SETE

Jo Nesbø.

(Einaudi. Stile libero big) (Italian Edition).” EINAUDI

Sindrome di Otello. 

“– Sí e no, – rispose Oleg. – L’espressione «sindrome di Otello» lascia intendere che la gelosia sia la causa dell’omicidio nella tragedia, ma non è vero. Helga e io abbiamo letto l’Otello ieri…

– L’avete letto insieme? – Rakel posò una mano sul braccio di Harry. – Non sono teneri?

Oleg alzò gli occhi al cielo. – Comunque, la mia interpretazione è che la causa vera, piú profonda di tutti gli omicidi, non sia la gelosia, ma l’invidia e le aspirazioni di un uomo offeso. Ossia Iago. Otello non è che un burattino. La tragedia si dovrebbe intitolare Iago, non Otello.

– E tu, Helga, sei d’accordo con lui? – A Rakel quella ragazza carina, un po’ anemica e educata piaceva, e sembrava essersi ripresa in fretta.

– A me il titolo Otello piace. E forse non c’è una causa profonda. Forse è vero quello che dice Otello stesso. Che la colpa è della luna piena, che fa impazzire gli uomini.

– «Non c’è una ragione, – disse Harry in inglese, con voce solenne e una pronuncia impeccabile. – Io faccio tante di quelle cose senza una ragione».

– Tu mi stupisci, Harry, – disse Rakel. – Citi addirittura Shakespeare.

– Walter Hill, – disse lui. – I guerrieri della notte, 1979.

– Yeah, – rise Oleg. – Il miglior film sulle gangs di sempre.

Thirst

1. 
   

Prologue

He stared into the white nothingness.

The way he had done for almost three years.

No one saw him, and he saw no one. Apart from each time the door opened and enough steam was sucked out for him to be able to glimpse a naked man for a brief moment before the door closed and everything was shrouded in fog.

The baths would be closing soon. He was alone.

He wrapped the white towelling bathrobe more tightly around him, got up from the wooden bench and walked out, past the empty swimming pool and into the changing room.

No trickling showers, no conversations in Turkish, no bare feet padding across the tiled floor. He looked at himself in the mirror. Ran a finger along the scar that was still visible after the last operation. It had taken him time to get used to his new face. His finger carried on down his throat, across his chest, and came to a halt at the start of the tattoo.

He removed the padlock from his locker, pulled on his trousers and put his coat on over the still damp bathrobe. Tied his shoelaces. He made sure he was definitely alone before going over to a locker with a coded padlock, one with a splash of blue paint on it. He turned the lock until it read 0999. Removed the lock and opened the door. Took a moment to admire the big, beautiful revolver that lay inside before taking hold of the red hilt and putting it in his coat pocket. Then he removed the envelope and opened it. A key. An address, and some more detailed information.

There was one more thing in the locker.

Painted black, made of iron.

He held it up against the light with one hand, looking at the wrought ironwork with fascination.

He would have to clean it, scrub it, but he already felt aroused at the thought of using it.

Three years. Three years in a white nothingness, in a desert of empty days.

Now it was time. Time he drank from the well of life again.

Time he returned.

Harry woke with a start. Stared out at the semi-darkness of the bedroom. It was him again, he was back, he was here.

“Nightmare, darling?” The whispered voice by his side was warm and soothing.

He turned towards her. Her brown eyes studied his. And the apparition faded and disappeared.

“I’m here,” Rakel said.

“And here I am,” he said.

“Who was it this time?”

“No one,” he lied, and touched her cheek. “Go back to sleep.”

Harry closed his eyes. Waited until he was sure she had closed hers before opening his again. He studied her face. He had seen him in a forest this time. Moorland, wreathed in white fog that swirled around them. He had raised his hand and pointed something towards Harry. He could just make out the demonic, tattooed face on his naked chest. Then the fog had grown thicker, and he was gone. Gone again.

“And here I am,” Harry Hole whispered.

Part 1

1

Wednesday evening

The Jealousy Bar was almost empty, but even so it was hard to breathe.

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

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

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

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

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

“So you said, but thanks again.”

Mehmet polished a glass and pretended not to listen.

“So tell me, Elise, what do you want from life?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mehmet had to admire Geir for managing to summon up a smile. “Of course.”

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

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

“Thanks for the wine, Geir.”

“If one of the three of us—”

Mehmet hurried to look away when Geir pointed to him.

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

She stood up. “I hope you figure it out. Have a good life.”

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

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

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

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

There were two of them.

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

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

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

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

“I was startled!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No. Delete it at once.

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

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

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

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

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

Geir was breathing hard through his nose.

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

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

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

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

Geir swallowed.

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

Geir coughed. “Kari, please …”

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

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

He was left sitting in the darkness, blinking.

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m only renting,” Mehmet said. “The basement.”

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

“No, I don’t suppose it would.”

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

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

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

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

“But—”

“What part of thisdon’t you understand? You can choose which finger. Most people prefer the left little finger.”

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

“Oh?”

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

Banks stared at him in surprise. Nodded slowly.

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

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

Ping.

A match on Tinder.

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

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

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

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

She stared at the closed bedroom door. Swallowed.

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

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

Then she pulled herself together and opened the door.

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

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

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

“So we meet again, Elise,” he whispered.

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

He raised his hand and shoved something into his mouth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he bit.

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

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

“I’d call that a m‑match, baby,” he whispered. Then he bit again.

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

2

Thursday morning

The sharp afternoon light reached through the living-room windows and out into the hallway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Go and make a start, Berntsen,” Katrine said.

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

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

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

“I haven’t touched anything disgusting,” she said.

He smiled. White teeth. Ten bonus points.

“I’m allergic to latex,” he said

Twenty penalty points.

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

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

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

“I know. You worked in the Harry Hole group.”

“The Harry Hole group?”

“The boiler room.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” they replied in chorus, as if they all wanted to be first.

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

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

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

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

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

The girl shook her head.

“Did Else—”

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

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

“I don’t know,” the girl said.

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

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

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

“When did you last see Elise?” Wyller asked.

The three girls looked at each other again. “Wedidn’t see her, but …”

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

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

“They were just a bit drunk,” the third one said. She giggled again.

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

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

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

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

“No, no!” The girls laughed. “Henrik. And Alf.”

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

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

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

“For Henrik and Alf,” he added with a wry smile.

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

Her trousers and knickers were pulled down to her ankles.

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

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

“When Bjørn told us to,” she replied. “He asked so nicely.”

“Really? Any other injuries?”

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

“Any signs of sexual assault?”

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

“Let’s hope so,” Katrine said.

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

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

“I was joking,” Bjørn said quietly in his amiable Toten dialect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How do you know that the hairs come from men?” she sighed.

“A single woman with a demanding job …” Bjørn said without looking at her.

Katrine folded her arms. “What are you trying to say, Bjørn?”

“What?” His pale face flushed lightly and his eyes bulged more than usual.

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

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

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

“So, men?”

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

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

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

“Oh?”

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

Katrine tilted her head. “Now that you mention it …”

“Like bite marks.”

“Oh, fuck,” Katrine blurted out. “An animal?”

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

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

“Agreed. But the pattern is human.”

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

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

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

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

Katrine heard steps in the hall. “No more people in here now!” she called.

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

“And these lads are … ?”

“No criminal record, and they had a taxi receipt to prove that they left here just after 11:30. They said she walked in on them while they were urinating in the archway. Shall I bring them in for questioning?”

