The Thirst

34

SATURDAY DAYTIME

MASA KANAGAWA USED the tongs to lift the red-hot iron from the oven. He put it on the anvil and started to beat it with one of the smaller hammers. The hammer was the traditional Japanese design, with a head that stuck out at the front in a sort of gallows shape. Masa had taken over the little smithy from his father and grandfather, but like plenty of the other smiths in Wakayama he had found it a struggle to make ends meet. The steel industry, which had long been the backbone of the city’s economy, had moved to China, and Masa had had to concentrate on niche products. Such as the katana, a samurai sword that was particularly popular in the USA, and which he produced to order for private customers all over the world. Japanese law dictated that a sword-smith needed a licence, must have served a five-year apprenticeship, and was only permitted to produce two long swords per month, all of which had to be registered with the authorities. Masa was just a simple smith, who made good swords for a fraction of the price charged by the licensed smiths, but he knew he could get caught, so kept a low profile. He neither knew nor wanted to know what his clients used the swords for, but he hoped it was for exercise, for decoration or collecting. All he knew was that it helped feed him and his family, and enabled him to keep the little smithy running. But he had told his son that he ought to find a different profession, that he ought to study, that being a smith was too hard and the rewards too meagre. His son had followed his father’s advice, but it cost money to keep him at university, so Masa accepted whatever commissions he was offered. Such as this one, to make a replica of a set of iron teeth from the Heian period. It was for a client in Norway, and this was the second time he had ordered the same thing. The first time was six months ago. Masa Kanagawa didn’t know the client’s name, he just had the address of a post office box. But that was fine, the goods had been paid for in advance and the price Masa had asked for was high. Not just because it was complicated work, making the little teeth to match the design the customer had sent him, but because it felt wrong. Masa couldn’t explain why it felt more wrong than forging a sword, but when he looked at the iron teeth they made him shudder. And as he drove home along Highway 370, the singing road where the carefully designed and constructed ridges in the surface created a tune as the tyres rolled over them, he no longer heard it as beautiful, soothing choral music. He heard a warning, a deep rumble that grew and grew until it became a scream. A scream like a demon’s.

Harry woke up. He lit a cigarette and reflected. What sort of awakening was this? This wasn’t waking up to work. It was Saturday, his first lecture after the winter break wasn’t until Monday, and Øystein was looking after the bar today.

It wasn’t waking up alone. Rakel was lying by his side. During the first few weeks after she came home from hospital, whenever he lay and looked at her sleeping he had been terrified that she wouldn’t wake up, that the mysterious ‘it’ that the doctors hadn’t identified was going to come back.

‘People can’t cope with doubt,’ Steffens had said. ‘People like to believe that you and I know, Harry. The accused is guilty, the diagnosis is definite. Admitting that we have doubts is taken as an admission of our own inadequacy, not an indication of the complexity of the mystery or the limitations of our profession. But the truth is that we will never know for certain what was wrong with Rakel. Her mast cell count was slightly elevated, so at first I thought it was a rare blood disease. But all the signs are gone and there’s a lot to suggest that it was some sort of poison. In which case you don’t have to worry about it recurring. Just like these vampirist murders, wouldn’t you say?’

‘But we know who killed those women.’

‘You’re right. Bad analogy.’

As the weeks passed, the gaps between him thinking about Rakel having a relapse grew longer.

As did the gaps between him thinking there had been another vampirist killing every time the phone rang.

So it wasn’t waking up full of angst.

He had had a few of those after Valentin Gjertsen died. Oddly enough, not while Internal Investigations were interviewing him, before eventually concluding that Harry couldn’t be blamed for firing in an uncertain situation with a dangerous murderer who had himself provoked the response. It was only after, then, that Valentin and Marte Ruud started to haunt him in his dreams. And it was her, not him, who whispered in his ear. That’s why you’re also being fooled. He had told himself that it was other people’s responsibility to find her now. And as the weeks turned to months, their visits had become less frequent. It helped that he had got back into his daily routine at Police College and at home, and that he wasn’t touching alcohol.

And now, at last, he was where he ought to be. Because this was the fifth sort. Waking up content. He would copy and paste yet another day, with his serotonin level exactly where it should be.

Harry crept out of bed as quietly as he could, pulled on some trousers and went downstairs, inserted Rakel’s favourite capsule into the espresso machine, switched it on and went out onto the steps. He felt the snow sting pleasantly under his bare feet as he breathed in the winter air. The white-clad city was still in darkness, but a new day was blushing off to the east.

Aftenposten was saying that the future looked brighter than the news might make us think. That in spite of the increasingly detailed picture the media were painting of murders, wars and atrocities, recently published research showed that the number of people being murdered was at a historic low, and sinking. Yes, one day murder might even become extinct. Mikael Bellman, whose appointment as Justice Minister was going to be confirmed next week, according to Aftenposten, had commented that there was obviously nothing wrong with setting ambitious targets, but that his personal target wasn’t a perfect society, but a better one. Harry couldn’t help smiling. Isabelle Skøyen was a talented prompt. Harry looked again to the sentence about murder one day becoming extinct. Why was this long-term claim triggering the anxiety he had to admit he had – in spite of his own contentment – felt for the past month, possibly longer? Murder. He had made it his life’s work to fight murderers. But if he succeeded, if they all disappeared, wouldn’t he disappear with them? Had he not buried a part of himself with Valentin? Was that why Harry had found himself standing by Valentin Gjertsen’s grave just a few days ago? Or was there some other reason? What Steffens had said about not being able to cope with doubt. Was it the lack of answers that was nagging at him? Damn it, Rakel was better, Valentin was gone, time to let go now.

The snow creaked.

‘Nice winter break, Harry?’

‘We survived, fru Syvertsen. I see you haven’t had enough skiing, though.’

‘Skiing weather is skiing weather,’ she said, jutting her hip out. Her ski suit looked like it had been painted on her. She was holding her cross-country skis, no doubt as light as helium, in one hand as if they were chopsticks.

‘You don’t fancy coming for a quick circuit, Harry? We could sprint to Tryvann while everyone’s asleep.’ She smiled, the light from the lamp above them reflecting off her lips, some sort of cream to fend off the cold. ‘Nice and … slippery.’

‘I haven’t got any skis,’ Harry smiled back.

She laughed. ‘You’re kidding? You’re Norwegian and you haven’t got a pair of skis?’

‘Treason, I know.’ Harry glanced down at the paper. Looked at the date. 4 March.

‘I seem to remember that you didn’t have a Christmas tree either.’

‘Shocking, isn’t it? Someone should report us.’

‘You know what, Harry? Sometimes I envy you.’

Harry looked up.

‘You don’t care, you just break all the rules. I sometimes wish I could be that frivolous.’

Harry laughed. ‘With that kind of smooth talk I don’t doubt that you get both a bit of friction and a nice slippery ride, fru Syvertsen.’

‘What?’

‘Have a good ski!’ Harry saluted her with the folded newspaper and walked back to the house.

He looked at the picture of the one-eyed Mikael Bellman. Maybe that was why his gaze looked so unflinching. It was the look of a man who appeared certain that he knew the truth. The look of a priest. A look that could convert people.

The truth is that we will never know for certain.

We all get fooled in the end, Harry.

Did it show? Did his doubt show?

Rakel was sitting at the kitchen table pouring coffee for both of them.

‘Up already?’ he said, kissing her on the head. Her hair smelt faintly of vanilla and sleep-Rakel, his favourite smell.

‘Steffens just called,’ she said, squeezing his hand.

‘What did he want so early?’

‘He was just wondering how things were going. He’s called Oleg in for a follow-up after that blood sample he took before Christmas. He says there’s nothing to worry about, but he wants to see if there could be a genetic link that might explain “it”.’

It. She, he and Oleg had hugged each other more after Rakel came home from hospital. Talked more. Planned less. Had just been together. Then, as if someone had thrown a stone in the water, the surface went back to the way it had been before. Ice. But even so, it felt like something was moving down there in the abyss beneath him.

‘Nothing to worry about,’ Harry repeated, as much to himself as her. ‘But it worried you anyway?’

She shrugged. ‘Have you thought any more about the bar?’

Harry sat and took a sip of his instant coffee. ‘When I was there yesterday I thought I’m obviously going to have to sell it. I don’t know anything about running a bar, and it doesn’t feel like much of a calling, serving youngsters with potentially unlucky genes.’

‘But …’

Harry pulled on his fleece jacket. ‘Øystein loves working there. And he’s staying off the stock, I know that. Easy, unlimited access seems to make some people pull themselves together. And it is actually paying its way.’

‘Hardly surprising, when it can boast two vampirist murders, one near shootout and Harry Hole behind the bar.’

‘Hm. No, I think it’s just that Oleg’s idea of musical themes is working. Tonight, for instance, it’s nothing but the most stylish ladies over fifty. Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde …’

‘Before my time, darling.’

‘Tomorrow it’s jazz from the sixties, and the funny thing is that the same people who come to the punk evenings will show up for that too. We do one Paul Rodgers night a week in Mehmet’s honour. Øystein says we ought to have a music quiz. And—’

‘Harry?’

‘Yes?’

‘It sounds like you’re planning to hold on to the Jealousy.’

‘Does it?’ Harry scratched his head. ‘Damn. I haven’t got time for that. A couple of daft sods like me and Øystein.’

Rakel laughed.

‘Unless …’ Harry said.

‘Unless?’

Harry didn’t answer, just smiled.

‘No, no, forget it!’ Rakel said. ‘I’ve got enough on my hands unless I—’

‘Just one day a week. You don’t work on Fridays. A bit of accounting and some other paperwork. You could have some shares, be chairman of the board.’

‘Chairwoman.’

‘Deal.’

She batted his outstretched hand away. ‘No.’

‘Think about it.’

‘OK, I’ll think about it before I say no. Shall we go back up to bed?’

‘Tired?’

‘… No.’ She looked at him over her coffee cup with half-closed eyes. ‘I could imagine helping myself to some of what I see fru Syvertsen can’t have.’

‘Hm. So you’ve been spying. Well, after you, chairwoman.’

Harry glanced at the front of the paper again. 4 March. The day of his release. He followed her to the stairs. Passed the mirror without looking in it.

Svein Finne, ‘the Fiancé’, walked into Vår Frelsers Cemetery. It was daybreak, and there was no one about. Only an hour earlier he had walked out through the gate of Ila Prison a free man, and this was his first errand. Against the white snow the small, black, rounded headstones looked like dots on a sheet of paper. He walked along the icy path, taking cautious steps. He was an old man now, and he hadn’t walked on ice for many years. He stopped in front of a particularly small headstone, just neutral initials – VG – beneath the cross.

Valentin Gjertsen.

No words of remembrance. Of course. No one wanted to remember. And no flowers.

Svein Finne took out the feather he had in his coat pocket, knelt down and stuck it in the snow in front of the headstone. In the Cherokee tribe they used to place an eagle’s feather in the coffins of their dead. He had avoided contact with Valentin when they had both been in Ila. Not for the same reason as the other inmates, whom Valentin scared the life out of. But because Svein Finne didn’t want the young man to recognise him. Because he would, sooner or later. It had taken Svein one single glance on the day Valentin arrived in Ila. He had his mother’s narrow shoulders and high-pitched voice, just as he remembered her from their engagement. She was one of the ones who had tried to get an abortion while Svein was busy elsewhere, so he had forced his way in and lived there to watch over his offspring. She had lain beside him, trembling and sobbing every night until she gave birth to the boy in a magnificent bloodbath there in the room, and he had cut the umbilical cord with his own knife. His thirteenth child, his seventh son. But it wasn’t when Svein learned the name of the new inmate that he was one hundred per cent certain. It was when he was told the details of what this Valentin had been convicted of.

Svein Finne got to his feet again.

The dead were dead.

And the living would soon be dead.

He took a deep breath. The man had contacted him. And had woken the thirst inside him, the thirst he’d thought the years had cured him of.

Svein Finne looked at the sky. The sun would soon be up. And the city would wake, rub its eyes, shake off the nightmare of the murderer who had rampaged last autumn. Smile and see that the sun was shining on them, blissfully unaware of what was coming. Something that would make the autumn look like a tame prelude. Like father, like son. Like son, like father.

The policeman. Harry Hole. He was out there somewhere.

Svein Finne turned and began to walk. His steps were longer, faster, more sure.

There was so much to do.

Truls Berntsen was sitting on the sixth floor, watching the red glow of the sun try to force its way over Ekebergsåsen. In December Katrine Bratt had moved him from the doghouse to an office with a window. Which was nice. But he was still archiving reports and incoming material about closed or cold cases. So the reason why he got there so early had to be that at minus twelve degrees, it was warmer in the office than in his flat. Or that he was having trouble sleeping these days.

In recent weeks most of the material that needed archiving had naturally enough been late tip-offs and unnecessary witness statements relating to the vampirist murders. Someone claiming to have seen Valentin Gjertsen, probably someone who also thought Elvis was still alive. It didn’t matter that the DNA test of the corpse had provided incontrovertible evidence that it really had been Valentin Gjertsen that Harry Hole had killed, because for some people facts were just minor irritants that got in the way of their obsessions.

Got in the way of their obsessions. Truls Berntsen didn’t know why the sentence stuck, it was just something he had thought rather than said out loud.

He picked up the next envelope from the pile. Like the others, it had been opened and its contents listed by another officer. This one featured the Facebook logo, a stamp that showed it had been sent by special delivery, and an archiving order attached with a paper clip, on which it said ‘Vampirist Case’ beside the case number, and Magnus Skarre’s name and signature next to the word case manager.

Truls Berntsen took out the contents. On top was a letter in English. Truls didn’t understand all of it, but enough to recognise that it referred to a court disclosure order, and that the enclosed material was printouts of the Facebook accounts of all the murder victims in the vampirist case, plus the still missing Marte Ruud. He leafed through the pages and noticed that some of them were stuck together, so he guessed that Skarre hadn’t looked through everything. Fine, the case had been solved and the perpetrator would never find himself in the dock. But obviously Truls would dearly love to catch that bastard Skarre with his trousers down. He checked the names of the people the victims had been in contact with. Looked rather optimistically for Facebook messages to or from Valentin Gjertsen or Alexander Dreyer which he could accuse Skarre of having missed. He scanned page after page, only stopping to check senders and recipients. He sighed when he got to the end. No mistakes there. The only names he had recognised apart from the victims had been a couple that he and Wyller had dismissed because they had been in touch with the victims by phone. And it was surely only natural that some of the same people who had been in touch by phone, such as Ewa Dolmen and that Lenny Hell, had also been in contact on Facebook.

Truls put the documents back in the envelope, stood up and went over to the filing cabinet. He pulled out the top drawer. Let go of it. He liked the way it glided out, with a sigh, like a goods train. Until he stopped the drawer with one hand.

Looked at the envelope.

Dolmen, not Hermansen.

He hunted through the drawer until he found the file containing the interviews from the phone list, then took it and the envelope back to the desk. He leafed through the printouts until he found the name again. Lenny Hell. Truls remembered the name because it had made him think of Lemmy, even if the guy he had spoken to over the phone had sounded more like a terrified bastard with that tremble in his voice that so many people – regardless of how innocent they were – got when they found out it was the police calling them. So, Lenny Hell had been in touch with Ewa Dolmen on Facebook. Victim number two.

Truls opened the file of interviews. Found the report of his own brief conversation with Lenny Hell. And his conversation with the owner of Åneby Pizza & Grill. And a note he didn’t understand, in which Wyller reported that Nittedal Police Station had vouched for both Lenny and the owner of the pizzeria, confirming that Lenny had been in the restaurant at the time of Elise Hermansen’s murder.

Elise Hermansen. Victim number one.

They had questioned Lenny because he had called Elise Hermansen several times. And he had been in touch with Ewa Dolmen on Facebook. There was the mistake. Magnus Skarre’s mistake. And, possibly, Lenny Hell’s mistake. Unless it was just a coincidence. Single men and women of a similar age seeking each other within the same geographic area of what was after all a fairly sparsely populated country. There were more improbable coincidences. And the case was closed, there was nothing to consider. Not really. But on the other hand … The papers were still writing about the vampirist. In the USA, Valentin Gjertsen had acquired an obscure little fan club, and someone had bought the book and film rights to his life story from his estate. It may not have been on the front pages any more, but it could be again. Truls Berntsen got his phone out. Found Mona Daa’s number. Looked at it. Then he stood up, grabbed his coat and walked towards the lift.

Mona Daa screwed up her eyes and pushed with her arms as she curled the dumbbells up towards her chest. She imagined she was unfurling her wings and flying away from here with her arms outstretched. Across Frognerparken, across Oslo. That she could see everything. Absolutely everything.

And she was showing them.

She had seen a documentary about her favourite photographer, Don McCullin, who became known as a humanitarian war reporter because he showed the worst aspects of humanity in order to encourage reflection and soul-searching, not for cheap thrills. She couldn’t say the same of herself. And it had struck her that there was one word that hadn’t been mentioned in the one-sided hagiography of the documentary. Ambition. McCullin became the best, and he must have met thousands of admirers in between his battles, quite literally. Young colleagues who wanted to be like him, who had heard the myth about the photographer who stayed with the soldiers in Hue during the Tet Offensive, and the anecdotes from Beirut, Biafra, Congo, Cyprus. Here was a photographer who achieved what human beings thirsted for most, recognition and acclaim, yet not a word about how it could make a man put himself through the very worst trials, take risks he would otherwise never have dreamt of. And – potentially – commit similar offences to the ones he was documenting, all to take the perfect picture, get the groundbreaking story.

Mona had agreed to sit in a cage and wait for the vampirist. Without telling the police and potentially saving people’s lives. It would have been easy to sound the alarm, even if she did think she was being watched. A note slipped discreetly across the table to Nora. But she had – like Nora’s sexual fantasy of allowing herself to be raped by Harry Hole – made it feel like she was obliged to go through with it. Of course she had wanted it. The recognition, the acclaim, seeing the admiration in younger colleagues’ eyes when she was giving her acceptance speech for the Journalism Award, humbly saying that she was just a lucky, hard-working girl from a small town in the north. Before going on, slightly less humbly, to talk about her childhood, the bullying, and revenge and ambition. Yes, she would talk out loud about ambition, she wouldn’t be afraid to tell it how it was. And she wanted to fly. Fly.

‘You need a bit more resistance.’

It had got harder to lift the weights. She opened her eyes and saw two hands pushing down gently on the weights. The person was standing immediately behind her, so that in the big mirror in front of her she looked like some sort of four-armed Ganesh.

‘Come on, two more,’ the voice whispered in her ear. She recognised it. The police officer’s. And now she looked up and saw his face above hers. He was smiling. Blue eyes below a white fringe. White teeth. Anders Wyller.

‘What are you doing here?’ she said, forgetting to push with her arms, but feeling herself fly anyway.

‘What are you doing here?’ Øystein Eikeland asked, putting a half-litre of beer on the counter in front of the customer.

‘Huh?’

‘Not you, him there,’ Øystein said, gesturing over his shoulder with his thumb towards the tall man with the crew cut who had just walked behind the bar and was filling the cezve with coffee and water.

‘Can’t deal with any more instant coffee,’ Harry said.

‘Can’t deal with any more time off,’ Øystein said. ‘Can’t deal with being away from your beloved bar. Hear what this is?’

Harry stopped to listen to the rapid, rhythmic music. ‘Not until she starts singing, no.’

‘She doesn’t, that what’s so great,’ Øystein said. ‘It’s Taylor Swift, “1989”.’

Harry nodded. He remembered that Swift or her record company hadn’t wanted to put the album on Spotify, so instead they’d released a version with no singing.

‘Didn’t we agree that today’s singers were only going to be women over fifty?’ Harry said.

‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’ Øystein said. ‘She’s not singing.’

Harry gave up any idea of arguing against the logic of that. ‘People are here early today.’

‘Alligator sausage,’ Øystein said, pointing at the long, smoked sausages hanging above the bar. ‘The first week was because it was weird, but now the same people are back wanting more. Maybe we should change the name to Alligator Joe’s, Everglades, or—’

‘Jealousy is fine.’

‘OK, OK, just trying to be proactive here. Someone’s going to nick that idea, though.’

‘We’ll have had another one by then.’

Harry put the cezve on the hotplate and turned round just as a familiar figure came in through the door.

Harry folded his arms as the man stamped his boots and glared across the room.

‘Something wrong?’ Øystein wondered.

‘Don’t think so,’ Harry said. ‘Make sure the coffee doesn’t boil.’

‘You and that Turkish not-boiling thing.’

Harry walked round the bar and went over to the man, who had unbuttoned his coat. Heat was steaming off him.

‘Hole,’ he said.

‘Berntsen,’ Harry said.

‘I’ve got something for you.’

‘Why?’

Truls Berntsen grunt-laughed. ‘Don’t you want to know what it is?’

‘Only if I’m happy with the answer to the first question.’

Harry saw Truls Berntsen attempt an indifferent smirk, but fail and swallow instead. And the blush on his scarred face could of course be the result of the transition from the cold outside.

‘You’re a bastard, Hole, but you did save my life that time.’

‘Don’t make me regret it. Out with it.’

Berntsen pulled the document file from the inside pocket of his coat. ‘Lemmy – I mean Lenny Hell. You’ll see that he was in touch with both Elise Hermansen and Ewa Dolmen.’

‘Really?’ Harry looked at the yellow folder, held together by a rubber band, Truls Berntsen was holding towards him. ‘Why haven’t you gone to Bratt with this?’

‘Because she – unlike you – has to think about her career and would have had to take this to Mikael.’

‘And?’

‘Mikael’s taking over as Justice Minister next week. He doesn’t want any blots on his copybook.’

Harry looked at Truls Berntsen. He had long since figured out that Berntsen wasn’t as stupid as he might appear. ‘You mean he doesn’t want this case dragged out again?’

Berntsen shrugged. ‘The vampirist case came close to sticking a serious spoke in Mikael’s wheel. Then it turned into one of his greatest successes instead. So no, he doesn’t want to spoil that image.’

‘Hm. You’re giving these documents to me because you’re worried that otherwise they’ll end up in a drawer in the Police Chief’s office?’

‘I’m worried they’ll end up in the paper shredder, Hole.’

‘OK. But you still haven’t answered my question. Why?’

‘Didn’t you hear? The paper shredder.’

‘Why do you, Truls Berntsen, care about that? And no bullshit, I know who and what you are.’

Truls grunted something.

Harry waited.

Truls glanced at him, looked away, stamped his feet as if there was more snow on them. ‘I don’t know,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s true, I don’t know. I thought maybe it would be good if Magnus Skarre got a bloody nose for not noticing the link between the phones and Facebook, but it’s not that either. I don’t think. I think I just want … no, fuck it, I don’t know.’ He coughed. ‘But if you don’t want it, I’ll put it back in the filing cabinet and it can rot in there, same difference to me.’

Harry wiped the condensation from the window and watched Truls Berntsen as he walked out of the door and crossed the street, head bowed, in the sharp winter light. Was he mistaken, or had Truls Berntsen just shown symptoms of the partially benign illness known as police?

‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ Øystein asked when Harry walked back behind the bar.

‘Police porn,’ Harry said, putting the yellow folder on the counter. ‘Printouts and transcripts.’

‘The vampirist case? Hasn’t that been solved?’

‘Yes, there are just a few loose ends, formalities. Can’t you hear that the coffee’s boiling?’

