‘I’m not worried,’ Harry said. ‘I’m jealous. This is my neck, and of course we know you’ve got a weakness for doctors.’
She laughed, and he held her closer.
‘No,’ she said.
‘No?’ he said, and heard her breathing suddenly get deeper. Felt her body somehow give in.
‘Bastard,’ she groaned. Rakel was troubled by what she herself called a ‘very short sex fuse’, and swearing was the most obvious sign.
‘Maybe we should stop now,’ he whispered, letting go of her. ‘The garden calls.’
‘Too late,’ she hissed.
He unbuttoned her jeans and pushed them and her pants down to her knees, just above her boots. She leaned forward and grabbed hold of the windowsill with one hand, and was about to take the sun hat off with the other.
‘No,’ he whispered, leaning forward so that his head was next to hers. ‘Leave it on.’
Her low, burbling laugh tickled his ear. God, how he loved that laugh. Another sound merged into the laughter. The buzz of a vibrating phone that was lying next to her hand on the windowsill.
‘Throw it on the bed,’ he whispered, averting his eyes from the screen.
‘It’s Katrine Bratt,’ she said.
Rakel pulled her trousers up as she watched him.
There was a look of intense concentration on his face.
‘How long?’ he asked. ‘I see.’
She saw him disappear from her at the sound of the other woman’s voice on the phone. She wanted to reach out to him, but it was too late, he was already gone. The thin, naked body with muscles that twined like roots beneath his pale skin, it was still there, right in front of her. The blue eyes, their colour almost washed out after years of alcohol abuse, were still fixed on her. But he was no longer seeing her, his gaze was focused somewhere inside himself. He had told her why he had had to take the case the previous evening. She hadn’t protested. Because if Oleg was thrown out of Police College he might lose his footing again. And if it came to a choice between losing Harry or Oleg, she would rather lose Harry. She’d had several years’ training at losing Harry, she knew she could survive without him. She didn’t know if she could survive without her son. But while he had been explaining that it was for Oleg’s sake, an echo of something he had said recently drifted through her head: There may come a day when I really need to lie, and then it might be handy if you think I’m honest.
‘I’ll come now,’ Harry said. ‘What’s the address?’
Harry ended the call and started to get dressed. Quickly, efficiently, each movement carefully measured. Like a machine that’s finally doing what it was built for. Rakel studied him, memorising everything, the way you memorise a lover you’re not going to be seeing for a while.
He walked quickly past Rakel without looking at her, without a word of farewell. She was already sidelined, pushed from his consciousness by one of his two lovers. Alcohol and murder. And this was the one she feared the most.
Harry was standing outside the orange-and-white police cordon when a window on the first floor of the building in front of him opened. Katrine Bratt stuck her head out.
‘Let him through,’ she called to the young uniformed officer who was blocking his way.
‘He hasn’t got any ID,’ the officer protested.
‘That’s Harry Hole!’ Katrine shouted.
‘Is it?’ The policeman quickly looked him up and down before raising the cordon tape. ‘I thought he was a myth,’ he said.
Harry went up the steps to the open door of the flat. Inside, he followed the path between the crime-scene investigators’ little white flags, marking where they had found something. Two forensics officers were on their knees picking at a gap in the wooden floor.
‘Where …?’
‘In there,’ one of them said.
Harry stopped outside the door indicated by the officer. Took a deep breath and emptied his mind of thoughts. Then he went in.
‘Good morning, Harry,’ Bjørn Holm said.
‘Can you move?’ Harry said in a low voice.
Bjørn took one step away from the sofa he had been leaning over, revealing the body. Instead of moving closer, Harry took a step back. The scene. The composition. The whole. Then he went closer and started to note the details. The woman was sitting on the sofa, with her legs spread in such a way that her skirt had slid up to show her black underwear. Her head was resting against the back of the sofa, so that her long, bleached blonde hair hung down behind it. Some of her throat was missing.
‘She was killed over there,’ Bjørn said, pointing at the wall beside the window. Harry’s eyes slid across the wallpaper and bare wooden floor.
‘Less blood,’ Harry said. ‘He didn’t bite through the carotid artery this time.’
‘Maybe he missed it,’ Katrine said, coming in from the kitchen.
‘If he bit her, he’s got strong jaws,’ Bjørn said. ‘The average force of a human bite is seventy kilos, but he seems to have removed her larynx and part of her windpipe in one bite. Even with sharpened metal teeth, that would take a lot of strength.’
‘Or a lot of rage,’ Harry said. ‘Can you see any rust or paint in the wound?’
‘No, but perhaps anything that was loose came off when he bit Elise Hermansen.’
‘Hm. Possibly, unless he didn’t use the iron teeth this time, but something else. The body wasn’t moved to the bed either.’
‘I see what you’re getting at, Harry, but it is the same perpetrator,’ Katrine said. ‘Come and see.’
Harry followed her back to the kitchen. One of the forensics officers was taking samples from the inside of the glass jug from a blender that was standing in the sink.
‘He made a smoothie,’ Katrine said.
Harry swallowed and looked at the jug. The inside of it was red.
‘Using blood. And some lemons he found in the fridge, from the looks of it.’ She pointed at the yellow strips of peel on the worktop.
Harry felt nausea rising. And thought that it was like your first drink, the one that made you sick. Two more drinks and it was impossible to stop. He nodded and walked out again. He took a quick look at the bathroom and bedroom before going back into the living room. He closed his eyes and listened. The woman, the position of the body, the way she had been displayed. The way Elise Hermansen had been displayed. And there it was, the echo. It was him. It had to be him.
When he opened his eyes again, he found himself looking directly into the face of a fair-haired young man he thought he recognised.
‘Anders Wyller,’ the young man said. ‘Detective.’
‘Of course,’ Harry said. ‘You graduated from Police College a year ago? Two years?’
‘Two years ago.’
‘Congratulations on getting top marks.’
‘Thanks. That’s impressive, remembering what marks I got.’
‘I don’t remember a thing, it was a deduction. You’re working at Crime Squad as a detective after just two years of service.’
Anders Wyller smiled. ‘Just say if I’m in the way, and I’ll go. The thing is, I’ve only been here two and a half days, and if this is a double murder, no one’s going to have time to teach me anything for a while. So I was wondering about asking if I could shadow you for a bit. But only if it’s OK?’
Harry looked at the young man. Remembered him coming to his office, full of questions. So many questions, sometimes so irrelevant that you might have thought he was a Holehead. Holehead was college slang for students who had fallen for the myth of Harry Hole, which in a few extreme cases was the main reason why they had enrolled. Harry avoided them like the plague. But, Holehead or not, Harry realised that with those grades, as well as his ambition, smile and unforced social skills, Anders Wyller was going to go far. And before Anders Wyller went far, a talented young man like him might have time to do a bit of good, such as helping to solve a few murders.