“It wasn’t them, but yes.”

“OK.”

Wyller’s steps receded.

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

“Not unless she knew him well.”

“No?”

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

“A lawyer,” Bjørn said. “Where?”

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

“Do you think … ?”

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

Bjørn leaned over her. “White, certainly.”

“Pinkish white,” Katrine said, standing up. “Come with me.”

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

“If you say so,” Bjørn said.

“Don’t you see it?” she asked incredulously.

“Research has shown that women usually see more nuances of colour than men.”

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

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

“Scraped skin,” he said.

“The scratch on her lower arm. Do you see?”

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

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

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

“Ergo,” she took over, “he was already in the flat when she got home.”

“Without her knowing,” he said.

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

“Harry would have been pleased with you now,” Bjørn said. And laughed.

“What?”

“You’re blushing.”

I’m so fucked up, Katrine thought.

3

Thursday afternoon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’ll get—”

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

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

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

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

“Saliva?”

“Rust.”

“Rust?”

“Yes.”

“As in … ?” Bellman pressed the lift button in front of them.

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

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

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

“Perhaps he had a key.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How is he getting on?”

“Berntsen? Fine.”

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

“Fine?” he eventually repeated.

“Berntsen carries out the orders he’s given.”

“Which aren’t too demanding, I imagine?”

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

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

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

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

“You mean the injuries he received from the explosion?”

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

“Fucked up?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shook his head.

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

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

“Knows?” Ulla’s face contorted in a grimace.

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

“Not even your family?” she sniffed.

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

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

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

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

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

“How can I … ?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Quote me on what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Relax, I’m only kidding,” Mona Daa said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And I didn’t know you knew my name.”

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

Anders Wyller smiled weakly.

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

“Anders Wyller.”

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

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

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

“I prefer to do my sweating outdoors,” Wyller said.

Mona Daa nodded. “Running with a dog. You look like a dog person. I like that.”

“Why?”

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

“Thanks,” Truls said.

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

“Sure,” he said.

“I’ll write it down.”

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

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

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

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

“The meeting starts in three minutes,” Wyller said.

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

There she was.

Ulla.

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

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

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

So he whispered her name silently to himself instead.

Ulla.

4

Thursday, late afternoon

Katrine Bratt looked out across the conference room.

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

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

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

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

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

“Catch the murderer,” he had replied.

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

“And I gave you the answer.”

“Catching the odd murderer won’t solve—”

“It will solve everything.”

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

“Nothing. But you asked about leadership.”

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

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

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

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

“No friends?” This from Magnus Skarre, a tactical analyst. “Parents?”

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

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

“Single women tend to,” Skarre said.

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

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

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

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

“A freeze request?” Anders Wyller asked from the front row.

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

“That’s all,” Tord Gren said.

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

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

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

“Microscope,” Tord interrupted, typing something on his tablet

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

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

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

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

“Bloody hell,” Skarre said. “Talk about luck.”

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

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

“Tinder,” Wyller said.

“Sorry?”

“Did she have the Tinder app on her phone?”

“Yes,” Tord said.

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

“Good,” Katrine said. “Tord?”

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

“Tinder people meet in bars,” a voice said.

Katrine looked up in surprise. It was Truls Berntsen.

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

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

One of the analysts sat up in her chair and cleared her throat. “According to the printout from Telenor’s operations centre, Elise Hermansen left work at Youngstorget sometime between 6:30 and 7 p.m. She went to an area in the vicinity of Bentsebrua. Then—”

“Her sister told us Elise used the gym at Myrens Verksted,” Katrine interrupted. “And they’ve confirmed that she checked in at 19:32, and left at 21:14, Sorry, Stine.”

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

“Great, so we get to go on a bar crawl,” Katrine said.

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

Could be worse, she thought.

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

She saw from the screen that it was Bjørn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What makes you think that?”

“It was lubricating gel. Probably from a condom.”

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

“Him, or someone else she met yesterday evening.”

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

“Yes?” she said.

“That wasn’t actually why I called.”

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

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

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

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

She was beautiful.

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

Very beautiful.

Sadly she wasn’t on the agenda.

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

To hell with regulations.

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

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

He pushed the wardrobe door aside.

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

He thought about Katrine Bratt. In her uniform.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A satanist,” Skarre said.

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

Bjørn tapped at the computer.

Katrine felt a quiet gasp go through the room.

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

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

“Please,” Katrine said.

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

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

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

“Not enough?”

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

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

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

Wyller cleared his throat. “What about the black paint?”

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

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

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

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

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

The sound of scraping chairs.

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

5

Thursday evening and night

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

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

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

“Yes,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Yes, she was here. Yesterday evening.”

“You’re sure?”

“She was sitting right where you’re standing now.”

“Here? Alone?”

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

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

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

“No, I prefer something with news in it,” Mehmet said.

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

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

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

“Calls himself?”

“I’d say it’s his real name.”

“Does he pay by card?”

“Yes.”

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

“That should be possible, yes.” Mehmet smiled sadly.

“Did they leave together?”

“Definitely not.”

“Meaning?”

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

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

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t see anyone follow her?”

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

“Yes,” the blond policeman said. “U2 are—”

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

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

“I see. Was anyone else here showing any interest in her?”

Mehmet shook his head. “It was a quiet night.”

“Like tonight, then?”

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

“So it might not be too difficult to get their card details as well?”

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

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

“Me? I was here. Then at home.”

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

“Yes. Or no.”

“Yes or no?”

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

“No. I live alone.”

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

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

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

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

He picked up.

“Berntsen.”

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

“Out at bars.”

“Haven’t you got a murder to—?”

“What is it?”

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

“Put him through.”

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

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

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

It took Geir Sølle five minutes to give an account of his date at the Jealousy Bar, and how he had gone straight home afterwards, and was home before midnight. Truls vaguely remembered that the pissing boys had seen Elise alive after 11:30.

“Can anyone confirm when you got home?”

“The log on my computer. And Kari.”

“Kari?”

“My wife.”

“You’ve got family?”

“Wife and dog.” Truls heard him swallow audibly.

“Why didn’t you call earlier?”

“I’ve only just seen the picture.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I thought we might be able to help each other.”

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

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

“We do,” she said, without lowering hers. “What have you got?”

“It’ll cost fifty thousand.”

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

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

“What did you say?”

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

“What is it, then?”

“It’s a three-course meal.”

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

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

“Clean sheets?”

Ulrich shrugged.

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

“What do you—?”

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

“OK, but maybe we could finish our drinks first?”

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

“That depends,” she said.

“On what?”

“On what effect alcohol has … on you.”

Ulrich smiled. “Are you trying to give me performance anxiety, Katrine?”

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

“No,” he grinned. “But do you know what these drinks cost?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s, like, so fucking sick, man!”

“Totally sick!”

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

“What are you doing here?” one of them asked.

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

She shook her hands and walked out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ace of space, the ace of space!” Truls and Lemmy roared.

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

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

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

“Don’t you use anything, then, girl?”

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

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

She answered. “Yes, Gunnar.”

“Murdered with iron teeth?” Her otherwise placid boss sounded upset.

“Sorry?”

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

“Principles be damned—they want to protect their source because they want more inside information. We need to plug this leak, Bratt.”

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

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

“I thought as much.”

“You thought what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is it?” Ulla wondered, looking up from her book.

“This latest murder, it needs solving.”