‘Can’t you hear that Taylor Swift isn’t singing?’

Harry opened his mouth to say something, but instead heard himself laughing. He loved this guy. Loved this bar. He poured the spoiled coffee into two cups and tapped along on the folder to the beat of ‘Welcome to Some Pork’. As he glanced at the pages he thought that Rakel was bound to say yes, if he just sat quiet as a mouse and gave her some time.

His eyes stopped.

It was as if the ice creaked beneath him.

His heart began to beat faster. We all get fooled in the end, Harry.

‘What is it?’ Øystein asked.

‘What’s what?’

‘You look like you’ve … well …’

‘Seen a ghost?’ Harry asked, and reread it to make sure.

‘No,’ Øystein said.

‘No?’

‘No, you look more like you’ve … woken up.’

Harry looked up from the files and looked at Øystein. And felt it. His anxiety. It was gone.

‘It’s sixty,’ Harry warned. ‘And icy.’

Oleg eased off the accelerator slightly. ‘Why don’t you drive, seeing as you’ve got a car and a driving licence?’

‘Because you and Rakel are better drivers,’ Harry said, squinting against the sharp sunlight reflecting off the low snow-and tree-covered hillsides. A sign announced that they were four kilometres from Åneby.

‘Mum could have driven, then?’

‘I thought it might be useful for you to see a sheriff’s office. You could end up being sent somewhere like this one day, you know.’

Oleg braked behind a tractor that was throwing up snow as its chains sang against the tarmac. ‘I’m heading for Crime Squad, not the countryside.’

‘Oslo is almost the countryside, it’s only half an hour away.’

‘I’ve applied to the FBI course in Chicago.’

Harry smiled. ‘If you’re that ambitious, a couple of years in a sheriff’s office shouldn’t scare you. Take a left here.’

‘Jimmy,’ said the burly, cheery-looking man standing in front of the door of Nittedal sheriff’s office, which was located next door to social services and the jobcentre, in the sort of plain modern building that provided public services all over Norway. His fresh suntan made Harry assume he’d spent his winter break in the Canary Islands, even if his thoughts of ‘Lanzagrotty’ were based on a prejudiced assumption about where people from Nittedal with first names ending in ‘y’ went on holiday.

Harry shook his hand. ‘Thanks for taking the time to talk to us on a Saturday, Jimmy. This is Oleg, he’s a student at Police College.’

‘Looks like a future sheriff,’ Jimmy said, looking the tall young man up and down. ‘I consider it an honour that Harry Hole himself would want to visit us. So I’m afraid you’re the ones wasting your time here, not me.’

‘Oh?’

‘You said on the phone that you couldn’t get any answer from Lenny Hell, so I did a quick check while you were on your way. Turns out he went off to Thailand just after that interview with you.’

‘Turns out?’

‘Yes, before he left he told his neighbours and regular clients that he might be gone a while. So presumably he’s got a Thai number now, even if none of the people I spoke to know what it is. They don’t know where he’s staying out there either.’

‘A loner, maybe?’

‘You can safely say that.’

‘Family?’

‘Single. Only child. He never left home, and since his parents died he’s lived up in the Pig House on his own.’

‘Pig House?’

‘That’s just what we call it here in town. The Hell family worked with pigs for generations, did quite well out of it, and a hundred years ago they built a rather striking three-storey house up there. The Pig House.’ The sheriff chuckled. ‘Doesn’t do to get ideas above your station, eh?’

‘Hm. So what do you think Lenny Hell is doing in Thailand for so long?’

‘Well, what do people like Lenny do in Thailand?’

‘I don’t know Lenny,’ Harry said.

‘Nice guy,’ the sheriff said. ‘Smart too, an IT engineer. Works from home, freelance, we sometimes call him in when we get computer trouble. No drugs, nothing stupid. No money problems either, as far as I know. But he’s never quite got to grips with the whole women thing.’

‘What does that mean?’

Jimmy looked at the smoke from their breath as it hung in the air. ‘Bit cold out here, guys. Shall we go inside and get some coffee?’

‘I reckon Lenny’s on the lookout for a Thai bride,’ Jimmy said as he poured filter coffee into two white social services mugs and his own Lillestrøm Sportsklubb mug. ‘He couldn’t cope with the competition here at home.’

‘No?’

‘No. Like I said, Lenny’s something of a lone wolf, he keeps to himself and doesn’t say much, and he’s not much of a babe magnet to start with. And he has trouble controlling his jealousy. As far as I know, he’s never hurt a fly – or a woman – but there was one incident when a woman called us, saying that Lenny had become a bit intense after their first date.’

‘Stalking?’

‘That’s what it’s called these days, yes. Lenny had evidently sent her a load of text messages and flowers, even though she’d said she wasn’t interested in taking it any further. He’d be standing there waiting when she finished work. She made it very clear that she never wanted to see him again, and so she didn’t. But instead she told us she started to feel that things in her flat had been moved while she was at work. So she called us.’

‘She thought he’d been in her flat?’

‘I talked to Lenny, but he denied it. And we never heard any more about it after that.’

‘Does Lenny Hell have a 3D printer?’

‘A what?’

‘A machine that can be used to copy keys.’

‘No idea, but like I said, he’s an IT engineer.’

‘How jealous is he?’ Oleg asked, and the other two turned towards him.

‘On a scale of one to ten?’ Jimmy asked. Harry couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic.

‘I’m just wondering if it could be morbid jealousy?’ Oleg asked, glancing uncertainly at Harry.

‘What’s the lad talking about, Hole?’ Jimmy took an audible slurp from his canary-yellow mug. ‘Is he asking if Lenny’s killed anyone?’

‘OK. Like I said on the phone, we’re just tidying up a few loose ends from the vampirist case, and Lenny did talk to two of the victims.’

‘And this Valentin guy killed them,’ Jimmy said. ‘Or is there some doubt about that now?’

‘No doubt,’ Harry said. ‘As I said, I just wanted to talk to Lenny Hell about those conversations. See if I could find out anything we didn’t already know. I saw on the map that his address is only a few kilometres from here, so I was thinking we could head up there and knock on the door. Get it out of the way.’

The sheriff stroked the emblem on his mug with a large hand. ‘It said in the paper that you’re a lecturer these days, not a detective.’

‘I suppose I’m like Lenny, a freelancer.’

Jimmy folded his arms, and his left sleeve slid up to reveal a faded tattoo of a naked woman. ‘OK, Hole. As you’ll appreciate, not much happens in Nittedal sheriff’s district, and thank God for that. So when you called, I didn’t just make a few phone calls, I also took a drive up to Lenny’s house. Or rather, I drove as far as I could. The Pig House is at the end of a forest road, and once you’ve passed the last neighbour there’s still a kilometre and a half to go. And the snow is half a metre deep, just as high as it is at the side of the road, with no sign of tracks made by either wheels or shoes. Only elk and foxes. And maybe the odd wolf. You get my meaning? There hasn’t been anyone there for weeks, Hole. If you want to get hold of Lenny, you’ll have to buy a plane ticket to Thailand. Pattaya’s popular with men who are after Thai ladies, or so I’ve heard.’

‘Snowmobile,’ Harry said.

‘What?’

‘If I come back tomorrow with a warrant, can you organise a snowmobile?’

Harry realised that the sheriff’s good humour had run out. Presumably he had imagined sharing a nice cup of coffee while he proved to the cops from the big city that they knew what effective police work was out in the countryside too. Instead they were making fun of his judgements and asking him to put a vehicle at their disposal, like he was some sort of supplies manager.

‘You don’t need a snowmobile for a kilometre and a half,’ Jimmy said, rubbing the tip of his suntanned nose, which had begun to peel. ‘Use skis, Hole.’

‘I haven’t got any skis. A snowmobile, and someone to drive it.’

The silence that followed seemed to last an eternity.

‘I saw that the youngster was driving.’ Jimmy tilted his head. ‘No driving licence, Hole?’

‘Yes, but I killed a police officer once when I was driving.’ Harry picked up his mug and emptied it. ‘I’d prefer to avoid that happening again. Thanks for the coffee, and see you tomorrow.’

‘So what was that?’ Oleg said as they were waiting at the junction indicating to pull out onto the main road. ‘A local sheriff volunteers to help on a Saturday, and you start giving him the runaround?’

‘Did I do that?’

‘Yes!’

‘Mm. Indicate left instead.’

‘Oslo’s right.’

‘According to the satnav, Åneby Pizza & Grill is two minutes away if we turn left.’

The owner of Åneby Pizza & Grill, who had introduced himself as Tommy, wiped his fingers on his apron as he looked carefully at the picture Harry was holding in front of him.

‘Maybe, but I don’t remember what Lenny’s friend looked like, I just remember that he was here, and that he had company on the night that woman got killed in Oslo. Lenny’s a lone wolf, always on his own, doesn’t come here much. That’s why I remembered that evening when you called back in the autumn.’

‘The man in the picture’s name is Alexander, or Valentin. Did you hear Lenny call him either of those names when they were talking?’

‘I don’t remember hearing them talk at all. And I was out front alone that night, my wife was in the kitchen.’

‘When did they leave?’

‘Couldn’t say. They shared a Knut Special XXL with pepperoni and ham.’

‘You remember that?’

Tommy grinned and tapped a finger to his temple. ‘Order a pizza and come back in three months’ time and ask me what it was. I’ll give you the same discount that the police station gets. All the pizza bases are low-carb, with nuts.’

‘Tempting, but I’ve got my boy waiting in the car. Thanks for your help.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

Oleg set off into the early dusk.

They were both silent, immersed in their own thoughts.

Harry was doing calculations. Valentin could easily have eaten a pizza with Lenny and then got back to Oslo in time to kill Elise Hermansen.

A lorry passed them going so fast that the car shook.

Oleg cleared his throat. ‘How are you going to get hold of a warrant?’

‘Mm?’

‘To start with, you don’t work at Crime Squad. And you don’t have any legal basis for the warrant.’

‘No?’

‘Not if I’ve understood the course correctly.’

‘Let’s hear it,’ Harry smiled.

Oleg slowed down slightly. ‘There’s incontrovertible proof that Valentin killed a number of women. Lenny Hell met these women by coincidence. That on its own isn’t enough to give the police the right to break into Lenny Hell’s house while he’s on holiday in Thailand.’

‘Agreed, it would be difficult to get a search warrant on those grounds. So let’s drive to Grini.’

‘Grini?’

‘I was thinking of having a chat with Hallstein Smith.’

‘Helga and I are making dinner together tonight.’

‘To be more precise, a chat about morbid jealousy. Dinner, you say? I understand, I’ll find my own way out to Grini.’

‘Grini’s almost on the way, so OK.’

‘Go and make dinner, it might take a while with Smith.’

‘Too late, you’ve already said I can come along.’ Oleg sped up, pulled out and overtook a tractor, and put the lights on full beam.

They drove for a while in silence.

‘Sixty,’ Harry said, typing on his phone.

‘And icy,’ Oleg said, easing off the accelerator slightly.

‘Wyller?’ Harry said. ‘Harry Hole. I hope you’re sitting at home and feeling bored on a Saturday afternoon. Oh? Then you’ll have to explain to the lovely lady, whoever she is, that you need to help a washed-up but legendary detective check a few things.’

‘Morbid jealousy,’ Hallstein Smith said, looking keenly at the guests who had just arrived. ‘It’s an interesting subject. But have you really come all this way to talk about that? Isn’t this more Ståle Aune’s specialty?’

Oleg nodded and looked like he agreed.

‘I wanted to talk to you, seeing as you’ve got doubts,’ Harry said.

‘Doubts?’

‘You said something that night Valentin was here. You said he knew.’

‘Knew what?’

‘You didn’t say.’

‘I was in shock, I probably said all sorts of things.’

‘No, for once you said relatively little, Smith.’

‘Did you hear that, May?’ Hallstein Smith laughed at the slight figure who was pouring tea for them.

She smiled and nodded, then went off into the living room with the teapot and one cup.

‘I said “he knew”, and you interpreted that to mean I doubted something?’ Smith asked.

‘It sounded like something inexplicable,’ Harry said. ‘Something you couldn’t quite understand how Valentin could know. Am I wrong?’

‘I don’t know, Harry. When it comes to my own subconscious, you can probably answer as well as me, maybe better. Why do you ask?’

‘Because a man has popped up. Well, he’s actually gone off to Thailand in something of a hurry. But I asked Wyller to check. And the person in question isn’t on any passenger lists during the period when he’s supposed to have gone. And during the past three months there hasn’t been any activity on this individual’s bank or credit cards, either in Thailand or anywhere else. And, almost as interestingly, Wyller found his name on our list of people who have bought 3D printers in the past year.’

Smith looked at Harry. Then he turned and looked out through the kitchen window. The snow lay like a soft, sparkling blanket over the field in the darkness outside. ‘Valentin knew where my office was. That’s what I meant by “he knew”.’

‘Your address, you mean?’

‘No, I mean the fact that he walked straight from the gate to the barn. He didn’t just know that my office was there, he also knew that I was usually there in the middle of the night.’

‘Maybe he saw light from the window?’

‘You can’t see any light in that window from the gate. Come with me, I want to show you something.’

They headed down to the barn, unlocked the door and went into the office, where Smith turned on his computer.

‘I’ve got all the security footage here, I just need to find it,’ Smith said, and started tapping.

‘Cool drawing,’ Oleg said, nodding at the bat-man on the wall. ‘Grim.’

‘Alfred Kubin,’ Smith said. ‘Der Vampyr. My father had a book of Kubin’s drawings. I used to sit at home and look at it while other kids went to the cinema to watch bad horror films. But sadly May won’t let me have any of Kubin’s pictures in the house, she says they give her nightmares. And speaking of nightmares, here’s the footage of Valentin.’

Smith pointed and Harry and Oleg leaned over his shoulders.

‘Here he is coming into the barn. You see, he’s not hesitating, he knows exactly where he’s going. How? The therapy sessions I had with Valentin weren’t here, but in a rented office in the city centre.’

‘You’re saying someone must have given him instructions in advance?’

‘I’m saying someone could have given Valentin Gjertsen instructions. That’s been the problem with this case right from the start. Vampirists don’t have the capacity for planning that these murders demonstrate.’

‘Hm. We didn’t find a 3D printer in Valentin’s flat. Someone else could have made the copies of the keys for him. Someone who had previously made copies of keys for himself, to let himself into the homes of women who had dumped him. Who had rejected him. Who had gone on to meet other men.’

‘Bigger men,’ Smith said.

‘Jealousy,’ Harry said. ‘Morbid jealousy. But in a man who’s never hurt a fly.’

‘And when a man isn’t capable of hurting anyone, he needs someone to act for him. Someone who can do the things he can’t.’

‘A murderer,’ Smith said, nodding slowly.

‘Someone who’s prepared to kill for the sake of killing. Valentin Gjertsen. So we have one man who plans, and another who acts. The agent and the artist.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Smith said, rubbing his cheeks with his hands. ‘Now my dissertation is actually starting to make sense.’

‘In what way?’

‘I was in Lyon recently, giving a lecture about the vampirist murders, and even if my colleagues have been enthusiastic as far as my pioneering work goes, I keep having to point out that there’s something missing that stops it from qualifying as truly groundbreaking, and that is that these murders don’t fit the general profile of a vampirist that I’ve come up with.’

‘Which is?’

‘An individual with schizophrenia and aspects of paranoia who, as a result of their overwhelming thirst for blood, kills whoever happens to be closest to them, an individual who can’t commit murders that require a lot of planning and patience. But this vampirist’s murders point more towards an engineering personality.’

‘A brain,’ Harry said. ‘Who approaches Valentin, who has had to put a stop to his activities because he can’t move freely without being caught by the police. The brain offers Valentin the keys to the flats of single women. Pictures, information about their routines, when they come and go, everything Valentin needs to get them without having to expose himself. How could he turn down an offer like that?’

‘A perfect symbiosis,’ Smith said.

Oleg cleared his throat.

‘Yes?’ Harry said.

‘The police spent years trying to find Valentin. How did Lenny find him?’

‘Good question,’ Harry said. ‘They didn’t get to know each other in prison, anyway. Lenny’s past is as clean as a priest’s dog collar.’

‘What did you say?’ Smith asked.

‘A dog collar.’

‘No, the name.’

‘Lenny Hell,’ Harry repeated. ‘What about it?’

Hallstein Smith didn’t answer, just stared at Harry with his mouth open.

‘Bloody hell,’ Harry said calmly.

‘Bloody hell, what?’ Oleg said.

‘Patients,’ Harry said. ‘With the same psychologist. Valentin Gjertsen and Lenny Hell met each other in the waiting room. Is that it, Hallstein? Come on, the risk of further murders outranks the oath of confidentiality.’

‘Yes, it’s true that Lenny Hell was a patient of mine a while ago. And he used to come here, and he knew about my habit of working in the barn at night. But he and Valentin couldn’t have met here, because Valentin’s sessions with me took place in the city.’

Harry pushed himself forward on his chair. ‘But is it possible that Lenny Hell is a morbidly jealous individual who worked with Valentin Gjertsen to kill women who had dumped him?’

Hallstein Smith rubbed his chin thoughtfully with two fingers. Nodded.

Harry leaned back in his chair. Looked at the computer screen, and the frozen image of the injured Valentin making his way out of the barn. The arrow on the scale, which had read 74.7 kilos when he arrived, now read 73.2 kilos. Which meant that he had left one and a half kilos of blood on the office floor. It was all just basic maths, and the calculation worked now. Valentin Gjertsen plus Lenny Hell. And the answer was two.

‘So the case has to be reopened,’ Oleg said.

‘That’s not going to happen,’ Gunnar Hagen said, looking at his watch.

‘Why not?’ Harry said, signalling to Rita for the bill.

The head of Crime Squad sighed. ‘Because the case has been solved, Harry, and because what you’re presenting me with feels too much like a conspiracy theory. Random coincidences, such as this Lenny Hell being in touch with two of the victims, and psychological guesswork based on the fact that it looks like Valentin knows that he ought to turn right? That’s the sort of thing journalists and authors use to conclude that Kennedy was shot by the CIA and the real Paul McCartney is dead. The vampirist case is still high profile, and we’d be making high-profile clowns of ourselves if we reopened the case on that sort of evidence.’

‘Is that what’s worrying you, boss? Looking like a clown?’

Gunnar Hagen smiled. ‘You always used to call me “boss” in a way that made me feel like a clown, Harry. Because everyone knew that you were really the boss. But that was fine, I could accept that, you were given free rein to make fun of us because you got results. But the lid’s already on this case. And it’s been screwed down very tightly.’

‘Mikael Bellman,’ Harry said. ‘He doesn’t want anyone to spoil his image before he becomes Minister of Justice.’

Hagen shrugged. ‘Thanks for inviting me for coffee late on a Saturday evening, Harry. How’s everything at home?’

‘Fine,’ Harry said. ‘Rakel’s fit and strong. Oleg’s making dinner with his girlfriend. How about you?’

‘Oh, fine, too. Katrine and Bjørn have just bought themselves a house, but you probably know that.’

‘No, I didn’t know.’

‘They had that little break, of course, but now they’ve decided to go for it. Katrine’s pregnant.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, due in June. The world moves on.’

‘For some,’ Harry said, handing a 200-krone note to Rita, who started counting out his change. ‘Not for others. Here at Schrøder’s things are standing still.’

‘So I see,’ Gunnar Hagen said. ‘I didn’t think cash was legal tender any more.’

‘That’s not what I meant. Thanks, Rita.’

Hagen waited until the waitress had gone. ‘So that’s why you wanted to meet here? To remind me. Did you think I’d have forgotten?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ Harry said. ‘But until we know what happened to Marte Ruud, this case isn’t solved. Not for her family, not for the people who work here, not for me. And not for you either, I can tell. And you know that if Mikael Bellman has screwed the lid on so tightly that it can’t be opened, then I’m going to smash the glass.’

‘Harry …’

‘Look, all I need is a search warrant and authorisation from you to investigate this single loose end. I promise to stop after that. Just this one favour, Gunnar. Then I’ll stop.’

Hagen raised one bushy eyebrow. ‘Gunnar?’

Harry shrugged. ‘You said it yourself, you’re not my boss any more. Come on, you’ve always been on the side of good, thorough police work, Gunnar.’

‘You know that sounds like flattery, Harry?’

‘So?’

Hagen let out a deep sigh. ‘I’m not making any promises, but I’ll think about it. OK?’ The head of Crime Squad stood up and buttoned his coat. ‘I remember some advice I was given when I first started working on cases, Harry. That if you want to survive, you have to learn when to let go.’

‘I’m sure that’s good advice,’ Harry said, lifting his coffee cup to his lips and looking up at Hagen. ‘If you think survival’s so bloody important.’

35

SUNDAY MORNING

‘THERE THEY ARE,’ Harry said to Hallstein Smith, who braked and stopped the car in front of the two men who were standing in the middle of the forest track, arms folded.

‘Brr,’ Smith said, sticking his hands in the pockets of his multicoloured blazer. ‘You’re right, I should have worn more clothes.’

‘Take this,’ Harry said, pulling off his black woolly hat with its embroidered skull and crossbones and the name ‘St. Pauli’ underneath.

‘Thanks,’ Smith said, pulling it down over his ears.

‘Good morning, Hole,’ the sheriff said. Behind him, where the track was no longer driveable, stood two snowmobiles.

‘Good morning,’ Harry said, taking off his sunglasses. The sunlight reflecting off the snow stung his eyes. ‘And thanks for agreeing to help at such short notice. This is Hallstein Smith.’

‘You don’t have to thank us for doing our job,’ the sheriff said, and nodded towards a man who was dressed the same way as him, in blue-and-white overalls that made them look like overgrown toddlers. ‘Artur, can you take the guy in the blazer?’

Harry looked on as the snowmobile carrying Smith and the police officer disappeared along the track. The noise cut through the cold, clear air like a chainsaw.

Jimmy straddled the oblong seat of the snowmobile and coughed before turning the ignition key. ‘If you’ll permit the local sheriff to drive a snowmobile?’

Harry put his sunglasses back on and got on behind him.

Their conversation the previous evening had been short.

‘Jimmy.’

‘Harry Hole here. I’ve got what I need – can you arrange snowmobiles, and show us the way to the house tomorrow morning?’

‘Oh.’

‘There’ll be two of us.’

‘How the hell did you get—?’

‘Half eleven?’

Pause.

‘OK.’

The snowmobile followed the trail left by the first one. In the scattered community below them in the valley the sunlight glinted off windows and the church spire. The temperature fell rapidly when they entered dense pine forest that shut out the sun, and plummeted when they headed into a depression in the landscape where the ice-covered river ran.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harry tried again.

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

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

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

Harry stepped inside.

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

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

Soulless.

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

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

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

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

‘Lenny Hell?’ Harry asked without turning round.

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

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

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

Harry took his phone out and called Bjørn Holm.

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

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

Harry went out into the hall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Smith!’

‘Yes?’

‘Come up here!’

When the psychologist stepped into the room thirty seconds later, he didn’t immediately go over to the desk where Harry was leafing through the folder, but stopped in the doorway with a surprised expression on his face.

‘Recognise them?’ Harry asked.

‘Yes.’ Smith went over to the bookcase and pulled out one of the folders. ‘They’re mine. These are my records. The ones that were stolen.’

