his own career by destroying Othello, so with Roderigo he sows discord between Othello and his wife. And Iago does this by planting a virus in Othello’s brain and in his heart, a lethal and tenacious virus that comes in many guises. Jealousy. Othello gets sicker and sicker, his jealousy causes epileptic attacks, leaving him shaking on the stage. Othello ends up killing his wife, and finally he kills himself too.’ Aune tugged at the sleeves of his tweed jacket. ‘The reason why I am telling you the plot is not because Shakespeare is part of the curriculum here at Police College, but because you need a bit of general education.’ Laughter. ‘So what, my unjealous ladies and gentlemen, is Othello syndrome?’

‘To what do we owe this visit?’ Harry whispered. He had gone to stand at the back of the lecture theatre next to Mikael Bellman. ‘Interested in jealousy?’

‘No,’ Bellman said. ‘I want you to investigate this latest murder case.’

‘Then I’m afraid you’ve had a wasted journey.’

‘I want you to do what you’ve done in the past: lead a small team that works in parallel to and independently of the larger investigative team.’

‘Thanks for the offer, Chief, but the answer’s no.’

‘We need you, Harry.’

‘Yes. Here.’

Bellman let out a laugh. ‘I don’t doubt that you’re a good teacher, but you’re not the only one. Whereas you happen to be unique as a detective.’

‘I’m through with murders.’

Mikael Bellman shook his head with a smile. ‘Come off it, Harry. How long do you think you can hide yourself away here, pretending to be something you’re not? You’re not a herbivore like him down there. You’re a predator. Just like me.’

‘The answer’s still no.’

‘And it’s a well-known fact that predators have sharp teeth. That’s what puts them at the top of the food chain. I see Oleg’s sitting down near the front. Who’d have thought he’d end up at Police College?’

Harry felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up in warning. ‘I’ve got the life I want, Bellman. I can’t go back. My answer’s final.’

‘Especially as a clean record is an essential prerequisite to being admitted.’

Harry didn’t respond. Aune harvested more laughter, and Bellman chuckled too. He put a hand on Harry’s shoulder, leaned in and lowered his voice a bit more. ‘It may be a few years ago now, but I’ve got connections who would swear on oath that they saw Oleg buying heroin that time. The penalty for that is a maximum of two years. He wouldn’t get a custodial sentence, but he could never become a police officer.’

Harry shook his head. ‘Not even you would do that, Bellman.’

‘No? It might look like shooting sparrows with a cannon, but it really is very important to me that this case is solved.’

‘If I say no, you have nothing to gain by ruining things for my family.’

‘Maybe not, but let’s not forget that I … what’s the word? Hate you.’

Harry looked at the backs of the people in front of him. ‘You’re not the sort of man who lets himself be governed by his feelings, Bellman, you don’t have enough of them for that. What would you say when it came out that you’d been sitting on this information about Police College student Oleg Fauke for so long without doing anything about it? There’s no point bluffing when your opponent knows what bad cards you’re holding, Bellman.’

‘If you want to stake the boy’s future on the fact that I’m bluffing, go ahead, Harry. It’s just this one case. Solve it for me, and all the rest will disappear. You can have until this afternoon to give me your answer.’

‘Out of curiosity, Bellman – why is this particular case so important to you?’

Bellman shrugged. ‘Politics. Predators need meat. And remember that I’m a tiger, Harry. And you’re only a lion. The tiger weighs more and has even more brain per kilo. That’s why the Romans in the Coliseum knew a lion would always be killed if they sent it out to fight a tiger.’

Harry saw a head turn round down towards the front. It was Oleg, smiling and giving him the thumbs up. The lad would soon turn twenty-two. He had his mother’s eyes and mouth, but his straight black hair came from the Russian father no one remembered any longer. Harry returned the thumbs up and tried to smile. When he turned back to Bellman, he was gone.

‘It’s mostly men who are afflicted with Othello syndrome,’ Ståle Aune’s voice rang out. ‘While male murderers with Othello syndrome have a tendency to use their hands, female Othellos use knives or blunt instruments.’

Harry listened. To the thin, thin ice on top of the black water beneath him.

‘You look serious,’ Aune said when he came back to Harry’s office from the toilet. He drank the last of his coffee and put his coat on. ‘Didn’t you like my lecture?’

‘Oh, I did. Bellman was there.’

‘So I saw. What did he want?’

‘He tried to blackmail me into investigating this latest murder.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘No.’

Aune nodded. ‘Good. It eats away at your soul, having as much close contact with evil as you and I have had. It may not look like it to other people, but it’s already destroyed parts of us. And it’s high time our nearest and dearest got the same attention that the sociopaths have had. Our shift is over, Harry.’

‘Are you saying you’re throwing in the towel?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hm. I see what you’re saying in general terms, but are you sure there isn’t something more specific?’

Aune shrugged. ‘Only that I’ve worked too much and spent too little time at home. And when I work on a murder case, I’m not at home even when I am there. Well, you know all about that, Harry. And Aurora, she’s …’ Aune filled his cheeks with air and blew it out. ‘Her teachers say it’s a bit better now. Children sometimes shut themselves off at that age. And they try things out. The fact that they have a scar on their wrist doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re engaged in systematic self-harm, it could just be natural curiosity. But it’s always upsetting when a father realises he can no longer get through to his child. Maybe all the more upsetting when he’s supposed to be a hotshot psychologist.’

‘She’s fifteen now, isn’t she?’

‘And this could all be over and forgotten by the time she turns sixteen. Phases, phases, that’s what that age is all about. But you can’t put off caring for your loved ones until after the next case, or your next day at work, you have to do it now. Wouldn’t you say, Harry?’

Harry rubbed his unshaven top lip with his thumb and forefinger as he nodded slowly. ‘Mm. Of course.’

‘Well, I’ll be off,’ Aune said, reaching for his briefcase and picking up a pile of photographs. ‘These are the pictures from the crime scene that Katrine sent. Like I said, they’re no use to me.’

‘Why would I want them?’ Harry wondered, looking down at a woman’s body on a bloodstained bed.

‘For one of your classes, maybe. I heard you mention the devil’s star case, so you obviously use real murder cases, and real documents.’

‘In that instance it works as a template,’ Harry said, trying to tear his eyes away from the woman’s picture. There was something familiar about it. Like an echo. Had he seen her before? ‘What’s the victim’s name?’

‘Elise Hermansen.’

The name didn’t ring any bells. Harry looked at the next picture. ‘These wounds on her neck, what are they?’

‘You really haven’t read a thing about the case? It’s on all the front pages, it’s hardly surprising that Bellman’s trying to pressgang you. Iron teeth, Harry.’

‘Iron teeth? A satanist?’

‘If you read VG, you’ll see that they refer to my colleague Hallstein Smith’s tweet about it being the work of a vampirist.’

‘A vampirist? A vampire, then?’

‘If only,’ Aune said, taking a page torn out of VG from his case. ‘A vampire does at least have some basis in zoology and fiction. According to Smith and a few other psychologists around the world, a vampirist is someone who takes pleasure from drinking blood. Read this …’

Harry read the tweet Aune held up in front of him. He stopped at the last sentence. The vampirist will strike again.

‘Mm. Just because there are only a few of them doesn’t mean that they’re not right.’

‘Are you mad? I’m all for going against the flow, and I like ambitious people like Smith. He made a big mistake when he was a student and landed himself with his nickname, “the Monkey”, and I’m afraid that means he still doesn’t have much credibility among other psychologists. But he was actually a very promising psychologist until he got into this business with vampirism. His articles weren’t bad either, but obviously he couldn’t get them published in any peer-reviewed journals. Now he’s got something printed at last. In VG.’

‘So why don’t you believe in vampirism?’ Harry said. ‘You yourself have said that if you can think of any form of deviancy, there’ll be someone out there who’s got it.’

‘Oh yes, it’s all out there. Or will be. Our sexuality is all about what we’re capable of thinking and feeling. And that’s pretty much unlimited. Dendrophilia means being sexually excited by trees. Kakorrhaphiophilia means finding failure sexually arousing. But before you can define something as a -philia or an -ism, it has to have reached a degree of prevalence, and have a certain number of common denominators. Smith and his group of mythomaniac psychologists have invented their own -ism. They’re wrong, there isn’t a group of so-called vampirists who follow any predictable pattern of behaviour for them or anyone else to analyse.’ Aune buttoned up his coat and walked towards the door. ‘Whereas the fact that you suffer from a fear of intimacy, and are incapable of giving your best friend a hug before he leaves, is decent material for a psychological theory. Give Rakel my love, and tell her I’ll magic those headaches away. Harry?’

‘What? Yes, of course. I’ll tell her. Hope things work out OK with Aurora.’

Harry was left staring into space after Aune had gone. The previous evening he had walked into the living room while Rakel was watching a film. He had glanced at the screen and asked if it was a James Gray film. It was a perfectly neutral picture of a street with no actors in it, without any specific cars or camera angles, two seconds of a film Harry had never seen. OK, a picture can never be completely neutral, but Harry still had no idea what made him think of that particular director. Apart from the fact that he had watched a James Gray film a few months ago. That could be all it was, an automatic and trivial connection. A film he had seen, then a two-second clip that contained one or two details that swirled through his brain so quickly that he couldn’t identify what the points of recognition were.

Harry took out his mobile phone.

Hesitated. Then he pulled up Katrine Bratt’s number. It had been over six months since the last time they were in touch, when she had sent him a text on his birthday. He had replied with ‘thanks’, no capital letter or full stop. He knew she knew that didn’t mean he didn’t care, just that he didn’t care about long text messages.

His call went unanswered.

When he rang her internal number at Crime Squad, Magnus Skarre picked up. ‘So, Harry Hole himself.’ The sarcasm was so heavy that Harry was left in no doubt. Harry hadn’t had many fans at Crime Squad, and Skarre certainly hadn’t been one of them. ‘No, I haven’t seen Bratt today. Which is pretty odd for a new lead detective, because we’ve got a hell of a lot to do here.’

‘Hm. Can you tell her I—?’

‘Better to call back, Hole, we’ve got enough to think about.’

Harry hung up. Drummed his fingers on the desk and looked at the pile of essays at one end of it. And at the sheaf of photographs at the other. He thought about Bellman’s analogy about predators. A lion? OK, why not? He’d read that lions that hunt alone have a success rate of only fifteen per cent or so. And that when lions kill large prey, they don’t have the strength to rip their throats open, so they have to suffocate them. They clamp their jaws around the animal’s neck and squeeze the windpipe. And that can take time. If it’s a big animal, a water buffalo for instance, the lion sometimes has to hang there, tormenting itself and the water buffalo for hours, yet still has to let go in the end. And that’s one way of looking at a murder investigation. Hard work and no reward. He had promised Rakel that he wouldn’t go back. Had promised himself.

Harry looked at the bundle of photographs again. Looked at the picture of Elise Hermansen. Her name had stuck in his mind automatically. As had the details of the photograph of her lying on the bed. But it wasn’t the details. It was the whole. The film Rakel had been watching the night before had been called The Drop. And the director wasn’t James Gray. Harry had been wrong. Fifteen per cent. All the same …

There was something about the way she was lying. Or had been lain out. The arrangement. It was like an echo from a forgotten dream. A cry in the forest. The voice of a man he was trying not to remember. The one who got away.

Harry remembered something he had once thought. That when he fell, when he pulled the cork from the bottle and took the first swig, it wasn’t the way he imagined, because that wasn’t the decisive moment. The decision had already been taken long before. And from that moment on, the only question was what the trigger would be. It was bound to come. At some point the bottle would be standing there in front of him. And it would have been waiting for him. And he for it. The rest was just opposite charges, magnetism, the inevitability of the laws of physics.

Shit. Shit.

Harry stood up quickly, grabbed his leather jacket and hurried out.

He looked in the mirror, checked that the jacket was sitting the way it should. He had read the description of her one last time. He disliked her already. A ‘w’ in a name that should be spelled with a ‘v’, like his, was a good enough reason for punishment on its own. He would have preferred a different victim, one more to his own taste. Like Katrine Bratt. But the decision had already been taken for him. The woman with a ‘w’ in her name was waiting for him.

He fastened the last button on the jacket. Then he left.

8

FRIDAY AFTERNOON

‘HOW DID BELLMAN manage to persuade you?’ Gunnar Hagen was standing by the window.

‘Well,’ the unmistakable voice said behind him, ‘he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.’ There was a bit more gravel to it now than when he had last heard it, but it had the same depth and calmness. Hagen had heard one of his female colleagues say that the only beautiful thing about Harry Hole was his voice.

‘And what was the offer?’

‘Fifty per cent extra for overtime and double pension contributions.’

The head of Crime Squad smiled briefly. ‘And you don’t have any conditions?’

‘Just that I’m allowed to pick the members of my group myself. I only want three.’

Gunnar Hagen turned round. Harry was slouched in the chair in front of Hagen’s desk with his long legs stretched out in front of him. His thin face had gained some more lines, and his thick, short blond hair had started to turn grey at the temples. But he was no longer as thin as the last time Hagen had seen him. The whites around his intense blue irises may not have been clear, but they weren’t marbled with red the way they had been when things had been at their worst.

‘Are you still dry, Harry?’

‘As a Norwegian oil well, boss.’

‘Hm. You do know that Norwegian oil wells aren’t dry, don’t you? They’ve just been shut down until the price of oil rises again.’

‘That was the image I was trying to convey, yes.’

Hagen shook his head. ‘And there was me thinking that you’d get more mature with age.’

‘Disappointing, isn’t it? We don’t get wiser, just older. Still nothing from Katrine?’

Hagen looked at his phone. ‘Not a thing.’

‘Shall we try calling her again?’

‘Hallstein!’ The call came from the living room. ‘The kids want you to be the hawk again!’

Hallstein Smith let out a resigned but happy sigh and put his book, Francesca Twinn’s Miscellany of Sex, down on the kitchen table. It was interesting enough to read that biting off a woman’s eyelashes is regarded as an act of passion in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea, but he hadn’t found anything he could use in his PhD, and making his kids happier was certainly more fun. It didn’t matter that he was still tired from the last game, because birthdays only came round once a year. Well, four times a year when you had four children. Six, if they insisted on their parents having birthday parties too. Twelve, if you celebrate half birthdays as well. He was on his way to the living room, where he could already hear the children cooing like doves, when the doorbell rang.

The woman standing outside on the step stared openly at Hallstein Smith’s head when he opened the door.

‘I managed to eat something with nuts in the day before yesterday,’ he said, scratching the irritating outbreak of livid red hives on his forehead.

He looked at her and realised that she wasn’t staring at the hives.

‘Oh, that,’ he said, taking off his hat. ‘It’s supposed to be a hawk’s head.’

‘Looks more like a chicken,’ the woman said.

‘It is actually an Easter chicken, so we call it a chickenhawk.’

‘My name is Katrine Bratt, I’m from Crime Squad, Oslo Police.’

Smith tilted his head. ‘Of course, I saw you on the news last night. Is this about what I said on Twitter? The phone hasn’t stopped ringing. It wasn’t my intention to cause such a fuss.’

‘Can I come in?’

‘Of course, but I hope you don’t mind slightly, er … boisterous children.’

Smith explained to the children that they were going to have to come up with their own hawk for a while, then led the policewoman into the kitchen.

‘You look like you could do with some coffee,’ Smith said, pouring a cup without waiting for an answer.

‘It ended up being a late night,’ the woman said. ‘I overslept, so I’ve come straight from bed. And I managed to leave my mobile at home, so I was wondering if I could borrow yours to call the office?’

Smith passed her his mobile and watched as she gazed helplessly at the ancient Ericsson. ‘The kids call it a stupid-phone. Do you want me to show you?’

‘I think I remember,’ Katrine said. ‘Tell me, what do you make of this picture?’

As she tapped at the phone, Smith studied the photograph she had handed him.

‘Iron dentures,’ he said. ‘From Turkey?’

‘No, Caracas.’

‘Right. There are similar sets of iron teeth in the Museum of Archaeology in Istanbul. They’re supposed to have been used by soldiers in Alexander the Great’s army, but historians doubt that, and think instead that the upper classes used them in some sort of sadomasochistic games.’ Smith scratched his hives. ‘So he used something like this?’

‘We’re not sure. We’re just working from the bite marks on the victim, some rust and a few flakes of black paint.’

‘Aha!’ Smith exclaimed. ‘Then we need to go to Japan!’

‘We do?’ Bratt put the phone to her ear.

‘You might have seen Japanese women with their teeth dyed black? No? Well, it’s a tradition known as ohaguro. It means “the darkness after the sun has gone down”, and first appeared during the Heian period, around the year AD 800. And … er, shall I go on?’

Bratt gestured impatiently.

‘It’s said that in the Middle Ages there was a shogun in the north who made his soldiers use iron teeth that were painted black. They were mostly to scare people, but could also be used in close combat. If the fighting got so crowded that the soldiers couldn’t use weapons or punch and kick their adversaries, they could use the teeth to bite through their enemies’ throats.’

The detective indicated that her call had been answered. ‘Hi, Gunnar, this is Katrine. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve come straight from home to talk to Professor Smith … yes, the one who sent the tweet. And that I left my phone at home, so if anyone’s been trying to get hold of me …’ She listened. ‘Harry? You’re kidding.’ She listened for a few more seconds. ‘He just walked in and said he’d do it? Let’s talk about it later.’ She handed the phone back to Smith. ‘So, tell me, what’s vampirism?’

‘For that,’ Smith said, ‘I think we should go for a walk.’

Katrine walked alongside Hallstein Smith down the gravel track that led from the house to the barn. He was explaining that his wife had inherited the farm and almost a hectare of land, and that only two generations ago there were cows and horses grazing here in Grini, just a few kilometres from the centre of Oslo. Even so, a smaller plot containing a boathouse on Nesøya that had also formed part of the inheritance was worth more. At least if you were to believe the offers they had received from their filthy rich neighbours.

‘Nesøya’s really too far away to be practical, but we don’t want to sell for the time being. We’ve only got a cheap aluminium boat with a twenty-five horsepower engine, but I love it. Don’t tell my wife, but I prefer the sea to this bit of farmland.’

‘I come from the coast too,’ Katrine said.

‘Bergen, right? I love the dialect. I spent a year working in a psychiatric ward in Sandviken. Beautiful, but so much rain.’

Katrine nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I’ve got drenched in Sandviken before.’

They reached the barn. Smith pulled out a key and undid the padlock.

‘Big lock for a barn,’ Katrine said.

‘The last one was too small,’ Smith said, and Katrine could hear the bitterness in his voice. She stepped through the doorway and let out a small yelp when she put her foot on something that moved. She looked down and saw a rectangular metal plate, one metre by one and a half, set into the cement floor. It felt like it was on springs as it swayed and knocked against the cement edge before settling again.

‘Fifty-eight kilos,’ Smith said.

‘What?’

He nodded to his left, towards a large arrow that was quivering between 50 and 60 on a half-moon-shaped dial, and she realised she was standing on old-fashioned cattle scales. She squinted.

‘Fifty-seven point six-eight.’

Smith laughed. ‘A long way below slaughter weight, anyway. I have to admit that I try to jump across the scales every morning, I don’t like the idea that every day could be my last.’

They carried on past a row of stalls and stopped in front of the door to an office. Smith unlocked it. The room contained a desk with a PC, a window looking out across the field, a drawing of a vampire with big, thin bat’s wings, a long neck and square face. The bookcase behind the desk was half full with files and a dozen or so books.

‘What you see before you is everything that has ever been published on vampirism,’ Smith said, running his hand over the books. ‘So it’s pretty easy to get an overview. But to answer your question, let’s start with Vandenbergh and Kelly, from 1964.’

Smith pulled out one of the books, opened it and read: ‘“Vampirism is defined as the act of drawing blood from an object (usually a love object), and receiving resultant sexual excitement and pleasure.” That’s the dry definition. But you’re after more than that, aren’t you?’

‘I think so,’ Katrine said, and looked at the picture of the vampire. It was a fine piece of art. Simple. Lonely. And it seemed to radiate a chill that instinctively made her pull her jacket tighter.

‘Let’s go a bit deeper,’ Smith said. ‘To start with, vampirism isn’t some newfangled invention. The word obviously refers to the myth about bloodthirsty creatures in human guise, going way back through history, especially in Eastern Europe and Greece. But the modern concept of vampires comes mainly from Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897 and the first vampire films of the 1930s. Some researchers mistakenly believe that vampirists – ordinary but sick individuals – are largely inspired by these myths. They forget that vampirism had already been mentioned in this …’ Smith pulled out an old book with a half-disintegrated brown cover. ‘Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis from 1887 – in other words, before the myth became widely known.’ Smith put it back carefully and pulled out another book.

‘My own research is based on the idea that vampirism is related to such conditions as necrophagia, necrophilia and sadism, just as the author of this book, Bourguignon, also thought.’ Smith opened it. ‘This is from 1983: “Vampirism is a rare compulsive disorder with an irresistible urge for blood ingestion, a ritual necessary to bring mental relief; like other compulsions, its meaning is not understood by the participant.”’

‘So a vampirist just does what vampirists do? They simply can’t act differently?’

‘That’s an oversimplification, but yes.’

‘Can any of these books help us to put together a profile of a murderer who extracts blood from his victims?’

‘No,’ Smith said, replacing Bourguignon’s book. ‘One’s been written, but it’s not on the shelf.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s never been published.’

Katrine looked at Smith. ‘Yours?’

‘Mine,’ Smith said with a sad smile.

‘What happened?’

Smith shrugged. ‘The time wasn’t right for that sort of radical psychology. After all, I was flying in the face of this.’ He pointed at one of the spines on the shelf. ‘Herschel Prins and his article in the British Journal of Psychiatry, 1985. And you don’t get away with that unpunished. I was dismissed because my results were based on case studies rather than empirical evidence. But of course that was impossible when there are so few cases of real vampirism, and the few that are recorded have been diagnosed as schizophrenia because there hasn’t been enough research. I tried, but even newspapers that are more than happy to publish articles about B-list American celebrities thought vampirism was frivolous, sensationalist. And when I had finally collected enough research evidence, that’s when the break-in happened.’ Smith gestured towards the empty shelves. ‘Taking my computer was one thing, but they took all my patient notes too, my entire archive of clients, the whole lot. And now certain malicious colleagues are claiming that I was saved by the bell, and that if my material had been published I would only have exposed myself to more ridicule, because it would have become obvious that vampirists don’t exist.’

Katrine ran her finger across the frame of the picture of the vampire. ‘Who would break in here to steal medical records?’

‘God knows. I assumed it was a colleague. I waited for someone to step forward with my theories and results, but it never happened.’

‘Maybe they were after your patients?’

Smith laughed. ‘I wish them luck with that. They’re so crazy no one else wants them, believe me. They’re only useful as research subjects, not as a way of making a living. If my wife hadn’t been doing so well with her yoga school we wouldn’t have been able to keep hold of the farm and boathouse. Speaking of which, there’s a birthday party going on up at the house that needs a hawk.’

They walked back outside and as Smith locked the door to the office Katrine noticed a small surveillance camera fixed to the wall above the stalls.

‘You know the police don’t investigate ordinary break-ins any more?’ she said. ‘Even if you’ve got security camera footage.’

‘I know.’ Smith sighed. ‘That’s for my own peace of mind. If they come back for any of my new material, I want to know which of my colleagues I’m dealing with. I’ve got a camera outside by the gate as well.’

Katrine couldn’t help laughing. ‘I thought academics were bookish, cosy types, not common thieves.’

‘Oh, I’m afraid we do just as many stupid things as less intelligent people,’ Smith said, shaking his head sadly. ‘Myself included, I have to admit.’

‘Really?’

‘Nothing interesting. Just a mistake my colleagues rewarded with a nickname. And it was a long time ago.’ Maybe it was a long time ago, but Katrine still saw the flash of pain dart across his face.

On the steps in front of the farmhouse Katrine handed him a card. ‘If the media call, I’d be very grateful if you don’t mention the fact that we’ve had this conversation. People will only get frightened if they think the police believe there’s a vampire on the loose.’

‘Oh, the media won’t call,’ Smith said, looking at her card.

‘Really? But VG printed what you wrote on Twitter.’

‘They didn’t bother to interview me. Presumably someone remembered that I’ve cried wolf before.’

‘Cried wolf?’

‘There was a murder back in the nineties where I’m pretty certain a vampirist was involved. And another case three years ago, I don’t know if you remember it?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘No, that one didn’t get many headlines either. Which was lucky, I suppose.’

‘So this would be the third time you’ve cried wolf?’

Smith nodded slowly and looked at her. ‘Yes. This is the third time. So the list of my failings is pretty long.’

‘Hallstein?’ called a woman’s voice from inside the house. ‘Are you coming?’

‘Just a moment, darling! Sound the hawk alarm! Caw, caw, caw!’

As Katrine walked towards the gate she heard the sound of voices getting louder behind her. Hysteria in advance of a massacre of doves.

9

FRIDAY AFTERNOON

AT 3 P.M. Katrine had a meeting with Krimteknisk, at 4 p.m with the forensics officer, both equally depressing, then at 5 p.m with Bellman in the Police Chief’s office.

‘I’m pleased you’ve responded positively to us bringing in Harry Hole, Bratt.’

‘Why wouldn’t I? Harry’s our most experienced murder detective.’

‘Some detectives might regard it as – what’s the word I’m looking for? – challenging, to have such a big name from the past looking over their shoulder.’

‘Not a problem – I always play with my cards on the table, sir.’ Katrine gave a brief smile.

‘Good. Anyway, Harry’s going to be leading his own small, independent team, so you needn’t worry about him taking over. Just a bit of healthy competition.’ Bellman put his fingertips together. She noticed that one of the white patches formed a band around his wedding ring. ‘And naturally, I’ll be cheering on the female participant. I hope we can count on a quick result, Bratt.’

‘I see,’ Katrine Bratt said, and glanced at her watch.

‘I see, what?’

She heard the irritation in his voice. ‘I see: you’re hoping for a quick result.’

She knew she was provoking the Chief of Police. Not because she wanted to. Because she couldn’t help it.

‘And you should be hoping for the same thing, Detective Inspector Bratt. Positive discrimination or not, jobs like yours don’t grow on trees.’

‘I’ll have to do my best to prove that I deserve it, then.’

She kept her eyes fixed on his. It was as if the eyepatch emphasised his uninjured eye, its intensity and beauty. And the hard, ruthless glint in it.

She held her breath.

Then he suddenly laughed. ‘I like you, Katrine. But let me give you a piece of advice.’

She waited, ready for anything.

‘At the next press conference, you should do the talking, not Hagen. I want you to underline the fact that this is an extremely difficult case, that we have no leads, and that we need to be prepared for a lengthy investigation. That will make the media less impatient and they’ll give us more room for manoeuvre.’

Katrine folded her arms. ‘It might also embolden the killer and make him more likely to strike again.’

‘I don’t think the killer is governed by what the papers say, Bratt.’

‘If you say so. Well, I have to prepare the next meeting of the investigative team.’

Katrine saw the note of warning in the way he looked at her.

‘Go ahead. And do as I say. Tell the media that this case is the most difficult you’ve had.’

‘I …’

‘In your own words, obviously. When’s the next press conference?’

‘We’ve cancelled today’s seeing as we haven’t got anything new.’

‘OK. Remember, if the case is presented as difficult, the glory will be all the greater when we solve it. And we won’t be lying, because we haven’t actually got anything, have we? Besides, the media love a big, horrifying mystery. See it as a win-win situation, Bratt.’

Win-fucking-win, Katrine thought as she walked down the stairs to Crime Squad on the sixth floor.

At 6 p.m., Katrine opened the meeting of the investigative team by stressing the importance of reports being written and registered in the system promptly, because this hadn’t been done after the first interview with Geir Sølle, Elise Hermansen’s Tinder date the night she was murdered, with the result that a second detective had contacted Geir Sølle.

‘For one thing, it makes extra work, as well as giving the public the impression that the police are disorganised, and that our right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.’

‘There must be something wrong with the computers, or the system,’ Truls Berntsen said, even though Katrine hadn’t mentioned him by name. ‘I know I sent it.’

‘Tord?’

‘There haven’t been any system failures reported in the last twenty-four hours,’ Tord Gren said, adjusting his glasses and noting the look in Katrine’s eye, which he interpreted correctly. ‘But of course there may be something wrong with your computer, Berntsen – I’ll take a look at it.’

‘Seeing as you’ve started, Tord, could you take us through your latest strokes of genius?’

The IT expert blushed, nodded, and went on in a stiff, unnatural tone of voice, as if he were reading from a script. ‘Location services. Most people who have a mobile phone permit one or more of the apps on their device to collect data on where they are at all times, many of them without knowing that they’ve allowed this.’

Pause. Tord swallowed. And Katrine realised that he was doing precisely that: reading from a script he had written and learned off by heart after Katrine had said she would be asking him to give a presentation to the group.

‘Many of the apps demand, as part of their terms and conditions, the right to be able to send details of the phone’s location to third parties, but not to the police. One such commercial third party is Geopard. They gather location data, and have no clause in their own contract prohibiting them from selling the information to the public sector or, in other words, to the police. When people who have served prison sentences for sexual offences are released, we gather contact details – address, mobile number, email address – because we routinely want to be able to get hold of these individuals in the event of further offences similar to those for which they were convicted. Because it used to be generally assumed that sex offenders are the most likely to reoffend. New research has shown this to be completely wrong: rape actually has one of the lowest reoffending rates. BBC Radio 4 recently reported that the chance of offenders being rearrested is sixty per cent in the USA and fifty per cent in the UK. And often for the same offence. But not for rape. Statistics from the US Justice Department show that 78.8 per cent of those convicted of stealing a motor vehicle are rearrested for the same offence within three years, for those convicted of trading in stolen goods the figure is 77.4 per cent, and so on. But the same thing only applies to 2.5 per cent of convicted rapists.’ Tord paused again. Katrine presumed he had noticed that the group had limited patience for this sort of discursive presentation. He cleared his throat. ‘Anyway, when we send our batch of contact data to Geopard, they can map the movements of these people’s phones, assuming they use location-tracking apps, at any given time and at any given place. On Wednesday evening, for instance.’

‘How precisely?’ Magnus Skarre called.

‘Down to a few square metres,’ Katrine said. ‘But the GPS is only two-dimensional, so we can’t see elevation. In other words, we don’t know what floor the phone is on.’

‘Is this actually legal?’ wondered Gina, one of the analysts. ‘I mean, privacy legislation—’

‘—is struggling to keep up with technology,’ Katrine interrupted. ‘I’ve spoken to our legal department, and they say it’s a grey area, but that it isn’t covered by existing legislation. And, as we know, if something isn’t illegal, then …’ She held her hands out, but no one in the room was willing to finish the sentence for her. ‘Go on, Tord.’

‘Once we received authorisation from our lawyers and financial authorisation from Gunnar Hagen, we bought a set of location data. The maps from the night of the murder give us GPS positions for ninety-one per cent of people who have previously been convicted of sex offences.’ Tord stopped, and seemed to think.

Katrine realised that he had reached the end of his script. She didn’t understand why a gasp of delight hadn’t gone round the room.

‘Don’t you understand how much work this has saved us? If we used the old method to write off this many potential suspects from a case—’

She heard a low cough. Wolff, the oldest of the detectives. Should have been pensioned off by now. ‘Seeing as you said “write off”, presumably that means the map didn’t show a match for Elise Hermansen’s address?’

‘Correct,’ Katrine said. She put her hands on her hips. ‘And it means that we only have to check the alibis of nine per cent.’

‘But the location of your phone doesn’t exactly give you an alibi,’ Skarre said, and looked round for support.

‘You know what I mean,’ Katrine said with a sigh. What was it with this lot? They were here to solve a murder, not suck all the energy out of each other.

‘Krimteknisk,’ she said, and sat down at the front so she wouldn’t have to look at them for a while.

‘Not much,’ Bjørn Holm said, getting to his feet. ‘The lab’s examined the paint left in the wound. It’s pretty specific stuff. We think it’s made of iron filings in a vinegar solution, with added vegetable-based tannic acid from tea. We’ve looked into it, and it could stem from an old Japanese tradition of dying teeth black.’

‘Ohaguro,’ Katrine said. ‘The darkness after the sun’s gone down.’

‘Correct,’ Bjørn said, giving her the same appreciative look that he used to when they were having breakfast at a cafe and she would get the better of him for once in the quiz in Aftenposten.

‘Thanks,’ Katrine said, and Bjørn sat down. ‘Then there’s the elephant in the room. What VG is calling “a source” and we call a leak.’

The already quiet room grew even more so.

‘One thing is the damage that’s already been done: now the murderer knows what we know, and can plan accordingly. But what’s worse is that we in this room no longer know if we can trust each other. Which is why I want to ask a very blunt question: who talked to VG?’

To her surprise she saw a hand in the air.

‘Yes, Truls?’

‘Müller and I spoke to Mona Daa right after the press conference yesterday.’

‘You mean Wyller?’

‘I mean the new guy. Neither of us said anything. But she gave you her card, didn’t she, Müller?’

All eyes turned to look at Wyller, whose face was glowing bright red beneath his blond fringe.

‘Yes … but …’

‘We all know that Mona Daa is VG’s crime reporter,’ Katrine said. ‘You don’t need a business card to call the paper and get hold of her.’

‘Was it you, Wyller?’ Magnus Skarre asked. ‘Look, all rookies are allowed a certain number of fuck-ups.’

‘I haven’t talked to VG,’ Wyller said, with desperation in his voice.

‘Berntsen just said that you did,’ Skarre replied. ‘Are you saying that Berntsen’s lying?’

‘No, but—’

‘Out with it!’

‘Look … she said she was allergic to cats, and I said I’ve got a cat.’

‘See, you did talk! What else?’

‘You could be the leak, Skarre.’ The calm, deep voice came from the very back of the room, and everyone turned round. No one had heard him come in. The tall man was more lying than sitting in a chair against the back wall.

‘Speaking of cats,’ Skarre said. ‘Look what it’s just dragged in. I haven’t talked to VG, Hole.’

‘You or anyone else in here could have unconsciously given away a bit too much information to a witness you were talking to. And they could have called the paper and said that they got it directly from the cops. Hence “a source in the police”. Happens all the time.’

‘Sorry, but no one believes that, Hole,’ Skarre snorted.

‘You should,’ Harry said. ‘Because no one here is going to admit to talking to VG, and if you end up thinking you’ve got a mole, your investigation isn’t going to go anywhere.’

‘What’s he doing here?’ Skarre wondered, turning to Katrine.

‘Harry is here to set up a group that’s going to work in parallel to us,’ Katrine said.

‘So far it’s a one-man group,’ Harry said. ‘And I’m here to order some materials. Those nine per cent whose location you don’t know for the time of the murder, can I have a list of them, in order of the length of their most recent sentence?’

‘I can do that,’ Tord said, then paused and looked questioningly at Katrine.

She nodded. ‘What else?’

‘A list of which sex offenders Elise Hermansen helped put away. That’s all.’

‘Noted,’ Katrine said. ‘But seeing as we’ve got you here, any initial thoughts?’

‘Well.’ Harry looked round. ‘I know the forensics officer has found lubricant which probably comes from the murderer, but we can’t rule out the possibility of revenge as the main motive, and anything sexual as a bonus. The fact that the murderer was probably already inside the flat when she got home doesn’t mean that she let him in or that they knew each other. I don’t think I’d have restricted the investigation at such an early stage. But I’m assuming that you’ve already thought of that yourselves.’

Katrine gave a crooked smile. ‘Good to have you back, Harry.’

Possibly the best, possibly the worst, but certainly the most mythologised murder detective in the Oslo Police managed to perform a perfectly acceptable bow from his almost prone position. ‘Thanks, boss.’

‘You meant that,’ Katrine said. She and Harry were standing in the lift.

‘What?’

‘You called me boss.’

‘Of course.’

They got out in the garage and Katrine pressed the key fob. There was a bleep and some lights flashed somewhere in the darkness. Harry had persuaded her that she ought to make use of the car that was automatically at her disposal during a murder case like this one. And then that she ought to drive him home, stopping for coffee at Schrøder’s Restaurant on the way.