“So do all murders, surely?”

“This one’s a big case now.”

“It’s one single woman.”

“It’s not that.”

“Is it because VG is running so hard with it?”

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

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

But Mikael Bellman could feel the ground shaking now.

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

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

He had to bring him in.

6

Friday morning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Good morning, neighbour.”

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

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

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

“The cellar,” Harry said.

“Have you installed a gym? Who’s your trainer?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harry put the tray down in front of her.

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

“Anything new?” Harry asked as he turned the page.

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

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

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

“Harry?”

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

“Would you be jealous if I was on Tinder?”

“No.”

“No?” He noticed her sitting up in bed. “Why not?”

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

She sighed. “Don’t you ever get jealous?”

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

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

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

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

“You’re thinking about it? Or you’re asking now?”

“I’m asking now.”

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

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

“Yes,” Harry said, stifling a yawn.

“All the time?” she asked.

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

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

“Haven’t you got a doctor’s appointment?”

“Just one night. No consequences.”

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

“Come on.”

“You’ll have to help me with suggestions.”

“Audrey Hepburn.”

“Necrophilia?”

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

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

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

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

“Really?”

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

“You could keep it secret.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Just answer, dar— oh, tarnation!”

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

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

“Looks like it.”

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

Harry heard her snort again on the stairs.

“Can you put the kettle on?” he called.

“Cary Grant,” she called back. “And Kurt Cobain. At the same time.”

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

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

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

7

Friday morning

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

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

“Hm. How much do people pay per appointment to listen to stuff like that?”

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

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

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

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

“So alcoholism skipped a generation. That sort of thing happens.”

“Unless me blaming my genes is just an easy excuse for my own weak character.”

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

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

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

“I don’t read about crime.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” Bellman said. “I want you to investigate this latest murder case.”

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

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

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

“We need you, Harry.”

“Yes. Here.”

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

“I’m through with murders.”

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

“The answer’s still no.”

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

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

“Especially as a clean record is an essential prerequisite to being admitted.”

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

Harry shook his head. “Not even you would do that, Bellman.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Out of curiosity, Bellman—why is this particular case so important to you?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, I did. Bellman was there.”

“So I saw. What did he want?”

“He tried to blackmail me into investigating this latest murder.”

“And what did you say?”

“No.”

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

“Are you saying you’re throwing in the towel?”

“Yes.”

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

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

“She’s fifteen now, isn’t she?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Elise Hermansen.”

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

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

“Iron teeth? A satanist?”

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

“A vampirist? A vampire, then?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harry took out his mobile phone.

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

His call went unanswered.

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

“Hm. Can you tell her I—?”

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

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

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

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

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

Shit. Shit.

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

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

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

8

Friday afternoon

“How did Bellman manage to persuade you?” Gunnar Hagen was standing by the window.

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

“And what was the offer?”

“Fifty per cent extra for overtime and double pension contributions.”

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

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

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

“Are you still dry, Harry?”

“As a Norwegian oil well, boss.”

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

“That was the image I was trying to convey, yes.”

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

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

Hagen looked at his phone. “Not a thing.”

“Shall we try calling her again?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Looks more like a chicken,” the woman said.

“It is actually an Easter chicken, so we call it a chickenhawk.”

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

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

“Can I come in?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Iron dentures,” he said. “From Turkey?”

“No, Caracas.”

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

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

“Aha!” Smith exclaimed. “Then we need to go to Japan!”

“We do?” Bratt put the phone to her ear.

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

Bratt gestured impatiently.

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

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

“For that,” Smith said, “I think we should go for a walk.”

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

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

“I come from the coast too,” Katrine said.

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

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

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

“Big lock for a barn,” Katrine said.

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

“Fifty-eight kilos,” Smith said.

“What?”

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

“Fifty-seven point six-eight.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s an oversimplification, but yes.”

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

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

“Why not?”

“Because it’s never been published.”

Katrine looked at Smith. “Yours?”

“Mine,” Smith said with a sad smile.

“What happened?”

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

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

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

“Maybe they were after your patients?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really?”

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

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

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

“Really? But VG printed what you wrote on Twitter.”

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

“Cried wolf?”

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

“I don’t think so.”

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

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

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

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

“Just a moment, darling! Sound the hawk alarm! Caw, caw, caw!”

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

9

Friday afternoon

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

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

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

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

“Not a problem—I always play with my cards on the table, sir.” Katrine gave a brief smile.

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

“I see,” Katrine Bratt said, and glanced at her watch.

“I see, what?”

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

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

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

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

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

She held her breath.

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

She waited, ready for anything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I …”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tord?”

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

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

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

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

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

“How precisely?” Magnus Skarre called.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The already quiet room grew even more so.

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

To her surprise she saw a hand in the air.

“Yes, Truls?”

“Müller and I spoke to Mona Daa right after the press conference yesterday.”

“You mean Wyller?”

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

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

“Yes … but …”

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

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

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

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

“No, but—”

“Out with it!”

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

“See, you did talk! What else?”

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

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

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

“Sorry, but no one believes that, Hole,” Skarre snorted.

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

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

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

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

“I can do that.” Tord said, then paused and looked questioningly at Katrine.

She nodded. “What else?”

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

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

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

Katrine gave a crooked smile. “Good to have you back, Harry.”

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

“You meant that,” Katrine said. She and Harry were standing in the lift.

“What?”

“You called me boss.”

“Of course.”

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

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

“Øystein? He got fired.”

“By you?”

“Course not. By the taxi firm. There was an incident.”

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

“What sort of incident?” Katrine wondered.

“Do you really want to know?”

“Not really, but go on.”

“Øystein doesn’t like panpipes.”

“No, who does?”

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

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

“In the end Øystein managed to kick the guy out of the car.”

“While it was moving?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Curious about the single life?”

He laughed. And she realised she’d missed that laugh. She’d missed making him laugh, it felt like a reward every time she managed it.

“Single life is fine,” she said. “I’m seeing guys.” She looked for a reaction. Was she hoping for a reaction?

“Well, I hope Bjørn’s seeing people too, for his sake.”

She nodded. But she hadn’t really given it much thought. And, like an ironic comment, the cheery ping indicating a Tinder match rang out, and Katrine saw a woman dressed in desperation red hurry towards the door.

“Why are you back, Harry? The last thing you said to me was that you were never going to work on another murder.”

Harry turned his coffee cup. “Bellman threatened to get Oleg thrown out of Police College.”

Katrine shook her head. “Bellman really is the biggest heap of shit on two legs since the Emperor Nero. He wants me to tell the press that this is an almost impossible case. To make him look better when we solve it.”

Harry looked at his watch. “Well, maybe Bellman’s right. A murderer who bites people with iron teeth and drinks half a litre of blood from the victim … This is probably more about the act of killing than who the victim is. And that instantly makes the case harder.”

Katrine nodded. The sun was shining on the street outside, but she still thought she could hear the rumble of thunder in the distance.

“The pictures of Elise Hermansen from the crime scene,” Harry said. “Did they remind you of anything?”

“The bite marks on her neck? No.”

“I don’t mean the details, I mean …” Harry stared out of the window. “As a whole. Like when you hear music you’ve never heard before, by a group you don’t know, but you still know who wrote the track. Because there’s something there. Something you can’t put your finger on.”