‘This too, I presume,’ Harry said, holding up the folder so that Hallstein Smith could read the label.

‘Alexander Dreyer. That’s my handwriting, yes.’

‘I don’t understand all the terminology here, but I can see that Dreyer was obsessed with Dark Side of the Moon. And women. And blood. You wrote that he might go on to develop vampirism and noted that if this happened you would have to consider breaking your oath of confidentiality and telling the police about your concerns.’

‘Like I said, Dreyer stopped coming to see me.’

Harry heard the sound of a door being opened and looked out of the window, just in time to see the policeman stick his head over the railing of the veranda and throw up in the snow.

‘Where did they go to look for the fuse box?’

‘The cellar,’ Smith said.

‘Wait here,’ Harry said.

He went downstairs. There was a light on in the hall now, and the door to the cellar was open. He crouched down as he descended the narrow, dark cellar steps but still managed to hit his head on something and felt the skin break. The edge of a water pipe. Then he felt the solid floor beneath his feet, and saw a single light bulb outside a storeroom, where Jimmy was standing with his hands hanging limply by his sides, staring in.

Harry walked towards him. The cold in the living room had hidden the smell, even though the corpse showed signs of decomposition. But it was damp down here, and even if it did get cold, it was never as far below zero as above ground. And as Harry approached, he realised that what he had thought was the smell of rotten potatoes was actually another body.

‘Jimmy,’ he said quietly, and the sheriff started and turned round. His eyes were wide open and he had a little cut on his forehead that made Harry jump before he realised it was the result of another encounter with the water pipe above the stairs.

The sheriff stepped aside and Harry looked in the storeroom.

It was a cage. Three metres by two. Iron mesh, and a door with an open padlock on it. But it wasn’t holding anyone captive now. Because whatever had been in that empty shell had long since departed. Soulless, again. But Harry could see why the young policeman had reacted so strongly.

Even if the level of decay indicated that she had been dead a long time, the mice and rats hadn’t been able to reach the naked woman who was hanging from the mesh roof of the cage. And the fact that the body was intact meant that Harry could see in detail what had been done to her. Knives. Mostly knives. Harry had seen so many, mutilated in so many different ways. You might think that would harden you. And it did. You got used to seeing the results of random violence, of vicious fights, fatal and efficient stabbings, of ritual madness. But it didn’t prepare you for this. For a type of mutilation where you could see what it was trying to achieve. The physical pain and desperate terror of the victim when she realised what was in the process of happening. The sexual pleasure and creative satisfaction of the murderer. The shock, the helpless desolation of those who found the body. Had the murderer got what he wanted here?

The sheriff began to cough behind him.

‘Not here,’ Harry said. ‘Go outside.’

He heard the sheriff’s stumbling steps behind him as he opened the door to the cage and went inside. The girl hanging there was thin and her skin as white as the snow outside, with red marks on it. Not blood. Freckles. And a black hole at the top of her stomach, from a bullet.

Harry doubted she had escaped her suffering by hanging herself. The cause of death could of course have been the bullet hole in her stomach, but the shot could also have been fired in frustration after she was dead, when she no longer worked, the way children go on destroying a broken toy.

Harry brushed aside the red hair hanging in front of her face. No doubt at all. The girl’s face expressed nothing. Fortunately. When, before too long, her ghost came to him at night, Harry would rather it did so with a blank expression on its face.

‘W-who’s that?’

Harry turned round. Hallstein Smith still had the St. Pauli hat pulled down to his eyes as if he was freezing, but Harry doubted that his trembling was caused by the cold.

‘It’s Marte Ruud.’

36

SUNDAY EVENING

HARRY SAT WITH his head in his hands, listening to the voices and heavy steps from the floor above. They were in the living room. The kitchen. The hall. Setting up cordons, placing little white flags, taking photographs.

Then he forced himself to raise his head and look again.

He had explained to the sheriff that they mustn’t cut Marte Ruud down until the crime-scene investigators had been. Of course, you could tell yourself that she had bled to death in the boot of Valentin’s car, there had been enough of her blood there for that. But there was a mattress on the floor in the left-hand side of the cage that told a different story. It was black, had over time become saturated with the sort of thing the human body rids itself of. And immediately above the mattress, attached to the mesh, hung a pair of handcuffs.

There was the sound of footsteps on the stairs. A familiar voice cursed loudly, then Bjørn Holm appeared, with a bleeding cut on his forehead. He stopped next to Harry and looked at the cage before turning towards him. ‘Now I understand why our two colleagues have identical wounds on their heads. You too, I see. But none of you felt like telling me, eh?’ He turned quickly and called towards the stairs: ‘Look out for the water p—’

‘Ow!’ a muffled voice exclaimed.

‘Why would anyone build a set of stairs so that you have to hit your head on—?’

‘You don’t want to look at her,’ Harry said quietly.

‘What?’

‘I don’t want to either, Bjørn. I’ve been here almost an hour, and it doesn’t get any damn easier.’

‘So why are you sitting here?’

Harry stood up. ‘She’s been alone for so long. I thought …’ Harry heard the telltale vibrato in his voice. He walked quickly towards the stairs and nodded to the forensics officer who was standing there rubbing his forehead.

The sheriff was in the hall talking on his phone.

‘Smith?’ Harry asked.

The sheriff pointed upstairs.

Hallstein Smith was sitting in front of the computer reading the folder with Alexander Dreyer’s name on it when Harry walked in.

He looked up. ‘Down there, Harry, that’s Alexander Dreyer’s work.’

‘Let’s call him Valentin. Are you sure?’

‘It’s all in my own notes. The cuts. He described it to me, told me his fantasies about torturing and then killing a woman. He described it as if he were planning a work of art.’

‘And you still didn’t tell the police?’

‘I thought about it, of course, but if we were to report all the grotesque crimes our clients commit in their imaginations, then neither we nor the police would do much else, Harry.’ Smith put his head in his hands. ‘Just think of all the lives that could have been saved if I’d only …’

‘Don’t be too hard on yourself, Hallstein, it isn’t even clear that the police would have done anything. Anyway, it’s possible that Lenny Hell used your stolen notes to copy Valentin’s fantasy.’

‘That’s not impossible. Not very likely, but not impossible.’ Smith scratched his head. ‘But I still don’t understand how Hell knew that by stealing my notes, he would find a murderer he could work with.’

‘You do talk quite a lot.’

‘What?’

‘Think about it, Smith. How likely is it that in your conversations with Lenny Hell about morbid jealousy you mentioned that you had other patients who fantasised about murder?’

‘I’m sure I did that, I always try to explain to my patients that they aren’t alone in their thoughts, in order to calm and normalise—’ Smith fell silent and put his hand to his mouth. ‘Dear God, you mean that I … that my big mouth is responsible?’

Harry shook his head. ‘We can find a hundred ways to blame ourselves, Hallstein. During my years as a detective, at least a dozen people have been killed because I haven’t managed to catch a serial killer as quickly as I should have. But if you’re going to survive, you have to learn to let go.’

‘You’re right.’ Smith laughed hollowly. ‘But I’m pretty sure the psychologist is supposed to say that, not the cop.’

‘Go home to your family, eat Sunday dinner and forget this for a while. Tord will be here soon to go through the computer, so we’ll see what he can find.’

‘OK.’ Smith stood up, pulled off the woolly hat and gave it to Harry.

‘Keep it,’ Harry said. ‘And if anyone asks, you’ll remember why we came out here today, won’t you?’

‘Of course,’ Smith said, pulling the hat back on. And it struck Harry that there was something unintentionally comic but also ominous about the St. Pauli skull above the psychologist’s jovial features.

‘Without a search warrant, Harry!’ Gunnar Hagen was shouting so loud that Harry had to hold the phone away from his ear, and Tord, who was sitting in front of Hell’s computer, looked up.

‘You went to the address and broke in without permission! I said no, loudly and clearly!’

‘I didn’t break in, boss.’ Harry looked out through the window at the valley. Darkness had started to fall and lights were going on. ‘The local sheriff did that. I just rang the doorbell.’

‘I’ve spoken to him, and he says he had a very clear impression that you had a warrant to search the house.’

‘I just said I had what I needed. And I did.’

‘Which was?’

‘Hallstein Smith is Lenny Hell’s psychologist. He was perfectly entitled to visit a patient he was concerned about. And in light of what has emerged regarding Hell’s connection to two murder victims, Smith believed there were grounds for concern. He asked me to accompany him, because of my police background, in case Lenny Hell turned violent.’

‘And Smith will back this up, I suppose?’

‘Of course, boss. We can’t mess about with this sort of psychologist–patient thing.’

Harry heard Gunnar Hagen manage the tricky feat of laughing while spitting with rage. ‘You deceived the sheriff, Harry. And you know that any evidence could be disregarded by a court if they find out—’

‘Stop going on about it and shut up, Gunnar.’

There was a brief pause. ‘What did you just say?’

‘I asked you, in a very friendly way, to shut up,’ Harry said. ‘Because there’s nothing to find out, the way we got in is perfectly correct. And there’s no one to stand trial. They’re all dead, Gunnar. The only thing that’s happened today is that we’ve found out what happened to Marte Ruud. And that Valentin Gjertsen wasn’t alone. I can’t see how either you or Bellman could come out of this badly.’

‘I don’t care about—’

‘Yes, you do, so here’s the text for the Police Chief’s next press release: The police have worked tirelessly to locate Marte Ruud, and that persistence has now paid off. And we damn well believe that Marte’s family and the whole of fucking Norway deserve that. Have you written that down? Lenny Hell in no way detracts from the Police Chief’s success with Valentin, boss. This is a bonus. So relax and enjoy your steak.’ Harry put his phone in his trouser pocket. Rubbed his face. ‘What have you got, Tord?’

The IT expert looked up. ‘Email correspondence. It confirms what you’re saying. When Lenny Hell first contacts Alexander Dreyer, he tells Dreyer that he’s got hold of his address from Smith’s patient archive, which he’s stolen. Then Hell gets straight to the point and suggests a collaboration.’

‘Does he use the word “murder”?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Go on.’

‘A couple of days pass before Dreyer, or rather Valentin, replies. He writes that he had to check that the patient archive really had been stolen, and that this wasn’t just the police setting a trap for him. Then he goes on to say that he’s open to suggestions.’

Harry looked over Tord’s shoulder. Shivered when he saw the words on the screen.

My friend, I’m open to attractive suggestions.

Tord scrolled down and continued: ‘Lenny Hell writes that they should only ever contact each other by email, and that under no circumstances should Valentin try to find out who he is. He asks Valentin to suggest a place where Hell can supply him with keys to the women’s flats, as well as any additional instructions, but without the two of them meeting. Valentin suggests the changing room of the Cagaloglu Hamam …’

‘The Turkish bathhouse.’

‘Four days before Elise Hermansen is murdered, Hell writes that the key to her flat and some extra instructions are inside one of the lockers in the changing room, that there’s one padlock with a fleck of blue paint on it. And that the code to the lock is 0999.’

‘Hm. Hell wasn’t just directing Valentin, he was steering him by remote control. What else does it say?’

‘It’s similar for Ewa Dolmen and Penelope Rasch. But there are no instructions about killing Marte Ruud. Quite the contrary. Let’s see … Here it is. The day after Marte Ruud went missing Hell writes: I know it was you who took that girl from Harry Hole’s favourite haunt, Alexander. That’s not part of our plan. I’m guessing you still have her in your flat. The girl will lead the police to you, Alexander. We need to act quickly. Bring the girl and I’ll make sure she disappears. Drive to map reference 60.148083, 10.777245, it’s a desolate stretch of road with very little traffic at night. Be there at 01.00 tonight, stop at the sign saying Hadeland 1km. Walk exactly one hundred metres straight into the forest to your right, lay her down by the big burnt tree, and leave.’

Harry looked at the screen and tapped the coordinates into Google Maps on his phone. ‘That’s only a few kilometres from here. Anything else?’

‘No, that was the last email.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, I haven’t found anything else on this computer yet. Maybe they were in touch by phone.’

‘Hm. Let me know if you find anything else.’

‘Will do.’

Harry went back downstairs.

Bjørn Holm was standing in the hall talking to one of the forensics officers.

‘One little detail,’ Harry said. ‘Take DNA samples from that water pipe.’

‘What?’

‘The first time anyone goes down there, they hit that water pipe. Skin and blood. It’s basically a big guestbook.’

‘OK.’

Harry walked towards the front door. Then stopped and turned back.

‘Congratulations, by the way. Hagen told me yesterday.’

Bjørn looked at him blankly. Harry made a round gesture over his stomach.

‘Oh, that.’ Bjørn Holm smiled. ‘Thanks.’

Harry went outside and breathed in deeply as the winter darkness and cold embraced him. It felt cleansing. He headed for the black wall of pine trees. They were using the two snowmobiles as shuttles between the house and the ploughed part of the road, and Harry was pretty sure he could get transport from there. But right now there was no one here. He found the compacted trail made by the snowmobiles, made sure he wasn’t going to fall through, and started to walk. The house had disappeared into the darkness behind him when a noise made him stop. He listened.

Church bells. Now?

He didn’t know if they were ringing for a funeral or christening, only that the sound made him shudder. And at that moment he saw something in the dense darkness ahead of him. A pair of yellow, glowing eyes, moving. Animal’s eyes. Hyena’s eyes. And a low growl that grew in strength. It was getting closer fast.

Harry raised his hand in front of him but was still blinded by the headlights of the snowmobile as it stopped ahead of him.

‘Where are you heading?’ a voice asked from behind the light.

Harry took his phone out, opened the app and gave it to the snowmobile driver. ‘There.’

60.148083, 10.777245.

There was forest on either side of the main road. No cars. A blue sign.

Harry found the tree precisely one hundred metres into the forest from the sign.

He waded over to the charred, splintered black trunk, where the snow wasn’t as deep as elsewhere. He crouched down and saw a paler scar in the wood, lit up by the lights of the snowmobile. Rope. A chain, perhaps. Which meant that Marte Ruud had been alive at that point.

‘They were here,’ he said, looking round. ‘Valentin and Lenny, they were both here. Perhaps they met?’

The trees stared back at him in silence, like reluctant witnesses.

Harry went back to the snowmobile and sat behind the police officer.

‘You’ll need to bring forensics back here so they can get hold of anything that’s left.’

The officer half turned round. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Back to the city with the bad news.’

‘You know Marte Ruud’s family have already been informed?’

‘Mm. But not her family at Schrøder’s.’

From inside the forest a bird shrieked a lone warning, far too late.

37

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON

HARRY MOVED THE half-metre-high pile of written answers so that he could see the two boys who had sat down in front of his desk better.

‘Well, I’ve read your answers regarding the case of the devil’s star,’ he said. ‘And obviously you deserve praise for spending your free time on a task I set the final-year students …’

‘But?’ Oleg said.

‘No but.’

‘No, because our answers were better than any of theirs, weren’t they?’ Jesus had folded his hands behind his head, over his long black plait.

‘No,’ Harry said.

‘No? Which of theirs was better?’

‘Ann Grimset’s group, if I remember rightly.’

‘What?’ Oleg said. ‘They didn’t even get the prime suspect right!’

‘That’s correct, they actually declared that they didn’t have a prime suspect at all. And, based on the information that was made available, that was the correct conclusion. You identified the right person, but that’s because you couldn’t help yourselves and googled to find out who the real culprit was twelve years ago. As a result, you got hung up working to a template and drew several mistaken conclusions so that you could end up with the right result.’

‘So you set a task that has no solution?’ Oleg said.

‘Not using the information provided,’ Harry said. ‘A taste of the future, if you really want to become detectives.’

‘So what should we do, then?’

‘Look for fresh information,’ Harry said. ‘Or put what you already know together in a different way. Often the solution is hidden in the information you already have.’

‘What about the vampirist case?’ Jesus asked.

‘Some fresh information. And some that was already there.’

‘Did you see what VG said today?’ Oleg asked. ‘That Lenny Hell instructed Valentin Gjertsen to kill women Hell was jealous about. Just like in Othello.’

‘Mm. I seem to remember you saying that the motive for murder in Othello wasn’t primarily jealousy, but ambition.’

‘Othello syndrome, then. By the way, it wasn’t Mona Daa who wrote it. It’s funny, but I haven’t seen anything written by her in ages.’

‘Who’s Mona Daa?’ Jesus asked.

‘The only crime reporter who got the whole picture,’ Oleg said. ‘A strange girl from up north. Goes to the gym in the middle of the night and wears Old Spice. So, tell us, Harry!’

Harry looked at the two eager faces in front of him. Tried to remember if he’d been that keen on the course when he was at Police College. Hardly. He was usually hung-over and couldn’t wait to get drunk again. These two were better. He cleared his throat. ‘OK. In that case, this is a lecture, and I must remind you that as police students you are under an oath of confidentiality. Understood?’

The pair of them nodded and leaned forward.

Harry leaned back. He wanted a smoke, and knew that cigarette outside on the steps was going to taste good.

‘We’ve been through Hell’s computer, and it’s all there,’ he said. ‘Plans of action, notes, information about the victims, information about Valentin Gjertsen, alias Alexander Dreyer, about Hallstein Smith, about me—’

‘About you?’ Jesus said.

‘Let him go on,’ Oleg said.

‘Hell wrote a manual about how to take impressions of the house keys of these women. He had discovered that on a Tinder date, eight out of ten women leave their bag at the table when they go to the toilet, and that most of them keep their keys in the little zipped compartment inside the bag. And that it takes on average fifteen seconds to make a wax impression of three keys, both sides, and that it’s easier to photograph the keys, but that for some types of keys a photograph isn’t enough to make a sufficiently accurate 3D file from which to produce copies using the 3D printer.’

‘Does that mean he knew he was going to feel jealous about them as early as the first date?’ Jesus asked.

‘In some cases, maybe,’ Harry said. ‘All he wrote was that when it was so simple, there was no reason not to make sure he had access to their homes.’

‘Creepy,’ Jesus whispered.

‘What made him pick Valentin, and how did he find him?’ Oleg asked.

‘Everything he needed was in the patient records he’d stolen from Smith. It said there that Alexander Dreyer was a man with such intense and detailed vampiristic fantasies of killing that Smith was considering trying to get him sectioned. The argument against was that Dreyer demonstrated a high degree of self-control, and lived such a well-ordered life. I assume that it was this combination of a desire to kill and self-control that made him the perfect candidate for Hell.’

‘But what did Hell have to offer Valentin Gjertsen?’ Jesus asked. ‘Money?’

‘Blood,’ Harry said. ‘Young, warm blood from female victims who couldn’t be linked to Alexander Dreyer.’

‘Murders in which there’s no obvious motive, and where the murderer hasn’t previously been in contact with the victims, are the worst ones to solve,’ Oleg said, as Jesus nodded. Harry recognised the quote from one of his own lectures.

‘Mm. The most important thing for Valentin was to keep his alias, Alexander Dreyer, away from the case. Together with his new face, it was that name which meant he was able to move about in public without being caught. He was less concerned about it coming out that Valentin Gjertsen was behind the murders. And of course in the end he was unable to resist the temptation to signal to us that he was the man behind the murders.’

‘To us,’ Oleg said. ‘Or to you?’

Harry shrugged. ‘Either way, it didn’t actually get us any closer to the man we’d been searching for all these years. He was able to just carry on following Hell’s directions, carry on killing. And it could be done safely, because Hell’s replica keys meant that Valentin could let himself into his victims’ homes.’

‘A perfect symbiosis,’ Oleg said.

‘Like the hyena and the vulture,’ Jesus whispered. ‘The vulture shows the hyena where to go by hovering over the wounded prey, and the hyena kills it. Food for both of them.’

‘So Valentin kills Elise Hermansen, Ewa Dolmen and Penelope Rasch,’ Oleg said. ‘But Marte Ruud? Did Lenny Hell know her?’

‘No, that was Valentin’s own work. And that was directed at me. He’d read in the papers that I had called him a wretched pervert, so he took someone who was close to me.’

‘Just because you called him a pervert?’ Jesus wrinkled his nose.

‘Narcissists love being loved,’ Harry said. ‘Or hated. Other people’s fear confirms and inflates their self-image. What they find insulting is to be ignored or belittled.’

‘The same thing happened when Smith insulted Valentin in the podcast,’ Oleg said. ‘Valentin saw red and set off at once to his farm to kill him. Do you think Valentin became psychotic? I mean, he’d managed to control himself for so long, and the first murders were cold, calculated acts. Whereas Smith and Marte Ruud were spontaneous reactions.’

‘Maybe,’ Harry said. ‘Or maybe he was just full of the self-confidence serial killers often get when their first murders are successful, making them think they can walk on water.’

‘But why did Lenny Hell commit suicide?’ Jesus asked.

‘Well,’ Harry said. ‘Suggestions?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Oleg said. ‘Lenny had planned the murder of women who had let him down and therefore deserved it, but now he was standing there with Marte Ruud’s and Mehmet Kalak’s blood on his hands. Two innocent people who had nothing to do with this. His conscience woke up. He couldn’t live with what he had caused to happen.’

‘Nope,’ Jesus said. ‘Lenny planned to kill himself right from the start, once the whole thing was over. These were the three women he wanted to kill, Elise, Ewa and Penelope.’

‘I doubt that,’ Harry said. ‘There were more women mentioned in Hell’s notes, and other replica keys.’

‘OK, what if he didn’t kill himself?’ Oleg said. ‘What if Valentin murdered him? They could have fallen out about the murders of Mehmet and Marte. Seeing as Lenny saw them as innocent victims. So maybe Lenny wanted to turn himself in to the police, and Valentin found out about that.’

‘Unless Valentin just got fed up with Lenny,’ Jesus said. ‘It’s not that unusual for hyenas to eat a vulture if it gets too close.’

‘The only fingerprints on the bolt gun are Lenny Hell’s,’ Harry said. ‘Obviously it’s possible that Valentin killed Lenny and tried to make it look like suicide. But why go to the trouble? The police have enough evidence against Valentin to put him away for life. And if Valentin was concerned about covering his tracks, he wouldn’t have left Marte Ruud in the cellar, or the computer and files that proved that he and Hell were working together upstairs.’

‘OK,’ Jesus said. ‘I agree with Oleg about the first part. Lenny Hell realised what he had allowed to happen and decided he couldn’t live with himself.’

‘You should never underestimate the first thing you think,’ Harry said. ‘That’s usually based on more information than you’re actually aware of. And the simplest solution is often the right one.’

‘But there’s one thing I don’t understand,’ Oleg said. ‘Lenny and Valentin didn’t want to be seen together, fine. But why such a complicated system of handing things over? Couldn’t they just have met in one of their homes?’

Harry shook his head. ‘It was important to Lenny to keep his identity hidden from Valentin, seeing as the risk of Valentin being arrested was still pretty high.’

Jesus nodded. ‘And he was worried that Valentin would lead the police to him in order to get a reduced sentence.’

‘And Valentin definitely didn’t want to let Lenny know where he lived,’ Harry said. ‘One of the reasons Valentin was able to stay hidden for so long was that he was very careful about that.’

‘So the case is solved, no loose ends,’ Oleg said. ‘Hell committed suicide and Valentin kidnapped Marte Ruud. But have you got evidence to show that he was the one who killed her?’

‘Crime Squad thinks so.’

‘Because?’