‘What’s happened to your taxi driver?’ Katrine asked.

‘Øystein? He got fired.’

‘By you?’

‘Course not. By the taxi firm. There was an incident.’

Katrine nodded. And thought about Øystein Eikeland, the long-haired beanpole with teeth like a junkie’s, a voice like a whiskey drinker, who looked about seventy but was actually one of Harry’s childhood friends. One of only two, according to Harry. The other one was called Tresko, and he was, if possible, an even more bizarre character: an overweight, unpleasant office worker who turned into a Mr Hyde of a poker player at night.

‘What sort of incident?’ Katrine wondered.

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘Not really, but go on.’

‘Øystein doesn’t like panpipes.’

‘No, who does?’

‘So he got a long job driving to Trondheim with this guy who has to go by taxi because he’s terrified of both trains and planes. And the guy has trouble with aggression too, so he’s got this CD with him, panpipe versions of old pop songs that he has to listen to while he’s doing breathing exercises to stop him losing control. What happens is that in the middle of the night, up on the Dovre Plateau, when the panpipe version of “Careless Whisper” comes round for the sixth time, Øystein pulls the CD out, opens the window and chucks it out. That’s when the fisticuffs started.’

‘Fisticuffs is a nice word. And that song’s bad enough in the original.’

‘In the end Øystein managed to kick the guy out of the car.’

‘While it was moving?’

‘No. But in the middle of the plateau, in the middle of the night, twenty kilometres from the nearest house. In his defence, Øystein did point out that it was July, mild weather, and that the guy couldn’t possibly be terrified of walking as well.’

Katrine laughed. ‘And now he’s out of a job? You ought to employ him as your private chauffeur.’

‘I’m trying to get him a job, but Øystein is – to quote his own words – pretty much made for unemployment.’

Schrøder’s Restaurant was, in spite of its name, basically just a bar. The usual early-evening clientele was in place and nodded good-naturedly to Harry without actually saying anything.

The waitress, on the other hand, lit up as if the prodigal son had just returned home. And served them a coffee that definitely wasn’t the reason why foreign visitors had recently started to count Oslo among the best cities in the world for coffee.

‘Sorry it didn’t work out with you and Bjørn,’ Harry said.

‘Yeah.’ Katrine didn’t know if he wanted her to elaborate. Or if she wanted to elaborate. So she just shrugged.

‘Yeah,’ Harry said, and raised his cup to his lips. ‘So what’s it like being single again?’

‘Curious about the single life?’

He laughed. And she realised she’d missed that laugh. She’d missed making him laugh, it felt like a reward every time she managed it.

‘Single life is fine,’ she said. ‘I’m seeing guys.’ She looked for a reaction. Was she hoping for a reaction?

‘Well, I hope Bjørn’s seeing people too, for his sake.’

She nodded. But she hadn’t really given it much thought. And, like an ironic comment, the cheery ping indicating a Tinder match rang out, and Katrine saw a woman dressed in desperation red hurry towards the door.

‘Why are you back, Harry? The last thing you said to me was that you were never going to work on another murder.’

Harry turned his coffee cup. ‘Bellman threatened to get Oleg thrown out of Police College.’

Katrine shook her head. ‘Bellman really is the biggest heap of shit on two legs since the Emperor Nero. He wants me to tell the press that this is an almost impossible case. To make him look better when we solve it.’

Harry looked at his watch. ‘Well, maybe Bellman’s right. A murderer who bites people with iron teeth and drinks half a litre of blood from the victim … This is probably more about the act of killing than who the victim is. And that instantly makes the case harder.’

Katrine nodded. The sun was shining on the street outside, but she still thought she could hear the rumble of thunder in the distance.

‘The pictures of Elise Hermansen from the crime scene,’ Harry said. ‘Did they remind you of anything?’

‘The bite marks on her neck? No.’

‘I don’t mean the details, I mean …’ Harry stared out of the window. ‘As a whole. Like when you hear music you’ve never heard before, by a group you don’t know, but you still know who wrote the track. Because there’s something there. Something you can’t put your finger on.’

Katrine looked at his profile. His brush of short hair was sticking up, as messily as before, but not quite as thick. His face had acquired some new lines, the wrinkles and furrows had deepened, and even if he had laughter lines around his eyes, the more brutal aspects of his appearance were more prominent. She had never understood why she thought he was so handsome.

‘No,’ she said, shaking her head.

‘OK.’

‘Harry?’

‘Mm?’

‘Is Oleg the reason you came back?’

He turned and looked at her with one eyebrow raised. ‘Why do you ask that?’

And she felt it now as she had back then, the way that look could hit her like an electric shock, the way he – a man who could be so reserved, so distant – could bulldoze everything else aside just by looking at you for a second, and demand – and get – all of your attention. In that one second there was only one man in the whole world.

‘Never mind,’ she said, and laughed. ‘Why am I asking that? Let’s get going.’

‘Ewa with a “w”. Mum and Dad wanted me to be unique. Then it turned out to be really common in those old Iron bloc countries.’ She laughed and drank a sip of her beer. Then opened her mouth and used her forefinger and thumb to wipe the lipstick from the corners of her mouth.

‘Iron Curtain and Eastern bloc,’ the man said.

‘Huh?’ She looked at him. He was quite cute. Wasn’t he? Nicer than the ones she was usually matched with. There was probably something wrong with him, something that would show up later. There usually was. ‘You’re drinking slowly,’ she said.

‘You like red.’ The man nodded towards the coat she’d draped over her chair.

‘So does that vampire guy,’ Ewa said, pointing at the news bulletin on one of the enormous televisions in the bar. The football match had ended and the bar, which had been full five minutes ago, had started to empty. She could feel she was a bit tipsy, but not too much. ‘Did you read VG? He drank her blood.’

‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘Do you know, she had her last drink a hundred metres down the road from here, at the Jealousy Bar?’

‘Is that true?’ She looked round. Most of the other customers seemed to be in groups or pairs. She had noticed one man who had been sitting on his own watching her, but he was gone now. And it wasn’t the Creep.

‘Yes, quite true. Another drink?’

‘Yes, I think I’d better,’ she said with a shiver. ‘Ugh!’

She gestured to the bartender, but he shook his head. The minute hand had just passed the magic boundary.

‘Looks like it’ll have to be another day,’ the man said.

‘Just when you’ve managed to terrify me,’ Ewa said. ‘You’ll have to walk me home now.’

‘Of course,’ the man said. ‘Tøyen, you said?’

‘Come on,’ she said, and buttoned her red coat over her red blouse.

She tottered slightly on the pavement outside, and felt him discreetly holding her up.

‘I had one of those stalkers,’ she said. ‘I call him the Creep. I met him one time, and we … well, we had quite a nice time. But when I didn’t want to take it any further, he got jealous. He started to show up in different places when I was out meeting other people.’

‘That must have been unpleasant.’

‘Yes. But it’s quite funny as well, being able to bewitch someone so that all they can think about is you.’

The man let her put her hand through his arm, and listened politely as she talked about other men she had bewitched.

‘I looked stunning, you see. So at first I wasn’t really surprised when he showed up, I just assumed he’d been following me. But then I realised that he couldn’t possibly have known where I’d be. And you know what?’ She stopped abruptly and swayed.

‘Er, no.’

‘Sometimes I had a feeling that he’d been inside my flat. You know, your brain registers how people smell and recognises them even when you’re not consciously aware of it.’

‘Sure.’

‘What if he’s this vampire?’

‘That would be quite a coincidence. Is this where you live?’

She looked up in surprise at the building in front of her. ‘It is. Goodness, that was quick.’

‘As they say, time flies when you’re in good company, Ewa. Well, this is where I say—’

‘Can’t you come up for a bit? I think I’ve got a bottle tucked away in the cupboard.’

‘I think we’ve both had enough …’

‘Just to make sure he isn’t there. Please.’

‘That’s really not very likely.’

‘Look, the light’s on in the kitchen,’ she said, pointing at one of the first-floor windows. ‘I’m sure I switched it off before I left!’

‘Are you?’ the man said, stifling a yawn.

‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘Look, I’m sorry, but I really do need to get home and go to bed.’

She stared at him coldly. ‘What’s happened to all the real gentlemen?’

He smiled tentatively. ‘Er … maybe they all went home to bed?’

‘Ha! You’re married, you succumbed to temptation, and now you regret it, is that it?’

The man looked at her thoughtfully. As if he felt sorry for her.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s it. Sleep well.’

She unlocked the front door. Went up the stairs to the first floor. Listened. She couldn’t hear anything. She didn’t know if she’d turned the kitchen light off, it was just something she’d said to get him to come with her. But now that she’d said it, it was as if she’d talked it up. Maybe the Creep really was in there.

She heard shuffling footsteps behind the door to the basement, heard the lock turn and a man in a security guard’s uniform came out. He locked the door with a white key, turned round, caught sight of her looking down and seemed to start back in surprise.

He let out a laugh. ‘I didn’t hear you. Sorry.’

‘Is there a problem?’

‘There’ve been a few break-ins in basement storerooms recently, so the housing association have ordered extra patrols.’

‘So you work for us?’ Ewa tilted her head a little. He wasn’t bad-looking. And he wasn’t as young as most other security guards either. ‘In that case, could I maybe ask you to check my flat? I’ve had a break-in too, you know. And now I can see that there’s a light on, even though I know I turned everything off before I went out.’

The guard shrugged. ‘We’re not supposed to go into people’s flats, but OK.’

‘Finally, a man who’s useful for something,’ she said, and looked him up and down once more. A grown-up security guard. Probably not all that smart, but solid, safe. And easy to handle. The common denominator for the men in her life had been that they had everything: came from good families, were looking at a decent inheritance, education, a bright future. And they had worshipped her. But sadly they had also drunk so much that their mutually bright future vanished into the depths with them. Maybe it was time to try something new. Ewa half turned away and bobbed her hip rather provocatively as she went through her keys. God, so many keys. And maybe she was a tiny bit drunker than she had thought.

She found the right one, unlocked the door, didn’t bother to kick her shoes off in the hall, and went into the kitchen. She heard the security guard follow her.

‘No one here,’ he said.

‘Except you and me,’ Ewa smiled, leaning back against the worktop.

‘Nice kitchen.’ The guard was standing in the doorway, running his hand over his uniform.

‘Thanks. If I’d known I’d be having a visitor I’d have tidied up.’

‘And maybe done the washing-up.’ Now he smiled.

‘Yeah, yeah, there are only twenty-four hours in a day.’ She brushed a lock of hair away from her face, and stumbled slightly on her high heels. ‘Would you mind checking the rest of the flat while I mix us a cocktail. What do you say?’ She put her hand on the smoothie blender.

The guard looked at his watch. ‘I need to be at the next address in twenty-five minutes, but we’ve probably got time to check if anyone’s hiding.’

‘A lot can happen in that time,’ she said.

The guard met her gaze, chuckled quietly, rubbed his chin and walked out of the room.

He headed towards what he assumed was the bedroom door, and was struck by how thin the walls were. He could make out individual words being spoken by a man in the next flat. He opened the door. Dark. He found a light switch. A weak ceiling lamp came on.

Empty. Unmade bed. Empty bottle on the bedside table.

He carried on, opened the door to the bathroom. Dirty tiles. A mouldy shower curtain pulled in front of the bath. ‘Looks like it’s safe!’ he called back towards the kitchen.

‘Sit yourself down in the living room,’ she called back.

‘OK, but I have to leave in twenty minutes.’ He went into the living room and sat down on the sagging sofa. Heard the chink of glasses in the kitchen, then her shrill voice.

‘Would you like a drink?

‘Yes.’ He thought how unpleasant her voice was, the sort of voice that could make a man wish he had a remote control. But she was voluptuous, almost a bit motherly. He fiddled with something in the pocket of his guard’s uniform, it had got caught on the lining.

‘I’ve got gin, white wine,’ the voice whined from the kitchen. Like a drill. ‘A bit of whiskey. What would you like?’

‘Something else,’ he said in a low voice to himself.

‘What did you say? I’ll bring everything!’

‘D-do, Mother,’ he whispered, freeing the metal contraption from the lining of his pocket. He put it down gently on the coffee table in front of him, where he was sure she would see it. He could feel his erection already. Then he took a deep breath. It felt like he was emptying the room of oxygen. He leaned back in the sofa and put his cowboy boots up on the table, next to the iron teeth.

Katrine Bratt let her eyes wander over the pictures in the light of the desk lamp. It was impossible to tell that they were sex offenders just by looking at them. That they had raped women, men, children, old people, in some instances torturing them, and in a few cases murdering them. OK, if you were told what they had done in the most gruesome detail, you could probably see something in the downcast and often frightened eyes in these custody photographs. But if you passed them in the street, you would walk on without having the faintest idea that you had been observed, evaluated and hopefully rejected as a victim. She recognised some of the men from her time in Sexual Offences, but not others. There were a lot of new ones. A new perpetrator was born every day. An innocent little bundle of humanity, the child’s cries drowned out by its mother’s screams, linked to life by an umbilical cord, a gift to make its parents weep with joy, a child who in later life would slice open the crotch of a bound woman while he masturbated, his hoarse groans drowned out by the woman’s screams.

Half the investigative team had started to contact these offenders, those with the most brutal records first. They were gathering and checking alibis, but hadn’t yet managed to place a single one in the vicinity of the crime scene. The other half were busy interviewing former boyfriends, friends, colleagues and relatives. The murder statistics for Norway were very clear: in eighty per cent of cases the murderer knew the victim, and in over ninety per cent if the victim was a woman killed in her own home. Even so, Katrine didn’t expect to find him in that statistic. Because Harry was right. This wasn’t that sort of murder. The identity of the victim was less important than the act itself.

They had also been through the list of offenders that Elise’s clients had testified against, but Katrine didn’t think the perpetrator – as Harry had suggested – was killing two birds with one stone: sweet revenge and sexual gratification. Gratification, though? She tried to imagine the murderer lying with one arm round the victim after the hideous act, with a cigarette in his mouth, smiling as he whispered, ‘That was wonderful.’ In marked contrast, Harry used to talk about the serial killer’s frustration at never quite being able to attain what he was after, making it necessary to keep going, in the hope that next time he would manage it, everything would be perfect, he would be delivered and born again to the sound of a screaming woman before he severed the umbilical cord to the rest of humanity.

She looked at the picture of Elise Hermansen on her bed again. Tried to see what Harry could have seen. Or heard. Music – wasn’t that what he said? She gave up and buried her face in her hands. What was it that had made her think she had the right mentality for a job like this? ‘Bipolarity is never a good starting point for anyone but artists,’ her psychiatrist had said the last time they’d met, before he wrote a fresh prescription for the little pink pills that kept her afloat.

It was almost the weekend, normal people were doing normal things, they weren’t sitting in an office looking at terrible crime-scene photographs and terrible people because they thought one of the faces might reveal something, only to move on to looking for a Tinder date to fuck and forget. But right now she desperately longed for something to connect her to normality. A Sunday lunch. When they were together, Bjørn had invited her to Sunday lunch with his parents out at Skreia several times, it was only half an hour’s drive away, but she had always found an excuse to say no. Right now, though, there was nothing she would have liked more than to be sitting round a table with her in-laws, passing the potatoes, complaining about the weather, boasting about the new sofa, chewing dried-up elk steak as the conversation ground on tediously but comfortingly, and the looks and the nods would be warm, the jokes old, the moments of irritation bearable.

‘Hi.’

Katrine jumped. There was a man standing in the doorway.

‘I’ve ticked the last of mine off the list,’ Anders Wyller said. ‘So if there’s nothing else, I’ll head home and get some sleep.’

‘Of course. Are you the only one left?’

‘Looks like it.’

‘Berntsen?’

‘He finished early. He must just be more efficient.’

‘Right,’ Katrine said, and felt like laughing, but couldn’t be bothered. ‘I’m sorry to ask you this, Wyller, but would you mind double-checking his list? I’ve a feeling—’

‘I’ve just done it. It seemed OK.’

‘It was all OK?’ Katrine had asked Wyller and Berntsen to contact the various telephone companies to get hold of lists of numbers and names of people the victim had spoken to in the past six months, then divide them up and check their alibis.

‘Yes. There was one guy in Åneby up in Nittedal, first name ending in “y”. He called Elise a few too many times early in the summer, so I double-checked his alibi.’

‘Ending in “y”?’

‘Lenny Hell. Yes, really.’

‘Wow. So do you suspect people based on the letters in their names?’

‘Among other things. It’s a fact that “-y” names are over-represented in crime statistics.’

‘And?’

‘So when I saw that Berntsen had made a note that Lenny’s alibi was that he had been with a friend at Åneby Pizza & Grill at the time Elise Hermansen was murdered, and that this could only be confirmed by the owner of the pizzeria, I called the local sheriff to hear for myself.’

‘Because the guy’s name is Lenny?’

‘Because the owner of the pizzeria’s name is Tommy.’

‘And what did the sheriff say?’

‘That Lenny and Tommy were extremely law-abiding and trustworthy citizens.’

‘So you were wrong.’

‘That remains to be seen. The sheriff’s name is Jimmy.’

Katrine laughed out loud. Realised that she needed that. Anders Wyller smiled back. Maybe she needed that smile too. Everyone tries to make a good first impression, but she had a feeling that if she hadn’t asked, Wyller wouldn’t have told her he was doing Berntsen’s work as well. And that showed that Wyller – like her – didn’t trust Truls Berntsen. There was one thought that Katrine had been trying to ignore since it first appeared, but now she changed her mind.

‘Come in and close the door behind you.’

Wyller did as she asked.

‘There’s something else I’m sorry to have to ask you to do, Wyller. The leak to VG. You’re the one who’s going to be working most closely with Berntsen. Can you …?’

‘Keep my eyes and ears open?’

Katrine sighed. ‘Something like that. This stays between us, and if you do discover something, you only talk to me about it. Understood?’

‘Understood.’

Wyller left, and Katrine waited a few moments before picking up her phone from the desk. Looked up Bjørn. She had added a photograph of him that popped up in conjunction with his number. He was smiling. Bjørn Holm was no oil painting. His face was pale, slightly puffy, his red hair eclipsed by a shining white moon. But it was Bjørn. The antidote to all these other pictures. What had she really been so scared of? If Harry Hole could manage to live with someone else, why couldn’t she? Her forefinger was getting close to the call button beside the number when the warning popped into her head again. The warning from Harry Hole and Hallstein Smith. The next one.

She put the phone down and concentrated on the pictures again.

The next one.

What if the murderer was already thinking about the next one?

‘You need to t-try harder, Ewa,’ he whispered.

He hated it when they didn’t make an effort.

When they didn’t clean their flats. When they didn’t look after their bodies. When they didn’t manage to keep hold of the man whose child they had given birth to. When they didn’t give the child any supper and locked it in the wardrobe and said it needed to be really quiet, and then it would get chocolate afterwards, while they received visits from men who were given supper, and all the chocolate, and all the things they played with, shrieking with joy, the way the mother never played with the child.

Oh no.

So the child would have to play with the mother instead. And others like the mother.

And he had played. Played hard. Up until the day when they had taken him away and locked him in another wardrobe, at Jøssingveien 33: Ila Prison and Detention Centre. The statutes said it was a facility for male prisoners from all around the country who had ‘specific intervention requirements’.

One of the faggot psychiatrists there had told him that both the rapes and his stammer were the consequence of psychological trauma while he was growing up. Idiot. He had inherited the stammer from a father he had never met. The stammer and a filthy suit. And he had dreamt of raping women for as long as he could remember. And then he had done what these women never managed. He had tried harder. He had almost stopped stammering. He had raped the female prison dentist. And he had escaped from Ila. And he had gone on playing. Harder than ever. The fact that the police were after him only gave an edge to the game. Right up to the day when he had stood face-to-face with that policeman and had seen the determination and hatred in his eyes, and had realised that this man was capable of catching him. Was capable of sending him back to the darkness of his childhood in the closed wardrobe where he tried to hold his breath so as not to have to breathe in the stench of sweat and tobacco from his father’s thick, greasy woollen suit that was hanging up in front of him, and which his mother said she was keeping in case his father showed up again one day. He knew he couldn’t handle being locked up again. So he had hidden. Had hidden from the policeman with murder in his eyes. Had sat still for three years. Three years without playing. Until that too had started to become a wardrobe. Then he had been presented with this opportunity. A chance to play safely. It shouldn’t be too safe, obviously. He needed to be able to detect the smell of fear in order to get properly turned on. Both his own and theirs. It didn’t matter how old they were, what they looked like, if they were big or small. As long as they were women. Or potential mothers, as one of the idiot psychiatrists had said. He tilted his head and looked at her. The walls of the flat may have been thin, but that no longer bothered him. Only now, when she was so close and in this light, did he notice that Ewa with a ‘w’ had little pimples around her open mouth. She was evidently trying to scream, but there was no way she was going to manage that, no matter how hard she tried. Because beneath her open mouth she had a new one. A bleeding, gaping hole in her throat where her larynx had been. He was holding her tightly against the living-room wall, and there was a gurgling sound as pink bubbles of blood burst where her severed airway protruded. Her neck muscles tensed and relaxed as she tried desperately to get air. And because her lungs were still working, she would live a few more seconds. But that wasn’t what fascinated him most right now. It was the fact that he had managed to put a conclusive stop to her insufferable chatter by biting through her vocal cords with his iron teeth.

And as the light in her eyes dimmed, he tried to find something in them that betrayed a fear of dying, a desire to live another second. But he found nothing. She ought to have tried harder. Maybe she didn’t have enough imagination. Didn’t love life enough. He hated it when they gave up on life so easily.

10

SATURDAY MORNING

HARRY WAS RUNNING. Harry didn’t like running. Some people ran because they liked it. Haruki Murakami liked it. Harry liked Murakami’s books, apart from the one about running – he had given up on that one. Harry ran because he liked stopping. He liked having run. He liked weight training: a more concrete pain that was limited by the performance of his muscles, rather than a desire to have more pain. That probably said something about the weakness of his character, his inclination to flee, to look for an end to the pain even before it had started.

A skinny dog, the sort the wealthy people of Holmenkollen kept even if they didn’t go hunting more than one weekend every other year, leapt away from the path. Its owner came jogging along a hundred metres behind it. That year’s Under Armour collection. Harry had time to notice his running technique as they approached each other like passing trains. It was a shame they weren’t running in the same direction. Harry would have tucked in behind him, breathing down his neck, then pretended to lose ground only to crush him on the climb up towards Tryvann. Would have let him see the soles of his twenty-year-old Adidas trainers.

Oleg said Harry was incredibly childish when they ran, that even though they had promised to jog calmly all the way, it would end with Harry suggesting they race up the last hill. In Harry’s defence, it should be pointed out that he was asking for a thrashing, because Oleg had inherited his mother’s unfairly high oxygen absorption rate.

Two overweight women who were more walking than running were talking and panting so loudly that they didn’t hear Harry approaching, so he turned off onto a narrower path. And suddenly he was in unknown territory. The trees grew more densely there, shutting out the morning light, and Harry had a fleeting taste of something from his childhood. The fear of getting lost and never being able to find his way back home again. Then he was out in open country again, andt he knew exactly where he was now, where home was.

Some people liked the fresh air up here, the gently rolling forest paths, the silence and smell of pine needles. Harry liked the view of the city. Liked the sound and smell of it. The feeling of being able to touch it. The certainty that you could drown in it, sink to the bottom of it. Oleg had recently asked Harry how he’d like to die. Harry had replied that he wanted to go peacefully in his sleep. Oleg had chosen suddenly and relatively painlessly. Harry had been lying. He wanted to drink himself to death in a bar in the city below them. And he knew that Oleg had also been lying – he would have chosen his former heaven and hell and taken a heroin overdose. Alcohol and heroin. Infatuations they could leave but never forget, no matter how much time passed.

Harry put in a final spurt on the driveway, heard the gravel kick up behind his trainers, caught a glimpse of fru Syvertsen behind the curtain of the house next door.

Harry showered. He liked showering. Someone ought to write a book about showering.

When he was finished he went into the bedroom, where Rakel was standing by the window in her gardening clothes: wellington boots, thick gloves, a pair of tatty jeans and a faded sun hat. She half turned towards him and brushed aside a few strands of hair sticking out from under the hat. Harry wondered if she knew how good she looked in that outfit. Probably.

‘Eek!’ she said quietly, with a smile. ‘A naked man!’

Harry went and stood behind her, put his hands on her shoulders and massaged her gently. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Looking at the windows. Should we do something about them before Emilia arrives, do you think?’

‘Emilia?’

Rakel laughed.

‘What?’

‘You stopped that massage very abruptly, darling. Relax, we’re not having visitors. Just a storm.’

‘Oh, that Emilia. I reckon this fortress could cope with a natural disaster or two.’

‘That’s what we think, living up here on the hill, isn’t it?’

‘What do we think?’

‘That our lives are like fortresses. Impregnable.’ She sighed. ‘I need to go shopping.’

‘Dinner at home? We haven’t tried that Peruvian place on Badstugata yet. It’s not that expensive.’

That was one of Harry’s bachelor habits that he’d tried to get her to adopt: not cooking dinner for themselves. She had more or less bought his argument that restaurants are one of civilisation’s better ideas. That even back in the Stone Age they had figured out that cooking and eating together was smarter than the entire population spending three hours every day planning, buying, cooking and washing-up. When she objected that it felt a bit decadent, he had replied that ordinary families installing kitchens that cost a million kroner, that was decadent. That the most healthy, un-decadent use of resources was to pay trained cooks what they deserved to prepare food in large kitchens, so that they could pay for Rakel’s help as a lawyer, or Harry’s work training police officers.

‘It’s my day today, so I’ll pay,’ he said, catching hold of her right arm. ‘Stay with me.’

‘I need to go shopping,’ she said, and grimaced as he pulled her towards his still damp body. ‘Oleg and Helga are coming.’

He held her even tighter. ‘Are they? I thought you said we weren’t having visitors.’

‘Surely you can cope with a couple of hours with Oleg and—’

‘I’m joking. It’ll be nice. But shouldn’t we—?’

‘No, we’re not taking them to a restaurant. Helga hasn’t been here before, and I want to get a proper look at her.’

‘Poor Helga,’ Harry whispered, and was about to nip Rakel’s earlobe with his teeth when he saw something between her breast and her neck.

‘What’s that?’ He put the tip of his finger very gently on a red mark.

‘What?’ she asked, feeling for herself. ‘Oh, that. The doctor took a blood sample.’

‘From your neck?’

‘Don’t ask me why.’ She smiled. ‘You look so sweet when you’re worried.’

‘I’m not worried,’ Harry said. ‘I’m jealous. This is my neck, and of course we know you’ve got a weakness for doctors.’

She laughed, and he held her closer.

‘No,’ she said.

‘No?’ he said, and heard her breathing suddenly get deeper. Felt her body somehow give in.

‘Bastard,’ she groaned. Rakel was troubled by what she herself called a ‘very short sex fuse’, and swearing was the most obvious sign.

‘Maybe we should stop now,’ he whispered, letting go of her. ‘The garden calls.’

‘Too late,’ she hissed.

He unbuttoned her jeans and pushed them and her pants down to her knees, just above her boots. She leaned forward and grabbed hold of the windowsill with one hand, and was about to take the sun hat off with the other.

‘No,’ he whispered, leaning forward so that his head was next to hers. ‘Leave it on.’

Her low, burbling laugh tickled his ear. God, how he loved that laugh. Another sound merged into the laughter. The buzz of a vibrating phone that was lying next to her hand on the windowsill.

‘Throw it on the bed,’ he whispered, averting his eyes from the screen.

‘It’s Katrine Bratt,’ she said.

Rakel pulled her trousers up as she watched him.

There was a look of intense concentration on his face.

‘How long?’ he asked. ‘I see.’

She saw him disappear from her at the sound of the other woman’s voice on the phone. She wanted to reach out to him, but it was too late, he was already gone. The thin, naked body with muscles that twined like roots beneath his pale skin, it was still there, right in front of her. The blue eyes, their colour almost washed out after years of alcohol abuse, were still fixed on her. But he was no longer seeing her, his gaze was focused somewhere inside himself. He had told her why he had had to take the case the previous evening. She hadn’t protested. Because if Oleg was thrown out of Police College he might lose his footing again. And if it came to a choice between losing Harry or Oleg, she would rather lose Harry. She’d had several years’ training at losing Harry, she knew she could survive without him. She didn’t know if she could survive without her son. But while he had been explaining that it was for Oleg’s sake, an echo of something he had said recently drifted through her head: There may come a day when I really need to lie, and then it might be handy if you think I’m honest.

‘I’ll come now,’ Harry said. ‘What’s the address?’

Harry ended the call and started to get dressed. Quickly, efficiently, each movement carefully measured. Like a machine that’s finally doing what it was built for. Rakel studied him, memorising everything, the way you memorise a lover you’re not going to be seeing for a while.

He walked quickly past Rakel without looking at her, without a word of farewell. She was already sidelined, pushed from his consciousness by one of his two lovers. Alcohol and murder. And this was the one she feared the most.

Harry was standing outside the orange-and-white police cordon when a window on the first floor of the building in front of him opened. Katrine Bratt stuck her head out.

‘Let him through,’ she called to the young uniformed officer who was blocking his way.

‘He hasn’t got any ID,’ the officer protested.

‘That’s Harry Hole!’ Katrine shouted.

‘Is it?’ The policeman quickly looked him up and down before raising the cordon tape. ‘I thought he was a myth,’ he said.

Harry went up the steps to the open door of the flat. Inside, he followed the path between the crime-scene investigators’ little white flags, marking where they had found something. Two forensics officers were on their knees picking at a gap in the wooden floor.

‘Where …?’

‘In there,’ one of them said.

Harry stopped outside the door indicated by the officer. Took a deep breath and emptied his mind of thoughts. Then he went in.

‘Good morning, Harry,’ Bjørn Holm said.

‘Can you move?’ Harry said in a low voice.

Bjørn took one step away from the sofa he had been leaning over, revealing the body. Instead of moving closer, Harry took a step back. The scene. The composition. The whole. Then he went closer and started to note the details. The woman was sitting on the sofa, with her legs spread in such a way that her skirt had slid up to show her black underwear. Her head was resting against the back of the sofa, so that her long, bleached blonde hair hung down behind it. Some of her throat was missing.

‘She was killed over there,’ Bjørn said, pointing at the wall beside the window. Harry’s eyes slid across the wallpaper and bare wooden floor.

‘Less blood,’ Harry said. ‘He didn’t bite through the carotid artery this time.’

‘Maybe he missed it,’ Katrine said, coming in from the kitchen.

‘If he bit her, he’s got strong jaws,’ Bjørn said. ‘The average force of a human bite is seventy kilos, but he seems to have removed her larynx and part of her windpipe in one bite. Even with sharpened metal teeth, that would take a lot of strength.’

‘Or a lot of rage,’ Harry said. ‘Can you see any rust or paint in the wound?’

‘No, but perhaps anything that was loose came off when he bit Elise Hermansen.’

‘Hm. Possibly, unless he didn’t use the iron teeth this time, but something else. The body wasn’t moved to the bed either.’

‘I see what you’re getting at, Harry, but it is the same perpetrator,’ Katrine said. ‘Come and see.’

Harry followed her back to the kitchen. One of the forensics officers was taking samples from the inside of the glass jug from a blender that was standing in the sink.

‘He made a smoothie,’ Katrine said.

Harry swallowed and looked at the jug. The inside of it was red.

‘Using blood. And some lemons he found in the fridge, from the looks of it.’ She pointed at the yellow strips of peel on the worktop.

Harry felt nausea rising. And thought that it was like your first drink, the one that made you sick. Two more drinks and it was impossible to stop. He nodded and walked out again. He took a quick look at the bathroom and bedroom before going back into the living room. He closed his eyes and listened. The woman, the position of the body, the way she had been displayed. The way Elise Hermansen had been displayed. And there it was, the echo. It was him. It had to be him.

When he opened his eyes again, he found himself looking directly into the face of a fair-haired young man he thought he recognised.

‘Anders Wyller,’ the young man said. ‘Detective.’

‘Of course,’ Harry said. ‘You graduated from Police College a year ago? Two years?’

‘Two years ago.’

‘Congratulations on getting top marks.’

‘Thanks. That’s impressive, remembering what marks I got.’

‘I don’t remember a thing, it was a deduction. You’re working at Crime Squad as a detective after just two years of service.’

Anders Wyller smiled. ‘Just say if I’m in the way, and I’ll go. The thing is, I’ve only been here two and a half days, and if this is a double murder, no one’s going to have time to teach me anything for a while. So I was wondering about asking if I could shadow you for a bit. But only if it’s OK?’

Harry looked at the young man. Remembered him coming to his office, full of questions. So many questions, sometimes so irrelevant that you might have thought he was a Holehead. Holehead was college slang for students who had fallen for the myth of Harry Hole, which in a few extreme cases was the main reason why they had enrolled. Harry avoided them like the plague. But, Holehead or not, Harry realised that with those grades, as well as his ambition, smile and unforced social skills, Anders Wyller was going to go far. And before Anders Wyller went far, a talented young man like him might have time to do a bit of good, such as helping to solve a few murders.

‘OK,’ Harry said. ‘The first lesson is that you’re going to be disappointed in your colleagues.’

‘Disappointed?’

‘You’re standing there all drilled and proud because you think you’ve made it to the top of the police food chain. So the first lesson is that murder detectives are pretty much the same as everyone else. We aren’t especially intelligent, some of us are even a bit stupid. We make mistakes, a lot of mistakes, and we don’t learn a great deal from them. When we get tired, sometimes we choose to sleep instead of carrying on with the hunt, even though we know that the solution could be just around the next corner. So if you think we’re going to open your eyes, inspire you and show you a whole new world of ingenious investigative skills, you’re going to be disappointed.’

‘I know all that already.’

‘Really?’

‘I’ve spent two days working with Truls Berntsen. I just want to know how you work.’

‘You took my course in murder investigation.’

‘And I know you don’t work like that. What were you thinking?’

‘Thinking?’

‘Yes, when you stood there with your eyes closed. I don’t think that was part of the course.’

Harry saw that Bjørn had straightened up. That Katrine was standing in the doorway with her arms folded, nodding in encouragement.

‘OK,’ Harry said. ‘Everyone has their own method. Mine is to try to get in touch with the thoughts that go through your brain the first time you enter a crime scene. All the apparently insignificant connections the brain makes automatically when we absorb impressions the first time we visit a place. Thoughts that we forget so quickly because we don’t have time to attach meaning to them before our attention is grabbed by something else, like a dream that vanishes when you wake up and start to take in all the other things around you. Nine times out of ten those thoughts are useless. But you always hope that the tenth one might mean something.’

‘What about now?’ Wyller said. ‘Do any of the thoughts mean anything?’

Harry paused. Saw the absorbed look on Katrine’s face. ‘I don’t know. But I can’t help thinking that the murderer has a thing about cleanliness.’

‘Cleanliness?’

‘He moved his last victim from the place where he killed her to the bed. Serial killers usually do things in roughly the same way, so why did he leave this woman in the living room? The only difference between this bedroom and Elise Hermansen’s is that here the bedclothes are dirty. I inspected Hermansen’s flat yesterday when Forensics picked up the sheets. It smelt of lavender.’

‘So he committed necrophilia with this woman in the living room because he can’t deal with dirty sheets?’

‘We’re coming to that,’ Harry said. ‘Have you seen the blender in the kitchen? OK, so you saw that he put it in the sink after he used it?’

‘What?’

‘The sink,’ Katrine said. ‘Youngsters don’t know about washing up by hand, Harry.’

‘The sink,’ Harry said. ‘He didn’t have to put it there, he wasn’t going to do any washing-up. So maybe it was a compulsive act, maybe he has an obsession with cleanliness? A phobia of bacteria? People who commit serial killings often suffer from a whole host of phobias. But he didn’t finish the job, he didn’t do the washing-up, he didn’t even run the tap and fill the jug with water so that the remnants of his blood-and-lemon smoothie would be easier to wash off later. Why not?’

Anders Wyller shook his head.