Katrine looked at his profile. His brush of short hair was sticking up, as messily as before, but not quite as thick. His face had acquired some new lines, the wrinkles and furrows had deepened, and even if he had laughter lines around his eyes, the more brutal aspects of his appearance were more prominent. She had never understood why she thought he was so handsome.

“No,” she said, shaking her head.

“OK.”

“Harry?”

“Mm?”

“Is Oleg the reason you came back?”

He turned and looked at her with one eyebrow raised. “Why do you ask that?”

And she felt it now as she had back then, the way that look could hit her like an electric shock, the way he—a man who could be so reserved, so distant—could bulldoze everything else aside just by looking at you for a second, and demand—and get—all of your attention. In that one second there was only one man in the whole world.

“Never mind,” she said, and laughed. “Why am I asking that? Let’s get going.”

“Ewa with a ‘w.’ Mum and Dad wanted me to be unique. Then it turned out to be really common in those old Iron bloc countries.” She laughed and drank a sip of her beer. Then opened her mouth and used her forefinger and thumb to wipe the lipstick from the corners of her mouth.

“Iron Curtain and Eastern bloc,” the man said.

“Huh?” She looked at him. He was quite cute. Wasn’t he? Nicer than the ones she was usually matched with. There was probably something wrong with him, something that would show up later. There usually was. “You’re drinking slowly,” she said.

“You like red.” The man nodded towards the coat she’d draped over her chair.

“So does that vampire guy,” Ewa said, pointing at the news bulletin on one of the enormous televisions in the bar. The football match had ended and the bar, which had been full five minutes ago, had started to empty. She could feel she was a bit tipsy, but not too much. “Did you read VG? He drank her blood.”

“Yes,” the man said. “Do you know, she had her last drink a hundred metres down the road from here, at the Jealousy Bar?”

“Is that true?” She looked round. Most of the other customers seemed to be in groups or pairs. She had noticed one man who had been sitting on his own watching her, but he was gone now. And it wasn’t the Creep.

“Yes, quite true. Another drink?”

“Yes, I think I’d better,” she said with a shiver. “Ugh!”

She gestured to the bartender, but he shook his head. The minute hand had just passed the magic boundary.

“Looks like it’ll have to be another day,” the man said.

“Just when you’ve managed to terrify me,” Ewa said. “You’ll have to walk me home now.”

“Of course,” the man said. “Tøyen, you said?”

“Come on,” she said, and buttoned her red coat over her red blouse.

She tottered slightly on the pavement outside, and felt him discreetly holding her up.

“I had one of those stalkers,” she said. “I call him the Creep. I met him one time, and we … well, we had quite a nice time. But when I didn’t want to take it any further, he got jealous. He started to show up in different places when I was out meeting other people.”

“That must have been unpleasant.”

“Yes. But it’s quite funny as well, being able to bewitch someone so that all they can think about is you.”

The man let her put her hand through his arm, and listened politely as she talked about other men she had bewitched.

“I looked stunning, you see. So at first I wasn’t really surprised when he showed up, I just assumed he’d been following me. But then I realised that he couldn’t possibly have known where I’d be. And you know what?” She stopped abruptly and swayed.

“Er, no.”

“Sometimes I had a feeling that he’d been inside my flat. You know, your brain registers how people smell and recognises them even when you’re not consciously aware of it.”

“Sure.”

“What if he’s this vampire?”

“That would be quite a coincidence. Is this where you live?”

She looked up in surprise at the building in front of her. “It is. Goodness, that was quick.”

“As they say, time flies when you’re in good company, Ewa. Well, this is where I say—”

“Can’t you come up for a bit? I think I’ve got a bottle tucked away in the cupboard.”

“I think we’ve both had enough …”

“Just to make sure he isn’t there. Please.”

“That’s really not very likely.”

“Look, the light’s on in the kitchen,” she said, pointing at one of the first-floor windows. “I’m sure I switched it off before I left!”

“Are you?” the man said, stifling a yawn.

“Don’t you believe me?”

“Look, I’m sorry, but I really do need to get home and go to bed.”

She stared at him coldly. “What’s happened to all the real gentlemen?”

He smiled tentatively. “Er … maybe they all went home to bed?”

“Ha! You’re married, you succumbed to temptation, and now you regret it, is that it?”

The man looked at her thoughtfully. As if he felt sorry for her.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s it. Sleep well.”

She unlocked the front door. Went up the stairs to the first floor. Listened. She couldn’t hear anything. She didn’t know if she’d turned the kitchen light off, it was just something she’d said to get him to come with her. But now that she’d said it, it was as if she’d talked it up. Maybe the Creep really was in there.

She heard shuffling footsteps behind the door to the basement, heard the lock turn and a man in a security guard’s uniform came out. He locked the door with a white key, turned round, caught sight of her looking down and seemed to start back in surprise.

He let out a laugh. “I didn’t hear you. Sorry.”

“Is there a problem?”

“There’ve been a few break-ins in basement storerooms recently, so the housing association have ordered extra patrols.”

“So you work for us?” Ewa tilted her head a little. He wasn’t bad-looking. And he wasn’t as young as most other security guards either. “In that case, could I maybe ask you to check my flat? I’ve had a break‑in too, you know. And now I can see that there’s a light on, even though I know I turned everything off before I went out.”

The guard shrugged. “We’re not supposed to go into people’s flats, but OK.”

“Finally, a man who’s useful for something,” she said, and looked him up and down once more. A grown‑up security guard. Probably not all that smart, but solid, safe. And easy to handle. The common denominator for the men in her life had been that they had everything: came from good families, were looking at a decent inheritance, education, a bright future. And they had worshipped her. But sadly they had also drunk so much that their mutually bright future vanished into the depths with them. Maybe it was time to try something new. Ewa half turned away and bobbed her hip rather provocatively as she went through her keys. God, so many keys. And maybe she was a tiny bit drunker than she had thought.

She found the right one, unlocked the door, didn’t bother to kick her shoes off in the hall, and went into the kitchen. She heard the security guard follow her.

“No one here,” he said.

“Except you and me,” Ewa smiled, leaning back against the worktop.

“Nice kitchen.” The guard was standing in the doorway, running his hand over his uniform.

“Thanks. If I’d known I’d be having a visitor I’d have tidied up.”

“And maybe done the washing‑up,” Now he smiled.

“Yeah, yeah, there are only twenty-four hours in a day.” She brushed a lock of hair away from her face, and stumbled slightly on her high heels. “Would you mind checking the rest of the flat while I mix us a cocktail. What do you say?” She put her hand on the smoothie blender.

The guard looked at his watch. “I need to be at the next address in twenty-five minutes, but we’ve probably got time to check if anyone’s hiding.”

“A lot can happen in that time,” she said.

The guard met her gaze, chuckled quietly, rubbed his chin and walked out of the room.

He headed towards what he assumed was the bedroom door, and was struck by how thin the walls were. He could make out individual words being spoken by a man in the next flat. He opened the door. Dark. He found a light switch. A weak ceiling lamp came on.

Empty. Unmade bed. Empty bottle on the bedside table.

He carried on, opened the door to the bathroom. Dirty tiles. A mouldy shower curtain pulled in front of the bath. “Looks like it’s safe!” he called back towards the kitchen.

“Sit yourself down in the living room,” she called back.

“OK, but I have to leave in twenty minutes.” He went into the living room and sat down on the sagging sofa. Heard the chink of glasses in the kitchen, then her shrill voice.

“Would you like a drink?