‘Because they found Valentin’s DNA at Schrøder’s, and Marte’s blood in the boot of his car, and because they found the bullet she was shot in the stomach with. It had drilled its way into the brick wall in Hell’s cellar, and the angle in comparison to the position of the body showed that she was shot before she was hanged. The bullet came from the same Ruger Redhawk revolver Valentin had with him when he was planning to shoot Smith.’

‘But you don’t agree,’ Oleg said.

Harry raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t I?’

‘When you say “Crime Squad thinks so”, that means you think otherwise.’

‘Hm.’

‘So what do you think?’ Oleg asked.

Harry ran one hand over his face. ‘I’m not sure it’s all that important who put her out of her misery. Because in this instance that’s exactly what it was. An act of deliverance. The mattress in the cage was teeming with DNA. Blood, sweat, semen, vomit. Some hers, some Lenny Hell’s.’

‘Oh God,’ Jesus said. ‘You mean Hell abused her too?’

‘There could even have been more of them.’

‘More than Valentin and Hell?’

‘There’s a water pipe above the stairs to the cellar. It’s impossible not to hit it if you don’t know it’s there. So I asked Bjørn Holm, our senior criminal forensics officer, to send me a list of everyone whose DNA was found on that pipe. Anything too old degrades, but he found seven unique profiles. As usual, we’d taken DNA samples from everyone working at the scene, and found matches for the local sheriff, his colleague, Bjørn, Smith and me, plus another member of crime-scene unit we didn’t manage to warn in time. But we couldn’t identify the seventh profile.’

‘So it wasn’t Valentin Gjertsen or Lenny Hell?’

‘No. All we know is that it’s a man, and he isn’t related to Lenny Hell.’

‘Could have been someone working there?’ Oleg said. ‘An electrician, a plumber, someone like that?’

‘True,’ Harry said, and his gaze fell on the copy of Dagbladet that lay open in front of him, and a portrait of Bellman, who was about to take over as Justice Minister. He read the caption again: ‘I’m particularly pleased that the persistence and tireless work of the police enabled us to find Marte Ruud. The family and the police both deserved that. And that makes it easier for me to leave my post as Police Chief.’

‘I have to go now, guys.’

They left Police College together and just as they were about to go their separate ways in front of Chateau Neuf Harry remembered the invitation.

‘Hallstein’s finished his vampirist dissertation, and the disputation is on Friday. We’ve been invited.’

‘Disputation?’

‘Oral exam with all your family and friends dressed up to the nines in the room,’ Jesus said. ‘Hard not to screw up.’

‘Your mum and I are going,’ Harry said. ‘I don’t know if you feel like it, or have time? Ståle’s one of his opponents.’

‘Wow!’ Oleg said. ‘Hope it’s not too early. I’m going to Ullevål on Friday.’

Harry frowned. ‘What for?’

‘It’s just Dr Steffens, he wants another blood sample. He says he’s researching a rare blood disorder called systemic mastocytosis, and that if that’s what Mum had, then her blood repaired itself.’

‘Mastocytosis?’

‘It’s caused by a genetic defect called c-kit mutation. It’s not hereditary, but Steffens is hoping that the substance in the blood that may help to repair it might be. So he wants some of my blood to compare it to Mum’s.’

‘So that’s the genetic link your mother was talking about?’

‘Steffens says he still thinks it was a case of poisoning, and that this is a shot in the dark. But that most big discoveries are just that. Shots in the dark.’

‘He’s right about that. The disputation is at two o’clock. There’s a reception afterwards you can go to if you like, but I’ll probably skip that.’

‘I’m sure you will,’ Oleg smiled, and turned to Jesus. ‘Harry doesn’t like people, you see.’

‘I do like people,’ Harry said. ‘I just don’t like being with them. Particularly not when there’s a lot of them at the same time.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Speaking of which.’

‘Sorry I’m late, private tutorial,’ Harry said, slipping behind the bar.

Øystein groaned as he put two glasses of beer down on the counter, spilling them as he did so. ‘Harry, we’ve got to get more people in here.’

Harry peered at the crowd filling the bar. ‘I think there are too many already.’

‘I mean on this side of the counter, you idiot.’

‘The idiot was joking. Do you know anyone with good taste in music?’

‘Tresko.’

‘Who isn’t autistic.’

‘No.’ Øystein poured the next beer and gestured to Harry to take payment.

‘OK, let’s think about it. So Hallstein looked in?’ Harry pointed at the St. Pauli hat that had been pulled down over a glass next to the Galatasaray banner.

‘Yes, he said thanks for the loan. He had a few foreign journalists with him, to show them the place where it all began. He’s having one of those doctor’s things the day after tomorrow.’

‘Disputation.’ Harry handed the customer his card back and thanked him.

‘Yeah. There was another guy who came over to them – Smith introduced him to the others as a colleague from Crime Squad.’

‘Oh?’ Harry said, taking the next order from a man with a hipster beard and a Cage the Elephant T-shirt. ‘What did he look like?’

‘Teeth,’ Øystein said, pointing to his own row of brown pegs.

‘Not Truls Berntsen, surely?’

‘Don’t know his name, but I’ve seen him here several times. Usually sits in that booth over there. Usually comes on his own.’

‘Bound to be Truls Berntsen.’

‘The women are all over him.’

‘Can’t be Truls Berntsen.’

‘But he still goes home alone. Weird bloke.’

‘Because he doesn’t take a woman home?’

‘Would you trust someone who turns down free cunt?’

The bearded hipster raised an eyebrow. Harry shrugged, put the beers in front of him, went over to the mirror and pulled on the St. Pauli hat. He was about to turn round again when he froze. He stood and looked at himself in the mirror, at the skull on his forehead.

‘Harry?’

‘Mm.’

‘Can you give me a hand here? Two mojitos with Sprite Light.’

Harry nodded slowly. Then he took the hat off, went round the bar and hurried for the door.

‘Harry!’

‘Call Tresko.’

‘Yes?’

‘Sorry to call so late, I thought maybe the Forensic Medical Institute was closed for the night.’

‘We’re supposed to be closed, but this is just how it is when you work in a place with a systemic lack of capacity. And you’re calling on the internal number that only the police are supposed to use.’

‘Yes, this is Harry Hole, I’m an inspector at—’

‘I know it’s you, Harry. This is Paula, and you’re not an inspector anywhere.’

‘Oh, it’s you. OK, I’m working on the vampirist case, that’s why I’m calling. I want you to check those matches you got for the samples from the water pipe.’

‘I wasn’t the person who did them, but let me look. But I should tell you that, apart from Valentin Gjertsen, I don’t have the names of the DNA profiles in the vampirist case, just numbers.’

‘That’s OK, I’ve got lists of names and numbers from all the crime scenes in front of me, so go ahead.’

Harry ticked them off as Paula read off the DNA profiles that matched. The sheriff, the local officer, Hole, Smith, Holm and his colleague from Forensics. And finally the seventh person.

‘Still no match there, then?’ Harry said.

‘No.’

‘What about the rest of Hell’s house, was any other DNA found that matched Valentin’s profile?’

‘Let’s see … No, it doesn’t look like it.’

‘Nothing on the mattress, the body, nothing to connect—?’

‘Nope.’

‘OK, Paula. Thanks.’

‘Speaking of connections, did you ever find out what was going on with that strand of hair?’

‘Strand of hair?’

‘Yes, last autumn. Wyller brought me a strand of hair and said it was something you wanted to have analysed. He probably thought it would get rushed through if he dropped your name.’

‘And was it?’

‘Of course, Harry – you know all the girls here have a soft spot for you.’

‘Isn’t that the sort of thing you say to very old men?’

Paula laughed. ‘That’s what happens when you get married, Harry. Voluntary castration.’

‘Hm. I found that strand of hair on the floor of the room my wife was in at Ullevål Hospital, it was probably just paranoia.’

‘I see. I assumed it couldn’t have been important seeing as Wyller told me to forget it. Were you worried your wife had a lover?’

‘Not really. Not until you just planted the idea, anyway.’

‘You men are so naive.’

‘That’s how we survive.’

‘But you’re not, are you? We’re taking over the planet, if you hadn’t noticed.’

‘Well, you’re working in the middle of the night, and that’s bloody weird. Goodnight, Paula.’

‘Goodnight.’

‘Hang on, Paula. Forget what?’

‘What?’

‘What did Wyller tell you to forget?’

‘The connection.’

‘Between what?’

‘Between the strand of hair and one of the DNA profiles from the vampirist case.’

‘Really? Which one?’

‘I don’t know, like I said, we only have the numbers. We don’t even know if they’re suspects or police officers working at the scene.’

Harry said nothing for a few moments. ‘Have you got the number?’ he eventually asked.

‘Good evening,’ the older paramedic said as he came into the staffroom in A&E.

‘Good evening, Hansen,’ said the only other person in the room as he pumped black coffee from the flask into his cup.

‘Your police friend just called.’

Senior Consultant John Doyle Steffens turned round and raised an eyebrow. ‘Have I got friends in the police?’

‘He mentioned you, anyway. A Harry Hole.’

‘What did he want?’

‘He sent us a picture of a pool of blood and asked us to estimate how much it was. He said you’d done that based on a picture of a crime scene, and assumed that those of us who attend accidents are trained to do the same. I had to disappoint him.’

‘Interesting,’ Steffens said, and picked a hair off his shoulder. He didn’t regard his increasing hair loss as a sign that he was fading, but rather the reverse, that he was blossoming, mobilising, getting rid of things he had no use for. ‘Why didn’t he get in touch with me directly?’

‘Probably didn’t think a senior consultant would be working in the middle of the night. And it sounded urgent.’

‘I see. Did he say what it was about?’

‘Just something he was working on, he said.’

‘Have you got the picture?’

‘Here.’ The paramedic pulled out his phone and showed the doctor the message. Steffens glanced at the picture of a pool of blood on a wooden floor. There was a ruler beside the pool.

‘One and a half litres,’ Steffens said. ‘Fairly precisely. You can call and tell him.’ He took a sip of his coffee. ‘A lecturer working in the middle of the night, what is the world coming to?’

The paramedic chuckled. ‘The same could be said of you, Steffens.’

‘What?’ the senior consultant said, making way for the other man in front of the flask.

‘Every other night, Steffens. What are you really doing here?’

‘Taking care of patients who are badly injured.’

‘I know that, but why? You’ve got a full-time job as senior consultant of haematology, but you still take extra shifts here in A&E. That’s not exactly common.’

‘Who wants common? It’s mostly a desire to be where you can be most useful, isn’t it?’

‘So you’ve got no family who’d rather you stayed at home?’

‘No, but I’ve got colleagues whose families would rather they didn’t stay at home.’

‘Ha! But you’re wearing a wedding ring.’

‘And you’ve got blood on your sleeve, Hansen. Have you just brought in someone who was bleeding?’

‘Yes. Divorced?’

‘Widowed.’ Steffens drank some more coffee. ‘Who’s the patient? Woman, man, young, old?’

‘Woman in her thirties. Why?’

‘Just wondered. Where is she now?’

‘Yes?’ Bjørn Holm whispered.

‘Harry. Had you gone to bed?’

‘It’s two o’clock in the morning, what do you think?’

‘There was around a litre and a half of Valentin’s blood on the office floor.’

‘What?’

‘It’s basic mathematics. He weighed too much.’

Harry heard the bed creak, then bedclothes brushing the phone before he heard Bjørn’s whispered voice again. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You can see it on the scales in the security camera footage when Valentin is leaving. He only weighs one and a half kilos less than when he arrived.’

‘One and a half litres of blood weighs one and a half kilos, Harry.’

‘I know that. Even so, we’re still short of evidence. Once we’ve got it I’ll explain. And you’re not to tell a soul about this, OK? Not even the person lying next to you.’

‘She’s asleep.’

‘So I can hear.’

Bjørn laughed. ‘She’s snoring for two.’

‘Can we meet at eight o’clock, in the boiler room?’

‘I guess. Are Smith and Wyller coming too?’

‘We’ll be seeing Smith at his disputation on Friday.’

‘And Wyller?’

‘Just you and me, Bjørn. And I want you to bring Hell’s computer and Valentin’s revolver.’

38

THURSDAY MORNING

‘UP AND ABOUT early, Bjørn,’ said the older officer behind the counter of the evidence store.

‘Morning, Jens. I’d like to sign out something from the vampirist case.’

‘Yes, that’s back under the spotlight, isn’t it? Crime Squad was here getting stuff yesterday, I’m pretty sure it’s on shelf G. But let’s see what the bastard machine thinks …’ He tapped at the keyboard as if it were red hot, and looked across the screen. ‘… let’s see … bloody thing’s frozen again …’ He looked up at Bjørn with a resigned and rather helpless expression. ‘What do you say, Bjørn, wasn’t it better when we could just look in a folder and find out exactly wh—?’

‘Who was here from Crime Squad?’ Bjørn Holm asked, trying to hide his impatience.

‘What’s his name again? The one with the teeth.’

‘Truls Berntsen?’

‘No, no, the one with the nice teeth. The new guy.’

‘Anders Wyller,’ Bjørn said.

‘Mm,’ Harry said, leaning back in his chair in the boiler room. ‘And he signed out Valentin’s Redhawk?’

‘Plus the iron teeth and handcuffs.’

‘And Jens didn’t say what Wyller wanted them for?’

‘No, he didn’t know. I’ve tried calling Wyller in the office, but they said he’s taken some time owing so I called his mobile.’

‘And?’

‘No answer. Probably asleep, but I can try again now.’

‘No,’ Harry said.

‘No?’

Harry closed his eyes. ‘We all get fooled in the end,’ he whispered.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Let’s go and wake Wyller. Can you call the unit and find out where he lives?’

Thirty seconds later Bjørn put the phone back on the desk and repeated the name of the street in a clear voice.

‘You’re kidding,’ Harry said.

Bjørn Holm turned the Volvo Amazon into the quiet street and drove down between the banks of snow where the cars seemed to have gone into hibernation for the winter.

‘Here it is,’ Harry said, leaning forward and looking up at the four-storey building. There was some graffiti on the pale blue wall between the second and third floors.

‘Sofies gate 5,’ Bjørn said. ‘Not exactly Holmenkollen …’

‘Another life,’ Harry said. ‘Wait here.’

Harry got out, went up the two steps to the door and looked at the names beside the doorbells. Some of the old names had changed. Wyller’s name was further down than where his had once stood. He pressed the buzzer. Waited. Pressed again. Nothing. He was about to press it a third time when the door opened and a young woman hurried out. Harry caught the door before it closed and slipped inside.

The stairwell smelt the same as it used to. A mixture of Norwegian and Pakistani food, and the cloying smell of old fru Sennheim on the first floor. Harry listened. Silence. Then he crept up the stairs, instinctively avoiding the sixth step, which he knew creaked.

He stopped outside the door on the first landing.

There was no light behind the frosted glass.

Harry knocked. Looked at the lock. Knew it wouldn’t take much to break in. A plastic card and a hard shove. He thought about it. Being the person who broke in. And felt his heart beat faster, and his breath misted the glass in front of him. That tantalising excitement, was that what Valentin had felt when he opened the doors of his victims’ flats?

Harry knocked again. He waited, then gave up and turned to leave. At that moment he heard footsteps behind the door. He turned round. Saw a shadow through the frosted glass. The door opened.

Anders Wyller was wearing jeans, but his chest was bare and he hadn’t shaved. But he didn’t look like he’d just woken up. On the contrary, his pupils were big and dark, his forehead wet with sweat. Harry noticed something red on his shoulder – a cut? There was some blood, anyway.

‘Harry,’ Wyller said. ‘What are you doing here?’ His voice sounded different from the usual high, boyish pitch. ‘And how did you get in?’

Harry cleared his throat. ‘We need the serial number of Valentin’s revolver. I rang the bell.’

‘And?’

‘And you didn’t answer. I thought maybe you were asleep, so I came in anyway. I actually used to live in this building, on the fourth floor, so I know the doorbells aren’t very loud.’

‘Yes,’ Wyller said, stretching as he let out a yawn.

‘So,’ Harry said. ‘Have you got it?’

‘Got what?’

‘The Redhawk. The revolver.’

‘Oh, that. Yes. The serial number? Hang on, I’ll go and get it.’

Wyller pulled the door to, and Harry saw him disappear across the hall through the glass. The flats all had the same layout, so he knew that was where the bedroom was. The figure headed back towards the front door, then turned left into the living room.

Harry pulled the door open. There was a smell – perfume? He saw that the bedroom door was closed. That was what Wyller had done, he had closed the door. Harry looked automatically for clothes or shoes in the hall that could tell him something, but there was nothing there. He looked at the bedroom door and listened. Then he took three long, silent strides and was inside the living room. Anders Wyller hadn’t heard him as he knelt in front of the coffee table with his back to Harry, writing on a notepad. Next to the pad was a plate with a slice of pizza on it. Pepperoni. And the big revolver with the red butt. But Harry couldn’t see the handcuffs or iron teeth.

There was an empty cage in one corner of the living room. The sort people keep rabbits in. Hang on, though. Harry remembered the meeting where Skarre had pressurised Wyller about the leak to VG, when Wyller said he had told VG that he had a cat. So where was the cat? And did you keep cats in cages? Harry’s gaze moved on to the end wall, where there was a narrow bookcase containing a few textbooks from Police College, including Bjerknes and Hoff Johansen’s Investigative Methods. But there were some that weren’t on the syllabus, like Ressler, Burgess and Douglas’s Sexual Homicide – Patterns and Motives, a book about serial killings that he had referred to in recent lectures because it contained information about the FBI’s newly established ViCAP unit. Harry looked at the other shelves. There were what looked like family photographs, two adults and Anders Wyller as a young boy. There were more books on the shelf below: Haematology at a Glance, Atul B. Mehta, A. Victor Hoffbrand. And Basic Haematology by John D. Steffens. A young man who was interested in blood disorders? Why not? Harry moved closer and looked more carefully at the family photograph. The boy looked happy. The parents less so. ‘Why did you sign out Valentin’s things?’ Harry said, and saw Wyller’s back stiffen. ‘Katrine Bratt didn’t ask you to. Physical evidence isn’t the sort of thing you normally take home with you, even if the case has been solved.’

Wyller turned round and Harry saw his eyes dart automatically to the right. Towards the bedroom.

‘I’m a detective with Crime Squad and you’re a lecturer at Police College, Harry, so strictly speaking I should be asking you what you want the serial number for.’

Harry looked at Wyller. Realised that he wasn’t going to get an answer. ‘The serial number was never checked in order to trace its original owner. And that could hardly have been Valentin Gjertsen, seeing as he didn’t exactly have a firearms licence, to put it mildly.’

‘Is that important?’

‘Don’t you think it is?’

Wyller shrugged his bare shoulders. ‘As far as we know, the revolver was never used to kill anyone, not even Marte Ruud, because the post-mortem showed she was dead before she was shot. We’ve got the ballistic data for the revolver, and it doesn’t match any of the other cases in our database. So no, I don’t think it’s important to check the serial number, not while there are other things crying out for our attention.’

‘I see,’ Harry said. ‘Well, maybe this lecturer can make himself useful by seeing where the serial number leads.’

‘Of course,’ Wyller said, tearing the sheet from the notepad and giving it to Harry.

‘Thanks,’ Harry said, looking at the blood on his shoulder.

Wyller followed him to the door, and when Harry turned round on the landing he saw that Wyller had spread himself out in the doorway, the way bouncers do.

‘Just out of curiosity,’ Harry said. ‘That cage in the living room, what do you keep in it?’

Wyller blinked a couple of times. ‘Nothing,’ he said. Then he quietly closed the door.

‘Did you find him?’ Bjørn asked as he pulled out into the road.

‘Yes,’ Harry said, tearing a page out of his own notebook. ‘And here’s the serial number. Ruger’s an American company, can you check with the ATF?’

‘You don’t seriously think they’ll be able to trace that revolver?’

‘Why not?’

‘Because the Americans are pretty half-hearted when it comes to registering the owners of firearms. And there are more than three hundred million weapons in the USA. More guns than people, in other words.’

‘Frightening.’

‘What is frightening,’ Bjørn Holm said, putting his foot down harder on the accelerator to get a controlled slide as they turned to go down the hill towards Pilestredet, ‘is that even the ones who aren’t criminals and say they’ve got guns for self-defence use their guns to shoot the wrong people. There was an article in the Los Angeles Times saying that in 2012 more than twice as many people were killed in accidental shootings as in self-defence. And almost forty times as many shot themselves. And that’s before you even start to look at the statistics for murder.’

‘You read the Los Angeles Times?’

‘Well, mostly because Robert Hilburn used to write about music in it. Have you read his biography of Johnny Cash?’

‘Nope. Hilburn – is he the one who wrote about the Sex Pistols’ tour of the USA?’

‘Yep.’

They stopped at a red light in front of Blitz, once the bridgehead of punk in Norway, where you could still see the occasional Mohawk. Bjørn Holm grinned at Harry. He was happy now. Happy about becoming a father, happy the vampirist case was over, happy to be able to slide a car that smelt of the 1970s and talk about music that was almost as old.

‘It would be great if you could let me have an answer before twelve o’clock, Bjørn.’

‘If I’m not mistaken, the ATF is based in Washington DC, where it’s the middle of the night.’

‘They’ve got an office with Interpol in The Hague, try there.’

‘OK. Did you find out why Wyller had signed out those things?’

Harry stared at the traffic light. ‘No. Have you got Lenny Hell’s computer?’

‘Tord’s got it, he should be waiting for us in the boiler room.’

‘Good.’ Harry tried impatiently to stare the red light green.

‘Harry?’

‘Yes?’

‘Did it ever occur to you that it looked as if Valentin had left his flat very quickly, just before Katrine and Delta got there? As if someone had warned him?’

‘No,’ Harry lied.

The light turned green.

Tord was pointing and explaining things to Harry as the coffee machine spluttered and groaned behind them.

‘Here are Lenny Hell’s emails to Valentin before the murders of Elise, Ewa and Penelope.’

The emails were short. Just the victim’s name, address and a date. The date of the murder. And they all ended with the same line. Instructions and keys in agreed location. Instructions to be burned after reading.

‘They don’t say much,’ Tord said. ‘But enough.’

‘Hm.’

‘What?’

‘Why do the instructions have to be burned?’

‘Isn’t it obvious? There were things in them that could lead people to Lenny.’

‘But he didn’t delete the emails from his computer. Is that because he knew that IT experts like you could reconstruct the correspondence anyway?’

Tord shook his head. ‘Nowadays it isn’t that simple. Not if both sender and recipient delete the emails thoroughly.’

‘Lenny would have known how to delete emails thoroughly. So why didn’t he?’

Tord shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘Because he knew that by the time we had his computer, the game would already be up.’

Harry nodded slowly. ‘Maybe Lenny knew that from the start. That one day the war he was waging from his bunker would be lost. And that it would then be time for a bullet to the head.’

‘Maybe.’ Tord looked at his watch. ‘Was there anything else?’

‘Do you know what stylometry is?’

‘Yes. The analysis of variations in writing style. There was a lot of research into stylometry after the Enron scandal. Several hundred thousand emails were made public so that researchers could see if they could identify their senders. They got a hit rate of between eighty and ninety per cent.’

After Tord had left Harry rang the number of VG’s crime desk.

‘Harry Hole. Can I speak to Mona Daa?’

‘Long time, Harry.’ Harry recognised the voice of one of the older crime reporters. ‘You could have done, but Mona vanished a few days ago.’