‘OK, we’ll come back to that, too,’ Harry said, then nodded towards the body. ‘As you can see, this woman—’

‘A neighbour has identified her as Ewa Dolmen,’ Katrine said. ‘Ewa with a “w”.’

‘Thanks. Ewa is, as you can see, still wearing her knickers, unlike Elise, whom he undressed. There are empty tampon wrappers at the top of the bin in the bathroom, so I assume that Ewa was on her period. Katrine, can you take a look?’

‘The forensics officer is on her way.’

‘Just to see if I’m right, and the tampon is still there.’

Katrine frowned. Then did as Harry asked while the three men looked away.

‘Yes, I can see the string from a tampon.’

Harry pulled a pack of Camels from his pocket. ‘Which means that the murderer – assuming he didn’t insert the tampon himself – didn’t rape her vaginally. Because he’s …’ Harry pointed at Anders Wyller with a cigarette.

‘Obsessed with cleanliness,’ Wyller said.

‘That’s one possibility, anyway,’ Harry went on. ‘The other is that he doesn’t like blood.’

‘Doesn’t like blood?’ Katrine said. ‘He drinks it, for God’s sake.’

‘With lemon,’ Harry said, putting the unlit cigarette to his lips.

‘What?’

‘I’m asking myself the same question,’ Harry said. ‘What? What does that mean? That the blood was too sweet?’

‘Are you trying to be funny?’ Katrine asked.

‘No, I just think it’s odd that a man we think seeks sexual gratification by drinking blood doesn’t take his favourite drink neat. People add lemon to gin, and to fish, because they claim it makes the taste more pronounced. But that’s wrong, lemon paralyses the taste buds and drowns everything else. We add lemon to hide the taste of something we don’t actually like. Cod liver oil started to sell much better when they began to add lemon. So maybe our vampirist doesn’t like the taste of blood, maybe his consumption of blood is also a compulsion.’

‘Maybe he’s superstitious and drinks to absorb his victims’ strength,’ Wyller said.

‘He certainly seems to be driven by sexual depravity, yet appears able to refrain from touching this woman’s genitals. And that could be because she’s bleeding.’

‘A vampirist who can’t bear menstrual blood,’ Katrine said. ‘The tangled pathways of the human mind …’

‘Which brings us back to the glass jug,’ Harry said. ‘Have we got any other physical evidence left by the perpetrator, apart from that?’

‘The front door,’ Bjørn said.

‘The door?’ Harry said. ‘I took a look at the lock when I arrived, and it looked untouched.’

‘Not a break-in. You haven’t seen the outside of it.’

The other three were standing out in the stairwell, looking on as Bjørn untied the rope that had been holding the door open, back against the wall. It swung slowly shut, revealing its front.

Harry looked. Felt his heart beating hard in his chest as his mouth went dry.

‘I tied the door back so that none of you touched it when you arrived,’ Bjørn said.

On the door the letter ‘v’ was written in blood, about a metre high. It was uneven at the bottom where the blood had run.

The four of them stared at the door.

Bjørn was the first to break the silence. ‘V for victory?’

‘V for vampirist,’ Katrine said.

‘Unless he was just ticking off another victim,’ Wyller suggested.

They looked at Harry.

‘Well?’ Katrine said impatiently.

‘I don’t know,’ Harry said.

The sharp look returned to her eyes. ‘Come on, I can see that you’re thinking something.’

‘Mm. V for vampirist might not be a bad suggestion. It could fit with the fact that he’s putting a lot of effort into telling us precisely this.’

‘Precisely what?’

‘That he’s something special. The iron teeth, the blender, this letter. He regards himself as unique, and is giving us the pieces of the puzzle so that we too will appreciate that. He wants us to get closer.’

Katrine nodded.

Wyller hesitated, as if he realised that his time to speak had passed, but still ventured: ‘You mean that deep down the murderer wants to reveal who he is?’

Harry didn’t answer.

‘Not who he is, but what,’ Katrine said. ‘He’s raising a flag.’

‘Can I ask what that means?’

‘Of course,’ Katrine said. ‘Ask our expert on serial killers.’

Harry was looking at the letter. It was no longer an echo of a scream, it was the scream itself. The scream of a demon.

‘It means …’ Harry flicked his lighter and held it to his cigarette, then inhaled deeply. He let the smoke out again. ‘He wants to play.’

‘You think the V stands for something else,’ Katrine said when she and Harry left the flat an hour later.

‘Do I?’ Harry said, looking along the street. Tøyen. The immigrant district. Narrow streets, Pakistani carpet shops, cobblestones, Norwegian-language teachers on bikes, Turkish cafes, swaying mothers in hijabs, youngsters getting by on student loans, a tiny record shop pushing vinyl and hard rock. Harry loved Tøyen. So much so that he couldn’t help wondering what he was doing up in the hills with the bourgeoisie.

‘You just didn’t want to say it out loud,’ Katrine said.

‘Do you know what my grandfather used to say when he caught me swearing? “If you call for the devil, he’ll come.” So …’

‘So, what?’

‘Do you want the devil to come?’

‘We’ve got a double murder, Harry, maybe a serial killer. Can it really get any worse?’

‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘It can.’

11

SATURDAY EVENING

‘WE’RE ASSUMING THAT we’re dealing with a serial killer,’ Detective Inspector Katrine Bratt said, and looked out at the conference room and her entire investigative team. Plus Harry. They had agreed that he would participate in meetings until he’d set up his own group.

There was a different, more focused atmosphere than during their previous meetings. This was obviously to do with the development of the case, but Katrine was pretty sure that Harry’s presence also made a difference. He may well have been Crime Squad’s drunk, arrogant enfant terrible, someone who had directly or indirectly caused the deaths of other officers, and whose working methods were highly questionable. But he still made them sit up and pay attention. Because he still had the same dour, almost frightening charisma, and his achievements were beyond question. Off the top of her head, she could only think of one person he had failed to catch. Maybe Harry was right when he said that longevity bestowed respect, even upon a whorehouse madam if she kept going for long enough.

‘This sort of perpetrator is very difficult to find for a number of reasons, but primarily because – as in this case – he plans carefully, chooses his victims at random, and doesn’t leave any evidence at the scene except what he wants us to find. That’s why the folders in front of you containing the analysis from Forensics, the forensics medical officer and our own tactical analysts is so thin. We still haven’t managed to link any known sex offender to Elise Hermansen or Ewa Dolmen, or either of the crime scenes. But we have managed to identify the methodology behind the murders. Tord?’

The IT expert let out a short, inappropriate laugh, as if he had found what Katrine had said funny, before saying: ‘Ewa Dolmen sent a message from her mobile phone which tells us that she had a Tinder date at a sports bar called Dicky’s.’

‘Dicky’s?’ Magnus Skarre exclaimed. ‘That’s more or less opposite the Jealousy Bar.’

A collective groan ran round the room.

‘So we could be on to something, if the murderer’s MO is to use Tinder and arrange to meet in Grünerløkka,’ Katrine said.

‘What, though?’ one of the detectives asked.

‘An idea of how it might happen next time.’

‘What if there isn’t a next time?’

Katrine took a deep breath. ‘Harry?’

Harry rocked back on his chair. ‘Well, serial killers who are still learning the ropes usually leave a long gap between their first murders. It can be months, years, even. The classic pattern is that after a killing there’s a cooling-down period, before his sexual frustration starts to build up again. These cycles typically get shorter and shorter between each murder. With a cycle that’s already as short as two days, it’s tempting to assume that this isn’t the first time he’s committed this type of offence.’

A silence followed, during which everyone waited for him to go on. He didn’t.

Katrine cleared her throat. ‘The problem is that we can’t find any serious crimes in Norway during the past five years that show any similarities to these two murders. We’ve checked with Interpol to see if it’s possible that any likely perpetrator may have switched hunting grounds and moved to Norway. There are a dozen candidates, but none of them appears to have moved recently. So we have no idea who he is. But we do know that experience indicates that it’s likely to happen again. And in this case, soon.’

‘How soon?’ a voice asked.

‘Hard to say,’ Katrine said, glancing at Harry, who discreetly held up one finger. ‘But the gap could be as short as one day.’

‘And there’s nothing we can do to stop him?’

Katrine shifted her weight to the other foot. ‘We’ve contacted the Chief of Police to ask for permission to issue a public warning in conjunction with the press conference at 1800 hours. With a bit of luck the perpetrator will cancel or at least postpone any plans for another murder if he thinks people are going to be more wary.’

‘Would he really do that?’ Wolff wondered.

‘I think—’ Katrine began, but was interrupted.

‘With all due respect, Bratt, I was asking Hole.’

Katrine swallowed and tried not to get annoyed. ‘What do you say, Harry? Would a public warning stop him?’

‘I don’t know,’ Harry said. ‘Forget what you’ve seen on television, serial killers aren’t robots with the same software who follow the same pattern of behaviour, they’re as diverse and unpredictable as everyone else.’

‘Smart answer, Hole.’ Everyone in the room turned towards the door, where the new arrival, Police Chief Bellman, was leaning against the door frame with his arms folded. ‘No one knows what effect a public warning might have. Maybe it would only encourage this sick murderer, give him a feeling that he’s in control of the situation, that he’s invulnerable and can just carry on. But what we do know, on the other hand, is that a public warning would give the impression that we here at Police Headquarters have lost control of the situation. And the only people who would be scared by that are the city’s inhabitants. More scared, we should probably say, because – as those of you who have read what the papers have been saying online in the past few hours will have noticed – there is already a lot of speculation about these two murders being linked. So I have a better suggestion.’ Mikael Bellman pulled at his shirtsleeves so that the white cuffs stuck out from the sleeves of his jacket. ‘And that is that we catch this guy before he does any more damage.’ He smiled at them all. ‘What do you say, good people?’

Katrine saw a few of them nod their heads.

‘Good,’ Bellman said. ‘Carry on, Detective Inspector Bratt.’

The bells of the City Hall signalled that it was eight o’clock as an unmarked police car, a VW Passat, drove slowly past.

‘That was the worst fucking press conference I’ve ever held,’ Katrine said as she steered the Passat towards Dronning Mauds gate.

‘Twenty-nine times,’ Harry said.

‘What?’

‘You said “We can’t comment on that” twenty-nine times,’ Harry said. ‘I counted.’

‘I was so close to saying “Sorry, the Chief of Police has muzzled us”. What’s Bellman playing at? No warning, no saying we’ve got a serial killer on the loose and that people should watch out?’

‘He’s right when he says it would spread irrational fear.’

‘Irrational?’ Katrine snapped. ‘Look around you! It’s Saturday night, and half the women you can see wandering about are on their way to meet a man they don’t know, a prince they hope will change their lives. And if your idea of a gap of a single day is correct, one of them is going to be really fucking right about that.’

‘Did you know there was a serious bus crash in the centre of London the same day as the terror attacks in Paris? Almost as many people were killed as in Paris. Norwegians who had friends in Paris started calling, worried they might be among the dead. But no one was particularly worried about their friends in London. After the terror attacks people were frightened of going to Paris, even though the police there were on high alert. No one was worried about travelling by bus in London even though traffic safety hadn’t improved.’

‘What’s your point?’

‘That people are more scared than the likelihood of meeting a vampirist ought to make them. Because it’s all over the front pages of the newspapers, and because they’ve read that he drinks blood. But at the same time they light cigarettes that are pretty much certain to kill them.’

‘So tell me, do you actually agree with Bellman?’

‘No,’ Harry said, gazing out at the street. ‘I’m just musing. Because I’m trying to put myself in Bellman’s shoes to work out what he wants. Bellman always has something in mind.’

‘And what is it this time?’

‘I don’t know. But he wants this kept as low-key as possible, and solved as fast as possible. Like a boxer defending his title.’

‘What are you talking about now, Harry?’

‘Once you’ve got hold of a belt, you really want to try to avoid fights. Because the best thing you can achieve is holding on to what you’ve already got.’

‘Interesting theory. What about that other theory of yours?’

‘I said I wasn’t sure.’

‘He painted the letter V on Ewa Dolmen’s door. That’s his initial, Harry. And you said you recognised the crime scene from when he was active.’

‘Yes, but like I said, I can’t put my finger on what it is that I recognised.’ Harry paused as a split-second shot of a neutral street scene flashed through his mind.

‘Katrine, listen: biting throats, iron teeth, drinking blood – that isn’t his MO. Serial attackers and murderers might be unpredictable when it comes to details, but they don’t change their whole MO.’

‘He’s got a lot of different MOs, Harry.’

‘He likes pain, and he likes their fear. Not blood.’

‘You said the killer put lemon in the blood because he didn’t like it.’

‘Katrine, it wouldn’t even help us to know that it is him. How long have you and Interpol been looking for him now?’

‘Getting on for four years.’

‘That’s why I think it would be counterproductive to tell the others about my suspicions and risk the investigation narrowing down to focus on just one person.’

‘Or else you want to catch him yourself.’

‘What?’

‘He’s the reason you’re back, isn’t he, Harry? You got his scent right from the start. Oleg was just an excuse.’

‘We’re dropping this conversation now, Katrine.’

‘Because Bellman would never have gone public about Oleg’s past – the fact that he hadn’t done anything before now would bounce back and hit him.’

Harry turned the radio up. ‘Heard this one? Aurora Aksnes, it’s pretty …’

‘You hate synth-pop, Harry.’

‘I like it more than this conversation.’

Katrine sighed. They pulled up at a red light. She leaned forward towards the windscreen.

‘Look. It’s a full moon.’

‘It’s a full moon,’ Mona Daa said, looking out of the kitchen window at the rolling fields. The moonlight made it look like they were shimmering, as if they were covered with fresh snow. ‘Does that increase the likelihood of him striking for a third time as early as tonight, do you think?’

Hallstein Smith smiled. ‘Hardly. From what you’ve told me about the two murders, this vampirist’s paraphilias are necrophilia and sadism rather than mythomania or any delusion that he’s a supernatural being. But he will strike again, that much is certain.’

‘Interesting.’ Mona Daa was writing in her notebook, which was lying on the kitchen table next to the cup of freshly brewed green chilli tea. ‘And where and when will that happen, do you think?’

‘You said the second woman had also been on a Tinder date?’

Mona Daa nodded as she continued to take notes. Most of her colleagues used recording devices, but – even though she was the youngest of the crime reporters – she preferred to do it the old-fashioned way. Her official explanation was that in the race to be first with the news, she saved time in comparison to the others because she edited her stories while taking notes. That was a particular advantage when she was covering press conferences. Although this afternoon at Police HQ you could have managed without a Dictaphone or notebook. Katrine Bratt’s refrain of ‘We can’t comment’ had eventually managed to provoke even the most experienced crime reporters.

‘We haven’t printed anything about it being a Tinder date in the paper yet, but we’ve received a tip-off from a source in the police saying that Ewa Dolmen had sent a text message to a friend telling her that she was on a Tinder date at Dicky’s in Grünerløkka.’

‘Right.’ Smith adjusted his glasses. ‘I’m pretty sure he’ll stick to the method that’s proved successful for him so far.’

‘So what would you say to people who are thinking of meeting new men via Tinder over the next few days?’

‘That they ought to wait until the vampirist is caught.’

‘But do you think he’ll go on using Tinder himself after he’s read this and realised that everyone knows that’s his method?’

‘This is a psychosis, he won’t let himself be stopped by rational considerations when it comes to risk. This isn’t a classic serial killer, calmly planning what he does, a cold-blooded psychopath who doesn’t leave any evidence, who hides in corners spinning his web and taking his time between murders.’

‘Our source says the detectives leading the investigation believe he is a classic serial killer.’

‘This is a different sort of madness. The murder is less important to him than the biting, the blood – that’s what’s driving him. And all he wants is to carry on, he’s on a roll now, his psychosis is fully developed. The hope is that he – unlike the classic serial killer – actually wants to be identified and caught because he’s so out of control, so indifferent to being found. The classic serial killer and the vampirist are both natural disasters in the sense that they are perfectly ordinary people who happen to be mentally ill. But while the serial killer is a storm that can rage and rage and you don’t know when it’s over, the vampirist is like a landslide. It’s over after a very short time. But in that time he could have wiped out an entire community, OK?’

‘OK,’ Mona said, scribbling away. Wipe out an entire community. ‘Well, thanks very much, I’ve got all I need.’

‘Don’t mention it. I’m actually surprised that you came out here for so little.’

Mona Daa opened her iPad. ‘We had to come anyway, to get a picture, so I came along as well. Will?’

‘I was thinking of taking a picture out on the field,’ the photographer said, having sat quietly and listened to the interview. ‘You, the open landscape and the light of the moon.’

Mona knew exactly what the photographer was thinking, of course. Man alone outside in the dark, full moon, vampire. She nodded almost imperceptibly to him. Sometimes it was best not to tell the subject of a photograph what your ideas were, because then you only ran the risk of them objecting.

‘Any chance my wife can be in the picture too?’ Smith wondered, looking rather taken aback. ‘VG … this is a pretty big deal for us.’

Mona Daa couldn’t help smiling. Sweet. For a moment an idea flashed through her head, of them taking a picture of the psychologist biting his wife’s neck to illustrate the case, but that would obviously be taking it too far, too much slapstick for a serious murder story.

‘My editor would probably prefer to have you on your own,’ she said.

‘I understand, I just had to ask.’

‘I’ll stay here and write, then maybe we can get it up on the website before we leave. Have you got Wi-Fi?’

She got the password, freudundgammen, and was already halfway through by the time she saw the camera flash out on the field.

The unofficial explanation of why she avoided recordings was that they were incontrovertible evidence of what had really been said. Not that Mona Daa ever consciously wrote anything that contradicted what she believed her interviewee had meant. But it gave her the freedom to emphasise certain points. Translating quotes into a tabloid form that the readers would understand. And would click to read.

PSYCHOLOGIST: VAMPIRIST CAN WIPE OUT WHOLE CITIES!

She glanced at the time. Truls Berntsen had said he’d call at ten o’clock if anything new had cropped up.

‘I don’t like science-fiction films,’ said the man sitting opposite Penelope Rasch. ‘The most irritating thing is the sound as the spaceship passes the camera.’ He pursed his lips and made a quick whooshing sound. ‘There’s no air in space, there’s no sound, just complete silence. We’re being lied to.’

‘Amen,’ Penelope said, and raised her glass of mineral water.

‘I like Alejandro González Iñárritu,’ the man said, raising his own glass of water. ‘I prefer Biutiful and Babel to Birdman and The Revenant. I’m afraid he’s getting a bit mainstream now.’

Penelope felt a little shiver of pleasure. Not so much because he had just mentioned both her favourite films, but because he had included Iñárritu’s rarely used middle name. And he had already mentioned her favourite author (Cormac McCarthy) and city (Florence).

The door opened. They had been the only customers in the neglected little restaurant he had suggested, but now another couple walked in. He turned round. Not towards the door to look, but away from it. And she got a couple of seconds in which to study him unobserved. She had already noted that he was slim, about the same height as her, well mannered, nicely dressed. But was he attractive? It was hard to say. He certainly wasn’t ugly, but there was something slippery about him. And something made her doubt he was as young as the forty years he claimed to be. His skin looked tight around his eyes and neck, as if he’d had a facelift.

‘I didn’t know this restaurant was here,’ she said. ‘Very quiet.’

‘T-too quiet?’ he smiled.

‘It’s nice.’

‘Next time we can go to this place I know that serves Kirin beer and black rice,’ he said. ‘If you like that.’

She very nearly squealed. This was fantastic. How could he know that she loved black rice? Most of her friends didn’t know it even existed. Roar had hated it, he said it tasted of health-food shops and snobbery. And, to be fair, those were both fair accusations: black rice contained more antioxidants than blueberries and was served alongside the forbidden sushi that was reserved for the emperor and his family.

‘I love it,’ she said. ‘What else do you like?’

‘My job,’ he said.

‘Which is?’

‘I’m a visual artist.’

‘How exciting! What …?’

‘Installations.’

‘Roar – my ex – he was a visual artist too, perhaps you know him?’

‘I doubt it, I operate outside conventional artistic circles. And I’m self-taught, so to speak.’

‘But if you can make a living as an artist, it’s odd that I haven’t heard of you. Oslo’s so small.’

‘I do other things to survive.’

‘Such as?’

‘Caretaker.’

‘But you exhibit?’

‘It’s mostly private installations for a professional clientele, where the press aren’t invited.’

‘Wow. It sounds great that you’re able to be exclusive. I told Roar that he ought to try that. What do you use in your installations?’

He wiped his glass with a napkin. ‘Models.’

‘Models as in … living people?’

He smiled. ‘Both. Tell me about yourself, Penelope. What do you like?’

She put a finger under her chin. Yes, what did she like? Right now she had a sense that he had covered everything.

‘I like people,’ she said. ‘And honesty. And my family. Children.’

‘And being held, tight,’ he said, glancing over at the couple who were sitting two tables away from them.

‘Sorry?’

‘You like being held tight, and playing rough games.’ He leaned across the table. ‘I can see it in you, Penelope. And that’s fine, I like that too. This place is starting to get a bit crowded, so shall we go back to yours?’

It took Penelope a moment to realise that it wasn’t a joke. She looked down and saw that he had put his hand so close to hers that their fingertips were almost touching. She swallowed. What was it about her that meant she always ended up with nutters? It was her friends who had suggested that the best way to get over Roar was to meet other men. And she had tried, but they were either bumbling, socially inadequate IT nerds where she had to do all the talking, or men like this one, who were only after a quick shag.

‘I think I’ll go home alone,’ she said, and looked around for the waiter. ‘I’m happy to settle up.’ They had barely been there twenty minutes, but according to her friends, that was the third, and most important, rule of Tinder: Don’t play games, leave if you don’t click.

‘I can manage two bottles of mineral water,’ the man smiled, and tugged gently at his pale blue shirt collar. ‘Run, Cinderella.’

‘In that case, thank you.’

Penelope picked up her bag and hurried out. The sharp autumn air felt good against her warm cheeks. She crossed Bogstadveien. Because it was Saturday night the streets were full of happy people and there was a queue at the taxi rank. Which was just as well – the price of taxis in Oslo was so high that she avoided them unless it was pouring with rain. She passed Sorgenfrigata, where she had once dreamt that she and Roar would some day live in one of the lovely buildings. They had agreed that the flat didn’t need to be more than seventy or eighty square metres in size, as long as it had been recently renovated, the bathroom at least. They knew that it would be incredibly expensive, but both her and Roar’s parents had promised to help out financially. And by ‘help out’ they obviously meant paying for the whole flat. She was, after all, a recently qualified designer on the hunt for a job, and the art market hadn’t yet discovered Roar’s immense talent. Except that bitch of a gallery owner who had set her trap for him. After Roar moved out, Penelope had been convinced that he would see through the woman, realise she was a wrinkled puma who just wanted a young trophy boyfriend to play with for a while. But that hadn’t happened. On the contrary, they had just announced their engagement in the form of a hideous art installation made of candyfloss.

At the metro station in Majorstua Penelope took the first train heading west. She got off at Hovseter, known as the eastern edge of the west side of the city. A cluster of apartment blocks and relatively cheap flats where she and Roar had rented the cheapest they could find. The bathroom was disgusting.

Roar had tried to console her by giving her a copy of Patti Smith’s Just Kids, an autobiographical account of two ambitious artists living on hope, air and love in New York in the early 1970s, and who obviously end up making a success of things. OK, they lost each other along the way, but …

She walked from the station towards the building rising up in front of her, which looked like it had a halo. Penelope realised that there was a full moon tonight, that must be what was glowing behind the building. Four. She had slept with four men since Roar left her, eleven months and thirteen days ago. Two of them had been better than Roar, two worse. But she didn’t love Roar for the sex. But because … well, because he was Roar, the bastard.

She found herself quickening her pace as she passed the little clump of trees on the left-hand side of the road. The streets of Hovseter grew empty early each evening, but Penelope was a tall, fit young woman, and until now it hadn’t even occurred to her that it might be dangerous to walk here after dark. Perhaps it was because of that murderer who was in all the papers. No, it wasn’t that. It was because someone had been inside her flat. It was three months ago now, and at first she had dared to hope that Roar had come back. She realised someone had been there when she found mud in the hallway that didn’t match her shoes. And when she found some more in the bedroom, in front of the chest of drawers, she had counted her knickers in the idiotic hope that Roar had taken a pair. But no, that didn’t seem to be the case. Then she realised what was missing. The engagement ring in its box, the one Roar had bought her in London. Could it just have been a run-of-the-mill burglary, after all? No, it was Roar. He had snuck in and taken it, and had given it to that bitch of a gallery owner! Naturally, Penelope had been furious, and had called Roar and confronted him with it. But he swore he hadn’t been back, and claimed to have lost the keys to the flat during the move, because otherwise he would have posted them to her. A lie, of course, like everything else, but she had still gone to the effort of getting the locks changed, both the front door and the door to her flat on the fourth floor.

Penelope took her keys out of her handbag – they were next to the pepper spray she had bought – unlocked the front door, heard the low hiss of the hydraulics as it swung behind her, saw that the lift was on the sixth floor, and started to walk up the stairs. She passed the Amundsens’ door. Stopped. Felt that she was out of breath. Funny, she was in good shape, these stairs had never tired her out before. Something was wrong. What?

She stared up at the door to her flat.

It was an old building, built for the working classes of western Oslo, now long gone, and they had been sparing with the lighting. There was just one large, metal-framed light on each floor, jutting out from high up on the wall above the stairs. She held her breath and listened. She hadn’t heard a sound since she came into the building.

Not since the hiss of the hydraulics.

Not a sound.

That was what was wrong.

She hadn’t heard the door close.

Penelope didn’t have time to turn round, didn’t have time to put her hand in her bag, didn’t have time to do anything before an arm swung round her, locking her arms and pressing her chest so hard that she couldn’t breathe. Her bag fell onto the stairs and was the only thing she managed to hit as she kicked out wildly around her. She screamed soundlessly into the hand that was clamped over her mouth. It smelt of soap.

‘There, there, Penelope,’ a voice whispered in her ear. ‘In space, no one c-can hear you scream, you know.’ He made the whooshing sound.

She heard a noise from down near the front door, and for a moment hoped someone was coming, before realising that it was her bag, her keys – and the pepper spray – sailing through the railings and hitting the floor downstairs.

‘What is it?’ Rakel asked, without turning round or stopping chopping the onion for the salad. She had seen from the reflection in the window above the kitchen worktop that Harry had stopped laying the table and had gone over to the living-room window.

‘I thought I heard something,’ he said.

‘Probably Oleg and Helga.’

‘No, it was something else. It was … something else.’

Rakel sighed. ‘Harry, you’ve only just got home, and already you’re climbing the walls. Look at what it’s doing to you.’

‘Just this one case, then it’s over.’ Harry walked over to the worktop and kissed the back of her neck. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Fine,’ she lied. Her body ached, her head ached. Her heart ached.

‘You’re lying,’ he said.

‘Am I good liar?’

He smiled and massaged her neck.

‘If I ever disappeared,’ she said, ‘would you look for someone new?’

‘Look for? That sounds tiring. It was bad enough trying to persuade you.’

‘Someone younger. Someone you could have kids with. I wouldn’t be jealous, you know.’

‘You’re not that good a liar, darling.’

She smiled and let go of the knife, leaned her head forward and felt his warm, dry fingers massage the aches away, giving her a break from the pain.

‘I love you,’ she said.

‘Mm?’

‘I love you. Especially if you make me a cup of tea.’

‘Aye aye, boss.’

Harry let go and Rakel stood there waiting. Hoping. But no, the pain came back again, punching her like a fist.

Harry stood with both hands on the kitchen worktop, staring at the kettle. Waiting for the low rumble. Which would get louder and louder until the whole thing shook. Like a scream. He could hear screams. Silent screams that filled his head, filled the room, filled his body. He shifted his weight. Screams that wanted to get out, that had to get out. Was he going mad? He looked up at the glass of the window. All he could see in the darkness was his own reflection. There he was. He was out there. He was waiting for them. He was singing. Come out and play!

Harry closed his eyes.

No, he wasn’t waiting for them. He was waiting for him, for Harry. Come out and play!

He could feel that she was different from the others. Penelope Rasch wanted to live. She was big and strong. And the keys to her flat lay three floors below them. He could feel her relinquishing the air from her lungs and tightened his grasp round her chest. Like a boa constrictor. A muscle tightening a little more each time the prey lets air out of its lungs. He wanted her alive. Alive and warm. With this wonderful desire to survive. Which he would break, little by little. But how? Even if he managed to drag her all the way downstairs to get the key, there was a risk that one of the neighbours would hear them. He felt his rage growing. He should have skipped Penelope Rasch. Should have taken that decision three days ago when he discovered that she’d changed the locks. But then he had been lucky, had made contact with her on Tinder, she had agreed to meet at that discreet place, and he had thought that it was going to work out after all. But a small, quiet place also means that the few people who are there pay more attention to you. One customer had stared at him a little too hard. And he had panicked, had decided to get out of there, and had rushed things. Penelope had turned him down and walked out.

He had been prepared for that eventuality and had the car nearby. He had driven fast. Not so fast that he risked being stopped by the police, but fast enough to reach the cluster of trees before she emerged from the metro. She hadn’t turned round when he was following her, nor when she got her keys out of her bag and went in. He had managed to stick his foot in the gap before the door clicked shut.

He felt a shudder run through her body and knew that she would soon lose consciousness. His erection rubbed against her buttocks. A broad, fleshy woman’s arse. His mother had had a similar backside.

He could feel the boy coming, eager to take over, and he was screaming inside, wanting to be fed. Now. Here.

‘I love you,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘I really do, Penelope, and that’s why I’m going to make an honest woman of you before we go any further.’

She went limp in his arms and he hurried, holding her up with one arm as he fumbled in his jacket pocket with the other.

Penelope Rasch came to, and realised that she must have passed out. It had got darker. She was floating, and there was something tugging and pulling at her arms, something cutting into her wrists. She looked up. Handcuffs. And something on one of her ring fingers, shimmering dully.

Then she felt the pain between her legs and looked down just as he pulled his hand out of her.

His face was partially shaded, but she saw him put his fingers to his nose and sniff. She tried to scream, but couldn’t.

‘Good, my darling,’ he said. ‘You’re clean, so we can begin.’

He unbuttoned his jacket and shirt, pushed his shirt aside, revealing his chest. A tattoo became visible, a face screaming as soundlessly as her. He was thrusting his chest out, as if the tattoo had something to say to her. Unless it was the other way round. Perhaps she was the one on display. On display to this snarling image of the devil.

He felt for something in his jacket pocket, pulled it out and showed her. Black. Iron. Teeth.

Penelope managed to get some air. And screamed.

‘That’s right, darling,’ he laughed. ‘Just like that. Music to work to.’

Then he opened his mouth wide and inserted the teeth.

And they echoed and sang between the walls: his laughter and her screaming.

There was a buzz of voices and international news broadcasts on the big television screens that hung on the walls of VG’s offices, where the head of news and the duty manager were working on updates to the online edition.

Mona Daa and the photographer were standing behind the head of news’s chair, studying the image on his console.

‘I tried everything, but I just couldn’t make him look creepy,’ the photographer sighed.

And Mona realised that he was right, Hallstein Smith simply looked far too jovial, standing there with the full moon above him.

‘It’s still working,’ the head of news said. ‘Look at the traffic. Nine hundred per minute now.’

Mona saw the counter to the right of the screen.

‘We’ve got a winner,’ her boss said. ‘We’ll move it to the top of the website. Maybe we should ask the night editor if she wants to change the front page.’

The photographer raised his clenched fist towards Mona and she dutifully touched her knuckles to his. Her father claimed it was Tiger Woods and his caddie who had popularised the gesture. They had switched from the obligatory high five after the caddie had injured the golfer’s hand by high-fiving him a bit too enthusiastically when Woods pitched the sixteenth hole in the final round of the Masters. It was one of her father’s greatest regrets that Mona’s congenital hip defect meant she could never be the great golfer he had hoped. She, on the other hand, had hated golf from the first time he took her to a driving range, but because the standard was so comically low she had won everything there was to win with a swing that was so short and ugly that the coach of the national junior team refused to select her on the grounds that it was better to get beaten with a team that at least looked like it was playing golf. So she had dumped her golf clubs in the basement at her dad’s and headed for the weight room instead, where no one had any objections to the way she lifted 120 kilos off the floor. The number of kilos, the number of blows, the number of clicks. Success was measured in numbers, anyone who claimed otherwise was just scared of the truth and seriously believed that delusion was an essential fact of life for the average person. But right now she was more interested in the comments section. Because something had struck her when Smith said the vampirist didn’t care about the risks. That it was possible he might read VG. That he might post some sort of comment online.

Her eyes scanned the comments as they appeared.

But it was the usual stuff.

The sympathetic, expressing pity for the victims.

The self-appointed guardians of truth, explaining how a particular political party bore responsibility for a society that had produced a particular type of undesirable person, in this instance a vampirist.

The executioners, shrieking for the death penalty and castration the moment they got a chance.

And then there were the wannabe stand-up comedians whose role models had popularised the idea that anything could be joked about. ‘New band, Wampire.’ ‘Sell Tinder shares now!’

And if she did see a comment that looked suspicious, what was she going to do? Report it to Katrine Bratt & co.? Maybe. She owed Truls Berntsen that much. Or she could call the blond one, Wyller. Make him indebted to her. Even if you’re not on Tinder, you still swipe left and right.

She yawned. Walked over to her desk and picked up her bag.

‘I’m going to the gym,’ she said.

‘Now? It’s practically the middle of the night!’

‘Call me if anything happens.’

‘Your shift ended an hour ago, Daa, other people can—’

‘This is my story, so you call me, OK?’

She heard someone laugh as the door closed behind her. Maybe they were laughing at her walk, maybe at her provocative clever-girl-can-do-it-all-herself attitude. She didn’t care. She did have a funny walk. And she could do it all herself.

Lift, airlock, swing doors, then she was outside the building, its glass facade lit up by the moonlight. Mona breathed in. Something big was going on, she just knew it. And she knew that she was going to be part of it.

Truls Berntsen had parked the car beside the steep, winding road. The brick buildings below him lay silent in the darkness: Oslo’s abandoned industrial district, railway tracks with grass growing between the sleepers. And, further away, the architects’ new toy building blocks, Barcode, the playground of the new business world, in marked contrast to the sombre seriousness of the working life of the past, where minimalism was a matter of cost-saving practicality, not an aesthetic ideal.

Truls looked up at the house bathed in moonlight, up on the crest of the hill.

There were lights in the windows and he knew that Ulla was in there. Maybe she was sitting in her usual place, on the sofa with her legs tucked beneath her, reading a book. If he took his binoculars in among the trees further up the hill he’d find out. And if she was doing that, he’d see her brush her blonde hair behind one ear, as if she were listening out for something. In case the children woke up. In case Mikael wanted something. Or perhaps just listening out for predators, like a gazelle at a watering hole.

There was a buzz and a crackle and voices relaying short messages before disappearing again. The sounds of the city conveyed through a police radio soothed him more than music.

Truls looked at the glove compartment he’d just opened. The binoculars were tucked behind his service pistol. He had promised himself that he was going to stop. That it was time, that he didn’t need this any more, not now he’d found out there were other fish in the sea. OK. Monkfish, sculpins and weevers. Truls heard himself grunt. It was his laugh that had earned him the nickname Beavis. That, and his heavy lower jaw. And there she was, up there, imprisoned in that oversized, overpriced house with a terrace that Truls had helped construct, and where he had buried the corpse of a drug dealer in wet cement, a corpse that only Truls knew about, and which had never given him so much as one sleepless night.

A scraping sound on the radio. The voice from Emergency Control.

‘Have we got any cars near Hovseter?’

‘Car 31, in Skøyen.’

‘Hovseterveien 44, doorway B. We got a pretty hysterical resident saying there’s a madman in the stairwell assaulting a woman there, but that they daren’t intervene because he’s smashed the light on the stairs and it’s pitch-black.’

‘Assaulting with a weapon?’

‘They don’t know. They say they saw him bite her before it went dark. The caller’s name was Amundsen.’