“Yes.” He thought how unpleasant her voice was, the sort of voice that could make a man wish he had a remote control. But she was voluptuous, almost a bit motherly. He fiddled with something in the pocket of his guard’s uniform, it had got caught on the lining.

“I’ve got gin, white wine,” the voice whined from the kitchen. Like a drill. “A bit of whiskey. What would you like?”

“Something else,” he said in low voice to himself.

“What did you say? I’ll bring everything!”

“D‑do, Mother,” he whispered, freeing the metal contraption from the lining of his pocket. He put it down gently on the coffee table in front of him, where he was sure she would see it. He could feel his erection already. Then he took a deep breath. It felt like he was emptying the room of oxygen. He leaned back in the sofa and put his cowboy boots up on the table, next to the iron teeth.

Katrine Bratt let her eyes wander over the pictures in the light of the desk lamp. It was impossible to tell that they were sex offenders just by looking at them. That they had raped women, men, children, old people, in some instances torturing them, and in a few cases murdering them. OK, if you were told what they had done in the most gruesome detail, you could probably see something in the downcast and often frightened eyes in these custody photographs. But if you passed them in the street, you would walk on without having the faintest idea that you had been observed, evaluated and hopefully rejected as a victim. She recognised some of the men from her time in Sexual Offences, but not others. There were a lot of new ones. A new perpetrator was born every day. An innocent little bundle of humanity, the child’s cries drowned out by its mother’s screams, linked to life by an umbilical cord, a gift to make its parents weep with joy, a child who in later life would slice open the crotch of a bound woman while he masturbated, his hoarse groans drowned out by the woman’s screams.

Half the investigative team had started to contact these offenders, those with the most brutal records first. They were gathering and checking alibis, but hadn’t yet managed to place a single one in the vicinity of the crime scene. The other half were busy interviewing former boyfriends, friends, colleagues and relatives. The murder statistics for Norway were very clear: in eighty per cent of cases the murderer knew the victim, and in over ninety per cent if the victim was a woman killed in her own home. Even so, Katrine didn’t expect to find him in that statistic. Because Harry was right. This wasn’t that sort of murder. The identity of the victim was less important than the act itself.

They had also been through the list of offenders that Elise’s clients had testified against, but Katrine didn’t think the perpetrator—as Harry had suggested—was killing two birds with one stone: sweet revenge and sexual gratification. Gratification, though? She tried to imagine the murderer lying with one arm round the victim after the hideous act, with a cigarette in his mouth, smiling as he whispered, “That was wonderful.” In marked contrast, Harry used to talk about the serial killer’s frustration at never quite being able to attain what he was after, making it necessary to keep going, in the hope that next time he would manage it, everything would be perfect, he would be delivered and born again to the sound of a screaming woman before he severed the umbilical cord to the rest of humanity.

She looked at the picture of Elise Hermansen on her bed again. Tried to see what Harry could have seen. Or heard. Music—wasn’t that what he said? She gave up and buried her face in her hands. What was it that had made her think she had the right mentality for a job like this? “Bipolarity is never a good starting point for anyone but artists,” her psychiatrist had said the last time they’d met, before he wrote a fresh prescription for the little pink pills that kept her afloat.

It was almost the weekend, normal people were doing normal things, they weren’t sitting in an office looking at terrible crime-scene photographs and terrible people because they thought one of the faces might reveal something, only to move on to looking for a Tinder date to fuck and forget. But right now she desperately longed for something to connect her to normality. A Sunday lunch. When they were together, Bjørn had invited her to Sunday lunch with his parents out at Skreia several times, it was only half an hour’s drive away, but she had always found an excuse to say no. Right now, though, there was nothing she would have liked more than to be sitting round a table with her in‑laws, passing the potatoes, complaining about the weather, boasting about the new sofa, chewing dried‑up elk steak as the conversation ground on tediously but comfortingly, and the looks and the nods would be warm, the jokes old, the moments of irritation bearable.

“Hi.”

Katrine jumped. There was a man standing in the doorway.

“I’ve ticked the last of mine off the list,” Anders Wyller said. “So if there’s nothing else, I’ll head home and get some sleep.”

“Of course. Are you the only one left?”

“Looks like it.”

“Berntsen?”

“He finished early. He must just be more efficient.”

“Right,” Katrine said, and felt like laughing, but couldn’t be bothered. “I’m sorry to ask you this, Wyller, but would you mind double-checking his list? I’ve a feeling—”

“I’ve just done it. It seemed OK.”

“It was all OK?” Katrine had asked Wyller and Berntsen to contact the various telephone companies to get hold of lists of numbers and names of people the victim had spoken to in the past six months, then divide them up and check their alibis.

“Yes. There was one guy in Åneby up in Nittedal, first name ending in ‘y.’ He called Elise a few too many times early in the summer, so I double-checked his alibi.”

“Ending in ‘y’?”

“Lenny Hell. Yes, really.”

“Wow. So do you suspect people based on the letters in their names?”

“Among other things. It’s a fact that ‘‑y’ names are over-represented in crime statistics.”

“And?”

“So when I saw that Berntsen had made a note that Lenny’s alibi was that he had been with a friend at Åneby Pizza & Grill at the time Elise Hermansen was murdered, and that this could only be confirmed by the owner of the pizzeria, I called the local sheriff to hear for myself.”

“Because the guy’s name is Lenny?”

“Because the owner of the pizzeria’s name is Tommy.”

“And what did the sheriff say?”

“That Lenny and Tommy were extremely law-abiding and trustworthy citizens.”

“So you were wrong.”

“That remains to be seen. The sheriff’s name is Jimmy.”

Katrine laughed out loud. Realised that she needed that. Anders Wyller smiled back. Maybe she needed that smile too. Everyone tries to make a good first impression, but she had a feeling that if she hadn’t asked, Wyller wouldn’t have told her he was doing Berntsen’s work as well. And that showed that Wyller—like her—didn’t trust Truls Berntsen. There was one thought that Katrine had been trying to ignore since it first appeared, but now she changed her mind.

“Come in and close the door behind you.”

Wyller did as she asked.

“There’s something else I’m sorry to have to ask you to do, Wyller. The leak to VG. You’re the one who’s going to be working most closely with Berntsen. Can you … ?”

“Keep my eyes and ears open?”

Katrine sighed. “Something like that. This stays between us, and if you do discover something, you only talk to me about it. Understood?”

“Understood.”

Wyller left, and Katrine waited a few moments before picking up her phone from the desk. Looked up Bjørn. She had added a photograph of him that popped up in conjunction with his number. He was smiling. Bjørn Holm was no oil painting. His face was pale, slightly puffy, his red hair eclipsed by a shining white moon. But it was Bjørn. The antidote to all these other pictures. What had she really been so scared of? If Harry Hole could manage to live with someone else, why couldn’t she? Her forefinger was getting close to the call button beside the number when the warning popped into her head again. The warning from Harry Hole and Hallstein Smith. The next one.

She put the phone down and concentrated on the pictures again.

The next one.

What if the murderer was already thinking about the next one?

“You need to t‑try harder, Ewa,” he whispered.

He hated it when they didn’t make an effort.

When they didn’t clean their flats. When they didn’t look after their bodies. When they didn’t manage to keep hold of the man whose child they had given birth to. When they didn’t give the child any supper and locked it in the wardrobe and said it needed to be really quiet, and then it would it get chocolate afterwards, while they received visits from men who were given supper, and all the chocolate, and all the things they played with, shrieking with joy, the way the mother never played with the child.