‘Vanished?’

‘We got a text saying she was taking a few days off and that her phone would be switched off. Probably a good move, that girl’s worked bloody hard over the past year, but the editor was pissed off she didn’t ask, just sent that short message and pretty much disappeared. Kids these days, eh, Harry? Anything I can help you with?’

‘No, thanks,’ Harry said, and hung up. He looked at his phone for a moment before slipping it into his pocket.

By quarter past eleven Bjørn Holm had got hold of the name of the man who had imported the Ruger Redhawk into Norway, a sailor from Farsund. And at half past eleven Harry spoke to his daughter on the phone. She remembered the Redhawk because she had dropped the heavy revolver, which weighed more than a kilo, on her father’s big toe when she was little. But she couldn’t say where it had gone.

‘Dad moved to Oslo when he retired, to be closer to us children. But he was ill towards the end, and did a lot of peculiar things. He started giving away lots of his possessions, as we discovered afterwards when we were trying to sort out his will. I never saw the revolver again, so he could have given it away.’

‘But you don’t know who to?’

‘No.’

‘You said he was ill. I presume that was what led to his death?’

‘No, he died of pneumonia. It was fast and relatively painless, thank goodness.’

‘I see. So what was the other illness, and who was his doctor?’

‘That was just it, we realised he wasn’t very well, but Dad always thought of himself as a big, strong sailor. I suppose he thought it was embarrassing, so he kept it secret, both what was wrong with him and who he saw about it. It wasn’t until his funeral that I heard about it from an old friend he’d confided in.’

‘Would that friend know who your father’s doctor was, do you think?’

‘Hardly, Dad just mentioned the illness, no details.’

‘And what was the illness?’

Harry wrote it down. Looked at the word. A rather lonely Greek term among all the Latin names in the world of medicine.

‘Thanks,’ he said.

39

THURSDAY NIGHT

‘I’M SURE,’ HARRY said into the darkness of the bedroom.

‘Motive?’ Rakel said, curling up beside him.

‘Othello. Oleg was right. First and foremost, it’s not about jealousy. It’s about ambition.’

‘Are you still talking about Othello? Are you sure you don’t want to close the window, it’s supposed to be minus fifteen tonight.’

‘No.’

‘You’re not sure if the window should be closed, but you’re quite sure who the architect behind the vampirist murders is?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re just missing that silly little thing called evidence.’

‘Yes.’ Harry pulled her closer to him. ‘That’s why I need a confession.’

‘So ask Katrine Bratt to call him in for questioning.’

‘Like I said, Bellman won’t let anyone touch the case.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

Harry stared at the ceiling. Felt the heat of her body. Would that be enough? Should they close the window?

‘I’m going to question him myself. Without him knowing that that’s what’s going on.’

‘Just let me remind you, as a lawyer, that an informal confession to you, one to one, has zero value.’

‘So we’ll have to make sure I’m not the only one who hears it, then.’

Ståle Aune rolled over in bed and picked up the phone. Saw who was calling and pressed the button to answer. ‘Yes?’

‘I thought you’d be asleep.’ Harry’s gruff voice.

‘And you still called?’

‘You’ve got to help me with something.’

‘Still you rather than us?’

‘Still humanity. Do you remember we talked about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?’

‘Yes.’

‘I need you to set a monkey trap during Hallstein’s disputation.’

‘Really? You, me, Hallstein and who else?’

Ståle Aune heard Harry take a deep breath.

‘A doctor.’

‘And this is a person you’ve managed to link to the case?’

‘More or less.’

Ståle felt the hairs on his arms stand up. ‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that I found a hair in Rakel’s room, and in a fit of paranoia I sent it for analysis. It turned out that there was nothing suspicious about the fact that it was there, because it came from this doctor. But then it turned out that the DNA profile of the hair ties him to the scenes of the vampirist murders.’

‘What?’

‘And that there’s a link between this doctor and a young detective who’s been among us the whole time.’

‘What are you saying? You’ve got proof that this doctor and the detective are involved in the vampirist murders?’

‘No,’ Harry sighed.

‘No? Explain.’

When Ståle Aune hung up twenty minutes later, he listened to the silence in the house. The calm. Everyone was asleep. But he knew he wasn’t going to get any more sleep.

40

FRIDAY MORNING

WENCHE SYVERTSEN LOOKED out across Frognerparken as she used the step machine. One of her friends had advised her against it, saying it made your backside bigger. She evidently hadn’t understood the point: Wenche wanted a bigger backside. Wenche had read online that exercise only gave you a more muscular backside rather than one that was bigger and more perfectly formed, and that the solution was oestrogen supplements, eating more, or – simplest of all – implants. But Wenche had ruled out the last, because one of her principles was keeping her body natural, and she had never – never – submitted to the knife. Apart from getting her bust fixed, of course, but that didn’t count. And she was a woman of principle. That was why she had never been unfaithful to herr Syvertsen, in spite of all the offers she got, particularly in gyms like this. It was often young men, who took her for a cougar on the prowl. But Wenche had always preferred men who were more mature. Not as old as the wrinkled, battered old man on the cycle beside her, but like her neighbour. Harry Hole. Men who were inferior to her intellectually and in terms of maturity were actually a turn-off, she needed men who could stimulate her, entertain her, spiritually as well as in material terms. It really was that simple, there was no point pretending otherwise. And herr Syvertsen had done a good job of the last of these. But Harry was unavailable, apparently. And then there was that business of her principles, too. Besides, herr Syvertsen had become unreasonably jealous and had threatened to interfere with her privileges and lifestyle on the few occasions he had found out that she had been unfaithful. Which of course was before she had established the principle of not being unfaithful.

‘Why isn’t a beautiful woman like you married?’

The words sounded like they were being ground out, and Wenche turned to face the old man on the bicycle. He smiled at her. His face was thin, with wrinkles like deep valleys, big lips and long, thick, greasy hair. He was thin, but broad-shouldered. A bit like Mick Jagger. Apart from his red bandanna and truck driver’s moustache.

Wenche smiled and raised her ringless right hand. ‘Married. But I take it off when I exercise.’

‘Shame,’ the old man smiled. ‘Because I’m not married, and I could have offered a b-betrothal on the spot.’

He raised his own right hand. Wenche started. She thought for a moment that she was seeing things. Was that really a big hole, right through his hand?

‘Oleg Fauke is here,’ the voice said over the intercom.

‘Send him in,’ John D. Steffens said, pushing his chair away from his desk and looking out of the window at the laboratory building, the department of transfusion medicine. He had already seen young Fauke get out of the little Japanese car that was still in the car park with its engine running. Another young man was sitting behind the wheel, presumably with the heater at full blast. It was a sparklingly cold, sunny day. For many people it was a paradox that a cloudless sky in July promised heat but cold in January. Because many people couldn’t be bothered to understand the basics of physics, meteorology and the nature of the world. It no longer irritated Steffens that people thought that cold was a thing, and didn’t understand that it was merely the absence of heat. Cold was the natural, dominant state. Heat the exception. The way murder and cruelty were natural, logical, and mercy an anomaly, a result of the human herd’s intricate way of promoting the survival of the species. Because mercy stopped there, within the species, and it was humanity’s boundless cruelty towards other species that allowed it to survive. For instance, the growth of human beings as a species meant that meat wasn’t just hunted, but produced. The very words, meat production, the very idea! People kept animals in cages, stripping them of all their happiness and pleasure in life, inseminating them so that they involuntarily produced milk and tender young flesh, took their offspring away as soon as they were born, while the mothers bellowed with pain, and then made them pregnant again as soon as possible. People got furious if certain species were eaten, dogs, whales, dolphins, cats. But mercy, for unfathomable reasons, stopped there. The far more intelligent pigs could and would be humiliated and eaten, and we had been doing it for so long human beings no longer even thought about the calculated cruelty that was part and parcel of modern food production. Brainwashing!

Steffens stared at the closed door that would soon be opening. Wondered if they would ever understand. That morality – which some people imagine is God-given and eternal – is as malleable and learned as our ideas of beauty, our enemies, our fashion trends. It seemed unlikely. And as a result, it was hardly surprising that humanity was unable to understand and accept radical research projects which went against their own engrained thoughts. Unable to understand that it was as logical and necessary as it was cruel.

The door opened.

‘Good morning, Oleg. Come in, have a seat.’

‘Thanks.’ The young man sat down. ‘Before you take the sample, can I ask you for a favour?’

‘A favour?’ Steffens pulled on a pair of white rubber gloves. ‘You know that my research could benefit you, your mother and the whole of your future family?’

‘And I know that research is more important to you than a slightly longer life is to me.’

Steffens smiled. ‘Wise words for such a young man.’

‘I’m asking on my father’s behalf if you could spare two hours to attend and give a professional opinion during a friend’s disputation. Harry would very much appreciate it.’

‘A disputation? By all means, it would be an honour.’

‘The only problem is …’ Oleg said, then cleared his throat, ‘that it starts now, or soon, and we’d need to go as soon as you’ve got your blood sample.’

‘Now?’ Steffens looked down at the diary that lay open in front of him. ‘I’m afraid I have a meeting which—’

‘He’d really appreciate it,’ Oleg said.

Steffens looked at the young man as he rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘You mean … your blood in exchange for my time?’

‘Something like that,’ Oleg said.

Steffens leaned back in his office chair and clasped his hands together in front of his mouth. ‘Just tell me one thing, Oleg. What is it that leads you to have such a close relationship to Harry Hole? After all, he isn’t your biological father.’

‘You tell me,’ Oleg said.

‘Answer that and give me your blood, and I’ll go with you to this disputation.’

Oleg thought. ‘I almost said that it’s because he’s honest. That in spite of the fact that he isn’t the best father in the world or anything like that, I can trust what he says. But I don’t think that’s the most important thing.’

‘So what is the most important thing?’

‘That we hate the same groups.’

‘That you what?’

‘Music. We don’t like the same music, but we hate the same stuff.’ Oleg pulled his padded jacket off and rolled up his sleeve. ‘Ready?’

41

FRIDAY AFTERNOON

RAKEL LOOKED UP at harry as they walked arm in arm across Universitetsplassen towards the Domus Academica, one of three buildings belonging to the University of Oslo in the centre of the city. She had persuaded him to wear the smart shoes she had bought him in London, even though he had said they were too slippery for this sort of weather.

‘You ought to wear a suit more often,’ she said.

‘And the council should grit more often,’ Harry said, pretending to slip again.

She laughed and held him tight. Felt the hard yellow file he had folded and stuffed into his inside pocket. ‘Isn’t that Bjørn Holm’s car, and a very illegal piece of parking?’

They passed the black Volvo Amazon, which was parked right in front of the steps.

‘Police authorisation behind the windscreen,’ Harry said. ‘Clear case of misuse.’

‘It’s because of Katrine,’ Rakel smiled. ‘He’s just worried she’ll fall.’

There was a buzz of voices in the vestibule outside the Gamle festsal auditorium. Rakel looked for familiar faces. It was mostly professional colleagues and family. But there was someone she recognised at the other end of the room, Truls Berntsen. He evidently hadn’t understood that a suit was the correct attire for a disputation. Rakel forged a path for herself and Harry over to Katrine and Bjørn.

‘Congratulations, you two!’ Rakel said, and hugged them both.

‘Thanks!’ Katrine beamed, stroking her bulging stomach.

‘When …?’

‘In June.’

‘June,’ Rakel repeated, and saw Katrine’s smile twitch.

Rakel leaned forward, put a hand on Katrine’s arm and whispered: ‘Don’t think about it, it’ll be fine.’

Rakel saw Katrine look at her as if in shock.

‘Epidural,’ Rakel said. ‘They’re brilliant things. They get rid of any pain just like that!’

Katrine blinked twice. Then she laughed. ‘Do you know, I’ve never been to a disputation before. I had no idea it was so formal until I saw Bjørn putting on his finest bootlace tie. What actually happens?’

‘Oh, it’s fairly straightforward really,’ Rakel said. ‘We go into the auditorium first, stand as the chair of the defence, the candidate and the two opponents come in. Smith is probably pretty tense even if he’s already had to give an examination lecture to them either yesterday or this morning. He’s probably most worried that Ståle Aune’s going to be awkward, but there can’t be much chance of that.’

‘No?’ Bjørn Holm said. ‘But Aune’s said he doesn’t believe in vampirism.’

‘Ståle believes in serious scholarship,’ Rakel said. ‘The opponents are supposed to be critical, and get to the heart of the subject of the dissertation, but they have to stay within the bounds of the subject and the premise of the occasion, not ride their own hobbyhorses.’

‘Wow, you’ve done your homework!’ Katrine said as Rakel took a deep breath.

Rakel nodded and went on. ‘The opponents have three-quarters of an hour each, and between them brief questions from the hall are permitted, known as ex auditorio, but that doesn’t usually happen. After that there’s the disputation dinner, paid for by the candidate, but we’re not invited to that. Which Harry thinks is a great shame.’

Katrine turned towards Harry. ‘Is that true?’

Harry shrugged. ‘Who doesn’t like a bit of meat and gravy and dozing off to half-hour speeches made by the relatives of someone you really don’t know that well?’

People started to move around them, and a few cameras flashed.

‘The next Justice Minister,’ Katrine said.

It was as if the waters parted before Mikael and Ulla Bellman as they walked in, arm in arm. They were smiling, but Rakel didn’t think that Ulla was really smiling. Perhaps she wasn’t the smiling type. Or perhaps Ulla Bellman had been that beautiful, bashful girl who had learned that an exaggerated smile only led to more unwanted attention, and that a chilly exterior made life easier. If that was the case, Rakel couldn’t help wondering what she was going to make of life as the wife of a cabinet minister.

Mikael Bellman stopped next to them when a question was yelled out and a microphone stuck in front of his face.

‘Oh, I’m just here to celebrate one of the men who contributed to us solving the vampirist case,’ he said in English. ‘Dr Smith is the one you should be talking to today, not me.’ But Bellman did as he was asked and posed happily as the photographers called out their requests.

‘International press,’ Bjørn said.

‘Vampirism is hot,’ Katrine said, looking at the crowd. ‘All the crime reporters are here.’

‘Except Mona Daa,’ Harry said as he looked around.

‘And everyone from the boiler room,’ Katrine said, ‘except Anders Wyller. Do you know where he is?’

The others shook their heads.

‘He called me this morning,’ Katrine said. ‘Asked if he could have a chat with me on his own.’

‘What about?’ Bjørn wondered.

‘God knows. Ah, there he is!’

Anders Wyller had appeared at the far side of the crowd. He looked breathless and red-faced as he took his scarf off. At that moment the doors to the auditorium opened.

‘Right, we need to get seats,’ Katrine said, and hurried towards the door. ‘Make way, pregnant woman coming through!’

‘She’s so pretty,’ Rakel whispered, sticking her hand under Harry’s arm and leaning against his shoulder. ‘I’ve always wondered if you and she ever had a thing.’

‘A thing?’

‘Just a little one. When we weren’t together, for instance.’

‘’Fraid not,’ Harry said gloomily.

‘Afraid not? Meaning?’

‘Meaning sometimes I regret not making more use of our little gaps.’

‘I’m not joking, Harry.’

‘Nor am I.’

Hallstein Smith opened the door to the imposing room a crack and peered in. Looked at the chandelier hanging above the crowd filling all the seats in the auditorium. There were even people standing in the gallery. Once this room had housed Norway’s national assembly, and now he – little Hallstein – was going to stand at the podium and defend his research, and be awarded the title of doctor! He looked at May, who was sitting in the front row, nervous, but as proud as a mother hen. He looked at his foreign colleagues who had come even though he had warned them that the disputation would be in Norwegian; he looked at the journalists, at Bellman, who was sitting with his wife in the front row, right in the middle. At Harry, Bjørn and Katrine, his new friends in the police, who had played such a part in his dissertation about vampirism, in which the case of Valentin Gjertsen had obviously become one of the central planks. And even if the image of Valentin had changed dramatically in light of the events of recent days, they had only strengthened his conclusions about the vampiristic personality. Because of course Hallstein had pointed out that vampirists primarily act on instinct, and are driven by their desires and impulses – so the revelation that Lenny Hell had been the mastermind behind the well-planned murders had come in the nick of time.

‘Let’s get started,’ the chairman said, picking a speck of dust from his academic gown.

Hallstein took a deep breath and walked in. The audience rose to its feet.

Smith and the two opponents sat down, while the chairman explained how the disputation was going to proceed. Then he gave the floor to Hallstein.

The first opponent, Ståle Aune, leaned forward and whispered good luck.

Hallstein walked up to the podium, and looked out across the auditorium. Felt silence descend. The examination lecture that morning had gone well. Well? It had been fantastic! He couldn’t help noting that the adjudication committee had seemed happy, and even Ståle Aune had nodded appreciatively at his best points.

Now he was going to give a shorter version of the lecture, twenty minutes maximum. He began to speak, and soon got the same feeling he had had that morning, and departed from the script he had in front of him. His thoughts became words instantly, and it was as if he could see himself from outside, could see the audience, could see the expressions on their faces, hanging on his every word, their senses entirely focused on him, Hallstein Smith, professor of vampirism. Obviously there was no such thing yet, but he was going to change that, and today marked the start. He was approaching his conclusion. ‘During my brief time in the independent investigative group led by Harry Hole, I managed to learn many things. One of them was that the central question in any murder case is “Why?”. But that that doesn’t help if you can’t also answer “How?”.’ Hallstein went over to the table next to the podium, on which lay three objects covered by a felt cloth. He took hold of one end of the cloth and waited. A bit of theatre was forgivable.

‘This is how,’ he declared, and pulled the cloth away.

A gasp ran through the audience as they saw the large revolver, the grotesque handcuffs, and the black iron teeth.

He pointed at the revolver. ‘One tool to threaten and compel.’

At the handcuffs. ‘One to control, incapacitate, imprison.’

The iron teeth. ‘And one to get to the source, to gain access to the blood, to conduct the ritual.’

He looked up. ‘Thank you to Detective Anders Wyller for letting me borrow these objects so that I could illustrate my point. Because this is more than three “hows”. It is also a “why”. But how is it a “why”?’

Scattered, knowing laughter.

‘Because all the tools are old. Unnecessarily old, one might say. The vampirist has gone to the trouble of obtaining copies of artefacts from specific time periods. And that underlines what I say in my dissertation about the importance of ritual, and the fact that drinking blood can be traced back to a time when there were gods who needed to be worshipped and placated, and the currency for that was blood.’

He pointed at the revolver. ‘This marks a link to America, two hundred years ago, when there were Native American tribes that drank their enemies’ blood in the belief that they would absorb their power.’ He pointed at the handcuffs. ‘This is a link to the Middle Ages, when witches and sorcerers had to be caught, exorcised and ritually burned.’ He pointed at the teeth. ‘And these are a link to the ancient world, when sacrifices and human bloodletting were a common way of appeasing the gods. Just as I with my answers today …’ He gestured towards the chair and two opponents. ‘… hope to appease these gods.’

The laughter was more relaxed this time.

‘Thank you.’

The applause was, as far as Hallstein Smith could judge, thunderous.

Ståle Aune stood up, adjusted his spotted bow tie, stuck his stomach out and marched up to the podium.

‘Dear candidate, you have based your doctoral dissertation on case studies, and what I am wondering is how you were able to draw the conclusion you did given that your main example – Valentin Gjertsen – didn’t support your conclusions. That is, until Lenny Hell’s role was uncovered.’

Hallstein Smith cleared his throat. ‘Within psychology, there is more scope for interpretation than in most other sciences, and naturally it was tempting to interpret Valentin Gjertsen’s behaviour within the frame of the typical vampirist I had already described. But, as a researcher, I have to be honest. Until a few days ago, Valentin Gjertsen didn’t entirely fit my theory. And even if it is the case that the map and the terrain are never identical in psychology, I have to admit that that was frustrating. It is hard to take any pleasure from the tragedy of Lenny Hell. But if nothing else, his case reinforces the theory of this dissertation, and therefore provides an even clearer illustration and more precise understanding of the vampirist. Hopefully this can help prevent future tragedies by enabling the vampirist to be caught earlier.’ Hallstein cleared his throat. ‘I must thank the adjudication committee, who had already devoted so much time to studying my original dissertation, for permitting me to incorporate the changes made possible by the discovery of Hell’s role in the case, and which therefore made everything fall into place …’

When the chair discreetly signalled to the first opponent that his time was up, Hallstein felt that only five minutes had passed, not forty-five. It had gone like a dream!

And when the chair went up to the podium to say that there would now be an interval in which questions could be submitted ex auditorio, Hallstein could hardly wait to show them this fantastic piece of work which, in all its grimness, was still about the greatest and most beautiful thing of all: the human mind.

Hallstein used the break to mingle in the vestibule, to talk to people who weren’t invited to the dinner. He saw Harry Hole standing with a dark-haired woman, and made his way over to them.

‘Harry!’ he said, shaking the policeman’s hand, which was as hard and cold as marble. ‘This must be Rakel.’

‘It is,’ Harry said.

Hallstein shook her hand as he saw Harry look at his watch, then over at the door.

‘Are we expecting someone?’

‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘And here he is at last.’

Hallstein saw two people coming through the door at the other end of the room. A tall, dark young man, and a man in his fifties with fair hair and thin, rectangular, frameless glasses. It struck him that the young man looked like Rakel, but there was also something familiar about the other man.

‘Where have I seen that man in the glasses?’ Hallstein wondered.

‘I don’t know. He’s a haematologist, John D. Steffens.’

‘And what’s he doing here?’

Hallstein saw Harry take a deep breath. ‘He’s here to put an end to this story. He just doesn’t know it yet.’

At that moment the chair rang a bell and announced in a booming voice that it was time to go back into the auditorium.

John D. Steffens was making his way between two rows of seats with Oleg Fauke behind him. Steffens glanced around the room, trying to locate Harry Hole. And felt his heart stop when he caught sight of the fair-haired young man in the back row. At the same moment Anders caught sight of him, and Steffens saw the fear in the young man’s face. Steffens turned to Oleg to say he had forgotten a meeting and had to leave.

‘I know,’ Oleg said, and showed no sign of moving out of the way. Steffens noted that the boy was almost as tall as his pseudo-father, Hole. ‘But we’re going to let this run its course now, Steffens.’

The boy gently put his hand on Steffens’s shoulder, but it still felt to the senior consultant that he was being pushed onto the chair behind him. Steffens sat and felt his pulse slow down. Dignity. Yes, dignity. Oleg Fauke knew. Which meant that Harry knew. And hadn’t given him any chance to escape. And it was obvious from Anders’s reaction that he hadn’t known about this either. They had been fooled. Fooled into being here together. What now?

Katrine Bratt sat down between Harry and Bjørn just as the chair began to speak up at the podium.

‘The candidate has received a question ex auditorio. Harry Hole, please go ahead.’

Katrine looked at Harry in surprise as he stood up. ‘Thank you.’

She could see the looks of surprise on other people’s faces too, some of them with a smile on their lips, as if they were expecting a joke. Even Hallstein Smith seemed amused as he took over at the podium.

‘Congratulations,’ Harry said. ‘You’re very close to achieving your goal, and I must also thank you for your contribution to solving the vampirist case.’

‘I should be thanking you,’ Smith said with a small bow.

‘Yes, maybe,’ Harry said. ‘Because of course we found the person who was pulling the strings and directing Valentin. And, as Aune pointed out, your entire dissertation is based upon that. So you were lucky there.’