Truls reacted instantly and pressed the ‘speak’ button on the radio. ‘Detective Constable Truls Berntsen here, I’m closer, I’ll take it.’

He had already started the engine, and revved it hard as he pulled out onto the road, hearing a car coming round the bend behind him blow its horn angrily.

‘Copy,’ Emergency Control said. ‘And where are you, Berntsen?’

‘Just round the corner, I said. 31, I want you as backup, so wait if you get there first. Suspect that the assailant is armed. Repeat, armed.’

Saturday night, almost no traffic. If he drove through the Opera Tunnel at full speed, cutting straight through the centre beneath the fjord, he wouldn’t be more than seven or eight minutes behind car 31. Those minutes could, of course, be critical, both for the victim and for the perpetrator to get away, but Detective Constable Truls Berntsen could also be the officer who arrested the vampirist. And who knew what VG would be willing to pay for a report from the first man on the scene. He blew the car’s horn repeatedly and a Volvo swerved out of his way. Dual carriageway now. Three lanes. Foot on the floor. His heart was pounding against his ribs. A speed camera in the tunnel flashed. Police officer on duty, a licence to tell everyone in this whole damn city to fuck off. On duty. His blood was pulsing through his veins, brilliant, as if he was about to get a hard-on.

‘Ace of space!’ Truls roared. ‘Ace of space!’

‘Yes, we’re car 31. We’ve been waiting!’ The man and woman were standing behind the patrol car parked in front of doorway B.

‘Slow lorry that wouldn’t let me pass,’ Truls said, checking that his pistol was loaded and the cartridge full. ‘Heard anything?’

‘It’s all quiet in there. No one’s entered or left.’

‘Let’s go.’ Truls pointed to the male officer. ‘You come with me, and bring a torch.’ He nodded to the woman. ‘You stay here.’

The two men walked up to the entrance. Truls peered through the window at the darkened stairwell. He pressed the button beside the name Amundsen.

‘Yes?’ a voice whispered.

‘Police. Have you heard anything since you called?’

‘No, but he could still be out there.’

‘OK. Open the door.’

The lock clicked and Truls pulled the door open. ‘You go first with the torch.’

Truls heard the officer swallow. ‘I thought you said backup, not up front.’

‘Just be grateful you’re not here on your own,’ Truls whispered. ‘Come on.’

Rakel looked at Harry.

Two murders. A new serial killer. His type of hunt.

He was sitting there eating, making out that he was following the conversation around the table, was polite towards Helga, listened with apparent interest to Oleg. Perhaps she was wrong, perhaps he really was interested. Perhaps he wasn’t completely enchained by it after all, perhaps he had changed.

‘Gun licences are pointless when people will soon be able to buy a 3D printer and make their own pistols,’ Oleg said.

‘I thought 3D printers could only make things out of plastic?’ Harry said.

‘Home printers, yes. But plastic is durable enough if you just want a weapon and you’re only going to use it once to murder someone.’ Oleg leaned across the dining table. ‘You don’t even need an original pistol as the template, you just borrow one for five minutes, dismantle it, take wax copies of the pieces, then use those to make a 3D model that you feed into the computer that controls the printer. Once the murder has been committed, you just melt the whole plastic pistol down. And if anyone did work out that that was the murder weapon, it wouldn’t be registered to anyone.’

‘Hm. But the pistol could still be traced back to the printer that produced it. Forensics can already do that with inkjet printers.’

Rakel looked at Helga, who was looking rather lost.

‘Boys …’ Rakel said.

‘Whatever,’ Oleg said. ‘It’s really crazy – they can make practically anything. So far there are just over two thousand 3D printers in Norway, but imagine when everyone’s got one, when terrorists can 3D-print a hydrogen bomb.’

‘Boys, can’t we talk about something more pleasant?’ Rakel said, feeling strangely breathless. ‘Something a bit more cultured, just for once, seeing as we’ve got a guest?’

Oleg and Harry turned towards Helga, who smiled and shrugged, as if to say that she was fine with anything.

‘OK,’ Oleg said. ‘What about Shakespeare?’

‘That sounds better,’ Rakel said, looking at her son suspiciously as she passed the potatoes to Helga.

‘OK, Ståle Aune and Othello syndrome,’ Oleg said. ‘I haven’t told you that Jesus and I recorded the entire lecture. I was wearing a hidden microphone and transmitter under my shirt, and Jesus was in the next room recording it. Do you think Ståle would be OK if we uploaded it to the Net? What do you think, Harry?’

Harry didn’t answer. Rakel studied him. Was he drifting away again?’

‘Harry?’ she said.

‘Well, obviously I can’t answer that,’ he said, looking down at his plate. ‘But why didn’t you just record it on your phone? It isn’t forbidden to record lectures for private use.’

‘They’re practising,’ Helga said.

The others turned towards her.

‘Jesus and Oleg dream of working as undercover agents.’

‘Wine, Helga?’ Rakel picked up the bottle.

‘Thanks. But aren’t you having any?’

‘I’ve taken a headache pill,’ Rakel said. ‘And Harry doesn’t drink.’

‘I’m a so-called alcoholic,’ Harry said. ‘Which is a shame, because that’s supposed to be a really good wine.’

Rakel saw Helga’s cheeks burn, and hurried to ask: ‘So Ståle’s teaching you about Shakespeare?’

‘Yes and no,’ Oleg said. ‘Othello syndrome implies that jealousy is the main reason for the murders in the play, but that isn’t true. Helga and I read Othello yesterday—’

‘You read it together?’ Rakel put her hand on Harry’s arm. ‘Isn’t that sweet?’

Oleg looked up at the ceiling. ‘Either way, my interpretation is that the real, underlying cause of all the murders isn’t jealousy but a humiliated man’s envy and ambition. In other words, Iago. Othello is just a puppet. The play ought to be called Iago, not Othello.’

‘And do you agree with that, Helga?’ Rakel liked the slim, slightly anaemic, well-mannered girl, and she seemed to have found her feet pretty quickly.

‘I like Othello as the title. And maybe there isn’t a deep-seated reason. Maybe it’s like Othello himself says. That the full moon is the real cause, because it drives men mad.’

‘No reason,’ Harry declaimed solemnly in English. ‘I just like doing things like that.’

‘Impressive, Harry,’ Rakel said. ‘You can quote Shakespeare.’

‘Walter Hill,’ Harry said. ‘The Warriors, 1979.’

‘Yeah,’ Oleg laughed. ‘Best gang film ever.’

Rakel and Helga laughed. Harry raised his glass of water and looked across the table at Rakel. Smiled. Laughter round the family dinner table. And she thought that he was here now, he was with them. She tried to hold on to his gaze, hold on to him. But imperceptibly, as the sea turns from green to blue, it happened. His eyes turned inward again. And she knew that even before the laughter had died out, he was on his way again, into the darkness, away from them.

Truls walked up the stairs in the dark, crouching with his pistol behind the big, uniformed police officer with the torch. The silence was only broken by a ticking sound, like a clock somewhere further up inside the building. The cone of light from the torch seemed to push the darkness ahead of them, making it denser, more compact, like the snow Truls and Mikael used to shovel for pensioners in Manglerud. Afterwards they would snatch the hundred-krone note from gnarled, trembling hands, and say they would come back with the change. If they ever did wait for them, they were waiting still.

Something crunched beneath their feet.

Truls grabbed the back of the policeman’s jacket, and he stopped and pointed the torch at the floor. Splinters of glass sparkled, and between them Truls could see indistinct footprints in what he was fairly sure was blood. The heel and front of the sole were clearly divided, but he thought the print was too big to be a woman’s. The prints were pointing down the stairs, and he was sure he would have seen them if there had been any further down. The ticking sound had got louder.

Truls gestured to the policeman to go on. He looked at the stairs, saw that the bloody prints were getting clearer. Looked up the stairs. Stopped and raised his pistol. Let the policeman carry on. Truls had seen something. Something that had fallen through the light. Something that sparkled. Something red. It wasn’t ticking they had heard, it was the sound of blood dripping and hitting the stairs.

‘Shine the torch upward,’ he said.

The police officer stopped, turned round, and for a moment looked surprised that the colleague whom he had thought was right behind him had stopped a few steps below and was looking up at the ceiling. But he did as Truls said.

‘Oh my God …’ he whispered.

‘Amen,’ Truls said.

There was a woman hanging from the wall above them.

Her checked skirt had been pulled up, revealing the edge of her white knickers. On one thigh, level with the policeman’s head, blood was dripping from a large wound. It ran down her leg, into her shoe. The shoe was evidently full, because the blood was running down the outside and gathering in drops at the point of the shoe, then falling to join a red puddle on the stairs. Her arms were pulled up above her lolling head. Her wrists were tied with a peculiar set of cuffs which had been hooked over the lamp bracket. Whoever had put her there had to be strong. Her hair was covering her face and neck, so Truls couldn’t see if there was a bite mark, but the amount of blood in the puddle and the terrible dripping told him that she was empty, dry.

Truls looked hard at her. Memorised every detail. She looked like a painting. He would use that expression when he spoke to Mona Daa. Like a painting hung on the wall.

A door opened slightly on the landing above them. A pale face peered out. ‘Has he gone?’

‘Looks like it. Amundsen?’

‘Yes.’

Light streamed out when the door on the other side of the hallway opened. They heard a gasp of horror.

An elderly man stumbled out while a woman who was presumably his wife stayed behind and looked out anxiously from the doorway. ‘That was the devil himself,’ the man said. ‘Look what he’s done.’

‘Please, don’t come any closer,’ Truls said. ‘This is a murder scene. Does anyone know where the perpetrator went?’

‘If we’d known he was gone, we’d have come out to see if there was anything we could do,’ the old man said. ‘But we did see a man from the living-room window. He left the building and headed off towards the metro. We don’t know if it was him though. Because he was walking so calmly.’

‘How long ago was this?’

‘Quarter of an hour, at most.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Now you’re asking …’ He turned to his wife for help.

‘Ordinary,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ the man agreed. ‘Neither tall nor short. Neither fair nor dark hair. A suit.’

‘Grey,’ his wife added.

Truls nodded to the policeman, who understood the signal and began talking into the radio that was clipped to the top pocket of his jacket. ‘Request assistance to Hovseterveien 44. Suspect observed heading on foot towards the metro, fifteen minutes ago. Approximately 1 metre 75, possibly ethnic Norwegian, grey suit.’

Fru Amundsen had come out from behind the door. She seemed even less steady on her feet than her husband, and her slippers dragged on the floor as she pointed a trembling finger at the woman on the wall. She reminded Truls of one of those pensioners they used to clear snow for. He raised his voice: ‘I said, don’t come any closer!’

‘But—’ the woman began.

‘Inside! Murder scenes mustn’t be contaminated before Forensics gets here, we’ll ring on the door if we have any questions.’

‘But … but she’s not dead.’

Truls turned round. In the light from the open door, he saw the woman’s right foot quiver, as if it was cramping. And the thought popped into his head before he could stop it. That she was infected. She had become a vampire. And now she was waking up.

12

SATURDAY NIGHT

THERE WAS A loud noise of metal on metal as the bar carrying the weights hit the cradle above the narrow bench. Some people would think it a terrible sound, but for Mona Daa it was like bells chiming. And she wasn’t bothering anyone else either, she was on her own at Gain Gym. They’d switched to twenty-four-hour opening six months ago, presumably inspired by gyms in New York and Los Angeles, but Mona still hadn’t seen anyone else exercising there after midnight. Norwegians simply didn’t work enough hours for it to be a problem finding time for the gym during the day. She was the exception. She wanted to be the exception. A mutant. Because it was like evolution, it was the exceptions who drove the world forward. Who perfected things.

Her phone rang, and she got up from the bench.

It was Nora. Mona put her earphone in and took the call.

‘You’re at the gym, bitch,’ her friend groaned.

‘I haven’t been here long.’

‘You’re lying, I can see that you’ve been there for two hours.’

Mona, Nora and a few of their other friends from college could find each other using the GPS on their mobiles. They’d activated a service that allowed them to voluntarily track the others’ phones. It was both sociable and reassuring. But Mona couldn’t help thinking that it felt a bit claustrophobic at times. Professional sisterhood was all well and good, but they didn’t have to follow each other about like fourteen-year-olds going to the toilet together. It was high time they realised that the world was full of career opportunities for intelligent young women, and that the only thing holding them back was their own lack of courage and ambition, ambition to make a difference, not just get the others’ validation of their own smartness.

‘I hate you just a tiny bit when I think of all the calories that are falling off you right now,’ Nora said. ‘While I’m sitting here on my fat arse consoling myself with another pina colada. Listen …’

Mona felt like pulling the earphone out as the sound of drawn-out slurping through a straw battered her eardrum. Nora believed that a pina colada was the only antidote to premature autumn depression.

‘Did you actually want to talk about anything, Nora? I’m in the middle of—’

‘Yep,’ Nora said. ‘Work.’

Nora and Mona had been at the College of Journalism together. A few years ago the college had had stricter entrance requirements than any other higher education establishment in Norway, and it had seemed as if every other clever little boy or girl’s dream was to get their own newspaper column or a job on television. That had certainly been the case for Nora and Mona. Cancer research and running the country were for people who weren’t quite as bright. But Mona had noticed that the College of Journalism now had competition from all the local high schools that were using their state funding to offer Norwegian youngsters popular courses in journalism, film, music and beauty therapy, with no consideration of the kind of qualifications the country lacked and actively needed. Which meant that the richest country in the world had to import those skills while the nation’s carefree, unemployed, film-studying sons and daughters were left sitting at home with their drinking straws stuck deep in the state’s milkshake while they watched – and, if they could be bothered, criticised – films made abroad. Another reason for the falling entrance requirements was of course that the boys and girls had discovered the blog market and no longer needed to work hard for the grades with which to achieve the same level of attention offered by the more traditional route of television and the newspapers. Mona had written about this, about the fact that the media no longer demanded professional qualifications from its journalists, with the result that aspiring reporters no longer made the effort to acquire them. The new media environment, with its increasingly banal focus on celebrity, had reduced the role of journalists to that of the town gossip. Mona had used her own newspaper, the biggest in Norway, as an example. The article never got published. ‘Too long,’ the features editor had said, referring her to the magazine editor. ‘Well, if there’s one thing the so-called critical press doesn’t like, it’s being criticised,’ as one more positively inclined colleague explained. But Mona had a feeling that the magazine editor hit the nail on the head when she said: ‘But, Mona, you haven’t got any quotes from celebrities here.’

Mona went over to the window and looked out over Frognerparken. It had clouded over, and apart from the illuminated paths an almost tangible darkness had settled on the park. It was always like that in autumn, before the trees lost their leaves and everything became more transparent, and the city once again became hard and cold. But from late September to late October, Oslo was like a soft, warm teddy bear that she just wanted to hug and cuddle.

‘I’m all ears, Nora.’

‘It’s about the vampirist.’

‘You’ve been told to get him on as a guest. Do you think he does chat shows?’

‘For the last time, The Sunday Magazine is a serious discussion programme. I’ve called Harry Hole but he said no, and told me that Katrine Bratt is leading the investigation.’

‘But isn’t that good? You’re always complaining about how hard it is to find good female guests.’

‘Yes, but Hole is, like, the most famous detective we’ve got. You must remember that time when he was drunk live on air? A scandal, obviously, but people loved it!’

‘Did you tell him that?’

‘No, but I said that television needs celebrities, and that a famous face could attract more attention to the work the police do in this city.’

‘Ingenious. But he didn’t go for it?’

‘He said if I wanted to get him on Let’s Dance to represent the police, he’d start practising his slow foxtrot tomorrow. But that this was about a murder investigation, and that Katrine Bratt was the one with all the facts and the mandate to speak.’

Mona laughed.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. All I can see now is Harry Hole on Let’s Dance.’

‘What? Do you think he meant it?’

Mona laughed even louder.

‘I was just calling to hear what you think of this Katrine Bratt, seeing as you move in those circles.’

Mona picked up a pair of light dumbbells from the rack in front of her and did some quick bicep curls to keep her circulation going and to shift waste products out of her muscles. ‘Bratt’s intelligent. And articulate. A bit severe, maybe.’

‘But do you think she’d reach beyond the screen? In footage from press conferences she seems a bit …’

‘Grey? Yes, but she can look great when she wants to. Some of the guys in the newsroom think she’s the hottest thing they’ve got over in Police HQ. But she’s one of those women who suppress it and would rather look professional.’

‘I can feel myself starting to hate her already. What about Hallstein Smith?’

‘Now he’s got the potential to be one of your regulars. He’s eccentric enough, indiscreet enough, but smart with it. Run with that one.’

‘OK, thanks. Sisters are doing it for themselves, right?’

‘Aren’t we a bit past saying stuff like that?’

‘Yeah, but these days it’s ironic.’

‘Right. Ha ha.’

‘Ha ha yourself. How about you?’

‘What?’

‘He’s still out there.’

‘I know.’

‘I mean, literally. It’s not that far from Hovseter to Frognerparken.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Shit, haven’t you heard? He’s struck again.’

‘Fuck!’ Mona yelled, and from the corner of her eye saw the guy in reception look up. ‘My bastard head of news said he’d call me. He’s given it to someone else. Bye, Nora.’

Mona went to the locker room, stuffed her clothes in her bag, then ran down the steps and onto the street. She carried on towards the VG building as she looked for a free taxi on the road. She was lucky and got hold of one at a red light. She threw herself into the back seat and pulled out her phone. Brought up Truls Berntsen’s number. After just two rings she heard his weird, grunting laugh.

‘What?’ she said.

‘I was wondering how long it would take you,’ Truls Berntsen said.

13

SATURDAY NIGHT

‘SHE’D LOST OVER a litre and a half of blood by the time they got her down,’ the doctor said as he walked along the corridor in Ullevål Hospital with Harry and Katrine. ‘If the bite had hit the artery higher up in her thigh, where it’s thicker, we wouldn’t have been able to save her life. We wouldn’t usually let a patient in her condition be questioned by the police, but seeing as other people’s lives are at risk …’

‘Thanks,’ Katrine said. ‘We won’t ask more than we absolutely have to.’

The doctor opened the door and he and Harry waited outside while Katrine went over to the bed and the nurse who was sitting beside it.

‘It’s pretty impressive,’ the doctor said. ‘Don’t you think, Harry?’

Harry turned towards him and raised an eyebrow.

‘You don’t mind me using your first name, do you?’ the doctor said. ‘Oslo’s a small city, and seeing as I’m your wife’s doctor.’

‘Really? I didn’t know her appointment was here.’

‘I only realised when she filled in one of our forms and I saw she’d put your name as next of kin. And of course I remember the name from the papers.’

‘You’ve got a good memory …’ Harry said, and looked at the name badge on the white coat. ‘… Senior Consultant John D. Steffens. Because it’s been a long while since they printed my name. What is it you think is impressive?’

‘That a human being can bite through a woman’s thigh like that. A lot of people think modern man has weak jaws, but in comparison with most mammals we’ve got a fairly sharp bite. Did you know that?’

‘No.’

‘How hard do you think we bite, Harry?’

Harry realised after a few seconds that Steffens really was expecting an answer. ‘Well, our criminal forensics experts say seventy kilos.’

‘Well, then – you already know the answer.’

Harry shrugged. ‘The number doesn’t mean anything to me. If I’d been told 150, I wouldn’t have been any more or less impressed. Speaking of numbers, how do you know that Penelope Rasch lost a litre and a half? I didn’t think pulse and blood pressure were such accurate indicators?’

‘I was sent pictures from the crime scene,’ Steffens said. ‘I buy and sell blood, so I’ve got a pretty accurate eye.’

Harry was about to ask him to elaborate, but at that moment Katrine waved him over.

Harry went in and stood beside Katrine. Penelope Rasch’s face was as white as the pillowcase that framed it. Her eyes were open but her gaze was clouded.

‘We won’t trouble you for long, Penelope,’ Katrine said. ‘We’ve spoken to the policeman who talked to you at the scene, so we know that you met the assailant in the city just before, that he attacked you in the stairwell and that he used metal teeth to bite you. But can you tell us anything about who he is? Did he give you any other name apart from Vidar? Did he say where he lives, where he works?’

‘Vidar Hansen. I didn’t ask where he lives,’ she said. Her voice made Harry think of fragile porcelain. ‘He said he’s an artist, but works as a caretaker.’

‘Did you believe him?’

‘I don’t know. He could well have been a guard. Someone who has access to keys, anyway, because he’d been inside my flat.’

‘Oh?’

With what looked like a great effort, she pulled her left hand out from under the covers and held it up. ‘The engagement ring I got from Roar. He took it from the drawer in my bedroom.’

Katrine stared sceptically at the matt gold ring. ‘You mean … he put it on you in the stairwell?’

Penelope nodded and closed her eyes tightly again. ‘And the last thing he said …’

‘Yes?’

‘Was that he wasn’t like other men, that he’d come back and marry me.’ She let out a sob.

Harry could see that Katrine was shaken, but still focused.

‘What does he look like, Penelope?’

Penelope opened her mouth, then closed it again. Stared at them in despair. ‘I don’t remember. I … I must have forgotten. How can …?’ She bit her bottom lip and tears welled up in her eyes.

‘It’s OK,’ Katrine said. ‘It’s not unusual in your situation, you’ll be able to remember more later. Do you remember what he was wearing?’

‘A suit. And a shirt. He unbuttoned it. He had …’ She stopped.

‘Yes?’

‘A tattoo on his chest.’

Harry saw Katrine gasp. ‘What sort of tattoo, Penelope?’ He said.

‘A face.’

‘Like a demon that’s trying to get out?’

Penelope nodded. A single tear ran down her cheek. As if she didn’t have enough liquid inside her for two, Harry thought.

‘And it was as if he …’ Penelope sobbed again. ‘As if he wanted to show it to me.’

Harry closed his eyes.

‘She needs to rest,’ the nurse said.

Katrine nodded and put her hand on Penelope’s milk-white arm. ‘Thank you, Penelope, you’ve been a great help.’

Harry and Katrine were on their way out when the nurse called them back. They returned to the bed.

‘I do remember one more thing,’ Penelope whispered. ‘He looked like he’d had his face operated on. And I can’t help wondering …’

‘What?’ Katrine said, leaning in to hear the barely audible voice.

‘Why didn’t he kill me?’

Katrine looked at Harry for help. He took a deep breath, nodded to her and leaned closer to Penelope.

‘Because he couldn’t,’ he said. ‘Because you didn’t let him.’

‘Well, now we know for sure that it’s him,’ Katrine said as they walked along the corridor towards the exit.

‘Mm. And he’s changed his MO. And his preferences.’

‘How does that make you feel?’

‘That it’s him?’ Harry shrugged. ‘No feelings. He’s a murderer, and he needs to be caught. Full stop.’

‘Don’t lie, Harry. Not to me. He’s the reason you’re here.’

‘Because he might take more lives. Catching him is important, but it isn’t personal. OK?’

‘I hear you.’

‘Good,’ Harry said.

‘When he says he’ll come back and marry her, do you think that’s …?’

‘Meant as a metaphor? Yes. He’s going to haunt her dreams.’

‘But that means he …’

‘Deliberately didn’t kill her.’

‘You lied to her.’

‘I lied.’ Harry pushed the door open and they got in the car that was waiting for them right outside. Katrine in the front, Harry in the back.

‘Police HQ?’ Anders Wyller asked from the driver’s seat.

‘Yes,’ Katrine said, picking up the mobile that she’d left charging. ‘Bjørn’s texted to say that those bloody footprints on the stairs were probably left by cowboy boots.’

‘Cowboy boots,’ Harry repeated from the back seat.

‘Those ones with a narrow high heel and—’

‘I know what cowboy boots look like. They were mentioned in one of the witness statements.’

‘Which one?’ Katrine said, skimming through the other texts she’d received while she was inside the hospital.

‘The bartender at the Jealousy Bar. Mehmet Something.’

‘I must say, your memory is still intact. It says here that they want me as a guest on The Sunday Magazine, to talk about the vampirist.’ She tapped at her phone.

‘And?’

‘No, obviously. Bellman has said loud and clear that he wants the least possible publicity for this case.’

‘Even if it’s been solved?’

Katrine turned to Harry. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Firstly: the Chief of Police can boast on national television about having solved the case in three days. And secondly: we might need the publicity to catch him.’

‘Have we solved the case?’ Wyller’s eyes met Harry’s in the rear-view mirror.

‘Solved,’ Harry said. ‘Not finished.’

Wyller turned to Katrine. ‘What does he mean?’

‘That we know who the perpetrator is, but that the investigation isn’t over until the long arm of the law has caught him. And in his case, that arm has turned out to be too short. This individual has been wanted across the whole world for almost four years.’

‘Who is he?’

Katrine gave a deep sigh. ‘I can’t even say his name. Harry, you tell him.’

Harry looked out through the window. Katrine was right, of course. He could deny it, but he was here for one single selfish reason. Not for the victims, not for the good of the city, not for the reputation of the force. Not even for his own reputation. Not for anything but this one single thing: that he had got away. Oh, Harry certainly felt guilty at not having been able to stop him before, for all the murder victims, for every day that this man had gone free. Even so, this was the only thing he could think about: that he had to catch him. That he, Harry, had to catch him. He didn’t know why. Did he really need the worst serial killer and offender in order to validate his own life? God alone knew. And God alone knew if it was the other way round as well. That this man had emerged from his hiding place because of Harry. He had drawn the V on Ewa Dolmen’s door, and shown Penelope Rasch the demon tattoo. Penelope had asked why he hadn’t killed her. And Harry had lied. The reason the man hadn’t killed her was because he wanted her to talk. Talk about what she’d seen. Tell Harry what he already knew. That he needed to come out and play.

‘OK,’ Harry said. ‘Do you want the long version or the short one?’

14

SUNDAY MORNING

‘VALENTIN GJERTSEN,’ HARRY hole said, pointing at the face staring out at the investigative team from the huge screen.

Katrine looked intently at the thin face. Brown hair, deep-set eyes. Unless it just appeared that way because he was jutting his forehead forward, meaning that the light fell in a particular way. Katrine couldn’t help thinking it was odd that the police photographer had let Valentin get away with it. And then there was his expression. Custody pictures usually showed fear, confusion or resignation. But he looked contented. As if Valentin Gjertsen knew something they didn’t know. Didn’t know yet.

Harry let the face sink in for a few seconds before he went on. ‘At the age of sixteen he was charged with molesting a nine-year-old girl he’d lured onto a rowing boat. At seventeen a neighbour reported him for trying to rape her in the basement laundry room. When Valentin Gjertsen was twenty-six and serving time for assaulting a minor, he had an appointment to see the dentist at Ila Prison. He used one of the dentist’s own drills to force her to take off her nylon stockings and put them over her head. First he raped her in the dentist’s chair, then he set fire to the stockings.’

Harry tapped at the computer and the image changed. A muffled groan ran through the group, and Katrine saw that even some of the most experienced detectives looked down at their laps.

‘I’m not showing this for fun, but so that you know what sort of individual we’re dealing with. He let the dentist live. Just like Penelope Rasch. And I don’t think that’s workplace negligence. I think Valentin Gjertsen is playing a game with us.’

Harry clicked again, and the same picture of Valentin appeared, this time taken from Interpol’s website. ‘Valentin escaped from Ila almost four years ago, in a quite spectacular fashion. He beat another prisoner, Judas Johansen, until he was unrecognisable, then had a copy of the demon’s face he has tattooed on his own chest tattooed onto the chest of the corpse, and hid the body in the library where he worked, so that Judas was reported missing when he didn’t report for inspection. On the night that Valentin himself escaped, he dressed the corpse in his own clothes and laid it on the floor of his cell. The prison guards who discovered the unrecognisable body, and naturally assumed that it was Valentin, weren’t particularly surprised. Like any inmate convicted of paedophilia, Valentin Gjertsen was hated by the other prisoners. No one thought to check fingerprints or conduct a DNA test on the body. And so for a long time we assumed that Valentin Gjertsen was history. Until he showed up again in connection with another murder. Obviously we don’t know exactly how many people he killed or assaulted, but it’s definitely more than he’s been suspected or found guilty of. We do know that his last victim before he disappeared for good was his former landlady, Irja Jacobsen.’ Another click. ‘This picture is from the commune where she had gone into hiding from Valentin. Unless I’m mistaken, it was you, Berntsen, who was first on the scene where we found her strangled beneath a pile of children’s surfboards, with, as you can see, pictures of sharks on them.’

A grunt of laughter from the back of the conference room. ‘Correct. The surfboards were stolen goods that the poor junkies hadn’t managed to sell.’

‘Irja Jacobsen was probably murdered because she could have passed information about Valentin to the police. That may explain why it’s been so hard to get anyone to say a word about where he might be. Anyone who knows him simply doesn’t dare talk.’ Harry cleared his throat. ‘Another reason why Valentin has been impossible to find is that he’s undergone several rounds of extensive plastic surgery since his escape. The person you see in this picture doesn’t look like the person we observed later in a grainy surveillance picture from a football match at Ullevål Stadium. And he intentionally let us see that surveillance picture. So, because we haven’t managed to find him, we suspect that he may have had further operations after that, probably abroad seeing as we’ve checked anything that moves in Scandinavia as far as plastic surgery is concerned. Our suspicion that his face has changed again is reinforced by the fact that Penelope Rasch doesn’t recognise Valentin from the pictures we’ve shown her. Unfortunately she isn’t able to give a good alternative description of him, and the Tinder profile picture of this so-called Vidar on her phone is unlikely to be him.’

‘Tord has also checked out this Vidar’s Facebook profile,’ Katrine said. ‘Not surprisingly, it’s fake, set up recently on a device that we haven’t managed to trace. Tord believes this suggests that he must have a reasonable level of IT skills.’

‘Or else he had help,’ Harry said. ‘But we do at least have one person who saw and spoke to Valentin Gjertsen, just before he disappeared off the radar three years ago. Ståle has retired from his job as a consultant to Crime Squad, but he’s agreed to come here today.’

Ståle Aune stood up, fastening a button on his tweed jacket.

‘For a short time I had the questionable pleasure of seeing a patient who called himself Paul Stavnes. He was unusual as a schizophrenic psychopath insofar as he was aware of his own illness, at least to a certain extent. He also succeeded in manipulating me so that I didn’t realise who he was or what he was doing. Until the day when he let his cover slip quite by chance, then tried to kill me before disappearing for good.’

‘Ståle’s description formed the basis for this photofit picture.’ Harry tapped the computer. ‘So this is also fairly old now, but at least it’s better than the surveillance picture from the football match.’

Katrine tilted her head. The drawing showed that his hair, nose and the shape of his eyes were different, and the shape of his face was more angular than in the photograph. But the look of contentment was still there. Presumed contentment. Like the way you think a crocodile is grinning.

‘How did he become a vampirist?’ a voice by the window asked.

‘To start with, I’m not convinced that there’s any such thing as vampirists,’ Aune said. ‘But of course there could be plenty of reasons why Valentin Gjertsen drinks blood, without me being able to give an answer here and now.’

A long silence followed.

Harry cleared his throat. ‘We haven’t seen any sign of biting or drinking blood in any previous case that can be linked to Gjertsen. And yes, perpetrators do usually stick to a specific pattern, revisiting the same fantasies again and again.’

‘How certain are we that this really is Valentin Gjertsen?’ Skarre asked. ‘And not just someone trying to make us think that it’s him?’

‘Eighty-nine per cent.’ This from Bjørn Holm.

Skarre laughed. ‘Exactly eighty-nine?’

‘Yes. We found strands of body hair on the handcuffs he used on Penelope Rasch, possibly from the back of his hand. With DNA analysis it doesn’t take too long to confirm a match with eighty-nine per cent probability. It’s the last ten per cent that takes time. We’ll get the final answer in two days. The handcuffs are a type that are available online, by the way, a replica of handcuffs from the Middle Ages. Hence the iron, rather than steel. Apparently popular with people who like to do up their love nests to make them look like medieval dungeons.’

A single grunt of laughter.

‘What about the iron teeth?’ one of the female detectives asked. ‘Where could he have got those from?’

‘That’s more difficult,’ Bjørn Holm said. ‘We haven’t found anyone who manufactures teeth like this, at least not out of iron. He must have commissioned them specially from a blacksmith. Or made them himself. It’s certainly something new – we haven’t seen anyone use a weapon like this before.’

‘New behaviour,’ Aune said, undoing his jacket to free his stomach. ‘Fundamental changes of behaviour hardly ever happen. Human beings are notorious, they insist on making the same mistakes over and over again, even after they’ve received new information. That’s my opinion, anyway, and it’s become so contentious among psychologists that it’s even been given its own name, Aune’s Thesis. When we see individuals change their behaviour, it usually relates to a change in their surroundings, something the individual is adapting to. While the individual’s underlying motivation for that behaviour remains the same. It’s by no means unique for a sex offender to discover new fantasies and pleasures, but that’s because his taste gradually develops, not because the individual undergoes a fundamental change. When I was a teenager my father said that when I was older I would start to appreciate Beethoven. At the time I hated Beethoven and was convinced he was wrong. Even at a young age, Valentin Gjertsen had a wide-ranging appetite when it came to sexuality. He raped both young and old women, possibly boys, no adult men that we know of, but that could be for practical reasons, seeing as they’re more likely to be able to defend themselves. Paedophilia, necrophilia, sadism, all this was on Valentin Gjertsen’s menu. The Oslo Police have been able to link him to more sexually motivated crimes than anyone apart from Svein Finne, “the Fiancé”. The fact that he’s now acquiring a taste for blood merely means that he scores highly on what we call “openness”, and is willing to try new experiences. I say “acquiring” because certain observations, such as the fact that he added lemon, suggest that Valentin Gjertsen is experimenting with blood rather than being obsessed with it.’

‘Not obsessed?’ Skarre called. ‘He’s up to a victim a day now! While we’re sitting here he’s probably out on the hunt again. Wouldn’t you say, Professor?’ He pronounced the title without trying to conceal his sarcasm.

Aune threw his short arms out. ‘Once again, I don’t know. We don’t know. No one knows.’

‘Valentin Gjertsen,’ Mikael Bellman said. ‘Are we completely sure about that, Bratt? If so, give me ten minutes to think it over. Yes, I can see that it’s urgent.’

Bellman ended the call and put his mobile down on the glass table. Isabelle had just told him it was made of mouth-blown glass from ClassiCon, more than fifty thousand kroner. That she would rather have a few quality pieces than fill her new apartment with rubbish. From where he was sitting he could see an artificial beach and the ferries gliding back and forth across the Oslo Fjord. Strong winds lashed the almost violet water further out.

‘Well?’ Isabelle asked from the bed behind him.

‘The lead detective wants to know if she should agree to take part in The Sunday Magazine this evening. The subject is the vampirist murders, obviously. We know who the perpetrator is, but not where he is.’

‘Simple,’ Isabelle Skøyen said. ‘If you already had the guy, you should do it yourself. But seeing as it’s only a partial success, you should send a representative. Remind her to say “we” rather than “I”. And it wouldn’t do any harm if she were to suggest that the perpetrator may have managed to get across the border.’

‘The border? Why?’

Isabelle Skøyen sighed. ‘Don’t pretend to be more stupid than you are, darling, that’s just irritating.’

Bellman went over to the door to the veranda. He stood there, looking down at the Sunday tourists streaming towards Tjuvholmen. Some to visit the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Contemporary Art, some to look at the hyper-modern architecture and drink overpriced cappuccino. And some to dream about one of the laughably expensive apartments that hadn’t yet been sold. He had heard that the museum had exhibited a Mercedes with a big, brown human turd in place of the Mercedes star on the bonnet. OK, so for some people solid excrement was a status symbol. Others needed the most expensive apartment, the latest car or the biggest yacht to feel good. And then you had people – like Isabelle and he himself – who wanted absolutely everything: power, but without any suffocating obligations. Admiration and respect, but enough anonymity to be able to move freely. Family, to provide a stable framework and help their genes survive, but also free access to sex outside the four walls of the home. The apartment and the car. And solid shit.