Oh no.

So the child would have to play with the mother instead. And others like the mother.

And he had played. Played hard. Up until the day when they had taken him away and locked him in another wardrobe, at Jøssingveien 33: Ila Prison and Detention Centre. The statutes said it was a facility for male prisoners from all around the country who had “specific intervention requirements.”

One of the faggot psychiatrists there had told him that both the rapes and his stammer were the consequence of psychological trauma while he was growing up. Idiot. He had inherited the stammer from a father he had never met. The stammer and a filthy suit. And he had dreamt of raping women for as long as he could remember. And then he had done what these women never managed. He had tried harder. He had almost stopped stammering. He had raped the female prison dentist. And he had escaped from Ila. And he had gone on playing. Harder than ever. The fact that the police were after him only gave an edge to the game. Right up to the day when he had stood face‑to‑face with that policeman and had seen the determination and hatred in his eyes, and had realised that this man was capable of catching him. Was capable of sending him back to the darkness of his childhood in the closed wardrobe where he tried to hold his breath so as not to have to breathe in the stench of sweat and tobacco from his father’s thick, greasy woollen suit that was hanging up in front of him, and which his mother said she was keeping in case his father showed up again one day. He knew he couldn’t handle being locked up again. So he had hidden. Had hidden from the policeman with murder in his eyes. Had sat still for three years. Three years without playing. Until that too had started to become a wardrobe. Then he had been presented with this opportunity. A chance to play safely. It shouldn’t be too safe, obviously. He needed to be able to detect the smell of fear in order to get properly turned on. Both his own and theirs. It didn’t matter how old they were, what they looked like, if they were big or small. As long as they were women. Or potential mothers, as one of the idiot psychiatrists had said. He tilted his head and looked at her. The walls of the flat may have been thin, but that no longer bothered him. Only now, when she was so close and in this light, did he notice that Ewa with a “w’ had little pimples around her open mouth. She was evidently trying to scream, but there was no way she was going to manage that, no matter how hard she tried. Because beneath her open mouth she had a new one. A bleeding, gaping hole in her throat where her larynx had been. He was holding her tightly against the living-room wall, and there was a gurgling sound as pink bubbles of blood burst where her severed airway protruded. Her neck muscles tensed and relaxed as she tried desperately to get air. And because her lungs were still working, she would live a few more seconds. But that wasn’t what fascinated him most right now. It was the fact that he had managed to put a conclusive stop to her insufferable chatter by biting through her vocal cords with his iron teeth.

And as the light in her eyes dimmed, he tried to find something in them that betrayed a fear of dying, a desire to live another second. But he found nothing. She ought to have tried harder. Maybe she didn’t have enough imagination. Didn’t love life enough. He hated it when they gave up on life so easily.

10

Saturday morning

Harry was running. Harry didn’t like running. Some people ran because they liked it. Haruki Murakami liked it. Harry liked Murakami’s books, apart from the one about running—he had given up on that one. Harry ran because he liked stopping. He liked having run. He liked weight training: a more concrete pain that was limited by the performance of his muscles, rather than a desire to have more pain. That probably said something about the weakness of his character, his inclination to flee, to look for an end to the pain even before it had started.

A skinny dog, the sort the wealthy people of Holmenkollen kept even if they didn’t go hunting more than one weekend every other year, leapt away from the path. Its owner came jogging along a hundred metres behind it. That year’s Under Armour collection. Harry had time to notice his running technique as they approached each other like passing trains. It was a shame they weren’t running in the same direction. Harry would have tucked in behind him, breathing down his neck, then pretended to lose ground only to crush him on the climb up towards Tryvann. Would have let him see the soles of his twenty-year-old Adidas trainers. Oleg said Harry was incredibly childish when they ran, that even though they had promised to jog calmly all the way, it would end with Harry suggesting they race up the last hill. In Harry’s defence, it should be pointed out that he was asking for a thrashing, because Oleg had inherited his mother’s unfairly high oxygen absorption rate.

Two overweight women who were more walking than running were talking and panting so loudly that they didn’t hear Harry approaching, so he turned off onto a narrower path. And suddenly he was in unknown territory. The trees grew more densely there, shutting out the morning light, and Harry had a fleeting taste of something from his childhood. The fear of getting lost and never being able to find his way back home again. Then he was out in open country again, andt he knew exactly where he was now, where home was.

Some people liked the fresh air up here, the gently rolling forest paths, the silence and smell of pine needles. Harry liked the view of the city. Liked the sound and smell of it. The feeling of being able to touch it. The certainty that you could drown in it, sink to the bottom of it. Oleg had recently asked Harry how he’d like to die. Harry had replied that he wanted to go peacefully in his sleep. Oleg had chosen suddenly and relatively painlessly. Harry had been lying. He wanted to drink himself to death in a bar in the city below them. And he knew that Oleg had also been lying—he would have chosen his former heaven and hell and taken a heroin overdose. Alcohol and heroin. Infatuations they could leave but never forget, no matter how much time passed.

Harry put in a final spurt on the driveway, heard the gravel kick up behind his trainers, caught a glimpse of fru Syvertsen behind the curtain of the house next door.

Harry showered. He liked showering. Someone ought to write a book about showering.

When he was finished he went into the bedroom, where Rakel was standing by the window in her gardening clothes: wellington boots, thick gloves, a pair of tatty jeans and a faded sun hat. She half turned towards him and brushed aside a few strands of hair sticking out from under the hat. Harry wondered if she knew how good she looked in that outfit. Probably.

“Eek!” she said quietly, with a smile. “A naked man!”

Harry went and stood behind her, put his hands on her shoulders and massaged her gently. “What are you doing?”

“Looking at the windows. Should we do something about them before Emilia arrives, do you think?”

“Emilia?”

Rakel laughed.

“What?”

“You stopped that massage very abruptly, darling. Relax, we’re not having visitors. Just a storm.”

“Oh, that Emilia. I reckon this fortress could cope with a natural disaster or two.”

“That’s what we think, living up here on the hill, isn’t it?”

“What do we think?”

“That our lives are like fortresses. Impregnable.” She sighed. “I need to go shopping.”

“Dinner at home? We haven’t tried that Peruvian place on Badstugata yet. It’s not that expensive.”

That was one of Harry’s bachelor habits that he’d tried to get her to adopt: not cooking dinner for themselves. She had more or less bought his argument that restaurants are one of civilisation’s better ideas. That even back in the Stone Age they had figured out that cooking and eating together was smarter than the entire population spending three hours every day planning, buying, cooking and washing‑up. When she objected that it felt a bit decadent, he had replied that ordinary families installing kitchens that cost a million kroner, that was decadent. That the most healthy, un‑decadent use of resources was to pay trained cooks what they deserved to prepare food in large kitchens, so that they could pay for Rakel’s help as a lawyer, or Harry’s work training police officers.

“It’s my day today, so I’ll pay,” he said, catching hold of her right arm. “Stay with me.”

“I need to go shopping,” she said, and grimaced as he pulled her towards his still damp body. “Oleg and Helga are coming.”

He held her even tighter. “Are they? I thought you said we weren’t having visitors.”

“Surely you can cope with a couple of hours with Oleg and—”

“I’m joking. It’ll be nice. But shouldn’t we—?”

“No, we’re not taking them to a restaurant. Helga hasn’t been here before, and I want to get a proper look at her.”