‘I was.’

‘But there are a couple of other things I think we’d all like answers to.’

‘I’ll do my best, Harry.’

‘I remember when I saw the recording of Valentin entering your barn. He knew exactly where he was going, but he didn’t know about the scales inside the door. He marched in, unconcerned, convinced he had firm ground under his feet. And he almost lost his balance. Why does that happen?’

‘We take some things for granted,’ Smith said. ‘In psychology we call it rationalising, which basically means that we simplify things. Without rationalisation, the world would be unmanageable, our brains would become overloaded by all the uncertainties we have to deal with.’

‘That would also explain why we go down a flight of cellar steps without concern, without thinking that we might hit our heads on a water pipe.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But after we’ve done it once, we remember – or at least most of us do – the next time. That’s why Katrine Bratt takes care when she walks across those scales in your barn on only her second visit. So it’s no mystery that we found blood and skin on that water pipe in Hell’s cellar belonging to you and me, but not from Lenny Hell. He must have learned to duck as long ago as … well, when he was a child. Otherwise we would have found Hell’s DNA, because DNA can often be traced years after it ends up on something like that water pipe.’

‘I’m sure that’s correct, Harry.’

‘I’ll come back to that, but let me first deal with something that is a mystery.’

Katrine sat up in her chair. She didn’t yet know what was going on, but she knew Harry, could feel the vibration of the inaudible, low-frequency growl that lay beneath his voice.

‘When Valentin Gjertsen goes into your barn at midnight, he weighs 74.7 kilos,’ Harry said. ‘But when he leaves, he weighs 73.2 kilos, according to the security camera footage. Exactly one and a half kilos lighter.’ Harry gestured with his hand. ‘The obvious explanation is, of course, that the weight difference is the result of the blood he lost in your office.’

Katrine heard the chairman’s discreet but impatient cough.

‘But then I realised something,’ Harry said. ‘We’d forgotten the revolver! The one Valentin had brought with him, and which was still in the office when he left. A Ruger Redhawk weighs around 1.2 kilos. So, for the sums to add up, Valentin had only lost 0.3 kilos of blood …’

‘Hole,’ the chairman said. ‘If there is a question to the candidate here …’

‘First a question to an expert in blood,’ Harry said, and turned to face the audience. ‘Senior Consultant John Steffens, you’re a haematologist, and you happened to be on duty when Penelope Rasch was taken to hospital …’

John Steffens felt sweat break out on his forehead when all eyes turned to look at him. Just as they had looked at him when he had been on the witness stand explaining how his wife had died. How she had been stabbed, how she had literally bled to death in his arms. All eyes, then as now. Anders’s eyes, then as now.

He swallowed.

‘Yes, I was.’

‘You demonstrated then that you have a good eye for estimating blood quantities. Based on a photograph from the crime scene, you estimated the amount of blood she had lost at one and a half litres.’

‘Yes.’

Harry took a photograph out of his jacket pocket and held it up. ‘And based on this picture from Hallstein Smith’s office, which was shown to you by one of the paramedics, you estimated the amount of blood here also to be one and a half litres. In other words, one and a half kilos. Is that correct?’

Steffens swallowed. Knew that Anders was staring at him from behind. ‘That’s correct. Give or take a decilitre or two.’

‘Just to be clear, is it possible for someone to get to their feet and escape even if they’ve lost a litre and a half of blood?’

‘It differs from individual to individual, but yes, if the person has the physique and determination.’

‘Which brings me to my very simple question,’ Harry said.

Steffens felt a bead of sweat trickle down his forehead.

Harry turned back to the podium.

‘How come, Smith?’

Katrine gasped. The silence that followed felt like a physical weight in the room.

‘I’ll have to pass on that, Harry, I don’t know,’ Smith said. ‘I hope that doesn’t mean that my doctorate is at risk, but in my defence I would like to point out that this question is outside the frame of my dissertation.’ He smiled, but garnered no laughter this time. ‘But it’s within the parameters of the police investigation, so perhaps you ought to answer that yourself, Harry?’

‘Very well,’ Harry said, and took a deep breath.

No, Katrine thought, and held her breath.

‘Valentin Gjertsen didn’t have a revolver on him when he arrived. It was already in your office.’

‘What?’ Smith’s laughter sounded like the cry of a lone bird in the auditorium. ‘How on earth could it have got there?’

‘You took it there,’ Harry said.

‘Me? I’ve got nothing to do with that revolver.’

‘It was your revolver, Smith.’

‘Mine? I’ve never owned a revolver in my life, you only have to check the firearms register.’

‘In which this revolver is registered to a sailor from Farsund. Whom you treated. For schizophrenia.’

‘A sailor? What are you talking about, Harry? You said yourself that Valentin threatened you with the revolver in the bar, when he killed Mehmet Kalak.’

‘You got it back after that.’

A wave of anxiety spread around the auditorium, and there was a sound of low muttering and chairs being moved.

The chairman stood up, and looked like a cockerel spreading his feathers as he raised his gowned arms to appeal for calm. ‘Sorry, herr Hole, but this is a disputation. If you have information for the police, might I suggest that you address it to the correct authorities and not bring it into the world of academe.’

‘Herr Chairman, opponents,’ Harry said, ‘is it not of fundamental importance to the examination of this doctoral thesis if it is based upon a misinterpreted case study? Isn’t that the sort of thing that’s supposed to be illuminated in a disputation?’

‘Herr Hole—’ the chairman began, with thunder in his voice.

‘—is right,’ Ståle Aune said from the front row. ‘My dear chairman, as a member of the adjudication committee, I am very interested to hear what herr Hole wishes to say to the candidate.’

The chairman looked at Aune. Then at Harry. And finally at Smith, before sitting down again.

‘Well, then,’ Harry said. ‘I would like to ask the candidate if he held Lenny Hell hostage in his own house, and if it was him rather than Hell who was directing Valentin Gjertsen?’

An almost inaudible gasp ran round the auditorium, followed by a silence so complete that it seemed to suck all the air out of the room.

Smith shook his head in disbelief. ‘This is a joke, isn’t it, Harry? This is something you’ve cooked up in the boiler room to liven up the disputation, and now—’

‘I suggest you answer, Hallstein.’

Perhaps it was the use of his first name that made Smith realise that Harry was serious. Katrine at least thought she saw something sink in as he stood there at the podium.

‘Harry,’ he said quietly, ‘I had never been in Hell’s house before Sunday, when you took me there.’

‘Yes, you had,’ Harry said. ‘You were very careful to get rid of the evidence from anywhere you might have left fingerprints and DNA. But there was one place you forgot. The water pipe.’

‘The water pipe? We all left our DNA on that damn water pipe on Sunday, Harry!’

‘Not you.’

‘Yes, me too! Ask Bjørn Holm, he’s sitting right there!’

‘What Bjørn Holm can confirm is that your DNA was found on the water pipe, not that it got there on Sunday. Because on Sunday you came down to the cellar when I was already there. Silently, I didn’t hear you come, if you remember? Silently, because you didn’t hit your head on the water pipe. You ducked. Because your brain remembered.’

‘This is laughable, Harry. I hit that water pipe on Sunday, you just didn’t hear it.’

‘Perhaps because you were wearing this, which cushioned the blow …’ Harry pulled a black woollen hat from his pocket and put it on his head. On the front of the hat was a skull, and Katrine read the name St. Pauli. ‘But how can someone leave DNA, in the form of skin or blood or hair, when they’re wearing this pulled down over their forehead?’

Hallstein blinked hard.

‘The candidate isn’t answering,’ Harry said. ‘So let me answer for him. Hallstein Smith walked into that water pipe the first time he was there, which was a long time ago, before the vampirist set to work.’

In the silence that followed, Hallstein Smith’s low chuckle was the only sound.

‘Before I say anything,’ Smith said, ‘I think we should give former detective Harry Hole a generous round of applause for this fantastic story.’

Smith started to clap his hands, and a few others joined in before the applause died out.

‘But for this to be more than just a story, it requires the same thing as a doctoral thesis,’ Smith said. ‘Evidence! And you have none, Harry. Your entire deduction is based upon two highly dubious assumptions. That some very old scales in a barn shows exactly the right weight of a person who stands on it for barely a second, scales that I can tell you have a tendency to stick. And that because I was wearing a woollen hat I couldn’t have left DNA on the water pipe on Sunday. A hat that I can tell you I took off when I was going down those steps before I hit my head on the water pipe, and put on again seeing as it was colder down in the cellar. The fact that I have no scar on my forehead now is because I heal quickly. My wife can also confirm that I had a mark on my forehead when I returned home.’

Katrine saw the woman in the home-made, drab-coloured dress look at her husband with dark eyes in a blank face, as if she were suffering shock after a grenade explosion.

‘Isn’t that so, May?’

The woman’s mouth opened and closed. Then she nodded slowly.

‘You see, Harry?’ Smith tilted his head and looked at Harry with an expression of sad sympathy. ‘You see how easy it is to blow holes in your theory?’

‘Well,’ Harry said. ‘I respect your wife’s loyalty, but I’m afraid the DNA evidence is indisputable. The analysis from the Forensic Medical Institute not only proves that the organic matter matches your DNA profile, but also that it’s more than two months old, so couldn’t possibly have ended up there on Sunday.’

Katrine started in her chair and looked at Bjørn. He shook his head almost imperceptibly.

‘As a result, Smith, it isn’t a theory that you were in Hell’s cellar sometime last autumn. It is a fact. Just as it’s a fact that you had the Ruger revolver in your possession, and that it was in your office when you shot the unarmed Valentin Gjertsen. Besides, we also have stylometrical analysis.’

Katrine looked at the battered yellow folder Harry had pulled out of the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘A computer program that compares word choices, sentence structure, textual style and punctuation to identify the author. It was stylometry that gave fresh life to the debate about which of his plays Shakespeare actually wrote. The success rate for identifying the correct author is between eighty and ninety per cent. In other words, not high enough for it to count as evidence. But the success rate for ruling out a particular author, such as Shakespeare, is 99.9 per cent. Our IT expert, Tord Gren, used the program to compare the emails that were sent to Valentin with thousands of Lenny Hell’s earlier emails to other people. The conclusion is …’ Harry passed the file to Katrine. ‘… that Lenny Hell didn’t write the instructions which Valentin Gjertsen received by email.’

Smith looked at Harry. His fringe had fallen forward over his sweating brow.

‘We’ll discuss this further in a police interview,’ Harry said. ‘But this is a disputation. And you still have the chance to give the adjudication committee an explanation that will stop them refusing to award your doctorate. Isn’t that right, Aune?’

Ståle Aune cleared his throat. ‘That’s right. Ideally, science is blind to the morality of the age, and this wouldn’t be the first doctorate to have been achieved by morally questionable or even directly illegal methods. What we on the adjudication committee need to know before we can approve the dissertation is whether or not there was anyone actually steering Valentin. If that isn’t the case, I can’t see how this thesis can be accepted by the adjudication committee.’

‘Thank you,’ Harry said. ‘So what do you say, Smith? Would you like to explain this to the adjudication committee here and now, before we arrest you?’

Hallstein Smith looked at Harry. His panting was the only sound that could be heard, as if he were the only person in the auditorium who was still breathing. A lone flashbulb went off.

A livid disputation chairman leaned towards Ståle and whispered in a hiss:

‘Holy Jeremiah, Aune, what’s going on here?’

‘Do you know what a monkey trap is?’ Ståle Aune asked, then settled back in his chair and folded his arms.

Hallstein Smith’s head jerked, as if he’d been given an electric shock. He laughed as he raised his arm and pointed at the ceiling. ‘What have I got to lose, Harry?’

Harry didn’t answer.

‘Yes, Valentin was steered. By me. Of course I wrote those emails. But the most important thing isn’t who was behind them, the scientific point is that Valentin was a genuine vampirist, as my research demonstrates, and nothing you’ve said invalidates my results. And if I had to adjust the circumstances to recreate laboratory conditions, that’s no more than researchers have always done. Is it?’ He looked around the audience. ‘But when it comes down to it, I’m not choosing what he does, he is. And six human lives isn’t an unreasonable price to pay for what this –’ Smith tapped his printed and bound thesis with his forefinger – ‘can save humanity from in future, in terms of murder and suffering. The signs and profiles are all laid out here. Valentin Gjertsen was the one who drank their blood, who killed them, not me. I just made it easier for him. When you just for once have the good fortune to encounter a real vampirist, you have a duty to make the most of it, you can’t let short-sighted moralistic attitudes stop you. You have to look at the bigger picture, consider what’s best for humanity. Just ask Oppenheimer, ask Mao, ask the thousands of lab rats with cancer.’

‘So you killed Lenny Hell and shot Marte Ruud for our sakes?’ Harry said.

‘Yes, yes! Sacrifices on the altar of research!’

‘The way you’re sacrificing yourself and your own humanity? To benefit humanity?’

‘Exactly, yes!’

‘So they didn’t die in order that you, Hallstein Smith, could be vindicated? So that the monkey could sit on the throne, get his name in the history books? Because that’s what’s been driving you all along, isn’t it?’

‘I have shown you what a vampirist is, and what one is capable of! Don’t I deserve to be thanked for that?’

‘Well,’ Harry said, ‘first and foremost, you’ve demonstrated what a humiliated man is capable of.’

Hallstein Smith’s head jerked again. His mouth opened and closed. But nothing more came out.

‘We’ve heard enough.’ The chair stood up. ‘This disputation is at an end. And can I ask any police officers present to arrest—?’

Hallstein Smith moved surprisingly quickly. With two rapid steps he reached the table and snatched up the revolver, then took a long stride towards the audience and aimed the revolver at the forehead of the nearest person.

‘Get up!’ he snarled. ‘And the rest of you remain seated!’

Katrine saw a blonde woman stand up. Smith turned her round so that she was standing in front of him like a shield. It was Ulla Bellman. Her mouth was open and she was looking in mute despair at a man in the front row. Katrine could only see the back of Mikael Bellman’s head and had no idea what his face was expressing, only that he was sitting there as if frozen to the spot. There was a whimpering sound. It came from May Smith. She was leaning sideways slightly in her chair.

‘Let go of her.’

Katrine turned towards the gruff voice. It was Truls Berntsen. He had stood up from his chair in the back row and was walking down the steps.

‘Stop, Berntsen,’ Smith screamed. ‘Or I’ll shoot her and then you!’

But Truls Berntsen didn’t stop. In profile his jaw looked even heavier than usual, but his new muscles were also visible under his thick sweater. He reached the front, turned and walked along the front row, straight towards Smith and Ulla Bellman.

‘One step closer—’

‘Shoot me first, Smith, otherwise you won’t have time.’

‘As you wish.’

Berntsen snorted. ‘You fucking civilian, you wouldn’t d—’

Katrine felt sudden pressure against her ears, as if she were sitting in a plane that was rapidly losing altitude. It took a moment for her to realise that it was the blast from the heavy revolver.

Truls Berntsen had stopped and was standing there, swaying. His mouth was open, his eyes bulging. Katrine saw the hole in his sweater, waited for the blood. And then it came. It was as if Truls was making one last effort to stay upright as he looked directly at Ulla Bellman. Then he fell backwards.

Somewhere in the room a woman screamed.

‘No one move,’ Smith shouted, backing towards the exit with Ulla Bellman in front of him. ‘If I see a single one of you stand up, I’ll shoot her.’

Of course it was a bluff. And of course no one was going to take the risk that it wasn’t.

‘The keys to the Amazon,’ Harry whispered. He was still standing. He held his hand out towards Bjørn, who took a moment to react before putting the car keys in his hand.

‘Hallstein!’ Harry called, and started to move along the row. ‘Your car is parked in the university’s visitors’ car park, and right now it’s being examined by Forensics. I’ve got the keys to a car that’s parked right in front of this building, and I’m a better hostage for you.’

‘Because?’ Smith replied, still backing away.

‘Because I’ll stay calm, and because you have a conscience.’

Smith stopped. Looked thoughtfully at Harry for a few seconds.

‘Go over there and put the handcuffs on,’ he said, nodding towards the table.

Harry emerged from the row of seats, went past Truls, who was lying motionless on the floor, and stopped at the table with his back to Smith and the rest of the room.

‘So that I can see!’ Smith yelled.

Harry turned towards him and held his hands up so that he could see that they were held by the replica handcuffs with the chain between them.

‘Come here!’

Harry walked towards him.

‘One minute!’

Katrine saw Smith use his free hand to grab Harry, who was taller, by his shoulder, then turn him round and steer him out through the door, which he left ajar.

Ulla Bellman looked at the half-open door before she turned to her husband. Katrine saw Bellman beckon her to him. And Ulla started to walk towards him. With short, unsteady steps, as if she was walking on thin ice. But when she reached Truls Berntsen she sank to her knees. She rested her head against his bloody sweater. And in the silence of the auditorium the single painful sob that Ulla emitted sounded louder than the blast of the revolver.

Harry felt the barrel of the revolver against his back as he walked ahead of Smith. Damn, damn! He had been planning this in detail since yesterday, thinking through different scenarios, but he hadn’t seen this coming.

Harry shoved the door open, and the cold March air hit him in the face. Universitetsplassen was deserted, bathing in winter sunshine in front of them. The black paint of Bjørn’s Volvo Amazon glinted in the light.

‘Walk!’

Harry went down the steps out onto the open ground. With his second step his feet vanished from under him and he fell sideways without being able to brace his fall. Pain shot down his arm and back as his shoulder struck the icy ground.

‘Up!’ Smith hissed, grabbing the chain of the handcuffs and dragging him to his feet.

Harry used the momentum Smith had given him, aware that he was unlikely to get a better chance. He thrust his head forward as soon as he was standing, and headbutted Smith, who stumbled, took two steps back and fell down. Harry took a step closer to follow through, but Smith was lying on his back with both hands clutching the revolver, which was pointing straight at Harry.

‘Come on, Harry. I’m used to this, I ended up lying on the ground during every other break time at school. So come on!’

Harry stared down the barrel of the revolver. He had hit Smith’s nose, and a flash of white bone was visible through the broken skin. A trickle of blood ran down the side of one nostril.

‘I know what you’re thinking, Harry,’ Smith laughed. ‘He didn’t manage to kill Valentin from two and a half metres away. So come on, then! Or unlock the car.’

Harry’s brain did the necessary calculations. Then he turned round, slowly opened the driver’s door and heard Smith get to his feet. Harry got in and took his time inserting the key in the ignition.

‘I’ll drive,’ Smith said. ‘Move.’

Harry did as he said, moving slowly and clumsily across the gearstick to the passenger seat.

‘Then slip your feet over the handcuffs.’

Harry looked at him.

‘I don’t want the chain round my neck while I’m driving,’ Smith said, and raised the revolver. ‘It’s your bad luck if you’ve been skipping yoga classes. And I can see that you’re trying to delay us. You have five seconds, starting now. Four …’

Harry leaned back, as far as the rigid seat would let him, held his chained hands out in front of him and bent his knees.

‘Three, two …’

With difficulty Harry managed to tuck his smartly polished shoes through the chain of the handcuffs.

Smith got in, leaned across Harry. Pulled the old-fashioned seat belt across his chest and waist, fastened it, then tightened it with a hard tug so that Harry was literally strapped to the back of the seat. He fished Harry’s mobile from his jacket pocket. He fastened his own seat belt and turned the key. He revved the engine and wrestled with the gearstick. He figured the clutch out and reversed in a semi-circle. Rolled down the window and threw Harry’s phone out, followed by his own.

They pulled out onto Karl Johans gate, turning right so that the Palace filled their field of vision. Green at the lights. They turned left, roundabout, another green, past the Concert House. Aker Brygge. The traffic was flowing smoothly. Far too smoothly, Harry thought. The further he and Smith managed to get before Katrine alerted the patrol cars and police helicopter, the larger the area they would have to cover, and the more roadblocks they would need to set up.

Smith looked out across the fjord. ‘Oslo rarely looks more beautiful than it does on days like this, does it?’

His voice sounded nasal, and was accompanied by a faint whistle. His nose was probably broken.

‘A silent travelling companion,’ Smith said. ‘Well, you’ve done enough talking for today.’

Harry looked at the motorway ahead of them. Katrine couldn’t use their mobile phones to track them, but as long as Smith kept to the main roads there was still hope that they might be found quickly. From a helicopter, a car with a rally check across the roof and boot would be easy to distinguish from the others.

‘He came to see me, calling himself Alexander Dreyer, and wanting to talk about Pink Floyd and the voices he was hearing,’ Smith said, shaking his head. ‘But as you noticed, I’m good at reading people, and I soon realised that this was no ordinary person, but an extremely rare type of psychopath. So I used what he told me about his sexual preferences to check with colleagues who are experts in questions of morality and eventually figured out who I was dealing with. And what his dilemma was. That he was desperate to follow his hunting instinct, but that one single mistake, one faint suspicion, one silly little detail might give him away and put the police on to Alexander Dreyer. Are you following this, Harry?’ Smith cast a quick glance at him. ‘That if he was going to hunt again, it had to be in the knowledge that he was absolutely safe. He was perfect, a man with no options, it was just a matter of putting a leash on him and opening the cage and he’d eat – and drink – everything he was offered. But I couldn’t present myself as the person offering this, I needed a fictional puppet master, a lightning conductor to whom the trail would lead if Valentin was caught and confessed. Someone who would end up being uncovered at some point, regardless, to show that the terrain matched the map, who confirmed the theory in my dissertation of the impulsive, childishly chaotic vampirist. And Lenny Hell was the hermit who lived in an isolated house and never had any visitors. But one day he received a surprise visit from his psychologist. A psychologist with something on his head that made him look like a chickenhawk, and a big red revolver in his hand. Caw, caw, caw!’ Smith laughed loudly. ‘You should have seen Lenny’s face when he realised he was my slave! First I got him to take my patient records up to his office. Then we found a cage that the family had used to transport pigs, and we carried it down to the cellar. That must have been when I hit my head on that damn water pipe. We put a mattress inside for Lenny before I chained him up using handcuffs. And there he sat. I didn’t actually have any use for Lenny once I’d pumped him for details of all the women he’d stalked, got copies of the keys to their flats, and the password so I could email Valentin from Lenny’s computer. But I still had to wait before staging his suicide. If Valentin got caught or ended up dead and the police were led to Hell too soon, I had to make sure he had a watertight alibi for the first murder. Because of course I knew they’d check his alibi seeing as he’d been in contact with Elise Hermansen by phone. So I took Lenny to that local pizzeria at the time when I had instructed Valentin to kill Elise, and made sure people saw him. In fact I was so busy concentrating on holding that bolt gun against Lenny under the table that I didn’t notice there were nuts in the pizza bases until it was too late.’ More laughter. ‘As a result of that, Lenny had to spend a lot of time on his own in that cage. I had to laugh when you found Lenny Hell’s sperm on the mattress and concluded that he had abused Marte Ruud there.’

They passed Bygdøy. Snarøya. Harry was counting the seconds automatically. Ten minutes since they had driven away from Universitetsplassen. He looked up at the empty blue sky.

‘Marte Ruud was never assaulted. I shot her as soon as I brought her from the forest down into the cellar. Valentin had wrecked her, so it was an act of mercy to put her down.’ Smith turned towards him. ‘I hope you appreciate that, Harry. Harry? Do you think I talk too much, Harry?’