‘So,’ Mikael Bellman said. ‘You’re thinking that if Valentin Gjertsen goes missing for a while, the public will automatically think that he’s left the country, instead of the Oslo Police being unable to catch him. But if we do catch him, we’ve been smart. And if he commits another murder, anything we’ve said will be forgotten anyway.’

He turned towards her. He had no idea why she had chosen to put her big double bed in the living room when she had a perfectly adequate bedroom. Particularly as it was possible for the neighbours to see in. Although he had a suspicion that that was why. Isabelle Skøyen was a big woman. Her long, powerful limbs were spread out under the gold-coloured silk sheet that lay draped over her sensuous body. The sight alone made him feel ready to go again.

‘Just one word, and you’ve sown the idea of him leaving the country,’ she said. ‘In psychology it’s called anchoring. It’s simple, and it always works. Because people are simple.’ Her eyes roamed down his body and she smiled. ‘Especially men.’

She shoved the silk sheet onto the floor.

He looked at her. Sometimes he thought he preferred just looking at her body to touching it, while the opposite was true of his wife. Which was odd, because Ulla’s body, purely objectively, was more beautiful than Isabelle’s. But Isabelle’s violent, raging desires turned him on far more than Ulla’s tenderness and quiet, sob-racked orgasms.

‘Wank,’ she commanded, spreading her legs so that her knees resembled the half-furled wings of a bird of prey, and touched two of her long fingers to her genitals.

He did as she said. Closed his eyes. And heard the glass table buzz. Damn, he’d forgotten Katrine Bratt. He grabbed the vibrating phone and pressed answer.

‘Yes?’

The female voice at the other end said something, but Mikael couldn’t hear anything because one of the ferries blew its horn at the same time.

‘The answer’s yes,’ he shouted impatiently. ‘You’re to go on The Sunday Magazine. I’m busy at the moment, but I’ll call you with instructions later.’

‘It’s me.’

Mikael Bellman stiffened. ‘Darling, is that you? I thought it was Katrine Bratt.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Where? At work, of course.’

And in the far too long pause that followed, he realised that she had obviously also heard the sound of the ferry, and that that was why she had asked. He breathed hard through his mouth as he looked down at his drooping erection.

‘Dinner won’t be ready before half past five,’ she said.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘What—?’

‘Steak,’ she said, and hung up.

Harry and Anders Wyller got out of the car in front of Jøssingveien 33. Harry lit a cigarette and looked up at the red-brick building surrounded by a tall fence. They had driven from Police HQ in sunshine and shimmering autumn colours, but on the way up here the clouds had gathered and were now skimming the hills like a cement-coloured ceiling, draining the colour from the landscape.

‘So this is Ila Prison,’ Wyller said.

Harry nodded and sucked hard on the cigarette.

‘Why is he called the Fiancé?’

‘Because he got his rape victims pregnant and made them promise to give birth to the baby.’

‘Or else …?’

‘Or else he’d come back and perform a Caesarean section himself.’ Harry took one last drag, rubbed the cigarette out against the packet and tucked the butt inside. ‘Let’s get this done.’

‘The regulations don’t allow us to keep him tied up, but we’ll be watching you on the surveillance camera,’ said the guard who had buzzed them in and led them to the end of the long corridor, lined with grey-painted steel doors on both sides. ‘One of our rules is never to get within one metre of him.’

‘Christ,’ Wyller said. ‘Does he attack you?’

‘No,’ the guard said, inserting a key into the lock of the last door. ‘Svein Finne hasn’t had a single black mark against his name in the twenty years he’s been here.’

‘But?’

The prison guard shrugged and turned the key. ‘I think you’ll see what I mean.’

He opened the door, stepped aside and Wyller and Harry walked into the cell.

The man on the bed was sitting in shadow.

‘Finne,’ Harry said.

‘Hole.’ The voice from the shadow sounded like crushed rock.

Harry gestured towards the only chair in the room. ‘OK if I sit down?’

‘If you think you’ve got time for that. I heard you’ve got your hands full.’

Harry sat down. Wyller stood behind him, just inside the door.

‘Hm. Is it him?’

‘Is it who?’

‘You know who I mean.’

‘I’ll answer that if you give me an honest answer – have you missed it?’

‘Missed what, Svein?’

‘Having a playmate who’s up to your level? Like you had with me?’

The man in the shadows leaned forward, into the light from the window near the top of the wall, and Harry heard Wyller’s breathing speed up behind him. The bars laid strips of shadow across a pockmarked face with leathery, red-brown skin. It was covered with wrinkles, so deep and close together that they looked as if they’d been carved by a knife, right down to the bone. He had a red handkerchief tied round his forehead, like a Native American, and his thick, wet lips were framed by a moustache. His tiny pupils sat within brown irises, and the whites of his eyes looked yellow, but he had the muscular, sinewy body of a twenty-year-old. Harry did the maths. Svein Finne, ‘the Fiancé’, had to be seventy-five now.

‘You never forget your first. Isn’t that right, Hole? My name will always be at the top of your list of achievements. I took your virginity, didn’t I?’ His laugh sounded like he was gargling with gravel.

‘Well …’ Harry said, folding his arms. ‘If my honesty is the price for yours, then the answer is that I don’t miss it. And that I’ll never forget you, Svein Finne. Or any of the people you maimed and killed. You all visit me fairly regularly at night.’

‘Me too. They’re very faithful, my fiancées.’ Finne’s thick lips slipped apart as he smiled, and he put his right hand over his right eye. Harry heard Wyller step back and hit the door. Finne’s eye stared at Wyller through the hole in his hand that was big enough to hit a golf ball through. ‘Don’t be scared, son,’ Finne said. ‘It’s your boss you should be frightened of. He was just as young as you are now, and I was already lying on the ground, unable to defend myself. Even so, he held his pistol to my hand and fired. Your boss has a black heart, lad. Remember that. And now he’s thirsty again. Just like him out there. And your thirst is like a fire, that’s why you have to quench it. And until it’s quenched, it’ll keep growing, devouring everything it comes into contact with. Isn’t that right, Hole?’

Harry cleared his throat. ‘Your turn, Finne. Where’s Valentin hiding?’

‘You lot have been here to ask about that before, and I can only repeat myself. I barely spoke to Valentin when he was here. And it’s been almost four years since he escaped.’

‘His methods resemble yours. Some people claim that you taught him.’

‘Nonsense. Valentin was born ready-taught. Believe me.’

‘Where would you have hidden, if you were him?’

‘Close enough to be in your sights, Hole. I’d have been prepared for you this time.’

‘Does he live in the city? Move about the city? New identity? Is he alone or is he working with anyone else?’

‘He’s doing it differently now, isn’t he? Biting and drinking blood. Maybe it isn’t Valentin?’

‘It’s Valentin. So how do I catch him?’

‘You don’t catch him.’

‘No?’

‘He’d rather die than end up here again. His imagination was never enough for him, he had to do it.’

‘Sounds like you do know him after all.’

‘I know what he’s made of.’

‘The same as you? Hormones from hell.’

The old man shrugged. ‘Everyone knows that moral choice is an illusion, it’s only the chemistry of the brain that directs your and my behaviour, Hole. Some people’s behaviour gets diagnosed as ADHD or anxiety and is treated with drugs and sympathy. Others are diagnosed as criminal and evil and are locked up. But it’s the same thing. An unholy mixture of substances in the brain. And I agree that we should be locked up. We rape your daughters, for God’s sake.’ Finne let out a rasping laugh. ‘So clear us off the streets, threaten us with punishment so we don’t head off in the direction the chemicals in our brain would otherwise tell us to go in. But what makes that pathetic is that you’re so weak that you need a moral excuse to lock us up. You create a history of lies about free will and some sort of divine punishment that fits into a system of divine justice based on some unchanging, universal morality. But morality can hardly be unchanging or universal, it’s entirely dependent upon the spirit of the age, Hole. Men fucking men was completely OK a few thousand years ago, then they were put in prison, and now politicians go on parades with them. Everything gets decided according to what society needs or doesn’t need at any given time. Morality is flexible and utilitarian. My problem is that I was born in an age and in a country where men who scatter their seed so wantonly are undesirable. But after a pandemic, when the species needs to get back on its feet again, Svein “the Fiancé” Finne would have been a pillar of the community and a saviour of humanity. Don’t you think, Hole?’

‘You raped women and made them give birth to your children,’ Harry said. ‘Valentin kills them. So why don’t you want to help me catch him?’

‘Am I not being helpful?’

‘You’re giving me general answers and half-baked moral philosophy. If you help us, I’ll put in a good word to the parole board.’

Harry heard Wyller shuffle his feet.

‘Really?’ Finne stroked his moustache. ‘Even though you know I’d start raping again as soon as I got out? I appreciate that it must be very important for you to catch Valentin, seeing as you’re prepared to sacrifice so many innocent women’s honour. But I don’t suppose you have a choice.’ He tapped his temple with one finger. ‘Chemistry …’

Harry didn’t respond.

‘Well, then,’ Finne said. ‘To start with, I’ll have served my sentence on the first Saturday of March next year, so it’s too late to get a reduction that makes much difference. And I was taken outside a couple of weeks ago, and you know what? I wanted to get back here. So, thanks but no thanks. Tell me how you’re doing instead, Hole. I heard that you got married. And have a bastard son, yes? Do you live in a safe place?’

‘Was that all you had to say, Finne?’

‘Yes. But I shall follow your collective progress with interest.’

‘Me and Valentin?’

‘You and your family. Hope to see you in the welcoming committee when I’m released.’ Finne’s laugh turned into a wet cough.

Harry stood and gestured to Wyller to bang on the door. ‘Thanks for sparing some of your precious time, Finne.’

Finne raised his right hand in front of his face and waved. ‘See you again, Hole. Nice to be able to talk about f-future plans.’

Harry saw his grin flit back and forth behind the hole in his hand.

15

SUNDAY EVENING

RAKEL WAS SITTING at the kitchen table. The pain, drowned out by the noise and distraction of urgent jobs, became harder to ignore whenever she stopped. She scratched her arm. The rash had barely been noticeable yesterday evening. When the doctor asked if she was urinating regularly she had answered yes automatically, but now that she was more aware of it, she realised that she had hardly peed at all in the past couple of days. And then there was her breathing. As if she was out of shape, and she definitely wasn’t.

There was a clatter of keys at the front door and Rakel stood up.

The door opened and Harry came in. He looked pale and tired.

‘Just popped in to change clothes,’ he said, stroked her cheek and carried on towards the stairs.

‘How’s it going?’ she asked as she watched him disappear upstairs to their bedroom.

‘Good!’ he called. ‘We know who it is.’

‘Time to come home, then?’ she said half-heartedly.

‘What?’ She heard footsteps on the floor and knew he’d taken his trousers off, like a little boy or a drunk man.

‘If you and your great big brain have solved the case …’

‘That’s just it.’ He appeared in the doorway at the top of the stairs. He was wearing a thin woollen sweater and leaning against the door frame as he pulled on a pair of thin woollen socks. She had teased him about that, saying that only old men insisted on wearing wool all year round. He had replied that the best survival strategy was always to copy old men, because they, after all, were the winners, the survivors. ‘I didn’t solve anything. He chose to reveal himself.’ Harry straightened up. Patted his pockets. ‘Keys,’ he said, and vanished into the bedroom again. ‘I met Dr Steffens at Ullevål,’ he called. ‘He said he’s treating you.’

‘Really? Darling, I think you should try to get a few hours’ sleep – your keys are still in the door down here.’

‘All you said was that they’d examined you?’

‘What’s the difference?’

Harry came out, ran down the stairs, and hugged her. ‘Examined is past tense,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Treating is present tense. And, as far as I know, treatment is what happens after an examination comes up with something.’

Rakel laughed. ‘I came up with the headaches myself, and that’s what needs treating, Harry. And the treatment’s called paracetamol.’

He held her out in front of him and looked at her intently. ‘You wouldn’t hide anything from me, would you?’

‘So you’ve got time for this sort of nonsense, have you?’ Rakel leaned into him, forced the pain away, bit him on the ear and pushed him towards the door. ‘Go and get the job finished, then come straight home to Mummy. If not, I’ll 3D-print myself a home-loving man made out of white plastic.’

Harry smiled and walked over to the door. Pulled his keys out of the lock. Stopped and looked at them.

‘What is it?’ Rakel said.

‘He had the key to Elise Hermansen’s flat,’ Harry said, slamming the passenger door behind him. ‘And presumably also to Ewa Dolmen’s.’

‘Really?’ Wyller said, taking the handbrake off and rolling down the drive. ‘We definitely checked every key-cutter in the city, and none of them has made any new keys to any of the buildings.’

‘That’s because he made them himself. Out of white plastic.’

‘White plastic?’

‘Using an ordinary 3D printer costing fifteen thousand kroner which you can keep on your desk. All he needed was access to the original key for a few seconds. He could have taken a photograph of it, or made a wax impression of it, and used that to produce a 3D data file. So when Elise Hermansen came home, he had already locked himself inside her flat. That’s why she put the security chain on, she thought she was alone.’

‘And how do you think he got hold of the keys? None of the buildings the victims lived in used a security company, they each had their own caretaker. And they’ve all got alibis, and they all swear they haven’t lent any keys to anyone.’

‘I know. I don’t know how it happened, just that it did happen.’

Harry didn’t have to look at his young colleague to see how sceptical he was. There were hundreds of other explanations as to why Elise Hermansen’s safety chain had been on. Harry’s deduction didn’t rule out a single one of them. Tresko, Harry’s poker-playing friend, claimed that probability theory and how to play your cards according to the rulebook was the easiest thing in the world. But that what separated smart players from the not-so-smart was the ability to understand how their opponent was thinking, and that meant dealing with so much information that it felt like listening for a whispered answer in a howling storm. Maybe it was. Because through the storm of everything Harry knew about Valentin Gjertsen, all the reports, all his experience of other serial murders, all the ghosts of previous murder victims he hadn’t managed to save over the years, a voice was whispering. Valentin Gjertsen’s voice. That he had taken them from inside. That he had been inside their field of vision.

Harry pulled out his phone. Katrine answered on the second ring.

‘I’m sitting in make-up,’ she said.

‘I think Valentin has a 3D printer. And that could lead us to him.’

‘How?’

‘Shops selling electronic equipment register their customers’ names and addresses if the price is above a certain amount. There’ve only been a couple of thousand 3D printers sold in Norway. If everyone in the team drops what they’re doing, we might be able to get a good overview within a day, and have checked ninety-five per cent of the buyers within two. Which would mean we were left with a list of twenty buyers. Fake names or aliases, we’d find out if we couldn’t see them in the population register at the stated address, or called people to find that they denied buying a 3D printer. Most shops selling electronic equipment have security cameras, so we can check anyone suspicious using the time of the purchase. There’s no reason why he wouldn’t have gone to the shop closest to where he lives, so that would give us an area to search. And by releasing with the security camera images, we can get the public to point us in the right direction.’

‘How did you come up with the idea of the 3D printer, Harry?’

‘I was talking to Oleg about printers and guns and—’

‘Drop everything else, Harry? To focus on something that occurred to you when you were talking to Oleg?’

‘Yep.’

‘This is precisely the sort of alternative angle you’re supposed to be exploring with your guerrilla team, Harry.’

‘Which still only consists of me, and I need your resources.’

Harry heard Katrine burst into laughter. ‘If you weren’t Harry Hole, I’d already have hung up.’

‘Good job I am, then. Listen, we’ve been trying to find Valentin Gjertsen for four years without succeeding. This is the only new lead we’ve got.’

‘Let me think about it after the programme. It’s going out live and my head’s full of things I need to remember to say and not say. And my stomach’s full of butterflies, if I’m honest.’

‘Mm.’

‘Any tips for a television debutante?’

‘Lean back and be relaxed, genial and witty.’

He heard her chuckle. ‘The way you used to be?’

‘I was none of those. Oh yeah – be sober.’

Harry put his phone in his jacket pocket. They were getting close to the place. Where Slemdalsveien crossed Rasmus Winderens vei in Vinderen. And the lights turned red. They stopped. And Harry couldn’t help looking. He could never help it. He glanced at the platform on the other side of the metro track. The place where, half a lifetime ago, he’d lost control of his police car during a chase, sailed across the track and hit the concrete. The officer who had been sitting in the passenger seat died. How drunk had he been? Harry was never made to take a breath test, and the official report said he’d been in the passenger seat rather than driving. Anything, for the good of the force.

‘Did you do it to save lives?’

‘What?’ Harry asked.

‘Working at Crime Squad,’ Wyller said. ‘Or did you do it to catch murderers?’

‘Hm. Are you thinking about what the Fiancé said?’

‘I remember your lectures. I thought you were a murder detective simply because you loved the job.’

‘Really?’

Harry shrugged as the lights turned green. They carried on towards Majorstua and the evening darkness that seemed to be rolling towards them from the cauldron of Oslo.

‘Let me out at the bar,’ Harry said. ‘The one the first victim went to.’

Katrine was in the wings looking at the little desert island in the middle of the circle of light. The island was a black platform holding three chairs and a table. In one of these chairs sat the presenter of The Sunday Magazine, who was about to bring her on as the first guest. Katrine tried not to think about the sea of eyes. Not think about how hard her heart was beating. Nor think about the fact that Valentin was out there right now, and that there was nothing they could do about that, even though they knew full well that it was him. Instead she kept repeating to herself what Bellman had told her: to be credible and reassuring when she said the case had been solved, but that the perpetrator was still at large, and that there was a possibility he had fled the country.

Katrine looked at the director, who was standing between the cameras and the island wearing headphones and clutching a clipboard, shouting that there were ten seconds to go before they began the broadcast, then she started counting down. And suddenly a silly thing that had happened earlier in the day popped into her head. Possibly because she was exhausted and nervous, possibly because the brain takes refuge in silly things when it ought to be concentrating on things that are overwhelming and terrifying. She had called in to see Bjørn at Krimteknisk to ask him to fast-track analysis of the evidence they had found in the stairwell, so that she could use it on television to make herself more convincing. Naturally there hadn’t been many other people there on a Sunday: those who were there were all working on the vampirist murders. Perhaps this emptiness was the reason the situation had made such a strong impression on Katrine. When she walked straight into Bjørn’s office, as usual, a woman had been standing by his chair, almost leaning over him. And one of them must have said something funny, because both she and Bjørn were laughing. When they turned towards Katrine, she had realised that the woman was the recently appointed head of Krimteknisk something-or-other Lien. Katrine remembered Bjørn mentioning her appointment, and remembered thinking she was far too young and inexperienced, and that he should have got the job. Or rather: Bjørn should have taken the job, because he had actually been offered it. But his response had been classic Bjørn Holm: why lose a pretty decent criminal forensics expert to gain a pretty bad boss? Looked at that way, fru or frøken Lien had been a good choice, because Katrine had never heard of anyone called Lien who had excelled in any case. When Katrine had presented her request for quicker results, Bjørn had calmly replied that that was up to his boss, she was the one who decided what was a priority. And something-or-other Lien had given her an ambiguous smile and said she’d check with the other forensics officers and see when they might have the work finished. So Katrine had raised her voice and said that ‘checking’ wasn’t good enough, that the vampirist murders were the priority just now, that anyone with any experience could understand that. And that it would look bad on television if she was forced to say that she couldn’t answer because the new head of Krimteknisk didn’t think it was important enough.

And Berna Lien – yes, that was her name, and she did look a bit like Bernadette in The Big Bang Theory, short with glasses and breasts that were too big for her – had replied: ‘And if I prioritise this, do you promise not to tell anyone that I don’t think the child abuse case in Aker or the honour killings in Stovner are important enough?’ Katrine hadn’t realised that the pleading note in her voice was fake, until Lien went on in her normal, serious voice: ‘Naturally, I agree with you that it’s extremely urgent if it can prevent more murders, Bratt. And it’s that – and not the fact that you’re appearing on television – that weighs most heavily. I’ll get back to you within twenty minutes, OK?’

Katrine had merely nodded and walked away. She went straight to Police HQ, locked herself in the toilet and wiped off the make-up she had put on before heading off to Krimteknisk.

The theme music began to play, and the presenter – who was already sitting up – sat up even straighter as he warmed up his facial muscles with a couple of exaggeratedly wide smiles that he wasn’t likely to need given the subject matter of that evening’s programme.

Katrine felt her phone vibrate in her trouser pocket. As lead investigator, she needed to be accessible at all times, and had ignored the demand to switch her phone off altogether during the broadcast. It was a text from Bjørn.

Found a match for fingerprints on the front door of Penelope’s building. Valentin Gjertsen. Watching TV. Break a leg.

Katrine nodded to the girl beside her who was telling her again that she should walk towards the presenter as soon as she heard her name, and which chair she should sit in. Break a leg. As if she were about to go onstage. But Katrine realised that she was smiling inside anyway.

Harry stopped inside the door of the Jealousy Bar. And realised that the sound of a noisy crowd wasn’t real. Because, unless there were people hiding in the booths along one wall, he was the only customer. Then he caught sight of the football match on the television behind the bar. Harry sat down on one of the bar stools and watched.

‘Beşiktaş–Galatasaray,’ the bartender smiled.

‘Turkish teams,’ Harry said.

‘Yes,’ the bartender said. ‘Interested?’

‘Not really.’

‘That’s fine. It’s all crazy anyway. In Turkey, if you support the visitors and they win, you have to rush home at once so you don’t get shot.’

‘Hm. Religious differences or class?’

The bartender stopped polishing glasses and looked at Harry. ‘It’s about winning.’

Harry shrugged. ‘Of course. My name’s Harry Hole, I’m … I used to be a detective with Crime Squad. I’ve been brought back in to—’

‘Elise Hermansen.’

‘Precisely. I read in your witness statement that you had a customer who was wearing cowboy boots at the same time Elise and her date were here.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Can you tell me anything else about him?’

‘Not really. Because as I remember it, he came in just after Elise Hermansen and sat in that booth over there.’

‘Did you get a look at him?’

‘Yes, but not long enough or carefully enough to give much of a description. Look, you can’t see into the booths from here, and he didn’t order anything before he was suddenly gone again. That happens fairly often – presumably they think the place is a bit too quiet. That’s the way with bars – you need a crowd to attract a crowd. But I didn’t see when he left, so I haven’t really thought about it. Anyway, she was murdered inside her flat, wasn’t she?’

‘She was.’

‘You think he might have followed her home?’

‘It’s a possibility, at least.’ Harry looked at the bartender. ‘Mehmet, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right.’

There was something about the guy that Harry liked instinctively, which made him decide to come straight out and say what he was thinking. ‘If I don’t like the look of a bar, I turn at the door, and if I go in, I order something. I don’t just sit in a booth. He might have followed her here, then – once he’d read the situation and realised she was likely to be going home without the guy soon – he may have gone to her flat and waited for her there.’

‘Seriously? Sick man. And poor girl. Speaking of poor sods, here comes her date from that night.’ Mehmet inclined his head towards the door and Harry turned round. The Galatasaray fans had drowned out the entrance of a bald, rather overweight man in a padded gilet and black shirt. He sat down at the bar and nodded to the bartender with a stiff expression on his face. ‘A large one.’

‘Geir Sølle?’ Harry asked.

‘Preferably not,’ the man said with a hollow laugh, without changing his expression. ‘Journalist?’

‘Police. I’d like to know if either of you recognise this man.’ Harry put a copy of the photofit picture of Valentin Gjertsen down on the bar. ‘He’s probably had extensive plastic surgery since this was produced, so use your imagination.’

Mehmet and Sølle studied the picture. They both shook their heads.

‘You know what, forget the beer,’ Sølle said. ‘I just remembered I need to get home.’

‘As you can see, I’ve already poured it,’ Mehmet said.

‘The dog needs walking – give it to our police officer here, he looks thirsty.’

‘One last question, Sølle. In your witness statement, you said she told you about a stalker who had been following her and threatening men she was with. Did you get the impression that was true?’

‘True?’

‘It wasn’t just something she was saying to keep you away?’

‘Ha, right. You tell me. Presumably she had her own methods of getting rid of frogs.’ Geir Sølle’s attempt at a smile turned into a grimace. ‘Like me.’

‘And do you think she’d had to kiss a lot of frogs?’

‘Tinder can be disappointing, but you never give up hope, do you?’

‘This stalker, did you get the impression he was just a passing nutter, or someone she’d had a relationship with?’

‘No.’ Geir pulled the zip of his gilet all the way up to his chin, even though it was mild outside. ‘I’m going now.’

‘A man she’d had a relationship with?’ the bartender said, giving him his change. ‘I thought these murders were just about drinking blood. And sex.’

‘Maybe,’ Harry said. ‘But it’s usually about jealousy.’

‘And if it isn’t?’

‘Then it might be about what you said.’

‘Blood and sex?’

‘About winning.’ Harry looked down into the glass. Beer had always made him feel bloated and tired. He used to like the first few sips, but after that it just tasted dull. ‘Talking of winning. Looks like Galatasaray are going to lose, so would you mind turning over to The Sunday Magazine on NRK1 instead?’

‘What if I’m a Beşiktaş fan?’

Harry nodded to the corner of the top shelf in front of the mirror. ‘Then you probably wouldn’t have a Galatasaray banner up there next to that bottle of Jim Beam, Mehmet.’

The bartender looked at Harry. Then he grinned, shook his head and pressed the remote.

‘We can’t say with one hundred per cent certainty that the man who attacked the woman in Hovseter yesterday is the same person who killed Elise Hermansen and Ewa Dolmen,’ Katrine said, and it struck her how quiet the studio was, as if everything around them was listening. ‘But what I can say is that we have physical evidence and witness statements linking a specific individual to the attack. And because this person is already a wanted man, an escaped prisoner who was convicted of sex offences, we’ve decided to go public with his name.’

‘And this is the first time you’ve done that, here on The Sunday Magazine?’

‘That’s right. His real name is Valentin Gjertsen, but he’s probably using a different name.’

She saw that the presenter looked a bit disappointed because she’d said the name so quickly, without any build-up. He would clearly have liked to have had time to do a verbal drum roll beforehand.

‘And this is an artist’s impression that shows what he looked like three years ago,’ she said. ‘He’s probably had extensive plastic surgery since then, but it does at least give an idea.’ Katrine held up the picture towards the rows of seats containing the audience of some fifty or so people who, according to the director, were there to give the programme more ‘edge’. Katrine waited, saw the red light of the camera in front of her come on, and let the picture sink in with the people watching at home in their living rooms. The presenter was gazing at her with a look of satisfaction.

‘We would ask anyone with any information to call our hotline,’ she said. ‘This picture, his name and known aliases, as well as our phone number, can all be found on the Oslo Police District website.’

‘And of course it’s urgent,’ the presenter said, addressing the camera. ‘Because there’s a risk that he might strike again as early as this evening.’ He turned to Katrine. ‘At this very moment, even. That’s a possibility, isn’t it?’

Katrine saw that he wanted her help to implant the image of a vampire drinking fresh blood right now.

‘We don’t want to rule anything out,’ she said. That was the phrase Bellman had drummed into her, word for word. He had explained that, unlike ‘we can’t rule anything out’, ‘we don’t want to’ gave the impression that the Oslo Police had a good enough overview of the situation to be able to rule things out, but nonetheless chose not to. ‘But I have received reports suggesting that in the time between the most recent attack and the results of the analysis which has now identified him, Valentin Gjertsen may have left the country. It’s highly plausible that he has a hiding place outside Norway, a place he has been using since his escape from prison four years ago.’

Bellman hadn’t needed to explain this choice of words to her, she was a fast learner. ‘I have received reports’ prompted thoughts of surveillance, secret informants and thorough police work, and the fact that she was talking about a timescale when there would have been plenty of options for flights, trains and ferries didn’t necessarily mean that she was lying. The claim that it was plausible that he had been out of the country was defensible, as long as it wasn’t directly improbable. It also had the advantage of discreetly nudging responsibility for the fact that Valentin Gjertsen hadn’t been caught in the past four years onto ‘outside Norway’.

‘So how do you go about catching a vampirist?’ the presenter said, turning towards the second chair. ‘We’ve brought in Hallstein Smith, a professor of psychology and author of a series of articles about vampirism. Can you answer that for us, Professor Smith?’

Katrine looked at Smith, who had sat down on the third chair off-camera. He was wearing large glasses and a fancy, colourful jacket that looked as if it was home-made. It was in stark contrast to the sombreness of Katrine’s black leather trousers, fitted black jacket and glossy, slicked-back hair. She knew she looked good, and that there would be comments and invitations on their website when she checked later that evening. But she didn’t care, Bellman hadn’t said anything about how to dress. She just hoped that Lien bitch was watching.

‘Er,’ Smith said, smiling dumbly.

Katrine could see that the presenter was worried that the psychologist had frozen and was about to jump in.

‘To start with, I’m not a professor, I’m still working on my PhD. But if I pass, I’ll let you know.’

Laughter.

‘And the articles I’ve written haven’t been published in professional journals, just in dubious magazines dedicated to the more obscure corners of psychology. One of them was called Psycho, after the film. That probably marks the low point of my academic career.’

More laughter.

‘But I am a psychologist,’ he said, turning to the audience. ‘A graduate of Mykolas Romeris University in Vilnius, with grades well above average. And I have got the sort of couch where you can lie and look up at the ceiling for fifteen hundred kroner an hour while I pretend to take notes.’

For a moment it looked like the amused audience and presenter had forgotten the seriousness of the subject. Until Smith brought them back.

‘But I don’t know how to catch vampirists.’

Silence.

‘At least not in general terms. Vampirists are rare, and they come up to the surface even more rarely than that. Let me just point out, to start with, that we need to differentiate between two types of vampirist. One is relatively harmless – people who feel attracted by the myth of the immortal, bloodsucking demigod upon which modern vampire stories such as Dracula are based. This type of vampirism has clear erotic undertones and even drew comment from dear old Sigmund Freud himself. They rarely kill anyone. Then there are people who suffer from what we call clinical vampirism, or Renfield’s syndrome, which means that they’re obsessed with drinking blood. Most of the articles on this subject have been published in journals of forensic psychiatry, because they generally deal with extremely violent crimes. But vampirism as a phenomenon has never been acknowledged within established psychology, it gets rejected as sensationalist, an arena for charlatans. In fact it isn’t even mentioned in psychiatric reference books. Those of us researching vampirism have been accused of inventing a type of human being that doesn’t exist. And for the past three days I have wished that they were right. Unfortunately, they are wrong. Vampires don’t exist, but vampirists do.’

‘How does someone become a vampirist, herr Smith?’

‘Obviously there’s no simple answer to that, but the classic case would start with an incident in childhood in which the subject sees themselves or someone else bleed heavily. Or with them drinking blood. And finding this exciting. That was the case with vampirist and serial killer John George Haigh, for instance, when he was beaten with a hairbrush as punishment by his fanatically religious mother, and licked up the blood afterwards. Later, in puberty, blood becomes a source of sexual excitement. Then the nascent vampirist starts experimenting with blood, often by so-called auto-vampirism, cutting themselves and drinking their own blood. Then at some point they take the decisive step and drink someone else’s blood. It’s also common that after they have drunk a person’s blood, they kill them. By this point they are full-blown vampirists.’

‘And rape, where does that come into it? Elise Hermansen was sexually assaulted, after all.’

‘Well, the experience of power and control speaks very strongly to the adult vampirist. John George Haigh was, for instance, very interested in sex, and said he felt forced to drink his victims’ blood. He used to use a glass, by the way. But I’m fairly certain that for our vampirist here in Oslo, the blood is more important than the sexual assault.’

‘Detective Inspector Bratt?’

‘Er, yes?’

‘Do you agree? Does it seem as if blood is more important than sex for this vampirist?’

‘I have no comment to make about that.’

Katrine saw the presenter take a quick decision and turn back to Smith. Presumably he thought there were richer pickings there.

‘Herr Smith, do vampirists believe that they’re vampires? In other words, that they’re immortal as long as they avoid sunlight, that they can convert others by biting them, and so on?’

‘Not the clinical vampirist with Renfield’s syndrome. It’s actually rather unfortunate that the syndrome is named after Renfield, who of course was Count Dracula’s servant in Bram Stoker’s novel. It should be called Noll’s syndrome, after the psychiatrist who first identified it. On the other hand, Noll didn’t take vampirism seriously either: the article in which he wrote about the syndrome was intended as a parody.’

‘Is it out of the question that this individual might not actually be sick, but taking a drug that makes them thirst for human blood, in the same way that MDPV, so-called “bath salts”, made its users attack other people and eat them in Miami and New York in 2012?’

‘No. When people who take MDPV become cannibalistic they are extremely psychotic, unable to think rationally or plan, the police can catch them red-handed – pardon the pun – because they make no attempt to hide. Now, the typical vampirist is so driven by a thirst for blood that escape isn’t the first thing they think of, but in this case the planning is so thorough that he or she hasn’t left any evidence behind, if we’re to believe VG.’

‘She?’

‘I, er, was just trying to be politically correct. Vampirists are almost always men, especially when the attacks are violent, as in this instance. Female vampirists usually make do with auto-vampirism, seek out like-minded souls to swap blood with, get blood from slaughterhouses, or hang around near blood banks. I did have a female patient in Lithuania who actually ate her mother’s canaries while they were still alive …’

Katrine noticed the first yawn of the evening in the audience, and a solitary laugh that quickly fell silent.

‘At first my colleagues and I thought we were dealing with what is known as species dysphoria, which is when a patient believes they were born the wrong species and is actually something else: in this instance, a cat. That was until we realised we were looking at a case of vampirism. Unfortunately Psychology Today didn’t agree, so if you want to read the article about the case you’ll have to go to hallstein.psychologist.com.’

‘Detective Inspector Bratt, can we say that this is a serial killer?’

Katrine thought for a couple of seconds. ‘No.’

‘But VG is saying that Harry Hole, who of course isn’t exactly unknown as a specialist in serial murders, has been brought onto the case. Doesn’t that suggest that—?’

‘We sometimes consult firemen even when there isn’t a fire.’

Smith was the only person who laughed. ‘Good answer! Psychiatrists and psychologists would starve to death if we only saw patients when there was actually something wrong with them.’

That got a lot of laughs, and the presenter smiled gratefully at Smith. Katrine had a feeling that Smith was the more likely out of the pair of them to be asked back.

‘Serial killer or not, do you both consider that the vampirist is going to strike again? Or will he wait until the next full moon?’

‘I don’t want to speculate about that,’ Katrine said, and caught a glimpse of irritation in the presenter’s eyes. What the hell, did he really expect her to join in with his tabloid parlour games?

‘I’m not going to speculate either,’ Hallstein Smith said. ‘I don’t need to, because I know. A paraphile – what we rather imprecisely call a sexually perverted person – who doesn’t get treatment very rarely stops of his own accord. And a vampirist never does. But I think the fact that the most recent attempted murder took place at a full moon is a complete coincidence, and was enjoyed more by you in the media than the vampirist.’

It didn’t look like the presenter felt put out by Smith’s barb. He asked with a serious frown: ‘Herr Smith, would you say we should be critical of the police for not warning the public earlier that a vampirist was on the loose, like you yourself did in VG?’

‘Mm.’ Smith grimaced and looked up at one of the spotlights. ‘That becomes a question about what one ought to have known, doesn’t it? Like I said, vampirism is tucked away in one of the less familiar corners of psychology, rarely troubled by the light. So, no. I’d say it was unfortunate, but they shouldn’t be criticised for it.’

‘But now the police do know. So what should they do?’

‘Find out more about the subject.’

‘And finally: how many vampirists have you met?’

Smith puffed his cheeks out and exhaled. ‘Genuine ones?’

‘Yes.’

‘Two.’

‘How do you personally react to blood?’

‘It makes me feel queasy.’

‘Yet you still research and write about it.’

Smith smiled wryly. ‘Perhaps that’s why. We’re all a bit crazy.’

‘Does that apply to you as well, Detective Inspector Bratt?’

Katrine started. For a moment she’d forgotten she wasn’t just watching but was actually on television.

‘Er, sorry?’

‘A bit crazy?’

Katrine searched for an answer. Something quick-witted and genial, like Harry had advised. She knew she’d think of something when she got into bed later that night. Which couldn’t come soon enough, seeing as she could feel her tiredness seeping through now that the adrenalin rush of being on television was starting to fade. ‘I …’ she began, then gave up and plumped for a ‘Well, who knows?’