“Poor Helga,” Harry whispered, and was about to nip Rakel’s earlobe with his teeth when he saw something between her breast and her neck.

“What’s that?” He put the tip of his finger very gently on a red mark.

“What?” she asked, feeling for herself. “Oh, that. The doctor took a blood sample.”

“From your neck?”

“Don’t ask me why.” She smiled. “You look so sweet when you’re worried.”

“I’m not worried,” Harry said. “I’m jealous. This is my neck, and of course we know you’ve got a weakness for doctors.”

She laughed, and he held her closer.

“No,” she said.

“No?” he said, and heard her breathing suddenly get deeper. Felt her body somehow give in.

“Bastard,” she groaned. Rakel was troubled by what she herself called a “very short sex fuse,” and swearing was the most obvious sign.

“Maybe we should stop now,” he whispered, letting go of her. “The garden calls.”

“Too late,” she hissed.

He unbuttoned her jeans and pushed them and her pants down to her knees, just above her boots. She leaned forward and grabbed hold of the windowsill with one hand, and was about to take the sun hat off with the other.

“No,” he whispered, leaning forward so that his head was next to hers. “Leave it on.”

Her low, burbling laugh tickled his ear. God, how he loved that laugh. Another sound merged into the laughter. The buzz of a vibrating phone that was lying next to her hand on the windowsill.

“Throw it on the bed,” he whispered, averting his eyes from the screen.

“It’s Katrine Bratt,” she said.

Rakel pulled her trousers up as she watched him.

There was a look of intense concentration on his face.

“How long?” he asked. “I see.”

She saw him disappear from her at the sound of the other woman’s voice on the phone. She wanted to reach out to him, but it was too late, he was already gone. The thin, naked body with muscles that twined like roots beneath his pale skin, it was still there, right in front of her. The blue eyes, their colour almost washed out after years of alcohol abuse, were still fixed on her. But he was no longer seeing her, his gaze was focused somewhere inside himself. He had told her why he had had to take the case the previous evening. She hadn’t protested. Because if Oleg was thrown out of Police College he might lose his footing again. And if it came to a choice between losing Harry or Oleg, she would rather lose Harry. She’d had several years’ training at losing Harry, she knew she could survive without him. She didn’t know if she could survive without her son. But while he had been explaining that it was for Oleg’s sake, an echo of something he had said recently drifted through her head: There may come a day when I really need to lie, and then it might be handy if you think I’m honest.

“I’ll come now,” Harry said. “What’s the address?”

Harry ended the call and started to get dressed. Quickly, efficiently, each movement carefully measured. Like a machine that’s finally doing what it was built for. Rakel studied him, memorising everything, the way you memorise a lover you’re not going to be seeing for a while.

He walked quickly past Rakel without looking at her, without a word of farewell. She was already sidelined, pushed from his consciousness by one of his two lovers. Alcohol and murder. And this was the one she feared the most.

Harry was standing outside the orange-and-white police cordon when a window on the first floor of the building in front of him opened. Katrine Bratt stuck her head out.

“Let him through,” she called to the young uniformed officer who was blocking his way.

“He hasn’t got any ID,” the officer protested.

“That’s Harry Hole!” Katrine shouted.

“Is it?” The policeman quickly looked him up and down before raising the cordon tape. “I thought he was a myth,” he said.

Harry went up the steps to the open door of the flat. Inside, he followed the path between the crime-scene investigators’ little white flags, marking where they had found something. Two forensics officers were on their knees picking at a gap in the wooden floor.

“Where … ?”

“In there,” one of them said.

Harry stopped outside the door indicated by the officer. Took a deep breath and emptied his mind of thoughts. Then he went in.

“Good morning, Harry,” Bjørn Holm said.

“Can you move?” Harry said in a low voice.

Bjørn took one step away from the sofa he had been leaning over, revealing the body. Instead of moving closer, Harry took a step back. The scene. The composition. The whole. Then he went closer and started to note the details. The woman was sitting on the sofa, with her legs spread in such a way that her skirt had slid up to show her black underwear. Her head was resting against the back of the sofa, so that her long, bleached blonde hair hung down behind it. Some of her throat was missing.

“She was killed over there,” Bjørn said, pointing at the wall beside the window. Harry’s eyes slid across the wallpaper and bare wooden floor.

“Less blood,” Harry said. “He didn’t bite through the carotid artery this time.”

“Maybe he missed it,” Katrine said, coming in from the kitchen.

“If he bit her, he’s got strong jaws,” Bjørn said. “The average force of a human bite is seventy kilos, but he seems to have removed her larynx and part of her windpipe in one bite. Even with sharpened metal teeth, that would take a lot of strength.”

“Or a lot of rage,” Harry said. “Can you see any rust or paint in the wound?”

“No, but perhaps anything that was loose came off when he bit Elise Hermansen.”

“Hm. Possibly, unless he didn’t use the iron teeth this time, but something else. The body wasn’t moved to the bed either.”

“I see what you’re getting at, Harry, but it isthe same perpetrator,” Katrine said. “Come and see.”

Harry followed her back to the kitchen. One of the forensics officers was taking samples from the inside of the glass jug from a blender that was standing in the sink.

“He made a smoothie,” Katrine said.

Harry swallowed and looked at the jug. The inside of it was red.

“Using blood. And some lemons he found in the fridge, from the looks of it.” She pointed at the yellow strips of peel on the worktop.

Harry felt nausea rising. And thought that it was like your first drink, the one that made you sick. Two more drinks and it was impossible to stop. He nodded and walked out again. He took a quick look at the bathroom and bedroom before going back into the living room. He closed his eyes and listened. The woman, the position of the body, the way she had been displayed. The way Elise Hermansen had been displayed. And there it was, the echo. It was him. It had to be him.

When he opened his eyes again, he found himself looking directly into the face of a fair-haired young man he thought he recognised.

“Anders Wyller,” the young man said. “Detective.”

“Of course,” Harry said. “You graduated from Police College a year ago? Two years?”

“Two years ago.”

“Congratulations on getting top marks.”

“Thanks. That’s impressive, remembering what marks I got.”

“I don’t remember a thing, it was a deduction. You’re working at Crime Squad as a detective after just two years of service.”

Anders Wyller smiled. “Just say if I’m in the way, and I’ll go. The thing is, I’ve only been here two and a half days, and if this is a double murder, no one’s going to have time to teach me anything for a while. So I was wondering about asking if I could shadow you for a bit. But only if it’s OK?”

Harry looked at the young man. Remembered him coming to his office, full of questions. So many questions, sometimes so irrelevant that you might have thought he was a Holehead. Holehead was college slang for students who had fallen for the myth of Harry Hole, which in a few extreme cases was the main reason why they had enrolled. Harry avoided them like the plague. But, Holehead or not, Harry realised that with those grades, as well as his ambition, smile and unforced social skills, Anders Wyller was going to go far. And before Anders Wyller went far, a talented young man like him might have time to do a bit of good, such as helping to solve a few murders.

“OK,” Harry said. “The first lesson is that you’re going to be disappointed in your colleagues.”

“Disappointed?”

“You’re standing there all drilled and proud because you think you’ve made it to the top of the police food chain. So the first lesson is that murder detectives are pretty much the same as everyone else. We aren’t especially intelligent, some of us are even a bit stupid. We make mistakes, a lot of mistakes, and we don’t learn a great deal from them. When we get tired, sometimes we choose to sleep instead of carrying on with the hunt, even though we know that the solution could be just around the next corner. So if you think we’re going to open your eyes, inspire you and show you a whole new world of ingenious investigative skills, you’re going to be disappointed.”