They were approaching Høvikodden. The Oslo Fjord appeared again to their left. Harry calculated. The police might have time to set up a roadblock at Asker, they’d be there in ten minutes.

‘Can you imagine what a gift it was to me when you asked me to join the investigation, Harry? I was so surprised that I said no at first. Before I realised that if I was sitting there getting hold of all the information, I could warn Valentin when you were getting so close that he could no longer carry on. My vampirist was going to outshine Kürten, Haigh and Chase and become the greatest of them all. But I still didn’t know that his hamam was under surveillance until we were sitting in this car on the way there. And I was starting to lose control of Valentin – he killed that bartender, and kidnapped Marte Ruud. Luckily I found out that Alexander Dreyer had been identified at that cashpoint machine in time to be able to warn him to get out of his flat. By that point Valentin had worked out that it was me, his former psychologist, who was pulling the strings, but so what? The identity of the person who was in the boat with him didn’t make any difference. But I knew that the net was closing in. That it was time for the grand finale I had been planning for a while. I had got him to leave the flat and book into the Plaza Hotel, which obviously wasn’t somewhere he could stay for long, but I was at least able to send him an envelope containing copies of the keys to the barn and office, and instructions telling him to hide until midnight, when everyone had gone to bed. Naturally I couldn’t rule out that he might have started to suspect something, but what alternative did he have now that his cover was blown? He simply had to gamble that I could be trusted. And you have to give me credit for the way that was set up, Harry. Calling you and Katrine so that I had witnesses on the phone, as well as the security camera footage. Yes, of course it could be regarded as a cold-blooded liquidation, fabricating the story of the heroic researcher who had upset the serial killer with his public statements, and then killed him in self-defence. Yes, I accept that it meant that a perfectly ordinary disputation was attended by international media, and that fourteen companies have bought the rights to publish my thesis. But in the end it comes down to research, scholarship. It’s progress, Harry. And it’s possible that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but it’s also the road to an enlightened, humane future.’

Oleg turned the ignition key.

‘A&E at Ullevål!’ the young blond detective shouted from the back seat, where he was sitting with Truls Berntsen’s head in his lap. They were both soaked with Berntsen’s blood. ‘Foot on the floor and sirens on!’

Oleg was about to release the clutch when the back door was yanked open.

‘No!’ the detective shouted furiously.

‘Move, Anders!’ It was Steffens. He pushed his way in, forcing the young detective to move to the other side.

‘Hold his legs up,’ Steffens barked, now holding Berntsen’s head. ‘So he gets—’

‘Blood to his heart and brain,’ Anders said.

Oleg released the clutch and they pulled away from the car park, out onto the road between a clanging tram and an angry taxi.

‘How’s it looking?’

‘See for yourself,’ Anders snarled. ‘Unconscious, weak pulse, but he’s breathing. As you can see, the bullet hit him in the right hemithorax.’

‘That’s not the problem,’ Steffens said. ‘The big problem’s at the back. Help me turn him over.’ Oleg glanced in the rear-view mirror. Saw them turn Truls Berntsen onto his side and tear his sweater and shirt off. He concentrated on the road again, used his horn to get past a lorry, accelerated as he crossed a junction on red.

‘Oh, fuck,’ Anders groaned.

‘Yes, it’s a big hole,’ Steffens said. ‘The bullet probably blew part of his rib out. He’s going to bleed out before we get to Ullevål unless …’

‘Unless …?’

Oleg heard Steffens take a deep breath. ‘Unless we do a better job than I did with your mother. Use the backs of your hands on either side of the wound – like that – and press them together. Just close the wound as well as you can, there’s no other way.’

‘My hands are just sliding.’

‘Tear off some of his shirt and use that to get more friction.’

Oleg heard Anders breathing heavily. He glanced in the rear-view mirror again. Saw that Steffens had put one finger on Berntsen’s chest while he tapped it with another finger.

‘I’m trying percussion, but I’m too cramped to be able to put my ear alongside,’ Steffens said. ‘Can you manage to …?’

Anders leaned forward without taking his hands away from the wound. Put his head to Berntsen’s chest. ‘Very muffled,’ he said. ‘No air. Do you think …?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid it’s a haemothorax,’ his father said. ‘The pleural cavity’s filling with blood, and his lungs will soon collapse. Oleg …’

‘I hear you,’ Oleg said, and put his foot down.

Katrine was standing in the middle of Universitetsplassen with her phone pressed to her ear, looking up at the empty, cloudless sky. It wasn’t yet visible, but she had requisitioned the police helicopter from Gardermoen with orders to scan the E6 motorway as it approached Oslo from the north.

‘No, there are no mobile phones we can track,’ she called over the noise of sirens approaching from different parts of the city and merging together. ‘Nothing registered by the toll stations. We’re setting up roadblocks on the southbound E6 and E18. I’ll let you know as soon as we’ve got anything.’

‘OK,’ Falkeid said at the other end. ‘We’re on standby.’

Katrine ended the call. Another one came through.

‘Asker Police, on the E18,’ the voice said. ‘We’ve stopped an articulated lorry here and are positioning it across the road just after the slip road to Asker, and are filtering the traffic off there and back onto the motorway after the roundabout. A black 1970s Amazon with rally stripes?’

‘Yes.’

‘So we’re talking the world’s worst choice of getaway vehicle?’

‘Let’s hope so. Keep me informed.’

Bjørn jogged over. ‘Oleg and that doctor are driving Berntsen to Ullevål,’ he panted. ‘Wyller’s gone with them.’

‘What are his chances, do you think?’

‘I only have experience of dead bodies.’

‘OK, did Berntsen look like one?’

Bjørn Holm shrugged. ‘He was still bleeding, and at least that means he isn’t completely empty yet.’

‘And Rakel?’

‘She’s sitting in the auditorium with Bellman’s wife, she’s really cut up about it. Bellman himself had to rush off to manage the operation from somewhere he could get an overview of the situation, he said.’

‘Overview?’ Katrine snorted. ‘The only place we’ve got any sort of overview is here!’

‘I know, but take it easy, darling, we don’t want the little one to get stressed, do we?’

‘Bloody hell, Bjørn.’ She squeezed her phone. ‘Why couldn’t you have told me what Harry was planning?’

‘Because I didn’t know.’

‘You didn’t know? You must have known something if he’s brought Forensics in to examine Smith’s car.’

‘He hasn’t, that was a bluff. Like that bit about the dating of the DNA found on the water pipe.’

‘What?’

‘The Forensic Medical Institute can’t determine how old DNA is. What Harry said about them having found out that Smith’s DNA was more than two months old, that was a complete lie.’

Katrine looked at Bjørn. Put her hand in her bag and pulled out the yellow document folder Harry had given her. She opened it. Three sheets of A4. All blank.

‘A bluff,’ Bjørn said. ‘For stylometry to be able to reveal anything with any degree of accuracy, the text has to be at least five thousand characters long. Those short emails that were sent to Valentin reveal nothing about the identity of their author.’

‘Harry had nothing,’ Katrine whispered.

‘Not a damn thing!’ Bjørn said. ‘He was just going for a confession.’

‘Damn him!’ Katrine pressed her phone to her forehead, not quite sure if she wanted to warm it up or cool it down. ‘So why didn’t he say anything? Christ, we could have had armed police outside.’

‘Because he couldn’t say anything.’

The answer came from Ståle Aune, who had walked over and stopped beside them.

‘Why not?’

‘Simple,’ Ståle said. ‘If he’d informed anyone in the police of what he was planning, and the police hadn’t already intervened, then what happened in the auditorium would de facto have been a police interview. A police interview way outside the rules, in which the person being questioned wasn’t informed of his rights, and in which the interviewer lied intentionally in order to mislead. And then none of what Smith said today could have been used in a trial. But as it is now …’

Katrine Bratt blinked. Then she nodded slowly. ‘As it is, Harry Hole, lecturer and private citizen took part in a disputation in which Smith spoke out of his own volition and in the presence of witnesses. Did you know about this, Ståle?’

Ståle Aune nodded. ‘Harry called me yesterday. He told me all the things that were pointing to Hallstein Smith. But he had no proof. So he explained his plan to use the disputation to set a monkey trap, with my help. And using Dr Steffens as an expert witness.’

‘And how did you reply?’

‘I said Hallstein Smith, “the Monkey”, had walked into that sort of trap once before, and was hardly likely to do so again.’

‘But?’

‘But Harry used my own words against me by referring to Aune’s Thesis.’

‘Human beings are notorious,’ Bjørn said. ‘They make the same mistakes over and over again.’

‘Precisely,’ Aune nodded. ‘And Smith had apparently told Harry in the lift at Police HQ that he’d rather have his doctorate than a long life.’

‘And he walked straight into the monkey trap, of course, the idiot,’ Katrine groaned.

‘He lived up to his nickname, yes.’

‘Not Smith, I’m talking about Harry.’

Aune nodded. ‘I’m going back to the auditorium – Bellman’s wife needs help.’

‘I’ll come with you to secure the crime scene,’ Bjørn said.

‘Crime scene?’ Katrine asked.

‘Berntsen.’

‘Oh, yes. Yes.’

When the men had left her she looked up at the sky. Where had that helicopter got to?

‘Damn you,’ she muttered. ‘Damn you, Harry Hole.’

‘Is it his fault?’

Katrine turned round.

Mona Daa was standing there. ‘I don’t want to disturb you,’ she said. ‘I’m not actually working at the moment, but I saw it online so I came down. If you want to use VG to say anything, to send Smith a message or anything …?’

‘Thanks, Daa, I’ll let you know.’

‘OK.’ Mona Daa turned on her heel and started to leave, walking her penguin walk.

‘I was actually surprised not to see you at the disputation,’ Katrine said.

Mona Daa stopped.

‘You’ve been VG’s lead reporter on the vampirist case from the start,’ Katrine said.

‘So Anders hasn’t spoken to you.’

Something about the way Mona Daa used Anders Wyller’s first name, so naturally, made Katrine raise an eyebrow. ‘Spoken to me?’

‘Yes. Anders and me, we …’

‘You’re kidding?’ Katrine said.

Mona Daa laughed. ‘No. I realise that there are certain practical issues, purely professionally, but no, I’m not joking.’

‘And when did you …?’

‘Now, really. We’ve both got a few days off, and have been spending them in claustrophobically close proximity in Anders’s little flat, to find out if we’d make a good match. We thought it made sense to know before we told anyone.’

‘So no one knows about it?’

‘Not until Harry very nearly caught us red-handed with a surprise visit. Anders reckons Harry realised. And I know he tried to get hold of me at VG. I’m assuming that was to confirm his suspicions.’

‘He’s pretty good at suspicions,’ Katrine said, looking up at the sky for the helicopter.

‘I know.’

Harry listened to the faint whistling sound as Smith breathed in and out. Then he noticed something odd out on the fjord. A dog that looked like it was walking on water. Meltwater. Seeping up through cracks in the ice even though it was below freezing.

‘I’ve been accused of seeing vampirism simply because I want it to exist,’ Smith said. ‘But now it’s been proven, once and for all, and soon the whole world will know what Professor Smith’s vampirism is, regardless of what happens to me. And Valentin isn’t the only one, there’ll be more. More opportunities to keep the world focused on vampirism. I promise you, they’ve already been recruited. You asked me once if recognition meant more than life. Of course it does. Recognition is eternal life. And you’re going to get eternal life too, Harry. As the man who almost caught Hallstein Smith, the man they once called the Monkey. Do you think I talk too much?’

They were approaching IKEA. They’d be at Asker in five minutes. Smith wouldn’t react if there was a bit of a queue, the traffic often built up there.

‘Denmark,’ Smith said. ‘Spring comes earlier there.’

Denmark? Was Smith turning psychotic? Harry heard a dry clicking sound. The car was indicating. No, no, he was turning off the main road! Harry saw a sign with the name Nesøya on it.

‘There’s enough meltwater for me to be able to get out to the edge of the ice, wouldn’t you say? A super-light aluminium boat with just one man on board won’t sit too deep.’

Boat. Harry clenched his teeth and swore silently. The boathouse. The boathouse Smith had said had formed part of his wife’s inheritance. That was where they were going.

‘The Skagerrak is 130 nautical miles across. Average speed, twenty knots. How long would that take, Harry, seeing as you’re so good at maths?’ Smith laughed. ‘I’ve already worked it out. On a calculator. Six and a half hours. And from there you can get all the way across Denmark by bus, that won’t take long. Then Copenhagen. Nørrebro. Red Square. Sit on a bench, hold up a bus ticket and wait for the travel agent. What do you think about Uruguay? A nice little country. It’s a good thing I’ve already cleared the road all the way to the boatshed, and made enough space inside for a car. Otherwise these stripes on the roof would have been easy to spot from a helicopter, wouldn’t they?’

Harry closed his eyes. Smith had had his escape route planned for a while. Just in case. And there was only one reason why he was telling Harry about it now. Because Harry wasn’t going to get the chance to tell anyone else.

‘Turn left up ahead,’ Steffens said from the back seat. ‘Block 17.’

Oleg turned and felt the wheels lose their grip on the ice before regaining it again.

He had a feeling there was a speed limit in the hospital grounds, but was well aware that time and blood were both running out for Berntsen.

He braked in front of the entrance, where two men in yellow paramedics’ tunics were waiting with a trolley. With practised movements they lifted Berntsen out of the back seat and up onto the trolley.

‘He’s got no pulse,’ Steffens said. ‘Straight into the hybrid room. The crash team—’

‘Already in place,’ the older paramedic said.

Oleg and Anders followed the trolley and Steffens through two sets of doors to a room where a team of six people in caps, plastic glasses and silver-grey tunics were standing waiting.

‘Thanks,’ a woman said, and made a gesture that Oleg interpreted as meaning that he and Anders could go no further. The trolley, Steffens and the team disappeared behind two wide doors that swung shut behind them.

‘I knew you worked at Crime Squad,’ Oleg said when everything was quiet again. ‘But I didn’t know you’d studied medicine.’

‘I haven’t,’ Anders said, looking at the closed doors.

‘No? It sounded like it in the car.’

‘I read a few medical books on my own when I was at college, but I never studied medicine properly.’

‘Why not? Grades?’

‘I had the grades.’

‘But?’ Oleg didn’t know if he was asking because he was interested, or to keep his mind off what was happening to Harry.

Anders looked down at his bloody hands. ‘I suppose it was the same for me as it is for you.’

‘Me?’

‘I wanted to be like my father.’

‘And?’

Anders shrugged. ‘Then I didn’t want that any more.’

‘You wanted to join the police instead?’

‘At least then I could have saved her.’

‘Her?’

‘My mother. Or people in the same situation. Or so I thought.’

‘How did she die?’

Anders shrugged again. ‘Our house got broken into, and it turned into a hostage situation. My father and I just stood there and watched. Dad got hysterical, and the burglar stabbed my mother and got away. Dad ran around like a headless chicken, shouting at me not to touch her while he looked for a pair of scissors.’ Wyller swallowed. ‘My father, the senior consultant, was looking for a pair of scissors while I stood there and watched her bleed to death. I talked to a few doctors afterwards, and found out that she could have been saved if we’d only done what needed to be done straight away. My father’s a haematologist, the state’s invested millions into teaching him everything there is to know about blood. Yet he still didn’t manage to do the simple things that were needed to stop it draining out of her. If a jury had known how much he knows about saving lives, they’d have convicted him of manslaughter.’

‘So your father made a mistake. Making mistakes is human.’

‘Even so, he sits there in his office and thinks he’s better than other people just because he can say he’s a senior consultant.’ Anders’s voice started to tremble. ‘A policeman with average qualifications and a week-long course in close combat could have overpowered that burglar before he stabbed her.’

‘But he didn’t make a mistake today,’ Oleg said. ‘Steffens is your father, isn’t he?’

Anders nodded. ‘When it comes to saving the life of a corrupt, lazy piece of shit like Berntsen, of course he doesn’t make mistakes.’

Oleg looked at his watch. Pulled out his phone. No message from his mum. He put it back. She’d told him there was nothing he could do to help Harry. But that he could help Truls Berntsen.

‘It’s none of my business,’ Oleg said. ‘But have you ever asked your father how much he’s given up? How many years of hard work he’s devoted to learning everything there is to learn about blood, and how many people that work has saved?’

Anders shook his bowed head.

‘No?’ Oleg said.

‘I don’t talk to him.’

‘Not at all?’

Anders shrugged. ‘I moved. Changed my name.’

‘Is Wyller your mother’s name?’

‘Yes.’

They saw a man dressed in silver rush into the hybrid room before the doors closed again.

Oleg cleared his throat. ‘Like I said, it’s none of my business. But don’t you think you’re being hard on him?’

Anders raised his head. Looked Oleg in the eye. ‘You’re right,’ he said, nodding slowly. ‘It’s none of your business.’ Then he got up and walked towards the exit.

‘Where are you going?’ Oleg asked.

‘Back to the university. Will you take me? If not, I’ll catch the bus.’

Oleg stood up and followed him. ‘There are enough cooks there. But there’s a police officer here who might be about to die.’ He caught up with Anders and put his hand on his shoulder. ‘And as a fellow police officer, right now you’re his next of kin. So you can’t leave. He needs you.’

When he turned Anders round he saw that the young detective’s eyes were wet.

‘They both need you,’ Oleg said.

Harry needed to do something. Fast.

Smith had turned off the main road and was driving carefully down a narrow forest road with banks of snow on both sides. Between them and the frozen water was a red-painted boathouse with a white wooden plank across its double doors. He could see two houses, one on either side of the road, but they were partially hidden by trees and rocks, and were so far away that there was no way he could alert anyone there by shouting for help. Harry took a deep breath and felt his top lip with his tongue; it tasted metallic. He could feel sweat running under his shirt, even though he was freezing. He tried to think. Think the way Smith was thinking. A small, open boat all the way to Denmark. It was obviously perfectly possible, yet still so daring that no one in the police would consider it as a likely escape route. And what about him – how was Smith thinking of solving that problem? Harry tried to shut out the voice that was desperately hoping he would be spared. And the comfortably apathetic voice telling him everything was lost, and that fighting against the inevitable would only mean more pain. Instead he listened to the cold, logical voice. Which said that Harry no longer had any value as a hostage and would only hold Smith back in the boat. Smith wasn’t scared of using the gun, he’d already shot Valentin and a police officer. And it was likely to happen in here, before they got out of the car, because that would muffle the noise best.

Harry tried to lean forward, but the fixed, three-pointed belt was pinning him to the seat. And the handcuffs were pressing against the small of his back and rubbing through the skin of his wrists.

There was a hundred metres to go to the boathouse.

Harry bellowed. A guttural, rattling sound that came from the depths of his stomach. Then he rocked from side to side and hit his head against the side window. It cracked and a white rosette appeared in the glass. He roared as he butted it again. The rosette grew larger. A third time. A piece of glass fell out.

‘Shut up or I’ll shoot you now!’ Smith shouted, and aimed the revolver at Harry’s head while he kept one eye on the road.

Harry bit.

Felt the pain of the pressure on his gums, felt the metallic taste that had been there ever since he had stood in front of the table in the auditorium with his back to Smith and quickly picked up the iron teeth and put them in his mouth before putting the handcuffs on. How strangely easily the sharp teeth sank into Hallstein Smith’s wrist. Smith’s scream filled the car and Harry felt the revolver hit his left knee before falling to the floor between his feet. Harry tensed his neck muscles and pulled Smith’s arm to the right. Smith let go of the wheel and punched Harry in the head, but his own seat belt prevented him from reaching properly. Harry opened his mouth, heard a gurgling sound, and bit again. His mouth filled with warm blood. Perhaps he had hit the artery, perhaps not. He swallowed. It was thick, like drinking brown sauce, and tasted sickeningly sweet.

Smith grabbed hold of the wheel again with his left hand. Harry had been expecting him to brake, but instead he accelerated.

The Amazon spun on the ice before racing off down the slope. The plank across the boathouse snapped like a matchstick when it was struck by more than a ton of vintage Swedish car, and the doors were torn off their hinges.

Harry was thrown forward in his seat belt as the car slammed into the back of a twelve-foot metal boat that was forced into the doors at the end of the boathouse facing the water.

He noticed that the car key had snapped in the ignition before the engine died. Then he felt an intense pain in his teeth and mouth as Smith tried to pull his arm free. But he knew he had to hold on. Not that he was doing much damage. Even though he had punctured the artery, it was – as every self-harmer knew – so thin at that point in the wrist that it could take hours for Smith to bleed to death. Smith jerked his arm again, but more weakly this time. Harry caught a glimpse of his face out of the corner of his eye. Smith was pale. If he couldn’t stand the sight of blood, maybe Harry could get him to faint? Harry clamped his jaws together as hard as he could.

‘I see that I’m bleeding, Harry.’ Smith’s voice was weak but calm. ‘Did you know that when Peter Kürten, the ‘Vampire of Düsseldorf” was about to be executed, he asked Dr Karl Berg a question? He asked if Berg thought Kürten would have time to hear his own blood squirt from his decapitated neck before he lost consciousness. And if so, that pleasure would triumph over all other pleasure. But I’m afraid this isn’t enough to count as an execution, and it’s only the start of my pleasure.’

With a quick movement Smith released his seat belt with his left hand, and leaned over Harry, putting his head in his lap as he reached down to the floor. His hand fumbled over the rubber mat, but couldn’t find the revolver. He leaned further, then turned his head towards Harry as he pushed his arm deeper under the seat. Harry saw a broad smile spread across Smith’s lips. He had found the revolver. Harry lifted his foot and stamped down hard with it. He felt the lump of metal and Smith’s hand through the thin sole of his shoe.

Smith groaned and looked up at him. ‘Move your foot, Harry. Otherwise I’ll fetch the slaughter knife and use that instead. Do you hear? Move y—’

Harry loosened his bite and tensed his stomach muscles. ‘Assh you woosh.’

He raised both legs with a jerk, using the taut seat belt to help him as he forced his knees, and Smith’s head, up towards his chest.

Smith felt the revolver come free beneath Harry’s shoe, but as he was lifted up by Harry’s knees he lost his grip on it. He had to reach his arm further down, and managed to touch the hilt with two fingers just as Harry let go of his right arm. All he had to do was pick up the revolver and turn it round to point at Harry. Then Smith realised what was happening, and he saw Harry’s mouth open again, saw the glint of metal, saw him lean down towards him, felt warm breath on his neck. It was as if icicles were drilling through his skin. His scream was cut short as Harry’s jaws locked around his larynx. Then Harry’s foot came down again and stamped on his hand and the revolver.

Smith tried to hit Harry with his right hand, but the angle was too tight for him to get any force in the blow. Harry hadn’t bitten through his carotid artery, because then the jet of blood would have hit the roof, but he was blocking his airway, and Smith could already feel the pressure in his head building. But he still didn’t want to let go of the revolver. He had always been like that, the boy who never let go. The monkey. The monkey. But he had to get some air, otherwise his head was going to burst.

Hallstein Smith let go of the revolver, he could grab it again later. He raised his right hand and hit Harry on the side of his head. Then with his left hand, across Harry’s ear. Then again with his right, Harry’s eye, and he felt his wedding ring tear the policeman’s eyebrow. He felt his rage rise at the sight of the other man’s blood, it was like petrol on a fire, felt himself gain new strength, and let loose. Fight. Keep fighting.