‘Crazy enough that you could envisage meeting a vampirist? Not a murderer, as in this tragic case, but one who might just bite you a little bit?’

Katrine suspected that was a joke, possibly one alluding to her vaguely S&M-inspired outfit.

‘A little bit?’ she repeated, and raised one black, made-up eyebrow. ‘Yes, why not?’

And without actually trying, she too was rewarded with laughter this time.

‘Good luck with catching him, Detective Inspector Bratt. The last word to you, herr Smith. You didn’t answer the question about how to find vampirists. Any advice for Detective Inspector Bratt here?’

‘Vampirism is such an extreme paraphilia that it often occurs in conjunction with other psychiatric diagnoses. So I would encourage all psychologists and psychiatrists to help the police by going through their lists to see if they have patients who demonstrate behaviour that might fit the criteria for clinical vampirism. I think we can agree that a case like this has to take precedence over our oath of confidentiality.’

‘And with that, this edition of The Sunday Magazine …’

The television screen behind the counter went dark.

‘Nasty stuff,’ Mehmet said. ‘But your colleague looked good.’

‘Hm. Is it always this empty here?’

‘Oh, no.’ Mehmet looked around the bar. Cleared his throat. ‘Well, yes.’

‘I like it.’

‘Do you? You haven’t touched your beer. Look at it, going flat there.’

‘Good,’ the policeman said.

‘I could give you something with a bit more life in it.’ Mehmet nodded towards the Galatasaray banner.

Katrine was hurrying along one of the empty, labyrinthine corridors in Television Centre when she heard heavy footsteps and breathing behind her. She glanced back without stopping. It was Hallstein Smith. Katrine noted a running style that was as unorthodox as his research, unless he was just unusually knock-kneed.

‘Bratt,’ Smith called.

Katrine stopped and waited.

‘I’d like to start by apologising,’ Smith said as he caught up with her, gasping for breath.

‘What for?’

‘For talking far too much. I get a bit high from the attention, my wife’s always telling me. But much more importantly, that picture …’

‘Yes?’

‘I couldn’t say anything in there, but I think I might have had him as a patient.’

‘Valentin Gjertsen?’

‘I’m not sure, it must be at least two years ago, and it was only a couple of hours of therapy at the office I used to rent in the city. There’s not really that much of a similarity, but I thought of this particular patient when you mentioned plastic surgery. Because, if I remember rightly, he had a scar left by stitches under his chin.’

‘Was he a vampirist?’

‘What do I know? He didn’t mention it, and if he had I’d have included him in my research.’

‘Maybe he came to see you because he was curious, if he knew that you were conducting research into his … what was that word?’

‘Paraphilia. That’s not impossible. Like I said, I’m pretty sure we’re dealing with an intelligent vampirist who’s aware of his own illness. Either way, this makes the fact that my patient records were stolen even more annoying.’

‘You don’t remember what this patient said his name was, where he worked, where he lived?’

Smith sighed deeply. ‘I’m afraid my memory isn’t what it used to be.’

Katrine nodded. ‘We can always hope that he’s seen other psychologists and that they remember something. And that they’re not too Catholic when it comes to the oath of confidentiality.’

‘A bit of Catholicism isn’t to be sniffed at.’

Katrine raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you mean by that?’

Smith screwed his eyes shut in frustration and looked like he was trying not to swear. ‘Nothing.’

‘Come on, Smith.’

The psychologist threw his hands out. ‘I’m putting two and two together here, Bratt. Your reaction when the presenter asked if you were crazy, combined with what you said to me about getting drenched in Sandviken. We often communicate non-verbally, and what you were communicating was the fact that you had been treated in the psychiatric unit in Sandviken. And for you as a lead detective at Crime Squad, it’s probably a good idea for us to keep an oath of confidentiality that’s in part designed to protect people seeking help for problems from having it come back to haunt them later in their careers.’

Katrine Bratt felt her mouth hang open as she tried in vain to think of something to say.

‘You don’t actually have to respond to my idiotic guesses,’ Smith said. ‘I’m actually under an oath of confidentiality when it comes to them too. Goodnight, Bratt.’

Katrine watched Hallstein trudge off along the corridor, as knock-kneed as the Eiffel Tower. Her phone rang.

It was Bellman.

He was naked, locked into an impenetrable, burning fog that stung the parts of his skin where he had scrubbed through it, making the blood run onto the wooden bench beneath him. He closed his eyes, felt a sob rising, and visualised how it would happen. The fucking rules. They limited the enjoyment, limited the pain, stopped him from expressing himself the way he would like to. But things would change. The police had received his message, and were after him now. Right now. Trying to sniff him out, but they couldn’t. Because he was clean.

He started when he heard someone clear their throat in the fog and realised that he was no longer alone.

‘Kapatiyoruz.’

‘Yes,’ Valentin Gjertsen replied in a thick voice, but remained seated, trying to stifle the sob.

Closing time.

He touched his genitals carefully. He knew exactly where she was. How she should be played with. He was ready. Valentin breathed moist air into his lungs. And there was Harry Hole, thinking he was the hunter.

Valentin Gjertsen stood up suddenly and walked towards the door.

16

SUNDAY NIGHT

AURORA GOT OUT of bed and crept into the hall. Went past her mum and dad’s bedroom and the stairs that led down to the living room. She couldn’t help listening to the rumbling, silent darkness down there as she crept into the bathroom and turned the light on. She locked the door, pulled her pyjamas down and sat on the toilet. Waited, but nothing happened. She had been so desperate to pee that she couldn’t sleep, so why couldn’t she go now? Was it because she didn’t really need to, and had just persuaded herself that she did because she couldn’t sleep? And because it was so quiet and safe in here? She had locked the door. When she was a child, her parents had told her she wasn’t allowed to do that unless they had guests. Said they needed to be able to get in if anything happened to her.

Aurora closed her eyes. Listened. What if they had guests? Because it had been a sound that had woken her, she remembered that now. The sound of creaking shoes. No, boots. Long, pointed boots that creaked and bent as he crept forward. Stopped and waited outside the bathroom door. Waiting for her. Aurora felt that she couldn’t breathe and looked automatically at the bottom of the door. But it was hidden by the threshold, so she couldn’t see if anything outside was casting a shadow. Anyway, it was pitch-black out there. The first time she saw him she had been sitting on the swing in the garden. He’d asked for a glass of water, and had almost followed Aurora into the house, then vanished when they’d heard her mum’s car coming. The second time had been in the ladies’ toilet during the handball tournament.

Aurora listened. She knew he was there. In the darkness outside the door. He had told her he would come back. If she said anything. So she had stopped talking. That was the safest option. And she knew why she couldn’t pee now. Because then he’d know she was sitting here. She closed her eyes and listened as hard as she could. No. Nothing. And she could breathe again. He had gone.

Aurora pulled her pyjamas up, unlocked the door and hurried out. She ran past the top of the stairs to the door of her mum and dad’s room. She cautiously pushed it open and peered in. A strip of moonlight coming through a gap in the curtains lay across her dad’s face. She couldn’t see if he was breathing, but his face was so white, just like her grandmother’s when Aurora had seen her in the coffin. She crept closer to the bed. Her mum’s breathing reminded Aurora of the rubber pump they used to blow up the inflatable mattresses at the cottage. She went over to her dad and put her ear as close to his mouth as she dared. And felt her heart skip with joy when she felt his warm breath on her skin.

When she was lying in bed again it was as if it had never happened. As if it was all just a nightmare she could escape by closing her eyes and falling asleep.

Rakel opened her eyes.

She had been having a nightmare. But that wasn’t what had woken her. Someone had opened the front door downstairs. She looked at the space beside her. Harry wasn’t there. Presumably he had just got home. She heard his footsteps on the stairs, and listened automatically for their familiar sound. But no, these sounded different. And they didn’t sound like Oleg’s either, if he had decided to drop in for some reason.

She stared at the closed bedroom door.

The footsteps came closer.

The door opened.

A huge, dark silhouette filled the opening.

And Rakel remembered what she had been dreaming about. It was a full moon, and he had chained himself to the bed and the sheet had been torn to shreds. He had been twisting in agony, tugging at the chain, howling at the night sky as if he’d been hurt, before finally tearing off his own skin. And from beneath it his other self emerged. A werewolf with claws and teeth, with hunting and death in his crazed, ice-blue eyes.

‘Harry?’ she whispered.

‘Did I wake you?’ His deep, calm voice was the same as always.

‘I was dreaming about you.’

He slipped into the room without turning the light on as he undid his belt and pulled his T-shirt over his head. ‘About me? That’s a waste of a dream, I’m already yours.’

‘Where have you been?’

‘At a bar.’

The unfamiliar rhythm of his steps. ‘Have you been drinking?’

He slid into bed beside her. ‘Yes, I’ve been drinking. And you’ve gone to bed early.’

She held her breath. ‘What have you been drinking, Harry? And how much?’

‘Turkish coffee. Two cups.’

‘Harry!’ She hit him with the pillow.

‘Sorry,’ he laughed. ‘Did you know that Turkish coffee isn’t supposed to boil? And that Istanbul has three big football clubs that have hated each other like the plague for a hundred years but everyone’s forgotten why? Apart from the fact that it’s probably very human to hate someone because they hate you.’

She curled up next to him and put her arm round his chest. ‘All this is news to me, Harry.’

‘I know you like getting regular updates about how the world actually works.’

‘I don’t know how I’d survive without.’

‘You didn’t say why you’ve gone to bed so early?’

‘You didn’t ask.’

‘I’m asking now.’

‘I was so tired. And I’ve got an early appointment at Ullevål before work tomorrow.’

‘You haven’t mentioned that.’

‘No, I only heard today. Dr Steffens called in person.’

‘Sure it’s an appointment and not just an excuse?’

Rakel laughed quietly, turned away from him and pushed back into his embrace. ‘Sure you’re not just pretending to be jealous to make me happy?’

He bit her gently on the back of her neck. Rakel closed her eyes and hoped that her headache would soon be drowned out by lust, wonderful, pain-relieving lust. But it didn’t come. And perhaps Harry could feel it, because he lay there quietly, just holding her. His breathing was deep and even, but she knew he wasn’t asleep. He was somewhere else. With his other love.

Mona Daa was running on the treadmill. Because of her damaged hip, her running style looked like a crab’s, so she never used the treadmill until she was completely sure she was alone. But she liked jogging a few kilometres after a hard session in the gym, feeling the lactic acid drain from her muscles while she looked out across the darkness of Frognerparken. The Rubinoos, a power-pop group from the seventies who had written a song for one of her favourite films, The Revenge of the Nerds, were singing bitter-sweet pop songs through the earphones that were connected to her phone. Until they were interrupted by a call.

She realised that she had been half expecting it.

It wasn’t that she wanted him to strike again. She didn’t want anything. She merely reported what happened. That was what she told herself, anyway.

The screen said ‘Unknown number’. So it wasn’t the newsroom. She hesitated. A lot of weird types popped up during big murder cases like this one, but curiosity got the better of her and she clicked ‘answer’.

‘Good evening, Mona.’ A man’s voice. ‘I think we’re alone now.’

Mona looked round instinctively. The girl on reception was immersed in her own phone. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ve got the whole of the gym to yourself, I’ve got the whole of Frognerparken. Actually, it feels like we’ve got the whole of Oslo to ourselves, Mona. You with your unusually well-informed articles, me as the main character in those articles.’

Mona looked at the pulse monitor on her wrist. Her pulse rate had gone up, but not by much. All her friends knew she spent her evenings at the gym, and that she had a view of the park. This wasn’t the first time someone had tried to fool her, and it probably wasn’t the last either.

‘I don’t know who you are or what you want. You’ve got ten seconds to convince me not to hang up.’

‘I’m not entirely happy with the coverage, a lot of the detail of my work seems to be passing you by completely. I’m offering you a meeting where I shall tell you what I’m trying to show you. And what’s going to happen in the near future.’

Her pulse rate rose a bit further.

‘Tempting, I must say. Apart from the fact that you probably don’t want to be arrested, and I don’t want to be bitten.’

‘There’s an old abandoned cage from the zoo at Kristiansand down at the container port at Ormøya. There’s no lock on it, so take a padlock with you, lock yourself in, and I’ll come and talk to you from outside. That means I’ve got control of you at the same time as you’re safe. You can take a weapon to defend yourself with if you like.’

‘Like a harpoon, you mean?’

‘A harpoon?’

‘Yes, seeing as we’re going to be playing great-white-shark-and-diver-in-a-cage.’

‘You’re not taking me seriously.’

‘Would you take you seriously if you were me?’

‘If I were you, I would – before I made up my mind – ask for information about the killings that only the person who committed them could know.’

‘Go ahead, then.’

‘I used Ewa Dolmen’s blender to mix myself a cocktail, a Bloody Ewa, if you will. You can check that with your police source, because I didn’t wash up after me.’

Mona was thinking hard. This was mad. And it could be the scoop of the century, the story that would define her journalistic career for all time.

‘OK, I’m going to contact my source now, can I call you back in five minutes?’

Low laughter. ‘You don’t build trust by trying cheap tricks like that, Mona. I’ll call you back in five minutes.’

‘Fine.’

It took a while for Truls Berntsen to answer. He sounded sleepy.

‘I thought you were all working?’ Mona said.

‘Someone has to have some time off.’

‘I’ve just got one question.’

‘There’s a discount for bulk if you’ve got more.’

When Mona hung up she knew she’d struck gold. Or, to be more accurate, that gold had struck her.

When the unknown number called again, she had two questions. Where, and when.

‘Havnegate 3. Tomorrow evening, eight o’clock. And, Mona?’

‘Yes?’

‘Don’t tell a soul until it’s over.’

‘Any reason why we can’t just do this over the phone?’

‘Because I want to see you the whole time. And you want to see me. Sleep well. If you’re done on that treadmill.’

Harry lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. Obviously he could blame those two cups of Mehmet’s bitumen-strength coffee, but knew that wasn’t the cause. He knew he was there again, unable to switch his brain off until it was over. It just went on working and working until the perpetrator was caught, and sometimes far beyond that. Four years. Four years without so much as a sign of life. Or a sign of death. But now Valentin Gjertsen had shown himself. And not just a glimpse of his devil’s tail – he had voluntarily stepped out into the spotlight, like a self-obsessed actor, scriptwriter and director rolled into one. Because this was being directed, it wasn’t simply the actions of a raving psychotic. This wasn’t someone they were going to catch by chance. They just had to wait until he made his next move, and pray to God that he made a mistake. In the meantime, they had to keep looking in the hope of unearthing the tiny mistakes he had already made. Because everyone makes mistakes. Almost everyone.

Harry listened to Rakel’s regular breathing, then slipped out from under the covers, crept to the door and downstairs to the living room.

His call was answered on the second ring.

‘I thought you’d be asleep,’ Harry said.

‘And you still called?’ Ståle Aune said in a sleepy voice.

‘You have to help me find Valentin Gjertsen.’

‘Help me? Or help us?’

‘Me. Us. The city. Humanity, for fuck’s sake. He has to be stopped.’

‘I’ve told you, my watch is over, Harry.’

‘He’s awake, and he’s out there right now, Ståle. While we’re lying asleep.’

‘And with a guilty conscience. But we’re sleeping. Because we’re tired. I’m tired, Harry. Too tired.’

‘I need someone who understands him, who can predict his next move, Ståle. See where he’s going to make mistakes. Identify his weakness.’

‘I can’t—’

‘Hallstein Smith,’ Harry said. ‘What do you make of him?’

There was a pause.

‘You didn’t actually call to persuade me,’ Ståle said, and Harry could hear that he felt a bit hurt.

‘This is plan B,’ Harry said. ‘Hallstein Smith was the first person to say that this was the work of a vampirist, and that he’d strike again. He was right about Valentin Gjertsen sticking to the method that had worked, Tinder dating. Right about him taking the risk of leaving evidence. Right about Valentin’s ambivalence towards being identified. And he said early on that the police should be looking for a sex offender. Smith has hit the target pretty well so far. The fact that he goes against the flow is good, because I’m thinking of recruiting him to my little against-the-flow team. But, most importantly of all, you told me he was a smart psychologist.’

‘He’s that all right. Yes, Hallstein Smith could be a good choice.’

‘There’s just one thing I’m wondering about. That nickname of his …’

‘The Monkey?’

‘You said it was connected to the fact that he’s still struggling for credibility among his colleagues.’

‘Bloody hell, Harry, it’s more than half a lifetime ago.’

‘Tell me.’

It sounded like Ståle was thinking. Then he mumbled quietly into the phone: ‘That nickname was partly my fault, I’m afraid. And his too, of course. While he was a student here in Oslo we discovered that there was money missing from the little safe in the psychology department bar. Hallstein was our prime suspect because he was suddenly able to afford to come on a study trip to Vienna that he hadn’t initially signed up to because he didn’t have the cash. The problem was that it was impossible to prove that Hallstein had got hold of the code to the safe, which was the only way he could have got the money. So I set a monkey trap.’

‘A what?’

‘Daddy!’ Harry heard a high-pitched girl’s voice at the other end of the phone. ‘Is everything OK?’

Harry heard Ståle’s hand scrape against the microphone. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you, Aurora. I’m talking to Harry.’

Then her mother, Ingrid’s voice: ‘Oh, sweetie, you look terrified. A nightmare? Come with me and I’ll tuck you in. Or perhaps we could make some tea?’ Footsteps moved off across the floor.

‘Where were we?’ Ståle Aune said.

‘The monkey trap.’

‘Ah, yes. Have you read Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?’

‘All I know is that it’s not really about motorcycle maintenance.’

‘True. First and foremost it’s a book about philosophy, but also philosophy and the struggle between feelings and the intellect. Like the monkey trap. You make a hole in a coconut, big enough for the monkey to stick its hand in. You fill the coconut with food and fix it to a pole. Then you hide and wait. The monkey picks up the smell of food, comes and sticks its hand in the hole, grabs the food, and that’s when you jump out. The monkey wants to get away, but realises that it can’t get its hand out without letting go of the food. The interesting thing is that even though the monkey ought to be intelligent enough to realise that if it gets caught it’s unlikely to be able to enjoy the food, it still refuses to let go. Instinct, starvation, desire are stronger than the intellect. And that’s the monkey’s downfall. Every time. So I and the manager of the bar arranged a psychology quiz and invited everyone in the department. It was a large gathering, with a lot at stake, a lot of tension. Once the bar manager and I had been through the results, I announced that it was a dead heat between the two second-best minds in the department, Smith and a guy called Olavsen, and that the winner would be decided by testing the students’ skill at detecting lies. So I introduced a young woman as being one of the bar staff, sat her down on a chair, and asked the two finalists to find out as much as they could about the code to the safe. Smith and Olavsen had to sit opposite her while she was asked about the first number in the four-digit code, from one to nine in a random order. Then the second one, and so on. The young woman had been told to reply “No, that’s not the right number” each time, while Smith and Olavsen studied her body language, the dilation of her pupils, signs of increased heart rate, changes in the modulation of her voice, perspiration, involuntary eye movement, everything an ambitious psychologist takes pride in being able to interpret correctly. The winner would be the one who guessed the most digits correctly. The two of them sat there making notes, concentrating hard while I asked the forty questions. Because remember what was at stake: the title of second-smartest psychologist in the department.’

‘Obviously, because everyone knew that the smartest—’

‘—couldn’t take part because he had organised the quiz. Quite. When I’d finished, they each handed me a note with their suggestion. It turned out that Smith had got all four digits right. Great rejoicing all around the room! Because of course this was very impressive. Suspiciously impressive, one might say. Now, Hallstein Smith is more intelligent than the average monkey, and I’m not ignoring the possibility that he may actually have realised what was going on. Even so, he couldn’t help trying to win. He just couldn’t! Possibly because at the time Hallstein Smith was an impoverished, spotty, largely overlooked young man who didn’t have much luck with the ladies, or anything else come to that, and was therefore more desperate for this sort of victory than most people. Or perhaps because he knew it might arouse the suspicion that it was he who had taken the money from the safe, but that it wouldn’t prove it, because of course it could be the case that he really was brilliant at reading people and interpreting the human body’s many signals. But …’

‘Hm.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘No, what is it?’

‘The young woman in the chair. She didn’t know the code.’

Ståle murmured in agreement. ‘She didn’t even work in the bar.’

‘How did you know Smith would walk into the monkey trap?’

‘Because I’m brilliant at reading people and so on. The question is, what do you think now that you know that your candidate has a background as a thief?’

‘How much are we talking about?’

‘If I remember rightly, two thousand kroner.’

‘Not much. And you said there was money missing from the safe, which means he didn’t empty it completely, doesn’t it?’

‘At the time we thought that was because he hoped it wouldn’t be noticed.’

‘But since then you’ve been thinking that he only took what he needed to be able to join the rest of you on that study trip?’

‘He was asked, very politely, to surrender his place on the course in return for the matter not being referred to the police. He got onto a psychology course in Lithuania.’

‘He went into exile, now with the nickname “the Monkey” as a result of your stunt.’

‘He came back and did a postgraduate degree in Norway. Qualified as a psychologist. He did OK.’

‘You’re aware that you sound like you’ve got a guilty conscience?’

‘And you sound like you’re thinking about employing a thief.’

‘I’ve never had anything against thieves with acceptable motives.’

‘Hah!’ Ståle exclaimed. ‘You like him even more now. Because you understand the idea of the monkey trap: you can never give up either, Harry. You’re losing the bigger prize because you can’t let go of the smaller one. You’re determined to catch Valentin Gjertsen, even though you’re actually aware that it might well cost you everything you hold dear, yourself and those around you – you simply can’t let go.’

‘A neat parallel, but you’re wrong.’

‘Am I?’

‘Yes.’

‘If that’s the case, then I’m pleased. Now I ought to go and see how my womenfolk are getting on.’

‘If Smith does join us, could you give him a brief introduction into what’s expected of him as a psychologist?’

‘Of course, it’s the least I can do.’

‘For Crime Squad? Or because you’re why he got nicknamed “the Monkey”?’

‘Goodnight, Harry.’

Harry went back upstairs and lay down in bed. Without actually touching Rakel, he lay close enough to feel the heat radiating from her sleeping body. He closed his eyes.

And after a while he glided away. Out of bed, out through the window, through the night, down towards the glittering city where the lights never went out, down onto the streets, into the alleys, over the rubbish bins, where the light of the city never reached. And there, there he was. His shirt was open and from his bare chest a face screamed at him as it tried to rip the skin apart and get out.

It was a face he knew.

Hunter and hunted, scared and hungry, hated and full of hate.

Harry quickly opened his eyes.

He had seen his own face.

17

MONDAY MORNING

KATRINE LOOKED OUT at the investigative team’s collection of pale faces. Some of them had worked through the night, and those who hadn’t probably hadn’t got much sleep either. They had already been through the list of Valentin Gjertsen’s known contacts, most of them criminal, some of them in prison, some of them dead, it turned out. Then Tord Gren had briefed them about the call lists provided by Telenor, which showed the names of everyone the three victims had been in contact with by phone in the hours and days before they were attacked. So far there hadn’t been anything to link them in the numbers, or any suspicious-looking calls or texts. In fact the only thing that was suspicious at all was an unanswered call from an unregistered number, made to Ewa Dolmen’s phone two days before her murder. It had come from a pay-as-you-go mobile which couldn’t be traced, which could mean that it was switched off, had been destroyed, had had its SIM card removed, or that the balance on the card had simply run out.

Anders Wyller had presented the current state of the investigation into the sale of 3D printers, saying that there were just too many of them, and the percentage that weren’t registered to names and addresses in the stores that sold them was too great for there to be any point carrying on with that line of inquiry.

Katrine had looked at Harry, who had shaken his head at the result, before nodding to her that he agreed with the conclusion.

Bjørn Holm had explained that now that the forensic evidence from the last crime scene pointed towards a suspect, Krimteknisk would concentrate on securing further evidence that could tie Valentin Gjertsen to the three crime scenes and victims.

Katrine was ready to allocate the day’s work when Magnus Skarre stuck his hand up and said, before she had given him permission to speak: ‘Why did you decide to go public with the news that Valentin Gjertsen is the suspect?’

‘Why? To get tip-offs about where he might be, of course.’

‘And now we’re going to get hundreds, thousands of them, based on a pencil sketch of a face that could easily have belonged to two of my uncles. And we’ll have to check every single one of them, because imagine if it later emerged that the police had received a tip-off about Gjertsen’s new identity and where he was living before he bit and killed victims number four and five.’ Skarre looked round as if to gather support. Or, Katrine realised, because he was already speaking on behalf of several of them.

‘That’s always the dilemma, Skarre, but that’s what we decided.’

Skarre nodded towards one of the female analysts, who picked up the baton and ran with it. ‘Skarre’s right, Katrine. What we could really do with right now is some time to get on with our work in peace. We’ve asked the public for information about Valentin Gjertsen before and it didn’t get us anywhere, it just took the focus away from things which might have been able to get us somewhere.’

‘And now he knows that we know, we may have frightened him off. He’s got a hideaway where he’s managed to stay out of sight for three years, and now we risk him sneaking back into his hole. Just saying.’ Skarre folded his arms with a triumphant look on his face.

‘Risk?’ The voice came from the back of the room, followed by a snort of laughter. ‘Surely the ones at risk are the women you want to use as bait while we keep quiet about the fact that we know who it is, Skarre. And if we don’t catch the bastard, we might as well chase him back to his hole, in my opinion.’

Skarre shook his head with a smile. ‘You’ll learn, Berntsen, when you’ve been in the unit for a bit longer, that men like Valentin Gjertsen don’t stop. He’ll just do what he’s doing somewhere else. You heard what our boss –’ he pronounced our boss with exaggerated slowness – ‘said on television last night. That Valentin might have already left the country. But if you’re hoping that he’s sitting at home with his popcorn and knitting, a little more experience will make you realise you’re wrong.’

Truls Berntsen looked down at his palms and muttered something Katrine couldn’t hear.

‘We can’t hear you, Berntsen,’ Skarre called, without turning to look at him.

‘I said that those pictures that were shown the other day, of the Jacobsen woman under that pile of surfboards, didn’t reveal everything,’ Truls Berntsen responded in a loud, clear voice. ‘When I got there she was still breathing. But she couldn’t talk because he’d used pliers to rip her tongue out of her mouth and stuff it you know where. Do you know how much more comes out if you rip someone’s tongue out instead of cutting it off, Skarre? Either way, it sounded like she was begging me to shoot her. And if I’d had a pistol, I’m pretty fucking sure I’d have considered it. But she died soon after that, so that was OK. Just thought I’d mention it while we’re talking about experience.’

In the silence that followed, as Truls took a deep breath, Katrine found herself thinking that one day she might end up liking Constable Berntsen. That thought was immediately punctured by Truls Berntsen’s concluding remarks.

‘And as far as I know, our responsibility is Norway, Skarre. If Valentin fucks wogs and coons in other countries, they can deal with it. Better that than him helping himself to our girls.’

‘And that’s where we stop,’ Katrine said firmly. The looks of surprise revealed that they were at least awake again now. ‘We’ll gather for the afternoon meeting at 1600 hours, then there’s a press conference at 1800 hours. I want people to be able to reach me over the phone, so keep your reports as short and concise as possible. And, just so we’re all still aware, everything is urgent. The fact that he didn’t strike again yesterday doesn’t mean that he won’t today. After all, even God took a breather on Sunday.’

The conference room emptied quickly. Katrine gathered her papers, shut her laptop and got ready to leave.

‘I want Wyller and Bjørn,’ Harry said. He was still seated, hands behind his head, legs stretched out in front of him.

‘No problem with Wyller, but you’ll have to ask the new head of Krimteknisk about Bjørn. Something Lien.’

‘I’ve asked Bjørn, and he says he’s going to talk to her.’

‘Yes, I’m sure he is,’ Katrine found herself saying. ‘Have you spoken to Wyller?’

‘Yes. He got quite excited.’

‘And the last person?’

‘Hallstein Smith.’

‘Really?’

‘Why not?’

‘An eccentric with a nut allergy and no experience of police work?’

Harry leaned back in his chair, dug in his trouser pocket and pulled out a crumpled pack of Camels. ‘If there’s a new creature in the jungle called a vampirist, I want the person who knows most about that creature by my side the whole time. But you seem to be saying that the fact that he’s allergic to nuts should count against him?’

Katrine sighed. ‘I just mean that I’m getting fed up of all these allergies. Anders Wyller’s allergic to rubber, he can’t use latex gloves. Or condoms, I assume. Imagine that.’

‘I’d rather not,’ Harry said, looking down into the packet and sticking a sad, broken little cigarette between his lips.

‘Why don’t you just keep your cigarettes in your jacket pocket like other people, Harry?’

Harry shrugged. ‘Broken cigarettes taste better. By the way, I’m assuming that because the boiler room hasn’t officially been designated an office, the smoking ban doesn’t apply there?’

‘Sorry,’ Hallstein Smith said over the phone. ‘Thanks for asking, though.’

He hung up, put his phone in his pocket and looked at his wife May, who was sitting on the other side of the kitchen table.

‘Is something wrong?’ she asked with a worried expression.

‘That was the police. They asked if I wanted to join a small group working to catch this vampirist.’

‘And?’

‘And I’ve got a deadline for my PhD. I haven’t got time. And I’m not interested in that sort of manhunt. We have quite enough hawks and doves at home.’

‘And you told them that?’

‘Yes. Apart from the bit about hawks and doves.’

‘And what did they say?’

‘He. It was a man. Harry.’ Hallstein Smith laughed. ‘He said he understood, and that police investigations are boring and full of painstaking work, and not at all like they’re depicted on television.’

‘Well, then,’ May said, and raised her cup to her lips.

‘Well, then,’ Hallstein said, and did the same.

Harry’s and Anders Wyller’s footsteps echoed, drowning out the gentle sound of water dripping from the brick roof of the tunnel.

‘Where are we?’ Wyller asked. He was carrying the screen and keyboard of a desktop computer of older vintage.

‘Under the park, somewhere between Police HQ and Bots Prison,’ Harry said. ‘We call it the Culvert.’

‘And there’s a secret office here?’

‘Not secret. Just vacant.’

‘Who’d want an office here, underground?’

‘No one. That’s why it’s vacant.’ Harry stopped in front of a metal door. Inserted a key in the lock and turned it. Pulled the handle.

‘Still locked?’ Wyller asked.

‘Swollen.’ Harry braced one foot on the wall next to the door and yanked it open. They were hit by a warm, damp smell of brick cellar. Harry breathed it in happily. Back in the boiler room.

He switched the lights on inside. After a few moments’ hesitation, fluorescent lights on the ceiling began to flicker. Once the lights had settled down they looked around the square room with its grey-blue linoleum floor. No windows, just bare concrete walls. Harry glanced over at Wyller. Wondered if the sight of their workplace might dampen the spontaneous joy the young detective had shown when Harry invited him to join his team of guerrillas. It didn’t look like it.

‘Rock’n’roll,’ Anders Wyller said, and grinned.

‘We’re first, so you get to choose.’ Harry nodded towards the desks. On one of them stood a scorched brown coffee machine, a water container and four white mugs with names written on them by hand.

Wyller had just installed the computer and Harry had started up the coffee machine when the door was tugged open.

‘Wow, it’s warmer than I remember,’ Bjørn Holm laughed. ‘Here’s Hallstein.’

A man with big glasses, messy hair and a checked jacket appeared behind Bjørn Holm.

‘Smith,’ Harry said, holding his hand out. ‘I’m pleased you changed your mind.’

Hallstein Smith took Harry’s hand. ‘I’ve got a weakness for counter-intuitive psychology,’ he said. ‘If that’s what it was. If not, you’re the worst telephone salesman I’ve ever encountered. But it’s the first time I’ve called the salesman back to accept an offer.’

‘No point pushing anyone, we only want people who are motivated to be here,’ Harry said. ‘Do you like your coffee strong?’

‘No, preferably a bit … I mean, I’ll take it however you all do.’

‘Good. Looks like this is yours.’ Harry handed Smith one of the white mugs.

Smith adjusted his glasses and read the handwritten name on the side. ‘Lev Vygotsky.’

‘And this is for our forensics expert,’ Harry said, passing Bjørn Holm one of the other mugs.

‘Still Hank Williams,’ Bjørn read cheerfully. ‘Does that mean it hasn’t been washed for three years?’

‘Indelible marker,’ Harry said. ‘Here’s yours, Wyller.’

‘Popeye Doyle? Who’s that?’

‘Best cop ever. Look him up.’

Bjørn turned the fourth mug round. ‘So why doesn’t it say Valentin Gjertsen on your mug, Harry?’

‘Forgetfulness, probably.’ Harry took the jug from the coffee maker and filled all four mugs.

Bjørn noticed the bemused expressions on the others’ faces. ‘It’s a tradition that we have our heroes on our mugs, and Harry the name of the main suspect. Yin and yang.’

‘It doesn’t really matter,’ Smith said. ‘But just for the record, Lev Vygotsky isn’t my favourite psychologist. He was, admittedly, a pioneer, but—’

‘You’ve got Aune Ståle’s mug,’ Harry said, putting the last chair in place so that all four formed a circle in the middle of the floor. ‘OK, we’re free, we’re our own bosses and we don’t report to anyone. But we keep Katrine Bratt informed, and vice versa. Sit down. Let’s start with each of us saying honestly what we think of this case. Base it on facts and experience, or gut feeling, one single stupid detail or nothing at all. None of what you say will ever be used against you later, and it’s OK to go way off beam. Who wants to start?’ The four of them sat down.

‘Obviously I’m not making the decisions,’ Smith said. ‘But I think … well, you start, Harry.’ Smith wrapped his hands around him as if he was freezing, even though they were sitting next door to the boiler that heated the whole prison. ‘Maybe tell us why you think it isn’t Valentin Gjertsen.’

Harry looked at Smith. Took a sip from his mug. Swallowed. ‘OK, I’ll start. I don’t think it isn’t Valentin Gjertsen. Even if the thought has occurred to me. A killer carries out two murders without leaving any evidence. That takes planning and a cool head. But then he suddenly carries out an assault where he liberally scatters evidence and proof, all of which points towards Valentin Gjertsen. There’s something insistent about that, as if the person responsible wants to announce who he is. And that obviously arouses suspicions. Is someone trying to manipulate us into thinking it’s someone else? If so, Valentin Gjertsen is the perfect scapegoat.’ Harry looked at the others, noted Anders Wyller’s concentrated, wide-eyed expression, Bjørn Holm looking almost sleepy, and Hallstein Smith looking friendly, inviting, as if in a setting like this he had automatically slipped into his role as psychologist. ‘Valentin Gjertsen is a plausible culprit, given his past,’ Harry went on. ‘And he is also one the murderer knows we’re unlikely to find, seeing as we’ve already tried for so long without any result. Or because the killer knows that Valentin Gjertsen is dead and buried. Because he himself killed and buried him. Because a Valentin who’s been buried in secret can’t deny our suspicions with an alibi or anything like that, but even from the grave he can carry on drawing attention away from alternative perpetrators.’

‘Fingerprints,’ Bjørn Holm said. ‘The tattoo of the demon face. The DNA on the handcuffs.’

‘Right.’ Harry took another sip. ‘The perpetrator could have planted the fingerprints by cutting off one of Valentin’s fingers and taking it with him to Hovseter. The tattoo could be a copy that can be washed off. The hairs on the handcuffs could come from Valentin Gjertsen’s corpse, and the handcuffs left there on purpose.’

The silence in the boiler room was only broken by a last rattle from the coffee machine.

‘Bloody hell,’ Anders Wyller laughed.

‘That could have gone straight into my top ten of paranoid patients’ conspiracy theories,’ Smith said. ‘That’s, er … meant as a compliment.’

‘And that’s why we’re here,’ Harry said, leaning forward on his chair. ‘We’re supposed to think differently, look at possibilities that Katrine’s investigative team don’t touch. Because they’ve created a scenario of what happened, and the bigger the group is, the harder it is to break free from prevailing ideas and assumptions. They work a bit like a religion, because you automatically think that so many other people around you can’t be wrong. Well.’ Harry raised his unnamed mug. ‘They can. And they are. All the time.’