“I know all that already.”

“Really?”

“I’ve spent two days working with Truls Berntsen. I just want to know how you work.”

“You took my course in murder investigation.”

“And I know you don’t work like that. What were you thinking?”

“Thinking?”

“Yes, when you stood there with your eyes closed. I don’t think that was part of the course.”

Harry saw that Bjørn had straightened up. That Katrine was standing in the doorway with her arms folded, nodding in encouragement.

“OK,” Harry said. “Everyone has their own method. Mine is to try to get in touch with the thoughts that go through your brain the first time you enter a crime scene. All the apparently insignificant connections the brain makes automatically when we absorb impressions the first time we visit a place. Thoughts that we forget so quickly because we don’t have time to attach meaning to them before our attention is grabbed by something else, like a dream that vanishes when you wake up and start to take in all the other things around you. Nine times out of ten those thoughts are useless. But you always hope that the tenth one might mean something.”

“What about now?” Wyller said. “Do any of the thoughts mean anything?”

Harry paused. Saw the absorbed look on Katrine’s face. “I don’t know. But I can’t help thinking that the murderer has a thing about cleanliness.”

“Cleanliness?”

“He moved his last victim from the place where he killed her to the bed. Serial killers usually do things in roughly the same way, so why did he leave this woman in the living room? The only difference between this bedroom and Elise Hermansen’s is that here the bedclothes are dirty. I inspected Hermansen’s flat yesterday when Forensics picked up the sheets. It smelt of lavender.”

“So he committed necrophilia with this woman in the living room because he can’t deal with dirty sheets?”

“We’re coming to that,” Harry said. “Have you seen the blender in the kitchen? OK, so you saw that he put it in the sink after he used it?”

“What?”

“The sink,” Katrine said. “Youngsters don’t know about washing up by hand, Harry.”

“The sink,” Harry said. “He didn’t have to put it there, he wasn’t going to do any washing‑up. So maybe it was a compulsive act, maybe he has an obsession with cleanliness? A phobia of bacteria? People who commit serial killings often suffer from a whole host of phobias. But he didn’t finish the job, he didn’t do the washing‑up, he didn’t even run the tap and fill the jug with water so that the remnants of his blood-and-lemon smoothie would be easier to wash off later. Why not?”

Anders Wyller shook his head.

“OK, we’ll come back to that, too,” Harry said, then nodded towards the body. “As you can see, this woman—”

“A neighbour has identified her as Ewa Dolmen,” Katrine said. “Ewa with a ‘w.’ ”

“Thanks. Ewa is, as you can see, still wearing her knickers, unlike Elise, whom he undressed. There are empty tampon wrappers at the top of the bin in the bathroom, so I assume that Ewa was on her period. Katrine, can you take a look?”

“The forensics officer is on her way.”

“Just to see if I’m right, and the tampon is still there.”

Katrine frowned. Then did as Harry asked while the three men looked away.

“Yes, I can see the string from a tampon.”

Harry pulled a pack of Camels from his pocket. “Which means that the murderer—assuming he didn’t insert the tampon himself—didn’t rape her vaginally. Because he’s …” Harry pointed at Anders Wyller with a cigarette.

“Obsessed with cleanliness,” Wyller said.

“That’s one possibility, anyway,” Harry went on. “The other is that he doesn’t like blood.”

“Doesn’t like blood?” Katrine said. “He drinksit, for God’s sake.”

“With lemon,” Harry said, putting the unlit cigarette to his lips.

“What?”

“I’m asking myself the same question,” Harry said. “What? What does that mean? That the blood was too sweet?”

“Are you trying to be funny?” Katrine asked.

“No, I just think it’s odd that a man we think seeks sexual gratification by drinking blood doesn’t take his favourite drink neat. People add lemon to gin, and to fish, because they claim it makes the taste more pronounced. But that’s wrong, lemon paralyses the taste buds and drowns everything else. We add lemon to hide the taste of something we don’t actually like. Cod liver oil started to sell much better when they began to add lemon. So maybe our vampirist doesn’t like the taste of blood, maybe his consumption of blood is also a compulsion.”

“Maybe he’s superstitious and drinks to absorb his victims’ strength,” Wyller said.

“He certainly seems to be driven by sexual depravity, yet appears able to refrain from touching this woman’s genitals. And that couldbe because she’s bleeding.”

“A vampirist who can’t bear menstrual blood,” Katrine said. “The tangled pathways of the human mind …”

“Which brings us back to the glass jug,” Harry said. “Have we got any other physical evidence left by the perpetrator, apart from that?”

“The front door,” Bjørn said.

“The door?” Harry said. “I took a look at the lock when I arrived, and it looked untouched.”

“Not a break‑in. You haven’t seen the outside of it.”

The other three were standing out in the stairwell, looking on as Bjørn untied the rope that had been holding the door open, back against the wall. It swung slowly shut, revealing its front.

Harry looked. Felt his heart beating hard in his chest as his mouth went dry.

“I tied the door back so that none of you touched it when you arrived,” Bjørn said.

On the door the letter ‘v’ was written in blood, about a metre high. It was uneven at the bottom where the blood had run.

The four of them stared at the door.

Bjørn was the first to break the silence. “V for victory?”

“V for vampirist,” Katrine said.

“Unless he was just ticking off another victim,” Wyller suggested.

They looked at Harry.

“Well?” Katrine said impatiently.

“I don’t know,” Harry said.

The sharp look returned to her eyes. “Come on, I can see that you’re thinking something.”

“Mm. V for vampirist might not be a bad suggestion. It could fit with the fact that he’s putting a lot of effort into telling us precisely this.”

“Precisely what?”

“That he’s something special. The iron teeth, the blender, this letter. He regards himself as unique, and is giving us the pieces of the puzzle so that we too will appreciate that. He wants us to get closer.”

Katrine nodded.

Wyller hesitated, as if he realised that his time to speak had passed, but still ventured: “You mean that deep down the murderer wants to reveal who he is?”

Harry didn’t answer.

“Not who he is, but what,” Katrine said. “He’s raising a flag.”

“Can I ask what that means?”

“Of course,” Katrine said. “Ask our expert on serial killers.”

Harry was looking at the letter. It was no longer an echo of a scream, it was the scream itself. The scream of a demon.

“It means …” Harry flicked his lighter and held it to his cigarette, then inhaled deeply. He let the smoke out again. “He wants to play.”

“You think the V stands for something else,” Katrine said when she and Harry left the flat an hour later.

“Do I?” Harry said, looking along the street. Tøyen. The immigrant district. Narrow streets, Pakistani carpet shops, cobblestones, Norwegian-language teachers on bikes, Turkish cafes, swaying mothers in hijabs, youngsters getting by on student loans, a tiny record shop pushing vinyl and hard rock. Harry loved Tøyen. So much so that he couldn’t help wondering what he was doing up in the hills with the bourgeoisie.

“You just didn’t want to say it out loud,” Katrine said.

“Do you know what my grandfather used to say when he caught me swearing? ‘If you call for the devil, he’ll come.’ So …”

“So, what?”

“Do you want the devil to come?”

“We’ve got a double murder, Harry, maybe a serial killer. Can it really get any worse?”

“Yes,” Harry said. “It can.”