‘So what do I do?’ Mikael Bellman said as he stared out across the fjord.

‘To begin with, I can’t actually believe you’ve done what you have,’ Isabelle Skøyen said, walking up and down behind him.

‘It happened so fast,’ Mikael said, focusing on his own reflection. ‘I didn’t have time to think.’

‘Oh, you had time to think,’ Isabelle said. ‘You just didn’t have time to think long enough. You had time to think that he’d shoot you if you tried to intervene, but not that the entire media would shoot you if you didn’t intervene.’

‘I was unarmed, he had a revolver, and it wouldn’t even have occurred to anyone that intervention was an option if Truls Berntsen, the idiot, hadn’t got it into his head that this was a good time to play the hero.’ Bellman shook his head. ‘But then the poor bastard has always been head over heels in love with Ulla.’

Isabelle groaned. ‘Truls couldn’t have done any more damage to your career if he’d tried. The first thing people are going to think, whether or not it’s fair, is cowardice.’

‘Hold it there!’ Mikael snapped. ‘I wasn’t the only one who didn’t intervene, there were police officers there who—’

‘She’s your wife, Mikael. You were sitting next to her in the front row, and even if you’re at the end of your tenure, you are still Chief of Police. You’re supposed to be their leader. And now you’re supposed to become Minister of Justice—’

‘So you think I should have got myself shot? Because Smith did actually shoot. And Truls didn’t rescue Ulla! Doesn’t that prove that I, as Police Chief, made the correct judgement while Constable Berntsen, acting on his own initiative, got it badly wrong? In fact he actually put Ulla’s life in danger.’

‘Obviously that’s how we’re going to have to try to present this, but all I can say is that it’s going to be difficult.’

‘And what’s so damn difficult about it?’

‘Harry Hole. That he volunteered himself as hostage and you didn’t.’

Mikael threw his arms out. ‘Isabelle, it was Harry Hole who provoked the whole situation. By unmasking Smith as the puppet master he practically forced Smith to grab that revolver, which was just sitting there in front of him. By offering himself as a hostage, Harry Hole was merely taking responsibility for something that was his fault anyway.’

‘Yes, but we feel first and reason afterwards. We see a man who doesn’t intervene to rescue his wife, and we feel contempt. Then along comes what we think is cold, objective reflection, but is actually us trying to find new information to justify what we felt initially. It may be the contempt of stupid, unreflective people, Mikael, but I’m pretty sure that’s what people are going to feel.’

‘Why?’

She didn’t answer.

He looked her in the eye.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Because you’re feeling that contempt now?’

Mikael Bellman saw Isabelle Skøyen’s impressive nostrils flare as she took a deep breath. ‘You are so many things,’ she said. ‘You have so many qualities that have brought you to where you are.’

‘And?’

‘And one of them is your ability to know when to take cover and let others take the blow, when cowardice will pay off. It’s just that this time you forgot that you had an audience – and not just the usual audience, but the worst possible audience.’

Mikael Bellman nodded. Journalists from both home and abroad. He and Isabelle had a lot of work ahead of them. He picked up a pair of East German binoculars from her windowsill, presumably a gift from a male admirer. Pointed them at the fjord. He had seen something out there.

‘What do you think would be the best outcome for us?’ he asked.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Isabelle said. In spite of the fact that she had grown up in the country, or perhaps precisely because of that, she still spoke like the upper classes of western Oslo used to, without it sounding odd. Mikael had tried, and it hadn’t worked. Growing up in the east of the city had caused irreparable damage.

‘For Truls to die, or for him to survive?’ He adjusted the focus on the binoculars. It took him a moment to hear her laughter.

‘And that’s another of those qualities,’ she said. ‘You can switch off all emotion when the situation demands it. This is going to damage you, but you’ll survive.’

‘Dead would be best, wouldn’t it? Then it would be beyond question that he took the wrong decision, and that I was right. And then he won’t be able to give any interviews, and the whole thing will have a limited shelf life.’

He felt her hand on his belt buckle as her voice whispered right next to his ear: ‘So you’d like the next text to your phone to tell you that your best friend is dead?’

It was a dog. Far out on the fjord. Where on earth was it going?

The next thought came automatically.

And it was a new thought. A thought that had basically never before occurred to Police Chief and soon-to-be Justice Minister Mikael Bellman at any point in his forty-year life.

Where on earth are we going?

Harry had a high-pitched buzzing in his ear, and his own blood on one eye. And the blows were still coming. He no longer felt any pain, only that the car was getting colder and the darkness deeper.

But he wasn’t letting go. He had let go so many times before. Had given in to pain, fear, a death wish. But he had also given in to a primitive, egocentric survival instinct that had shouted down any longing for a painless nothingness, sleep, darkness. And that was why he was here. Still here. And this time he wasn’t letting go.

His jaw muscles ached so badly that his whole body was shaking. And the blows were still coming. But he didn’t let go. Seventy kilos of pressure. If he had managed to get a firmer grip of the neck, he could have stemmed the flow of blood to the brain, and Smith would have lost consciousness fairly quickly. By only stopping the supply of air that could take several minutes. Another blow to his temple. Harry felt his own consciousness waver. No! He jerked in the seat. Clenched his teeth tighter. Stick it out, stick it out. Lion. Water buffalo. Harry counted as he breathed through his nose. One hundred. The blows kept coming, but weren’t the gaps between them longer, weren’t they a bit less forceful? Smith’s fingers closed over his face and tried to push Harry away. Then gave up. Let go of him. Was Smith’s brain finally so starved of oxygen that he had stopped functioning? Harry felt relief, swallowed some more of Smith’s blood, and at that moment the thought struck him. Valentin’s prediction. You’ve been waiting for your turn to be a vampire. And one day you too will drink. Perhaps it was that thought, a gap in his concentration, but at that instant Harry felt the revolver move under the sole of his shoe, and realised that he had eased the pressure without noticing. That Smith had stopped punching him in order to reach for the gun. And that he had succeeded.

Katrine stopped in the doorway to the auditorium.

The room was empty apart from the two women who were sitting in the front row with their arms round each other.

She looked at them. An odd couple. Rakel and Ulla. The wives of sworn enemies. Was it the case that women found it easier to seek comfort in one another than men? Katrine didn’t know. So-called sisterhood had never interested her.

She went over to them. Ulla Bellman’s shoulders were shaking, but her sobbing was soundless.

Rakel looked up at Katrine with a questioning look.

‘We haven’t heard anything,’ Katrine said.

‘OK,’ Rakel said. ‘But he’ll be OK.’

It occurred to Katrine that that was her line, not Rakel’s. Rakel Fauke. Dark-haired, strong, with soft brown eyes. Katrine had always felt jealous. Not because she wanted the other woman’s life or to be Harry’s woman. Harry might be able to make a woman giddy and happy for a while, but in the long term he created sorrow, despair, destruction. For the long term you ought to have a Bjørn Holm. Yet even so she envied Rakel Fauke. She envied her for being the one Harry Hole wanted.

‘Sorry.’ Ståle Aune had come in. ‘I’ve got hold of a room where we can have a talk.’

Ulla Bellman nodded, still sniffing, then stood up and left the room with Aune.

‘Emergency psychiatry?’ Katrine asked.

‘Yes,’ Rakel said. ‘And the weird thing is that it works.’

‘Does it?’

‘I’ve been there. How are you holding up?’

‘Me?’

‘Yes. All this responsibility. Pregnant. And you’re close to Harry as well.’

Katrine stroked her stomach. And was struck by a strange thought, or at least one she had never had before. How close they were, birth and death. It was as if one foretold the other, as if life’s never-ending game of musical chairs demanded a death before granting new life.

‘Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?’

Katrine shook her head.

‘Names?’

‘Bjørn’s suggested Hank,’ Katrine said. ‘After Hank Williams.’

‘Of course. So he thinks it’s going to be a boy?’

‘Regardless of sex.’

They laughed. And it didn’t feel absurd. They were laughing and talking about a life that was about to start, instead of impending death. Because life was magical and death trivial.

‘I’ve got to go, but I’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything,’ Katrine said.

Rakel nodded. ‘I’ll stay here, but just say if there’s anything I can do to help.’

Katrine hesitated, then made her mind up. Stroked her stomach again. ‘I sometimes worry that I’m going to lose it.’

‘That’s natural.’

‘And then I wonder what would be left of me afterwards. If I’d be able to go on.’

‘You would,’ Rakel said firmly.

‘You have to promise that you’d do the same,’ Katrine said. ‘You say that Harry will be OK, and hope is important, but I also think it’s right that I tell you that I’ve spoken to the Delta group, and their evaluation is that the hostage taker – Hallstein Smith – probably won’t … well, the most common …’

‘Thanks,’ Rakel said, taking Katrine’s hand. ‘I love Harry, but if I lose him now, I promise to carry on.’

‘And Oleg, how would he …?’

Katrine saw the pain in Rakel’s eyes and instantly regretted saying it. Saw Rakel try to say something, but she failed and ended up shrugging her shoulders instead.

When she went outside again she heard a chopping sound and looked up. The sunlight shimmered off the body of the helicopter up in the sky.

John D. Steffens pushed open the door of A&E and breathed in the cold air. Then he went over to the older paramedic who was leaning against the wall, letting the sunlight warm his face as he smoked, slowly, visibly enjoying it with his eyes closed.

‘Well, Hansen?’ Steffens said, leaning against the wall alongside him.

‘Good winter,’ the paramedic said, without opening his eyes.

‘Could I …?’

The paramedic took out his packet of cigarettes and held it out.

Steffens took a cigarette and the lighter.

‘Is he going to make it?’

‘We’ll see,’ Steffens said. ‘We managed to get some blood back into him, but the bullet’s still in his body.’

‘How many lives do you think you have to save, Steffens?’

‘What?’

‘You worked the night shift, and you’re still here. As usual. So how many have you seen ahead of you, how many do you have to save in order to do good?’

‘I don’t quite know what you’re talking about now, Hansen.’

‘Your wife. The one you didn’t save.’

Steffens didn’t answer, just inhaled.

‘I checked up on you.’

‘What for?’

‘Because I’m worried about you. And because I know what it’s like. I lost my wife too. But all the overtime, all the lives saved, won’t bring her back. But you know that, don’t you? And one day you’ll make a mistake, because you’re tired, and you’ll have another life on your conscience.’

‘Will I?’ Steffens said, and yawned. ‘Do you know a haematologist who’s better than me in A&E?’

Steffens heard the paramedic’s footsteps move away.

Closed his eyes.

Sleep.

He wished he could.

It had been 2,154 days. Not since Ina, his wife and Anders’s mother, died – that was 2,912 days ago. But since he last saw Anders. During the initial period after Ina’s death there had at least been sporadic phone calls, even if Anders was furious and blamed him. On good grounds. Anders moved, fled, put as much distance between them as he could. By giving up his plans to study medicine, for instance, and studying to become a police officer instead. During one of their irregular, ill-tempered phone conversations Anders had said he’d rather be like one of his lecturers, a former murder detective, Harry Hole, whom Anders evidently worshipped the way he used to worship his own father. He had tried to see Anders at his various addresses, at Police College, but had been rejected. He had more or less ended up stalking his own son. In an attempt to make him realise that they each lost her a little less if they didn’t lose each other. That together they could keep a part of her alive. But Anders hadn’t been willing to listen.

So when Rakel Fauke had come for an examination and Steffens realised she was Harry Hole’s wife, he had naturally been very curious. What did this Harry Hole have that made him so able to influence Anders? Could he teach him something he could use to approach Anders again? And then he had discovered that the stepson, Oleg, reacted just like Anders had when he realised that Harry Hole couldn’t save his mother. It was the same, endless paternal betrayal.

Sleep.

It had been a shock, seeing Anders today. His first crazy thought was that they had been tricked, that Oleg and Harry had arranged some sort of reconciliation meeting.

Sleep now.

It was getting darker, and a chill fell across his face. A cloud passing in front of the sun? John D. Steffens opened his eyes. There was a figure standing in front of him, surrounded by a halo from the sun shining immediately behind.

John D. Steffens blinked. The halo was stinging his eyes. He had to clear his throat before he could get any sound out. ‘Anders?’

‘Berntsen’s going to make it.’ Pause. ‘They’re saying it’s thanks to you.’

Clas Hafslund was sitting in his winter garden, looking out across the fjord, where the ice had this peculiar layer of perfectly still water on top of it, making it look like a vast mirror. He had put down his newspaper, which once again was printing page after page about that vampirist case. Surely they had to get tired of it soon? Out here on Nesøya they didn’t have monsters like that, thank goodness. Everything was nice and peaceful, all year round. Even if right at the moment he could hear the irritating sound of a helicopter somewhere, probably an accident on the E18. Clas Hafslund jumped when he heard a sudden bang.

The sound waves rolled across the fjord.

A gun.

It sounded like it had come from one of the neighbouring properties. Hagen’s, or Reinertsen’s. The two businessmen had spent years arguing about whether the boundary between them ran to the left or the right of an oak tree that was hundreds of years old. In an interview with the local paper, Reinertsen had said that even if the dispute might appear comical because it concerned just a few square metres on the edge of what were otherwise very large plots of land, it wasn’t a petty matter, but about the principle of ownership itself. And he was certain that Nesøya’s homeowners would agree that this was a principle which was every citizen’s duty to fight for. Because there could be no doubt that the tree belonged to his, Reinertsen’s, land, you only had to look at the coat of arms of the family he had bought the estate from. It featured a large oak, and anyone could see that it was a copy of the one at the heart of the dispute. Reinertsen went on to declare that sitting and looking at the mighty tree warmed the very depths of his soul (here the journalist noted that Reinertsen would have had to sit on the roof of his house in order to see it), knowing that it was his. The day after the interview was printed, Hagen had chopped the tree down and used it to fuel his stove, and told the newspaper that it had warmed not only his soul but his toes as well. And that Reinertsen from now on would have to enjoy the sight of the smoke from his chimney, because whenever he lit his stove over the course of the next few years, it would be with nothing but the wood from the oak. Provocative, of course, but even if the bang had undoubtedly come from a gun, Clas Hafslund found it hard to believe that Reinertsen had just shot Hagen because of a damn tree.

Hafslund saw movement down by the old boathouse that lay approximately 150 metres away from both his and Hagen’s and Reinertsen’s properties. It was a man. In a suit. He was wading out onto the ice, pulling an aluminium boat behind him. Clas blinked. The man stumbled and sank to his knees in the icy water. Then the kneeling man turned towards Clas Hafslund’s house as if he could feel that he was being watched. The man’s face was black. A refugee? Had they reached Nesøya now? Affronted, he reached for the binoculars on the shelf behind him and trained them on the man. No. He wasn’t black. The man’s face was covered with blood. Now he put both hands on the side of the boat and pulled himself to his feet again. And stumbled on. Taking the rope again, he dragged the boat behind him. And Clas Hafslund, who was by no means a religious man, thought that he was seeing Jesus. Jesus, walking on water. Jesus dragging his cross to Calvary. Jesus who had risen from the dead in order to pay a visit to Clas Hafslund and the whole of Nesøya. Jesus with a big revolver in his hand.

Sivert Falkeid was sitting at the front of the inflatable boat with the wind in his face and Nesøya in sight. He looked at his watch one last time. It was precisely thirteen minutes since he and Delta had received the message and immediately linked it to the hostage situation.

‘A call reporting shots being fired on Nesøya.’

Their response time was acceptable. They would be there before the emergency vehicles that had also been sent to Nesøya. But either way, it went without saying that a bullet travelled faster.

He could see the aluminium boat and the outline of the water’s edge where the ice started.

‘Now,’ he said, and moved back in the boat to the others, so that the bow of the boat lifted and they could use their speed to slide across the ice on the meltwater.

The officer steering the boat pulled the propeller out of the water.

The boat lurched as it hit the edge of the ice, and Falkeid heard it scrape the bottom of the boat, but they had enough speed to carry them far enough onto the ice for them to be able to walk on it.

Hopefully.

Sivert Falkeid climbed over the side and tentatively put one foot down on the ice. The melt-water reached just above his ankle.

‘Give me twenty metres before you follow,’ he said. ‘Ten metres apart.’

Falkeid started to splash towards the aluminium boat. He estimated the distance to be three hundred metres. It looked abandoned, but the report had said that the man they assumed had fired the shot had dragged it out of the boatshed belonging to Hallstein Smith.

‘The ice is holding,’ he whispered into his radio.

Everyone in Delta had been equipped with ice picks on a cord attached to the chest of their uniform, so that they could pull themselves out if they went through the ice. And that cord had just tangled itself around the barrel of Falkeid’s semi-automatic, and he had to look down to free his weapon.

And he therefore heard the shot without having any chance of seeing anything that might indicate where it had come from. He instinctively threw himself down in the water.

There was another shot. And now he saw a little puff of smoke rise from the aluminium boat.

‘Shots from the boat,’ he heard in his earpiece. ‘We’ve all got it in our sights. Awaiting orders to blast it to hell.’

They had been informed that Smith was armed with a revolver. Naturally the risk of him managing to hit Falkeid from more than two hundred metres away was fairly slim, but that was still the situation. Sivert Falkeid lay there breathing as the numbingly cold melt-water soaked through his clothes and covered his skin. It wasn’t his job to work out what it would cost the state to spare the life of this serial killer. Cost in the form of trials, prison guards, the daily rate at a five-star prison. His job was to work out how great a threat this individual posed to the lives of his men and others, and adapt his response accordingly. Not to think about nursery places, hospital beds and the renovation of rundown schools.

‘Fire at will,’ Sivert Falkeid said.

No response. Just the wind and the sound of a helicopter in the distance.

‘Fire,’ he repeated.

Still no acknowledgement. The helicopter was approaching.

‘Can you hear me?’ a voice said in his earpiece. ‘Are you wounded?’

Falkeid was about to repeat his order when he realised that what had happened when they were training in Haakonsværn had happened again. The salt water had ruined the microphone and only the receiver was working. He turned towards their boat and shouted, but his voice was drowned out by the helicopter, which was now hovering motionless in the air right above them. So he gave the hand signal to open fire, two rapid downward movements of his right arm with his fist clenched. Still no response. What the hell? Falkeid began to snake his way back to the inflatable when he saw two of his men walking towards him on the ice without even crouching in order to present a smaller target.

‘Get down!’ he yelled, but they kept walking calmly towards him.

‘We’ve got comms with the helicopter!’ one of them shouted over the noise. ‘They can see him, he’s lying in the boat!’

He was lying in the bottom of the boat, with his eyes closed against the sun that was shining down on him. He couldn’t hear anything, but he imagined the water lapping and splashing against the metal beneath him. That it was summer. That the whole family was sitting in the boat. A family outing. Children’s laughter. If he could just keep his eyes closed, maybe he could stay there. He didn’t know for certain if the boat was floating or if his weight meant it was caught on the ice. It didn’t really matter. He wasn’t going anywhere. Time was standing still. Perhaps it always had been, unless perhaps it had only just stopped? Stopped for him, and for the man who was still sitting in the Amazon. Was it summer for him too? Was he also in a better place now?

Something was shading the sun. A cloud? A face? Yes, a face. A woman’s face. Like a darkened memory that was suddenly illuminated.

She was sitting on top of him, riding him. Whispering that she loved him, that she always had. That she had been waiting for this. Asking if he felt the same, that time was standing still. He felt vibrations in the boat, her groans rose to a continuous scream, as if he had plunged a knife into her, and he released the air from his lungs and the sperm from his testicles. And then she died on top of him. Hit his chest with her head as the wind hit the window above the bed in the flat. And before time began to move again, they both fell asleep, unconscious, without memory, without conscience.

He opened his eyes. It looked like a big, hovering bird.

It was a helicopter. It was hovering ten, twenty metres above him, but he still couldn’t hear anything. But he realised that was what was making the boat vibrate.

Katrine was standing outside the boathouse, shivering in the shade as she watched the officers approach the Volvo Amazon inside the building.

She saw them open the front doors on both sides. Saw a suited arm fall out from one side. From the wrong side. From Harry’s side. The naked hand was bloody. The officer put his head inside the car, presumably to check for breathing or a pulse. It took a while, and eventually Katrine couldn’t hold back any longer, and heard her own trembling voice: ‘Is he alive?’

‘Maybe,’ the officer shouted above the noise of the helicopter out over the water. ‘I can’t feel a pulse, but he might be breathing. If he is alive, I don’t think he’s got long left, though.’

Katrine took a few steps closer. ‘The ambulance is on its way. Can you see the gunshot wound?’

‘There’s too much blood.’

Katrine went inside the boathouse. Stared at the hand dangling out of the door. It looked as if it was searching for something, something to hold on to. Another hand to hold. She stroked her own hand over her stomach. There was something she should have told him.

‘I think you’re wrong,’ the other officer said from inside the car. ‘He’s already dead. Look at his pupils.’

Katrine closed her eyes.

He stared up at the face that had appeared above him on both sides of the boat. One of them had pulled his black mask off, and his mouth was opening, forming words; from the way his neck muscles were tensing it looked like he was shouting. Perhaps he was shouting at him to drop the revolver. Perhaps he was shouting his name. Perhaps he was shouting for revenge.

Katrine went over to the door on Harry’s side of the car. Took a deep breath and looked inside. Stared. Felt the shock hit her even harder than she had prepared herself for. She could hear the siren of the ambulance now, but she had seen more dead bodies than these two officers, and knew from a brief glance that this body had been permanently vacated. She knew him, and knew that this was just the shell he had left behind.

She swallowed. ‘He’s dead. Don’t touch anything.’

‘But we ought to try to revive him, shouldn’t we? Maybe—’

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘Let him be.’

She stood there. Felt the shock slowly fade. Give way to surprise. Surprise at the fact that Hallstein Smith had chosen to drive the car himself rather than make his hostage drive. That what she had thought was Harry’s seat wasn’t.

Harry lay in the bottom of the boat, looking up. People’s faces, the helicopter that was blocking the sun, the blue sky. He had managed to stamp his foot down on the revolver again before Hallstein Smith pulled it free. And then Hallstein seemed to give up. Maybe it was his imagination, but he had thought he could feel through the teeth, in his mouth, how the other man’s pulse became weaker and weaker. Until in the end it was gone altogether. Harry had lost consciousness twice before he managed to get his hands and the handcuffs round to the front of his body again, loosened the seat belt and fished the key to the handcuffs out of his jacket pocket. The car key had broken off in the ignition and he knew he didn’t have the strength to climb the steep, ice-covered slope back to the main road, or get over the high fences of the properties on either side of the road. He had called for help, but it was as if Smith had beaten his voice out of him, and the weak cries he did manage to make were drowned by a helicopter somewhere, probably the police helicopter. So that they would be able to see him from the air, he had dragged Smith’s boat out onto the ice, lain down in it and fired several shots into the air.

He let go of the Ruger revolver. It had done its job. It was over. He could retreat now. Back to the summer, when he was twelve years old and was lying in a boat with his head in his mother’s lap and his father telling him and Sis about a jealous general during the war between the Venetians and the Turks. Harry knew he would have to explain it to his sister once they’d gone to bed. He was secretly quite pleased about that, because no matter how long it took, they wouldn’t give up until she understood the connections. And Harry liked connections. Even when he knew, deep down, that there weren’t any.

He closed his eyes.

She was still lying there. Lying beside him. And now she was whispering in his ear.

‘Do you think you can give life too, Harry?’