‘Amen,’ Smith said.

‘So let’s move on to the next bad theory,’ Harry said. ‘Wyller?’

Anders Wyller looked down into his mug. Took a deep breath and began. ‘Smith, you described on television how a vampirist develops, from one phase to the next. Here in Scandinavia young people are monitored so closely that if they showed such extreme tendencies, it would be picked up by the health service before they reached the final phase. The vampirist isn’t Norwegian, he’s from some other country. That’s my theory.’ He looked up.

‘Thanks,’ Harry said. ‘I can add that in the recorded criminal history of serial killers, there isn’t a single blood-drinking Scandinavian.’

‘The Atlas Murder in Stockholm, 1932,’ Smith said.

‘Hm. I don’t know about that one.’

‘That’s probably because the vampirist was never found, and it was never ascertained that he was a serial killer.’

‘Interesting. And the victim was a woman, as in this case?’

‘Lilly Lindeström, a thirty-two-year-old prostitute. And I’d eat the straw hat I’ve got at home if she was the only one. More recently it’s become known as the Vampire Murder.’

‘Details?’

Smith blinked a couple of times, his eyes almost closed and he began to speak as if he were reciting from memory, word for word: ‘4 May, Walpurgis Eve, Sankt Eriksplan 11, one-room flat. Lilly had received a man there. She had been down to see her friend on the first floor and asked to borrow a condom. When the police broke into Lilly’s flat they found her dead, lying on an ottoman. No fingerprints or other clues. It was obvious that the murderer had cleaned up after him, even Lilly’s clothes were neatly folded. In the kitchen sink they found a sauce ladle covered in blood.’

Bjørn exchanged a glance with Harry before Smith went on.

‘None of the names in her address book, which admittedly only contained a load of first names, led the police to any suspects. They never came close to finding the vampirist.’

‘But if it was a vampirist, surely he would have struck again?’ Wyller said.

‘Yes,’ Smith said. ‘And who’s to say he didn’t? And cleaned up after himself even better.’

‘Smith’s right,’ Harry said. ‘The number of people who go missing each year is greater than the number of recorded murders. But might Wyller have a point in that a vampirist in the making would be identified at an early stage?’

‘What I described on television was the typical development,’ Smith said. ‘There are people who discover their inner vampirist later in life, just like it can take time for ordinary people to discover their true sexual orientation. One of the most famous vampirists in history, Peter Kürten, the so-called ‘Vampire of Düsseldorf’, was forty-five years old the first time he drank the blood of an animal, a swan he killed outside the city in December 1929. Less than two years later he had killed nine people and tried to kill another seven.’

‘So you don’t think it strange that Valentin Gjertsen’s otherwise pretty horrifying track record has never included blood-drinking or cannibalism?’

‘No.’

‘OK. What are your thoughts, Bjørn?’

Bjørn Holm straightened up on his chair and rubbed his eyes. ‘The same as you, Harry.’

‘Which is?’

‘That Ewa Dolmen’s murder is a copy of the killing in Stockholm. The sofa, the fact that the place had been tidied up, that the blender he used to drink the blood from was left in the sink.’

‘Does that sound plausible, Smith?’ Harry asked.

‘A copycat? If so, it would be something new. Er, paradox not intended. There have, certainly, been vampirists who have regarded themselves as the reincarnation of Count Dracula, but the notion that a vampirist would take it upon himself to recreate the Atlas Murder seems a little unlikely. A more plausible explanation would be that there are certain personality traits that are typical of vampirists.’

‘Harry thinks our vampirist seems to be obsessed with cleanliness,’ Wyller said.

‘I understand that,’ Smith said. ‘The vampirist John George Haigh was obsessed with clean hands, and wore gloves all year round. He hated dirt and only drank his victims’ blood from freshly washed glasses.’

‘How about you, Smith?’ Harry said. ‘Who do you think our vampirist is?’

Smith put two fingers between his lips and moved them up and down, making a flapping sound as he breathed in and out.

‘I think that like a lot of vampirists he’s an intelligent person who has tortured animals and possibly people since he was young, that he comes from a well-adapted family where he was the only one who didn’t fit in. He’ll soon want blood again, and I think he gets sexual satisfaction not only from drinking blood, but from seeing blood. That he is seeking the perfect orgasm he thinks a combination of rape and blood can give him. Peter Kürten – the swan killer from Düsseldorf – said that the number of times he stabbed his victims with a knife depended on how much blood came out, which in turn determined how quickly he reached orgasm.’

A gloomy silence settled on the room.

‘And where and how do we find a person like that?’ Harry asked.

‘Maybe Katrine was right last night on television,’ Bjørn said. ‘Perhaps Valentin has fled the country. Taken a trip to Red Square, maybe.’

‘Moscow?’ Smith said in surprise.

‘Copenhagen,’ Harry said. ‘Multicultural Nørrebro. There’s a park there that’s frequented by people engaged in human trafficking. Mostly import, a bit of export. You sit down on one of the benches or swings and hold up a ticket – a bus ticket, plane ticket, anything. A guy comes over and asks where you’re going. Then he asks more, nothing that would give him away, while a colleague sitting elsewhere in the park takes your picture without you noticing, and checks online that you’re who you say you are and not a detective. This travel agency is discreet and expensive, but even so, no one gets to travel business class. The cheapest seats are in a shipping container.’

Smith shook his head. ‘But vampirists don’t calculate risk as rationally as we do, so I don’t think he’s gone.’

‘Nor do I,’ Harry said. ‘So where is he? Is he hiding in a crowd, or does he live alone in some secluded place? Has he got friends? Can we imagine him having a partner?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Everyone here understands that no one can know, Smith, whether or not they’re a psychologist. All I’m asking for is your hunch.’

‘We researchers aren’t good at hunches. But he’s alone. I’m pretty certain of that. Very alone, even. A loner.’

There was a knock.

‘Pull hard and come in!’ Harry called.

The door opened.

‘Good day, bold vampire hunters,’ Ståle Aune said, stepping inside, paunch first, hand in hand with a round-shouldered girl with so much dark hair hanging in front of her face that Harry couldn’t see it. ‘I’ve agreed to give you a crash course in the role of psychologist in police work, Smith.’

Smith lit up. ‘I’d really appreciate that, dear colleague.’

Ståle Aune rocked on his heels. ‘You should. But I have no intention of working in these catacombs again, so I’ve arranged to borrow Katrine’s office.’ He put one hand on the girl’s shoulder. ‘Aurora came with me because she needs a new passport. Could you help her jump the queue while Smith and I talk, Harry?’

The girl pulled her hair aside. At first Harry couldn’t believe the pale face with greasy skin and red spots belonged to the pretty little girl he remembered from just a couple of years before. Looking at her dark clothes and heavy make-up, he guessed she was now a goth, or what Oleg called an emo. But there was no defiance or rebellion in her eyes. Nor the weariness of youth, or any sign of joy at seeing Harry again. Her favourite not-uncle, as she used to call him. There was nothing there. Actually, there was something there. Something he couldn’t put his finger on.

‘Queue-jumping it shall be. That’s how corrupt we are here,’ Harry said, and got a little smile from Aurora. ‘Let’s go up to the passport department.’

The four of them left the boiler room. Harry and Aurora walked silently along the culvert while Ståle Aune and Hallstein Smith chatted away two steps behind them.

‘So, I had this patient who talked so indirectly about his own problems that I didn’t put two and two together,’ Aune said. ‘When, quite by chance, I realised that he was the missing Valentin Gjertsen, he attacked me. If Harry hadn’t come to my rescue he would have killed me.’

Harry noticed Aurora tense at this.

‘He got away, but while he was threatening me I got a clearer picture of him. He held a knife to my throat as he tried to force me to make a diagnosis. He called himself “damaged goods”. And said that if I didn’t answer, he’d drain me of blood while his own cock swelled.’

‘Interesting. Could you see if he did actually get an erection?’

‘No, but I could feel it. As well as the jagged edge of the hunting knife. I remember hoping that my double chin might save me.’ Ståle chuckled.

Harry heard a stifled gasp from Aurora and half turned to give Aune a pointed look.

‘Oh, sorry, sweetheart!’ her father exclaimed.

‘What did you talk about?’ Smith wondered.

‘A lot,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘He was interested in the voices in the background of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.’

‘Now I remember! I don’t think he said his name was Paul. But all my patient records have been stolen, sadly.’

‘Harry, Smith says—’

‘I heard.’

They went up the steps to the ground floor, where Aune and Smith stopped in front of the lift and Harry and Aurora carried on into the atrium. A notice on the glass in front of the counter announced that their camera was out of action, and that anyone applying for a passport should use the photograph booth towards the rear of the building.

Harry led Aurora to the booth, which looked like an outside toilet, pulled the curtain aside and gave Aurora some coins before she sat down.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘You’re not supposed to show your teeth.’ Then he closed the curtain.

Aurora looked at her reflection in the black glass that concealed the camera.

Felt tears welling up.

It had seemed like a good idea, telling her dad that she wanted to go with him when he went to Police HQ to see Harry. That she needed a new passport before a class trip to London. He never had a clue about that sort of thing, her mum did all that. The plan had been to get Harry on his own for a few minutes and tell him everything. But now that they were alone she found she couldn’t do it. It was what her dad had said in the tunnel, about the knife, it had frightened her so much that the trembling had started again, and her legs almost gave way beneath her. It was the same jagged knife the man had held to her throat. And he was back. Aurora closed her eyes to avoid seeing her own terrified reflection. He was back, and he was going to kill them all if she talked. And what good would talking do? She didn’t know anything that could help them find him. That wouldn’t save her dad, or anyone else out there. Aurora opened her eyes again. Looked around the cramped booth, just like the toilet at the sports hall that time. She found herself looking down automatically, at the bottom of the curtain. The pointed boots on the floor, right outside. They were waiting for her, wanted to get in, wanted …

Aurora yanked the curtain aside, pushed her way past Harry and headed for the exit. Heard him call her name behind her. Then she was out in daylight and open ground. She ran across the grass, through the park, off towards Grønlandsleiret. She heard her hiccoughed sobs mixed with gasping breath, as if there wasn’t enough air, even out here. But she didn’t stop. She ran. Knew she was going to keep running until she dropped.

‘Paul, or Valentin, didn’t mention any particular attraction to blood as such,’ Aune said. He had settled down behind Katrine’s desk. ‘But considering his history, we can probably conclude that he’s not a man with any inhibitions about acting out his sexual preferences. And someone like that is unlikely to discover new sexual sides to himself as an adult.’

‘Maybe the preference was always there,’ Smith said. ‘He just hadn’t found a way to act out the fantasy. If his real desire was to bite people until they bled, and then drink straight from the well, so to speak, maybe it was the discovery of these iron teeth that made it possible for him to put that into action?’

‘Drinking other people’s blood is an ancient tradition with connotations of assuming the powers and abilities of other people, usually enemies, isn’t it?’

‘Agreed.’

‘If you’re going to put together a profile of this serial killer, Smith, I’d suggest taking as your starting point a person who is driven by a need for control, like we see in more conventional rapists and sexually motivated murderers. Or, to be more accurate, regaining control, reclaiming a power that was taken from him at some point. Restitution.’

‘Thanks,’ Smith said. ‘Restitution. I agree, I’ll definitely include that aspect.’

‘What does “restitution” mean?’ Katrine asked, who was sitting on the windowsill after being granted leave to stay by the two psychologists.

‘We all want to repair injuries inflicted on us,’ Aune said. ‘Or take revenge, which is much the same thing. I, for instance, decided to become the genius psychologist I am because I was so bad at playing football that no one ever wanted me on their team. Harry was just a boy when his mother died, and he decided to become a murder detective to punish people who take lives.’

There was a knock on the door frame.

‘Speak of the devil …’ Aune said.

‘Sorry to interrupt,’ Harry said. ‘But Aurora’s run off. I don’t know what happened, but it was definitely something.’

A cloud swept across Ståle Aune’s face and he heaved himself up from the chair with a groan. ‘God knows with teenagers. I’ll go and find her. This was a bit brief, Smith – give me a call and we’ll carry on.’

‘Anything new?’ Harry asked when Aune had gone.

‘Yes and no,’ Katrine said. ‘The Forensic Medical Institute has confirmed that there’s a hundred per cent match between the DNA found on the handcuffs and Gjertsen. Only one psychologist and two sexologists have contacted us after Smith’s plea to check their patient records, but the names they gave us have already been dismissed from the investigation. And, as expected, we’ve received several hundred calls from people reporting anything from scary neighbours and dogs with bite marks on them, to vampires, werewolves, gnomes and trolls. But also a few that are worth checking out. By the way, Rakel has been calling, trying to get hold of you.’

‘Yes, I just saw the missed calls. There’s not much of a signal down in our bunker. Would it be possible to do anything about that?’

‘I’ll ask Tord if we could set up a relay or something. So can I have my office back now?’

Harry and Smith were alone in the lift.

‘You’re avoiding eye contact,’ Smith said.

‘That’s the rule in lifts, isn’t it?’ Harry said.

‘I meant generally.’

‘If not making eye contact is the same as avoiding it, you’re probably right.’

‘And you don’t like lifts.’

‘Mm. Is it that obvious?’

‘Body language doesn’t lie. And you think I talk too much.’

‘This is your first day, you’re bound to be a bit nervous.’

‘No, I’m like this most of the time.’

‘OK. By the way, I haven’t thanked you for changing your mind.’

‘Don’t mention it. I should be apologising for the fact that my initial response was so selfish when people’s lives are at stake.’

‘I can understand that your doctorate means a lot to you.’

Smith smiled. ‘Yes, you understand because you’re one of us.’

‘One of who?’

‘The half-crazy elite. Maybe you’ve heard of the Goldman Dilemma from the 1980s? Elite athletes were asked if they’d be prepared to take a drug that would guarantee a gold medal, but they’d die five years later. More than half answered yes. When the rest of the population were asked the same question, only two out of 250 said yes. I know it sounds sick to most people, but not to people like you and me, Harry. Because you’d sacrifice your life to catch this murderer, wouldn’t you?’

Harry looked at the psychologist for a long while. Heard the echo of Ståle’s words. Because you understand the idea of the monkey trap: you can never give up either.

‘Anything else you’re wondering about, Smith?’

‘Yes. Has she put on weight?’

‘Who?’

‘Ståle’s daughter.’

‘Aurora?’ Harry raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, she probably used to be thinner.’

Smith nodded. ‘You’re not going to like my next question, Harry.’

‘We’ll see.’

‘Do you think Ståle Aune might have an incestuous relationship with his daughter?’

Harry stared at Smith. He had picked him because he wanted people who were prepared to think original thoughts, and as long as Smith came up with the goods Harry was prepared to tolerate almost anything. Almost anything.

‘OK,’ Harry said in a low voice. ‘You’ve got twenty seconds to explain yourself. Use them wisely.’

‘I’m just saying that—’

‘Eighteen.’

‘OK, OK. Self-harming behaviour. She was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt that hid the scars on her lower arms which she kept scratching the whole time. Hygiene. When you stood close to her you could tell that her personal hygiene wasn’t great. Eating. Extreme eating or dieting is typical in abuse victims. Mental state. She seemed depressed generally, may be suffering from angst. I realise that the clothes and make-up can be misleading, but body language and facial expressions don’t lie. Intimacy. I could see in your body language that you were open to the idea of a hug in the boiler room. But she pretended not to notice, that was why she’d pulled her hair in front of her face before she came in – you know each other well, you’ve hugged each other before, so she predicted what would happen. Abuse victims avoid intimacy and bodily contact. Is my time up?’

The lift stopped with a jolt.

Harry took a step forward, so that he towered over Smith, and pressed the button to keep the lift doors closed. ‘Let’s assume for a moment that you’re right, Smith.’ Harry lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘What the hell has that got to do with Ståle? Apart from the fact that back in the day he got you kicked off your psychology degree in Oslo and landed you with the nickname “the Monkey”.’

Harry saw tears of pain in Smith’s eyes, as if he’d been slapped. Smith blinked and swallowed. ‘Oh. You’re probably right, Harry. I’m just seeing something I subconsciously want to see because I’m still angry. It was a hunch, and like I said, I’m not good at them.’

Harry nodded slowly. ‘And you know that, so this wasn’t your first hunch. What did you see?’

Hallstein Smith straightened up. ‘I saw a father holding his daughter’s hand when she’s what, sixteen, seventeen years old? And my first thought is that it’s sweet that they’re still doing that, that I hope my daughters and I will still be holding hands well into their teenage years.’

‘But?’

‘But you can look at it from the other side, that the father is exerting power and control by holding on to her, keeping her in her place.’

‘And what makes you think that?’

‘Because she runs off the moment she gets the chance. I’ve worked on cases where there are suspicions of incest, Harry, and running away from home is precisely one of the things we look at. The symptoms I mentioned can mean a thousand other things, but if there’s one chance in a thousand that she’s being abused at home, it would be a dereliction of my professional duty not to share my thoughts, don’t you think? I understand that you’re a friend of the family, but that’s also the reason I’m sharing these thoughts with you. You’re the only person who can talk to her.’

Harry let go of the button, the doors slid open and Hallstein Smith slipped out.

Harry waited until the doors started to close again, stuck one foot between them and was going after Smith, down the stairs towards the culvert, when his phone buzzed in his pocket.

He answered.

‘Hello, Harry.’ Isabelle Skøyen’s masculine voice, simultaneously chirping and teasing, was unmistakable. ‘You’re back in the saddle, I hear.’

‘I don’t know about that.’

‘We did ride together for a while, Harry. It was fun. Could have been more fun.’

‘I thought it was as much fun as it could have been.’

‘Well, water under the bridge, Harry. I’m calling to ask for a favour. Our communications bureau is doing some work for Mikael, and you might have seen that Dagbladet has just published an article online which is pretty hard on Mikael?’

‘No.’

‘They write, quote: “The city is now paying the price for the fact that the Oslo Police under Mikael Bellman has failed to do what we have the police for, to catch people like Valentin Gjertsen. It is a scandal, a sign of professional bankruptcy, that Gjertsen has played cat and mouse with the police for four years. And now he’s tired of being the mouse, so he’s playing at being the cat instead.” What do you think?’

‘Could have been better written.’

‘What we want is for someone to come forward and explain how unreasonable this criticism of Mikael is. Someone who can remind people of the clear-up rate for serious crime under Bellman, someone who has been personally responsible for many murder investigations, someone who is held in high esteem. And because you’re now a lecturer at Police College you can’t be accused of sycophancy either. You’re perfect, Harry. What do you say?’

‘Obviously I want to help you and Bellman.’

‘You do? That’s great!’

‘The best way I can. Which is by catching Valentin Gjertsen. Something I’m pretty busy with right now, so if you’ll excuse me, Skøyen.’

‘I know you’re all working hard, Harry, but that could take time.’

‘And why is it so urgent to polish Bellman’s reputation right now? Let me save us both some time. I will never stand in front of a microphone and say anything dictated by a PR agent. If we hang up now we can say that we had a civilised conversation which didn’t end with me being forced to tell you to go to hell.’

Isabelle Skøyen laughed loudly. ‘You haven’t changed, Harry. Still engaged to that sweet lawyer with the black hair?’

‘No.’

‘No? Maybe we should have a drink one evening?’

‘Rakel and I are no longer engaged because we’re married.’

‘Ah. Well, I never. But is that necessarily a problem?’

‘It is for me. For you it’s probably more of a challenge.’

‘Married men are best, they never give you any trouble.’

‘Like Bellman?’

‘Mikael’s lovely, and he’s got the most kissable lips in the city Well, this conversation’s getting boring now, Harry, so I’m hanging up. You’ve got my number.’

‘No, I haven’t. Bye.’

Rakel. He’d forgotten that she’d called. He brought up her number as he checked his reaction, just for the hell of it. Had Isabelle Skøyen’s invitation had any effect on him, had it managed to turn him on at all? No. Well. A bit. Did that mean anything? No. It meant so little that he couldn’t be bothered to work out what sort of bastard he was. Not that it meant that he wasn’t a bastard, but that tiny little tingle, that involuntary, half-dreamt fragment of a scene – with her long legs and broad hips – which was there one moment, then gone, wasn’t enough for a guilty verdict. Bloody hell. He’d rejected her. Even though he knew that rejection made Isabelle Skøyen more likely to call him again.

‘Rakel Fauke’s phone, you’re talking to Dr Steffens.’

Harry felt the back of his neck begin to prickle. ‘This is Harry Hole, is Rakel there?’

‘No, Hole, she isn’t.’

Harry felt his throat tighten. Panic was creeping up on him. The ice was creaking. He concentrated on breathing. ‘Where is she?’

In the long pause that followed, which he suspected was there for a reason, Harry had time to think a lot of things. And of all the conclusions his brain automatically came to, there was one he knew he would remember. That it ended here, that he would no longer be able to have the one thing he wanted: for today and tomorrow to be a copy of the day he had yesterday.

‘She’s in a coma.’

In confusion, or in sheer, utter desperation, his brain tried to tell him that a coma was a city or a country.

‘But she tried to call me. Less than an hour ago.’

‘Yes,’ Steffens said. ‘And you didn’t answer.’

18

MONDAY AFTERNOON

SENSELESS. HARRY WAS sitting in a hard chair and trying to concentrate on what the man on the other side of the desk was saying. But the words made as much sense as the birdsong outside the open window behind the man in glasses and a white coat. As senseless as the blue sky and the fact that the sun had decided to shine brighter today than it had done for weeks. As senseless as the posters on the walls depicting people with grey organs and bright red blood vessels on show, or, beside them, a cross with a bleeding Christ on it.

Rakel.

The only thing in his life that made any sense.

Not science, not religion, not justice, not a better world, not pleasure, not intoxication, not the absence of pain, not even happiness. Only those five letters. R-a-k-e-l. It wasn’t the case that if it hadn’t been her, it would have been someone else. If it hadn’t been her, it would have been no one.

And having no one would have been better than this.

They can’t take no one away from you.

So in the end Harry cut through the torrent of words.

‘What does it mean?’

‘It means,’ Senior Consultant John D. Steffens said, ‘that we don’t know. We know that her kidneys aren’t working the way they should. And that could be caused by a number of things, but, like I said, we’ve ruled out the most obvious.’

‘So what do you think?’

‘A syndrome,’ Steffens said. ‘The problem is that there are thousands, each one rarer and more obscure than the last.’

‘Which means?’

‘That we need to keep looking. For the time being we’ve put her in a coma, because she was starting to have difficulty breathing.’

‘How long …?’

‘For the time being. We don’t just need to find out what’s wrong with your wife, we need to be able to treat it as well. Only when we’re sure she’ll be able to breathe independently will we bring her out of the coma.’

‘Could she … could she …’

‘Yes?’

‘Could she die while she’s in the coma?’

‘We don’t know.’

‘Yes, you do.’

Steffens put his fingertips together. Waited, as if to force the conversation into a lower gear.

‘She could die,’ he said eventually. ‘We could all die. The heart can stop at any moment, but obviously it’s a question of probability.’

Harry knew that the rage he felt bubbling up wasn’t really anything to do with the doctor and the platitudes he was coming out with. He had spoken to enough next of kin in murder cases to know that frustration sought a target, and the fact that it couldn’t find one only made him more furious. He took a deep breath. ‘And what sort of probability are we talking about here?’

Steffens threw his hands out. ‘Like I said, we don’t know the cause of her kidney failure.’

‘You don’t know, and that’s why it’s called probability,’ Harry said. Stopped. Swallowed. Lowered his voice. ‘So just tell me what you think the probability is, based on the little you do know.’

‘Kidney failure isn’t the fault, in and of itself, it’s a symptom. It could be a blood disease, or poisoning. It’s the season for mushroom poisoning, but your wife said you haven’t eaten any recently. And you’ve eaten the same things. Are you feeling unwell, Hole?’

‘Yes.’

‘You … Okay, I understand. What we’re left with, some sort of syndrome, is invariably a serious problem.’

‘Over or under fifty per cent, Steffens?’

‘I can’t—’

‘Steffens, I know we’re in no man’s land here, but I’m begging you. Please.’

The doctor stared at Harry for a long time before seeming to make a decision.

‘As things stand, based on her test results, I think the risk of losing her is a little over fifty per cent. Not much more than fifty, but slightly more. The reason I don’t like telling relatives these percentages is that they usually read too much into them. If a patient dies during an operation where we estimated the risk of death at twenty-five per cent, they often accuse us of having misled them.’

‘Forty-five per cent? A forty-five per cent chance of her surviving?’

‘At the moment. Her condition is deteriorating, so a bit lower if we can’t identify the cause within a day or two.’

‘Thanks.’ Harry stood up. Dizzy. And the thought came automatically: a hope that everything would go completely dark. A fast and pain-free exit, stupid and banal, yet no less senseless than everything else.

‘It would be useful to know how to get hold of you if …’

‘I’ll make sure you can reach me at any time,’ Harry said. ‘I’ll go back to her now, if there isn’t anything else I should know.’

‘Let me come with you, Harry.’

They headed back to room 301. The corridor stretched away and vanished into shimmering light. Presumably a window, with the low autumn sun shining directly through it. They passed nurses in ghostly white, and patients in dressing gowns, slowly moving towards the light with their living-dead shuffle. Yesterday he and Rakel had been embracing in the big bed with its slightly too soft mattress, and now she was here, in the land of coma, among ghosts and spirits. He needed to call Oleg. He needed to work out how to tell him. He needed a drink. Harry didn’t know where the thought came from, but there it was, as if someone had shouted it, spelling it out, straight into his ear. The thought needed to be drowned out, quickly.

‘Why were you Penelope Rasch’s doctor?’ he said in a loud voice. ‘She wasn’t a patient here.’

‘Because she needed a blood transfusion,’ Steffens said. ‘And I’m a haematologist and bank manager. But I also do shifts in A&E.’

‘Bank manager?’

Steffens looked at Harry. And perhaps he realised that Harry’s mind needed distracting, a brief pause from everything he found himself in the middle of.

‘The local branch of the blood bank. I should probably be called bath manager, because we took over the old rheumatic baths that used to be in the basement beneath this building. We call it the bloodbath. Don’t try to tell me that haematologists haven’t got a sense of humour.’

‘Hm. So that’s what you meant about buying and selling blood.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You said that was why you were able to use pictures from the crime scene in Penelope Rasch’s stairwell to calculate how much blood she’d lost. By eye.’

‘You’ve got a good memory.’

‘How is she doing?’

‘Oh, Penelope Rasch is recovering physically. But she’s going to need psychological help. Coming face-to-face with a vampire—’

‘Vampirist.’

‘—it’s an omen, you know.’

‘An omen?’

‘Oh yes. He was predicted and described in the Old Testament.’

‘The vampirist?’

Steffens smiled thinly. ‘Proverbs 30:14. “A sort whose teeth are swords, and whose jaws are set with knives, who devour the poor from the earth and the needy out of house and home.” Here we are.’

Steffens held the door open and Harry walked in. Into the night. On the other side of the closed curtain the sun was shining, but in here the only light was a shimmering green line jumping across a black screen, over and over again. Harry gazed down at her face. She looked so peaceful. And so far away, floating in a dark space where he couldn’t reach her. He sat down on the chair beside the bed, waited until he heard the door close behind him. Then he took hold of her hand and pressed his face to the covers.

‘No further away now, darling,’ he whispered. ‘No further.’

Truls Berntsen had moved the screens in the open-plan office so that the corner he shared with Anders Wyller was completely hidden from view. Which is why he was annoyed that the only person who could see him, Wyller, was so damn curious about everything, and especially who he was talking to on the phone. But right now the snooper was out at some tattoo and piercing parlour, because they’d had a tip-off saying they were importing vampire accessories, among them denture-like metal objects with pointed canine teeth, and Truls was planning to make the most of the break. He’d downloaded the final episode of the second season of The Shield, and had turned the volume so low that only he could hear it. For that reason he definitely wasn’t at all pleased when his phone started to flash and buzz like a vibrator on the desk in front of him as it played the start of Britney Spears’s ‘I’m Not a Girl’, which Truls, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear, was very fond of. The words, about her not being a woman yet, prompted vague thoughts of a girl who was under the age of consent, and Truls hoped that wasn’t why he had it as his ringtone. Or was it? Britney Spears in that school uniform, was it perverse to wank off to that? OK, in that case he was a perv. But what worried Truls more was that the number on the screen was vaguely familiar. The City Treasurer’s department? Internal Investigations? Some questionable old contact he’d done a burner job for? Someone he owed money or a favour? It wasn’t Mona Daa’s number anyway. Most likely it was a work call, and probably one that meant he was going to have to do something. Either way, he concluded that this was unlikely to be a call he had anything to win by answering. He put the phone in a drawer and concentrated on Vic Mackey and his colleagues on the STRIKE team. He loved Vic, The Shield really was the only cop series that showed how people in the force actually thought. Then all of a sudden he realised why the number had seemed familiar. He yanked the drawer open and grabbed the phone. ‘Detective Constable Berntsen.’

Two seconds passed before he heard anything at the other end, and he thought she had hung up. But then the voice was there, right by his ear, soft and tantalising.

‘Hello, Truls, this is Ulla.’

‘Ulla …?’

‘Ulla Bellman.’

‘Oh, hi, Ulla, is that you?’ Truls hoped he sounded convincing. ‘How can I help you?’

She let out a little laugh. ‘I don’t know about “help”. I saw you in the atrium of Police HQ the other day, and realised how long it had been since we last had a proper chat. You know, like we used to.’

We never had a proper chat, Truls thought.

‘Could we meet up sometime?’

‘Yeah, sure.’ Truls tried to stifle his grunting laughter.

‘Great. How about tomorrow? Mum’s got the kids then. We could go for a drink or a bite to eat?’

Truls could hardly believe his ears. Ulla wanted to meet him. To interrogate him about Mikael again? No, she must know they didn’t see much of each other these days. Besides: a drink or a bite to eat? ‘That would be great. Is there something on your mind?’

‘I just thought it would be nice to meet up, I don’t really have much contact with too many people from the old days.’

‘No, of course,’ Truls said. ‘So, where?’

Ulla laughed. ‘I haven’t been out for years. I don’t know what there is in Manglerud these days. You do still live there, don’t you?’

‘Yes. Er … Olsen’s is still there, down in Bryn.’

‘Is it? Right, then. Let’s say there. Eight o’clock?’

Truls nodded dumbly, then remembered to say ‘Yes’.

‘And, Truls?’

‘Yes?’

‘Don’t mention it to Mikael, please.’

Truls coughed. ‘No?’

‘No. See you tomorrow at eight o’clock, then.’

He stared at the phone after she’d hung up. Had that really happened or was it just an echo of the daydreams he had cooked up when he was sixteen, seventeen? Truls felt a happiness so intense that his chest felt like it was going to burst. And then panic hit. It was going to be a disaster. One way or another, it was obviously going to be a disaster.

It was all a disaster.

Obviously, it couldn’t have lasted, it was only a matter of time before he was chucked out of paradise.

‘Beer,’ he said, looking up at the young freckled girl who was standing at his table.

She wasn’t wearing any make-up, her hair was pulled up in a simple ponytail, and she’d rolled up the sleeves of her white blouse like she was ready for a fight. She wrote on her pad, as if she were expecting a longer order, which made Harry think she was new, seeing as they were at Schrøder’s, where nine out of ten orders stopped there. She’d hate the job for the first few weeks. The coarse jokes from the male customers, the ill-concealed jealousy from the most alcoholic of the women. Poor tips, no music to sway her hips to as she moved round the bar, no nice guys to be seen by, just argumentative old drunks to chuck out at closing time. She’d wonder if it was worth the boost it gave her student loan, which meant she could afford to live in a shared student house in such a relatively central location. But Harry knew that if she got through the first month without giving up and handing in her notice, things would gradually change. She’d start to laugh at the senseless humour in the comments, learn to give as good as she got in the same tacky way. When the women realised she wasn’t threatening their territory they’d start to confide in her. And she’d get tips. Not much, but they’d be genuine tips, as well as gentle encouragement and the occasional declaration of love. And they’d give her a name. Something that might be uncomfortably close to the bone, but it would still be meant affectionately, something that ennobled you among this ignoble company. Short-Kari, Lenin, Backscreen, She-Bear. In her case it would probably be something to do with her freckles and red hair. And as people moved in and out of the collective, and presumptive boyfriends came and went, little by little it would become her family. A kind, generous, irritating, lost family.

The girl looked up from her pad. ‘Is that all?’

‘Yes,’ Harry smiled.

She hurried to the bar as if someone was timing her. And who knows, maybe Rita was standing behind the bar doing just that.

Anders Wyller had texted to say that he was waiting for Harry at Tattoos & Piercings on Storgata. Harry started to write a reply, saying that Anders would have to deal with it on his own, when he suddenly heard someone sit down in front of him.

‘Hello, Rita,’ he said without looking up.

‘Hello, Harry. Bad day?’

‘Yes.’ He tapped in the old-fashioned smiley: colon, right-hand bracket.

‘And now you’re here to make it even worse?’

Harry didn’t answer.

‘Know what I think, Harry?’

‘What do you think, Rita?’ His finger tried to find the Send button.

‘I don’t think this is a crack in the ice.’

‘I’ve just ordered a beer from Freckly-Fia.’

‘Who we’re still calling Marte. And I’ve cancelled that beer. The devil on your right shoulder might want a drink, Harry, but the angel on your left steered you to a place where they don’t serve spirits, but where there is a Rita who you know will serve you coffee instead of beer, have a chat with you, then send you home to Rakel.’

‘She’s not at home, Rita.’

‘Aha, so that’s why. Harry Hole has managed to fuck up again. You men always seem to find a way.’

‘Rakel’s sick. And I need a beer before I call Oleg.’ Harry looked down at his phone. Looked again for the Send button as he felt Rita’s stubby warm hand settle on his.

‘Things usually turn out OK in the end, Harry.’

He stared at her. ‘Of course they don’t. Unless you actually know someone who made it out alive?’

She laughed. ‘In the end is somewhere between what’s dragging you down today, and the day when nothing can drag us down any more, Harry.’

Harry looked at his phone again. Then he tapped in Oleg’s name instead and pressed the Call button.

Rita stood up and left him alone.

Oleg answered after the first ring. ‘It’s good that you called! We’re in a seminar, discussing paragraph 20 of the Police Act. You have to interpret it to mean that if the situation demands it, every police officer is subordinate to one of a higher rank and must obey orders from that higher rank even if they don’t work in the same department, or even at the police station, don’t you? Paragraph 20 says that the ranking officer decides if the situation is precarious and requires that. Come on, tell me I’m right! I’ve just bet these two idiots here a drink …’ Harry could hear laughter in the background.

Harry closed his eyes. Of course there was something to hope for, something to look forward to: the time that comes after what’s dragging you down today. The day when nothing can drag you down any more.

‘Bad news, Oleg. Your mum’s in Ullevål.’

‘I’ll have the fish,’ Mona said to the waiter. ‘Skip the potatoes, sauce and vegetables.’

‘Then there’s only the fish left,’ the waiter said.

‘Precisely,’ Mona said, handing him the menu. She looked around the lunchtime customers at the new but already popular restaurant where they had got hold of the last table for two.

‘Just fish?’ Nora said, after ordering the Caesar salad with no dressing, but Mona already knew her friend would capitulate and order dessert to go with coffee.

‘Deffing,’ Mona said.

‘Deffing?’

‘Getting rid of subcutaneous fat so that the muscles stand out better. It’s the Norwegian Championships in three weeks.’

‘Bodybuilding? You’re really going to take part?’

Mona laughed. ‘With these hips, you mean? I’m hoping my legs and upper body will get me enough points. And my winning personality, obviously.’

‘You seem nervous.’

‘Of course.’

‘That’s three weeks away, and you never get nervous. What is it? Something to do with the vampirist murders? Thanks for the advice, by the way – Smith was great. And Bratt came up with the goods too, in her own way. Have you seen Isabelle Skøyen, that former Councillor for Social Affairs? She called us to ask if The Sunday Magazine would be interested in having Mikael Bellman on as a guest.’

‘So he could answer criticism of the fact that Valentin Gjertsen was never caught? Yes, she’s called us about that too. Quite an intense woman, to put it mildly!’

‘Are you running it? Christ, anything even vaguely related to the vampirist gets published.’

‘I wouldn’t have taken it. But my colleagues aren’t quite so fussy.’ Mona tapped on her iPad and passed it to Nora, who read out loud from VG’s online edition:

‘“Former Councillor for Social Affairs, Isabelle Skøyen, rejects criticism of the Oslo Police and says that the Chief of Police is firmly in charge: ‘Mikael Bellman and his police officers have already identified the vampirist murderer, and are now deploying all their resources to find him. Among other things, the Chief of Police has brought in renowned murder detective Harry Hole, who was more than willing to help his former senior officer, and is looking forward to slapping a pair of handcuffs on this wretched pervert.’”’ Nora passed the iPad back. ‘That’s pretty tawdry. So what do you think of Hole? Would you kick him out of bed?’

‘Definitely. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Don’t know.’ Nora stared into space. ‘Not kick. Maybe just a little push. Sort of please-leave-and-don’t-touch-me-there-and-not-there-and-definitely-not-there.’ She giggled.

‘Bloody hell,’ Mona said, shaking her head. ‘It’s people like you who are driving up the figures for misunderstanding-rapes.’

‘Misunderstanding-rapes? Is that a thing? And what does it actually mean?’

‘You tell me. No one’s ever misunderstood me.’

‘Which reminds me that I’ve finally worked out why you use Old Spice.’

‘No, you haven’t,’ Mona said with a sigh.

‘Yes, I have! As protection against rape. That’s it, isn’t it? Aftershave that smells of testosterone. It chases them off as effectively as pepper spray. But has it occurred to you that it’s chasing all the other men away as well, Mona?’

‘I give up,’ Mona groaned.

‘Yes, give up! Tell me!’

‘It’s because of my father.’

‘What?’

‘He used Old Spice.’

‘Of course. Because you used to be so close. You miss him, poor—’

‘I use it as a constant reminder of the most important thing he taught me.’

Nora blinked. ‘Shaving?’

Mona laughed and picked up her glass. ‘Never giving up. Never.’

Nora tilted her head and gave her friend a serious look. ‘You are nervous, Mona. What is it? And why wouldn’t you have taken that Skøyen piece? I mean, you own the vampirist murders.’

‘Because I’ve got bigger fish to fry.’ Mona moved her hands from the table as the waiter appeared again.

‘I certainly hope so,’ Nora said, looking at the pathetic little fillet the waiter put down in front of her friend.

Mona prodded it with her fork. ‘And I’m nervous because I’m probably being watched.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I can’t tell you, Nora. Or anyone else. Because that’s the agreement, and for all I know we might be being bugged now.’

‘Bugged? You’re kidding! And there was me saying that Harry Hole could—’ Nora put her hand over her mouth.

Mona smiled. ‘That’s unlikely to be used against you. The thing is, I’m looking at what might be the scoop of the century in crime reporting. Ever, in fact.’

‘You’ve got to tell me!’

Mona shook her head firmly. ‘What I can tell you is that I’ve got a pistol.’ She patted her handbag.

‘Now you’re scaring me, Mona! And what if they hear that you’ve got a pistol?’

‘I want them to hear that. Then they’ll know they can’t mess with me.’

Nora groaned in resignation. ‘But why do you have to do it alone, if it’s dangerous?’

‘Because that’s when it becomes newspaper legend, my dear Nora.’ Mona gave a big grin and raised her glass. ‘If this goes the way it should, I’ll pay for lunch next time. And championship or no championship, we’ll have champagne.’

‘Sorry I’m late,’ Harry said, closing the door to Tattoos & Piercings behind him.

‘We’re taking a look at what’s on offer,’ Anders Wyller smiled. He was standing behind a table, leafing through a catalogue with a bowlegged man in a Vålerenga Football Club cap, a black Hüsker Dü T-shirt and a beard that Harry was pretty sure had been there before the always synchronised hipsters stopped shaving.

‘Don’t let me disturb you,’ Harry said, stopping by the door.

‘As I was saying,’ the beard said, pointing at the catalogue, ‘those are only for decoration, you can’t put them in your mouth. And the teeth aren’t sharp either, apart from the canines.’

‘What about those?’

Harry looked round. There was no one else in the shop, and there would hardly have been room for anyone. Every square metre, not to mention cubic metre, had been used. The tattoo bench in the middle of the floor, T-shirts hanging from the ceiling. Racks of piercing jewellery and stands holding larger ornaments, skulls and chrome-covered metal models of comic-book characters. Any available wall space was covered with drawings and photographs of tattoos. In one of the photographs he recognised a Russian prison tattoo, a Makarov pistol, which told those in the know that its bearer had killed a police officer. And the indistinct lines could mean that it had been made the old way, using a guitar string fixed to a razor blade, the melted sole of a shoe and urine.

‘Are these all your tattoos?’ Harry wondered.

‘No, none of them,’ the man replied. ‘They’re from all over the place. Cool, aren’t they?’

‘We’re nearly done,’ Anders said.

‘Take all the time you n—’ Harry stopped abruptly.

‘Sorry I wasn’t able to help,’ the beard said to Wyller. ‘What you describe sounds more like the sort of the thing you’d find in a shop for sex fetishists.’

‘Thanks, we’ve already looked into that.’

‘Right. Well, just say if there’s anything else.’

‘There is.’

They both turned to the tall policeman who was pointing at a picture towards the top of the wall. ‘Where did you get hold of that?’

The other two went over to join him.

‘Ila Prison,’ the beard said. ‘It’s one of the tattoos left by Rico Herrem, an inmate who was also a tattooist. He died in Pattaya in Thailand soon after he got out two or three years ago. Anthrax.’

‘Have you ever given anyone that tattoo?’ Harry asked, feeling the screaming mouth in the demonic face draw his eyes to it.

‘Never. No one’s asked for it either. It’s not exactly the sort of thing anyone would want to go around with.’

‘No one?’

‘Not that I’ve seen. But now you mention it, there was a guy who worked here for a while who said he’d seen that tattoo. Cin, he called it. I only know that because cin and seytan are the only Turkish words I can still remember. Cin means demon.’

‘Did he say where he’d seen it?’

‘No, and he moved back to Turkey. But if it’s important I’ve probably got his phone number.’

Harry and Wyller waited until the man returned from the back room with a handwritten note.

‘I should warn you, he hardly speaks any English.’

‘How …?’

‘Sign language, my made-up Turkish and his kebab Norwegian. Which he’s probably forgotten. I’d recommend using a translator.’

‘Thanks again,’ Harry said. ‘And I’m afraid we’re going to have to take that drawing with us.’ He looked around for a chair to climb up on, only to see that Wyller had already put one in front of him.

Harry studied his smiling young colleague before climbing onto the chair.

‘What do we do now?’ Wyller asked when they were standing outside on Storgata and a tram rumbled past.

Harry put the drawing in the inside pocket of his jacket and looked up at the blue cross on the wall above them.

‘Now we go to a bar.’

He walked along the hospital corridor. Holding the bouquet of flowers up in front of him so that it covered part of his face. None of the people passing by, visitors or the ones in white, paid him any attention. His pulse was at its resting rate. When he was thirteen years old he fell off a ladder when he was trying to look at the neighbour’s wife, hit his head on the cement terrace and lost consciousness. When he came round his mother had her ear to his chest and he smelt her scent, a scent of lavender. She said she thought he was dead because she couldn’t hear his heart or find his pulse. It was hard to work out if that was relief or disappointment in her voice. But she had taken him to a young doctor, who only managed to find his pulse after a lot of effort, and said it was unusually low. That concussion often caused an increased heart rate. He was admitted and spent a week lying in a white bed, dreaming dazzlingly white dreams, like overexposed photographs, the way life after death is depicted in films. Angel-white. Nothing in a hospital prepares you for all the blackness that awaits.

The blackness that awaited the woman lying in the room whose number he had found out.

The blackness that awaited the policeman with that look in his eyes when he found out what had happened.

The blackness that awaits us all.

Harry looked at the bottles on the shelves in front of the mirror, and the way the golden liquid inside them glowed warmly in the reflected light. Rakel was asleep. She was asleep now. Forty-five per cent. Her chance of survival and the alcohol content of those bottles were roughly the same. Sleep. He could be there with her. He looked away. At Mehmet’s mouth instead, the lips that were forming incomprehensible words. Harry had read somewhere that Turkish grammar was regarded as the third most difficult in the world. The phone he was holding belonged to Harry.

‘Sağ olun,’ Mehmet said, and handed the phone back to Harry. ‘He says he saw the cin face on the chest of a man at a Turkish bathhouse in Sagene, the Cagaloglu Hamam. He says he saw him there a few times, and that the last time was probably less than a year ago, just before he went back to Turkey. He says the man usually wore his bathrobe, even in the sauna. The only time he saw him without it was inside the hararet.’

‘Hara-what?’

‘The steam room. The door opened, clearing the steam for a second or two, and that’s when he caught a glimpse of him. He said you don’t forget a tattoo like that, that it was like seeing seytan himself trying to break free.’

‘And you asked him about any distinguishing features?’

‘Yes. He didn’t notice the scars under his chin that you mentioned, or anything else come to that.’

Harry nodded thoughtfully while Mehmet went to pour them more coffee.

‘Stake out the bathhouse?’ Wyller asked from the bar stool next to Harry’s.

Harry shook his head. ‘We have no idea when or if he’s going to show up, and if he does, we don’t even know what Valentin looks like these days. And he’s far too smart not to keep his tattoo covered.’

Mehmet came back and put their cups down on the counter in front of them.

‘Thanks for your help, Mehmet,’ Harry said. ‘It would probably have taken us at least a day to get hold of an authorised Turkish interpreter.’

Mehmet shrugged. ‘I feel I ought to help. After all, this was where Elise was before she got murdered.’

‘Hm.’ Harry looked down into his cup. ‘Anders?’

‘Yes?’ Anders Wyller seemed pleased, possibly because this was the first time he’d heard Harry use his first name.

‘Can you go and get the car, and drive up to the door?’

‘Yes, but it’s only—’

‘And I’ll meet you outside.’

Once Wyller had left Harry took a sip of coffee. ‘This is none of my business, but are you in trouble, Mehmet?’

‘Trouble?’

‘You have no criminal record, I checked. But the guy who was here and then vanished the moment he saw us arrive does. And even if he didn’t stop to say hello, Danial Banks and I are old acquaintances. Has he got his claws into you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that you’ve just opened a bar, and your tax history shows that you aren’t sitting on a fortune. And Banks specialises in lending money to people like you.’

‘People like me?’

‘People the banks won’t touch. What he does is illegal, you know that? Usury, paragraph 295 of the Penal Code. You could report it, then you’d be free of him. Let me help you.’

Mehmet looked at the blue-eyed policeman. Then he nodded. ‘You’re right, Harry …’

‘Good.’

‘… it’s none of your business. Sounds like your colleague’s waiting for you.’

He shut the door of the hospital room behind him. The blinds were down, letting only a little light filter into the room. He put the bouquet of flowers on the nightstand at the top end of the bed. He looked down at the sleeping woman. She seemed so alone, lying there like that. He closed the curtains. Sat down on the chair beside the bed, took a syringe from his jacket pocket and pulled the cap off the needle. Took hold of her arm. Gazed at the skin. Real skin. He loved real skin. He felt like kissing it, but knew he had to restrain himself. The plan. Stick to the plan. Then he stuck the point of the needle into the woman’s arm. Felt it slip through the skin without any resistance.

‘There, now,’ he whispered. ‘Now I’m going to take you from him. You’re mine now. All mine.’

He pushed the plunger and watched as the dark contents were forced out, injected into the woman. Filling her with blackness. And sleep.

‘Police HQ?’ Wyller said.

Harry looked at his watch. Two o’clock. He had arranged to meet Oleg at the hospital in an hour.

‘Ullevål Hospital,’ he said.

‘Are you unwell?’

‘No.’

Wyller waited, then when nothing more was forthcoming, he put the car into first gear and pulled away.

Harry looked out through the window while he wondered why he hadn’t told anyone. He’d have to tell Katrine, for practical reasons. Anyone apart from her? No. Why should he?

‘I downloaded Father John Misty yesterday,’ Wyller said.

‘What for?’

‘Because you recommended it.’

‘Did I? Must be good, then.’

Nothing more was said until they were stuck in traffic, slowly creeping up Ullevålsveien past Sankt Olav Cathedral and Nordal Bruns gate.

‘Stop at that bus stop,’ Harry said. ‘I can see someone I know.’

Wyller braked and pulled in to the right, next to a shelter where some teenagers were waiting to catch the bus after school. Oslo Cathedral School, yes, that was the one she went to. She was standing slightly apart from the noisy crowd, with her hair hanging in front of her face. Without having any real idea what he was going to say, Harry lowered the window.

‘Aurora!’

A twitch ran through the girl’s long-legged frame, and she took off like a nervous antelope.

‘Do you always have that effect on young girls?’ Wyller asked, as Harry told him to drive on.

She’s running in the opposite direction to the car, Harry thought, watching her in the wing mirror. She didn’t even have to think. Because she’d thought this through in advance: that if you want to run from someone in a car, you run away from the direction the car is facing. But what that meant, he didn’t know. Some sort of teenage angst, perhaps. Or a phase, as Ståle had called it.

The traffic grew lighter further along Ullevålsveien.

‘I’ll wait in the car,’ Anders said, after he pulled up in front of the entrance to Block 3 of the hospital.

‘It might take a while,’ Harry said. ‘You wouldn’t rather sit in the waiting room?’

He smiled and shook his head. ‘Bad memories of hospitals.’

‘Mm. Your mother?’

‘How did you know that?’

Harry shrugged. ‘Had to be someone you were very close to. I lost my own mother in a hospital when I was a boy.’

‘Was that the doctors’ fault as well?’

‘No, she couldn’t be saved. So I shouldered the guilt myself.’

Wyller nodded wryly. ‘With my mother it was a self-appointed god in a white coat. That’s why I won’t set foot in there.’

On his way in Harry noticed a man leaving, holding a bunch of flowers in front of his face, noticed because you expect to see people with flowers going into a hospital, not coming out. Oleg was sitting in the waiting area. They embraced as patients and visitors around them continued their subdued conversations and disengaged browsing through old magazines. Oleg was only a centimetre or so shorter than Harry. And Harry occasionally forgot that the lad had finally stopped growing now, and that he could have actually cashed in on their bet.

‘Have they said anything else?’ Oleg said. ‘About what it is, and whether it’s dangerous?’

‘No,’ Harry said. ‘But like I said, you shouldn’t worry too much, they know what they’re doing. She’s been put in an induced coma, in a controlled way. OK?’

Oleg opened his mouth. Closed it again and nodded. And Harry saw it. That Oleg realised Harry was protecting him from the truth. And that he let him do it.

A nurse came over and told them they could go in and see her.

Harry went in first.

The blinds were down.

He went over to the bed. Looked down at the pale face. She looked like she was far away.

Far too far away.

‘Is … is she breathing?’

Oleg. He was standing right behind Harry, the way he used to when he was little and they had to walk past one of Holmenkollen’s many large dogs.

‘Yes,’ Harry said, nodding towards the flashing machines.

They sat down on either side of the bed. And glanced at the twitching green line on the screen when they didn’t think the other would notice.

Katrine looked out across the forest of hands.

The press conference had lasted barely fifteen minutes, and the impatience in the Parole Hall was already tangible. She wondered what had got them most worked up. The fact that there was nothing new on the police hunt for Valentin Gjertsen. Or that there was nothing new on Valentin Gjertsen’s hunt for fresh victims. It had been forty-six hours since the last attack.

‘I’m afraid it’s going to be the same answers to the same questions,’ she said. ‘So if there aren’t any new—’

‘What’s your reaction to the fact that you’re now working on three murders rather than two?’

The question had been called out by a journalist at the back of the room.

Katrine saw unease spread through the room like ripples on water. She glanced at Bjørn Holm who was sitting in the front row, but he just shrugged in response. She leaned into the microphones.

‘It’s possible that there is information that hasn’t reached me yet, so I’ll have to get back to you about that.’

Another voice: ‘The hospital has just released a statement. Penelope Rasch is dead.’

Katrine hoped her face didn’t betray the confusion she felt. Penelope Rasch’s survival hadn’t been in any doubt.

‘We’ll stop there and reconvene when we know more.’ Katrine gathered her papers and hurried away from the podium and out through the side door. ‘When we know more than you,’ she muttered to herself, and swore.

She marched down the corridor. What the hell had happened? Had something gone wrong with her treatment? She hoped so. Hoped there was a medical explanation, unforeseen complications, a sudden attack of something, even a mistake on the hospital’s part. No, it wasn’t possible, they’d placed Penelope in a secret room that only those closest to her knew the number of.

Bjørn came running up behind her. ‘I’ve just spoken to Ullevål. They say it was an unfamiliar poison, but which they wouldn’t have been able to do anything about anyway.’

‘Poison? From the bite, or did it happen in the hospital?’

‘Unclear – they say they’ll know more tomorrow.’

Bloody chaos. Katrine hated chaos. And where was Harry? Fuck, fuck.

‘Take care not to stab those heels through the floor,’ Bjørn said quietly.

Harry had told Oleg that the doctors didn’t know. About what was going to happen. About practical things that needed to be sorted out, even if there weren’t many of those. Apart from that, silence hung heavy between them.

Harry looked at the time. Seven o’clock.

‘You should go home,’ he said. ‘Grab something to eat and get some sleep. You’ve got college tomorrow.’

‘Only if I know you’re going to be here,’ Oleg said. ‘We can’t let her be alone.’

‘I’m going to be here until I get thrown out, which will be soon.’

‘But you’ll stay until then? You’re not going to go to work?’

‘Work?’

‘Yes. You’re staying here now, you’re not going on with … that case?’

‘Of course not.’

‘I know how you get when you’re working on a murder investigation.’

‘Do you?’

‘I remember some of it. And Mum’s told me.’

Harry sighed. ‘I’m staying here now. I promise. The world will go on without me, but …’ He fell silent, leaving the rest of the sentence hanging in the air between them: … not without her.

He took a deep breath.

‘How are you feeling?’

Oleg shrugged. ‘I’m scared. And it hurts.’

‘I know. Go now, and come back tomorrow after college. I’ll be here first thing in the morning.’

‘Harry?’

‘Yes?’

‘Is it going to be better tomorrow?’

Harry looked at him. The brown-eyed, black-haired boy didn’t have one drop of Harry’s blood in him, but it was still like looking in a mirror. ‘What do you think?’

Oleg shook his head, and Harry could see he was fighting back tears.

‘Right,’ Harry said. ‘I sat here the way you are now with my mother when she was ill. Hour after hour, day in, day out. I was only a little boy, and it ate me up from inside.’

Oleg wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and sniffed. ‘Do you wish you hadn’t done it?’

Harry shook his head. ‘That’s the weird thing. We couldn’t talk much, she was too ill. She just lay there with a weak smile, and faded away a little bit at a time, like the colour from a photograph left out in the sun. It’s simultaneously the worst and best memory from my childhood. Can you understand that?’

Oleg nodded slowly. ‘I think so.’

They hugged each other goodbye.

‘Dad …’ Oleg whispered, and Harry felt a warm tear against his neck.

But he himself couldn’t cry. Didn’t want to cry. Forty-five per cent, forty-five wonderful percentage points.

‘I’m here, my boy,’ Harry said. In a steady voice. With a numb heart. He felt strong. He could manage this.

19

MONDAY EVENING

MONA DAA HAD put her trainers on, but her footsteps still echoed between the containers. She had parked her little electric car by the gate and walked straight into the dark, empty container terminal, which was really a cemetery for defunct harbour equipment. The rows of containers were tombstones for dead and forgotten shipments, to recipients who had gone bankrupt or wouldn’t acknowledge the consignment, from senders who no longer existed and couldn’t accept returns. Now the goods were stuck in eternal transit here at Ormøya, in marked contrast to the redevelopment and gentrification of Bjørvika next to it. There, costly, luxurious buildings were rising up, one after the other, with the icy slopes of the Opera House as the jewel in the crown. Mona was convinced it would end up as a monument to the oil era, a Taj Mahal of social democracy.

Mona used the torch she had brought with her to find the way, with the help of the numbers and letters painted on the tarmac. She was wearing black leggings and a black tracksuit top. In one pocket she had pepper spray and a padlock, in the other the pistol, a 9mm Walther she had borrowed without permission from her father, who had served one year in the sanitation department of the military after his medical studies and never returned his gun.

And under the tracksuit top, beneath the transmitter belt, her heart was pounding faster and faster.

H23 was located between two rows of containers stacked three high.

And sure enough, there was a cage.

Its size suggested it had been used to transport something big. An elephant, maybe a giraffe or a hippo. The whole of one end of the cage could be swung open, but it was locked with a huge padlock that was brown with rust. In the middle of one of the long sides, though, was a small, unlocked door that Mona assumed was used by the people feeding the animals and cleaning the cage.

The hinges shrieked as she grabbed hold of the bars and pulled the door open. She looked around one last time. Presumably he was already here, hidden in the shadows or behind one of the containers, checking that she was alone, as agreed.

But there was no longer time for doubt and hesitation. She did the same thing she did when she was about to lift weights in competition, told herself the decision had been taken, that it was simple: the time for thinking was behind her, and action was all that remained. She got inside, took the padlock she had brought with her out of her pocket, and fastened it round the edge of the door and one of the bars. She locked it and put the key in her pocket.

The cage smelt of urine, but she couldn’t tell if it was animal or human. She went and stood in the middle of the cage.

He could approach from right or left, towards one of the ends. She looked up. He could climb onto the stack of containers and talk to her from above. She switched on the recording function of her phone and put it down on the stinking iron floor. Then she pulled the left sleeve of her jacket up and saw that the time was 19.59. She did the same with the right sleeve. The pulse meter said 128.

‘Hi, Katrine, it’s me.’

‘Good. I’ve been trying to get hold of you – did you get my messages? Where are you?’

‘At home.’

‘Penelope Rasch is dead.’

‘Complications. I saw it on VG’s website.’

‘And?’

‘And I’ve had other things to think about.’

‘Really? Such as?’

‘Rakel’s in Ullevål.’

‘Shit. Is it serious?’

‘Yes.’

‘Bloody hell, Harry. How bad?’

‘Don’t know, but I can’t be part of the investigation any more. I’m going to be at the hospital from now on.’

Pause.

‘Katrine?’

‘Yes? Yes, of course. I’m sorry, it’s just a bit too much to take in all at once. Naturally, you have my full support and sympathy. But, bloody hell, Harry, have you got anyone there to talk to? Do you want me to—?’

‘Thanks, Katrine, but you’ve got a man to catch. I’ll disband my team, and you’ll have to run with what you’ve got. Use Smith. His social skills are probably even worse than mine, but he’s fearless and dares to think outside the box. And Anders Wyller is interesting. Give him a bit more responsibility and see what comes of it.’

‘I’ve been thinking of doing that. Call if you need anything, anything at all.’

‘Yep.’

They ended the call and Harry stood up. Went over to the coffee machine, heard his own feet drag on the floor. He never used to drag his feet, never. He stood with the jug in his hand and looked around the empty kitchen. He’d forgotten where he’d left his mug. He put the jug down again, sat at the kitchen table and rang Mikael Bellman’s number. He reached his voicemail. Which was just as well, he didn’t have much to say.

‘This is Hole. My wife’s ill, so I’m leaving. This decision is final.’

He remained seated and looked out through the window at the lights of the city.

Thought about that one-ton water buffalo standing there with a solitary lion hanging from its throat. The water buffalo was bleeding from its wounds, but it had a lot of blood, and if it could just shake the lion off, it could easily trample it underfoot or spear it on its horns. But time was running out, its windpipe was being squeezed and it needed air. And there were more lions on the way, the pride had caught the scent of blood.

Harry saw the lights, but thought they had never seemed so far away.

The engagement ring. Valentin had given her a ring, and had come back. Just like the Fiancé. Damn. He pushed it away. Time to switch his head off now. Turn the lights off, lock up and go home.

It was 20.14 when Mona heard a noise. It came from the darkness, which had grown more dense while she had been sitting inside the cage. She saw a movement. Something was approaching. She had been through the questions she had prepared and wondered what she was most frightened of: him coming, or not coming. But she was no longer in any doubt. She felt her pulse throbbing in her neck and clutched the pistol in her jacket pocket. She had practised firing it in her parents’ basement, and from a distance of six metres she had hit what she’d been aiming at, a half-rotten raincoat hanging from a hook on the brick wall.

It came out of the darkness and into the light from a freight ship that was moored by the cement silos a few hundred metres away.

It was a dog.

It padded over to the cage and stared at her.

It looked like a stray. It didn’t have a collar, anyway, and was so skinny and scabby that it was hard to imagine it belonging anywhere but here. It was the sort of dog little Mona with her cat allergy had always hoped would follow her home one day, and never leave her.

Mona met the dog’s short-sighted stare, and imagined that she could see what it was thinking. A human being in a cage. And heard it laugh inside.

After looking at her for a while, the dog positioned itself parallel to the cage, lifted one back leg, and a stream of liquid hit the bars and floor inside.

Then it padded away and disappeared back into the darkness.

Without pricking its ears or sniffing the air.

And Mona realised.

There was no one coming.

She looked at the pulse meter. 119. And falling.

He wasn’t here. So where was he?

Harry could see something in the darkness.

In the middle of the drive, beyond the light from the windows and by the steps, he could make out the shape of someone standing with their arms by their sides, motionless, as they stared at the kitchen window and Harry.

Harry lowered his head and looked down at his mug of coffee as if he hadn’t seen the figure outside. His pistol was upstairs.

Should he run and get it?

On the other hand, if it really was the hunted man who was approaching the hunter, he didn’t want to frighten him off.

Harry stood up, stretched, aware that he was easily visible in the well-lit kitchen. He went into the living room, which also had windows facing the driveway, picked up a book, before taking two rapid strides towards the front door, grabbing the garden shears Rakel had left next to her boots, yanking the door open and running down the steps.

The figure still didn’t move.

Harry stopped.

Peered.

‘Aurora?’

Harry rummaged through the kitchen cupboard. ‘Cardamom, cinnamon, camomile. Rakel has a lot of teas starting with “c”, but seeing as I’m a coffee drinker I don’t really know what to recommend.’

‘Cinnamon would be fine,’ Aurora said.

‘Here,’ Harry said, handing her a box.

She took out a tea bag and Harry watched her as she dunked it in the mug of steaming water.

‘You ran off from Police HQ the other day,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said simply, pressing the tea bag with a teaspoon.

‘And from the bus stop earlier today.’

She didn’t answer, her hair had fallen in front of her face.

He sat down, took a sip of coffee. Gave her the time she needed, didn’t fill the silence with words that demanded answers.

‘I didn’t see it was you,’ she said eventually. ‘Well, I did see, but by then I was already scared, and it often takes a bit of time for your brain to tell your body that everything’s fine. And in the meantime my body had already managed to run away.’

‘Mm. Is there someone you’re afraid of?’

She nodded. ‘It’s Dad.’

Harry steeled himself, he didn’t want to go on, didn’t want to go there. But he had to.

‘What’s your dad done?’

Tears welled up in her eyes. ‘He raped me and said I must never tell anyone. Because then he would die …’

The nausea came so suddenly that Harry lost his breath for a moment, and bile burned in his throat when he swallowed. ‘Your dad said he would die?’

‘No!’ Her sudden, angry exclamation threw a short, hard echo off the walls of the kitchen.

‘The man who raped me said he’d kill Dad if I ever told a soul. He said he’d nearly killed Dad once before, and that nothing would stop him next time.’

Harry blinked. Tried to absorb the grim mixture of relief and shock. ‘You were raped?’ he said, with feigned calmness.

She nodded, sniffed and wiped her eyes. ‘In the girls’ toilet when we were playing in a handball tournament. It was the day you and Rakel got married. He did it, and then he left.’

Harry felt like he was falling.

‘Have you got somewhere I could get rid of this?’ She raised a dripping, dangling tea bag above the cup.

Harry just held his hand out.

Aurora looked at him uncertainly before letting go of the tea bag. Harry clenched his fist, felt the water burn his skin and run out between his fingers. ‘Did he hurt you, besides …?’

She shook her head. ‘He held me so tight that I got bruises. I told Mum they were from the match.’

‘You mean you’ve kept this to yourself right up to now? For three years?’

She nodded.

Harry felt that he was on the verge of getting up, going round the table and wrapping his arms round her. But a second thought had time to kick in, picking up on what Smith had said about closeness and intimacy.

‘So why have you come to tell me about it now?’

‘Because he’s killing other people. I saw the drawing in the paper. It’s him, it’s the man with the funny eyes. You’ve got to help me, Uncle Harry. You’ve got to help me protect Dad.’

He nodded, breathing with his mouth open.

Aurora tilted her head with a worried look on her face. ‘Uncle Harry?’

‘Yes?’

‘Are you crying?’

Harry could taste the salt of the first tear at the corner of his mouth. Damn.

‘Sorry,’ he said in a thick voice. ‘How’s the tea?’

Then Harry looked up and met her gaze. It had changed completely. As if something had opened it up. As if for the first time in a very long while she was looking out through those beautiful eyes of hers, not in, as she had done the last few times they had met.

Aurora stood up, pushed the mug away, and walked round the table. Leaned over Harry and wrapped her arms around him. ‘It’s going to be OK,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be OK.’

Marte Ruud went over to the customer who had just walked in through the door of the otherwise empty Schrøder’s Restaurant.

‘Sorry, but we stopped serving beer half an hour ago, and we’re closing in ten minutes.’

‘Give me a coffee,’ he said, and smiled. ‘I’ll drink it quickly.’

She went back to the kitchen. The cook had gone home over an hour ago, as had Rita. They usually only had one member of staff working this late on Monday evenings, and even though it was quiet, she was still a bit nervous because this was her first evening on her own. Rita would be coming back just after closing time to help with the till.

It didn’t take more than a few seconds to boil enough water for a single cup in the kettle. She added freeze-dried coffee. Went back out and put the cup down in front of the man.

‘Can I ask you something?’ he said, looking at the steaming cup. ‘Seeing as it’s just the two of us here.’

‘Yes,’ Marte said, even though she meant no. She just wanted him to drink the coffee and go, leaving her to lock the door and wait for Rita, so she could get home. Her first lecture started at quarter past eight tomorrow morning.

‘Isn’t this where that famous detective drinks? Harry Hole?’

Marte nodded. To be honest she hadn’t actually heard of him before he showed up, a tall man with an ugly scar on his face. Then Rita had told her all about Harry Hole, in great detail.

‘Where does he usually sit?’

‘They say he sits over there,’ Marte said, pointing at the corner table by the window. ‘But he doesn’t come as often as he used to.’

‘No, if he’s going to catch that “wretched pervert”, as he puts it, he probably hasn’t got time to sit here. But this is still his place. If you understand me?’

Marte smiled and nodded, even though she wasn’t sure that she did understand.

‘What’s your name?’

Marte hesitated, unsure if she liked the direction the conversation was taking. ‘We’re closing in six minutes, so if you’re going to have time to drink your coffee, maybe you …’

‘Do you know why you have freckles, Marte?’

She froze. How did he know her name?

‘You see, when you were little and had no freckles, you woke up one night. You’d been having a kabuslar, a nightmare. You were still frightened when you ran into your mother’s bedroom so that she could tell you that monsters and ghosts didn’t exist. But in her bedroom a naked blue-black man was sitting hunched up on your mother’s chest. Long, pointed ears, blood running from the sides of his mouth. And as you just stood there staring, he puffed up his cheeks, and before you could get away he blew out all the blood he had in his mouth, covering your face and chest with tiny drops. And that blood, Marte, it never went away, no matter how hard you washed and scrubbed.’ The man blew on his coffee. ‘So that explains how you got freckles, but the question is, why? And the answer to that is as easy as it is unsatisfactory, Marte. Because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The world simply isn’t very fair.’ He raised the cup to his lips, opened his mouth wide, and poured the still steaming black liquid into his mouth. She gasped in horror, short of breath, scared that something might be about to happen, without knowing what. And she didn’t have time to see the spray from his mouth before the hot coffee hit her in the face.

Blinded, she turned round and slipped on the liquid, one knee hit the floor, but she got to her feet and rushed for the door, pushing a chair over to slow him down as she tried to blink the coffee away. She grabbed the door handle and tugged it. Locked. He’d put the latch on. She heard creaking footsteps behind her as she put her finger and thumb on the lock, but didn’t have time to do more before she felt him grab hold of her belt and jerk her backwards. Marte tried to scream, but all she could get out were small whimpering sounds. Footsteps again. He was standing in front of her. She didn’t want to look up, didn’t want to look at him. She had never had a nightmare about any blue-black man when she was little, only one about a man with a dog’s head. And she knew that if she looked up now, that was what she would see. So she kept her gaze lowered, staring at the pointed cowboy boots instead.

20

MONDAY NIGHT, TUESDAY MORNING

‘YES?’

‘Harry?’

‘Yes.’

‘I wasn’t sure if this was your number. It’s Rita. From Schrøder’s. I know it’s late, and I’m sorry to wake you.’

‘I wasn’t asleep, Rita.’

‘I called the police, but they … well, they’ve been here, and now they’ve gone again.’

‘Try to calm down, Rita. What’s happened?’

‘It’s Marte, the new girl you met the last time you were here.’

Harry remembered her rolled-up shirtsleeves and slightly nervous eagerness. ‘Yes?’

‘She’s gone. I got here just before midnight to help her with the till, but there was no one here. The door wasn’t locked, though. Marte’s reliable, and we had an arrangement. She wouldn’t just leave without locking up. She’s not answering her phone and her boyfriend says she hasn’t come home. The police checked the hospital, but nothing. And then the policewoman said it happens all the time, people disappearing in odd ways, then showing up again a few hours later with a perfectly reasonable explanation. She said I should call them if Marte hasn’t shown up again within twelve hours.’

‘What they said is actually true, Rita, they’re just following routine.’

‘Yes, but … hello?’

‘I’m here, Rita.’

‘When I was cleaning up, getting ready to close I found that someone had written something on one of the tablecloths. It looks like lipstick, and it’s exactly the shade of red that Marte uses.’

‘OK. So what does it say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘No. It’s just a single letter. A “v”. And it’s in your place.’

Three o’clock in the morning.

A roar forced its way out between Harry’s lips, echoing off bare cellar walls. Harry stared at the iron bar that was threatening to fall and crush him as his trembling arms held it up. Then, with one final effort, he thrust the weights away from him, and they clanked against each other as he let the bar rest in its cradle. He lay on the bench gasping for breath.

He closed his eyes. He had promised Oleg that he would be with Rakel. But he had to get back out there. Had to catch him. For Marte. For Aurora.

No.

It was too late. Too late for Aurora. Too late for Marte. So he had to do it for those who hadn’t yet become victims, who could still be saved from Valentin.

Because it was for them, wasn’t it?

Harry took hold of the bar, felt the metal against the calluses on his hands.

Somewhere you can be useful.

His grandfather had said that, that all you need is to be useful. When his grandmother had been giving birth to Harry’s father, she had lost so much blood that the midwife had called the doctor. Grandfather, who had been told there was nothing he could do to help, couldn’t bear to listen to Grandma’s screams, so he walked out, harnessed the horse to the plough and started to plough one of the fields. He drove the horse on with his whip and with cries loud enough to drown out those from the house, then started pushing the plough himself when his faithful old horse began to stumble in the harness. When the screaming had stopped and the doctor came out to tell him that both mother and child were going to survive, Grandfather fell to his knees, kissed the ground and thanked the God he didn’t believe in.

That same night the horse collapsed in its stall and died.

Now Rakel was lying in bed. Silent. And he had to decide.

Somewhere you can be useful.

Harry lifted the bar from the cradle and lowered it to his chest. Took a deep breath. Tensed his muscles. And roared.