Penelope Rasch came to, and realised that she must have passed out. It had got darker. She was floating, and there was something tugging and pulling at her arms, something cutting into her wrists. She looked up. Handcuffs. And something on one of her ring fingers, shimmering dully.
Then she felt the pain between her legs and looked down just as he pulled his hand out of her.
His face was partially shaded, but she saw him put his fingers to his nose and sniff. She tried to scream, but couldn’t.
‘Good, my darling,’ he said. ‘You’re clean, so we can begin.’
He unbuttoned his jacket and shirt, pushed his shirt aside, revealing his chest. A tattoo became visible, a face screaming as soundlessly as her. He was thrusting his chest out, as if the tattoo had something to say to her. Unless it was the other way round. Perhaps she was the one on display. On display to this snarling image of the devil.
He felt for something in his jacket pocket, pulled it out and showed her. Black. Iron. Teeth.
Penelope managed to get some air. And screamed.
‘That’s right, darling,’ he laughed. ‘Just like that. Music to work to.’
Then he opened his mouth wide and inserted the teeth.
And they echoed and sang between the walls: his laughter and her screaming.
There was a buzz of voices and international news broadcasts on the big television screens that hung on the walls of VG’s offices, where the head of news and the duty manager were working on updates to the online edition.
Mona Daa and the photographer were standing behind the head of news’s chair, studying the image on his console.
‘I tried everything, but I just couldn’t make him look creepy,’ the photographer sighed.
And Mona realised that he was right, Hallstein Smith simply looked far too jovial, standing there with the full moon above him.
‘It’s still working,’ the head of news said. ‘Look at the traffic. Nine hundred per minute now.’
Mona saw the counter to the right of the screen.
‘We’ve got a winner,’ her boss said. ‘We’ll move it to the top of the website. Maybe we should ask the night editor if she wants to change the front page.’
The photographer raised his clenched fist towards Mona and she dutifully touched her knuckles to his. Her father claimed it was Tiger Woods and his caddie who had popularised the gesture. They had switched from the obligatory high five after the caddie had injured the golfer’s hand by high-fiving him a bit too enthusiastically when Woods pitched the sixteenth hole in the final round of the Masters. It was one of her father’s greatest regrets that Mona’s congenital hip defect meant she could never be the great golfer he had hoped. She, on the other hand, had hated golf from the first time he took her to a driving range, but because the standard was so comically low she had won everything there was to win with a swing that was so short and ugly that the coach of the national junior team refused to select her on the grounds that it was better to get beaten with a team that at least looked like it was playing golf. So she had dumped her golf clubs in the basement at her dad’s and headed for the weight room instead, where no one had any objections to the way she lifted 120 kilos off the floor. The number of kilos, the number of blows, the number of clicks. Success was measured in numbers, anyone who claimed otherwise was just scared of the truth and seriously believed that delusion was an essential fact of life for the average person. But right now she was more interested in the comments section. Because something had struck her when Smith said the vampirist didn’t care about the risks. That it was possible he might read VG. That he might post some sort of comment online.
Her eyes scanned the comments as they appeared.
But it was the usual stuff.
The sympathetic, expressing pity for the victims.
The self-appointed guardians of truth, explaining how a particular political party bore responsibility for a society that had produced a particular type of undesirable person, in this instance a vampirist.
The executioners, shrieking for the death penalty and castration the moment they got a chance.
And then there were the wannabe stand-up comedians whose role models had popularised the idea that anything could be joked about. ‘New band, Wampire.’ ‘Sell Tinder shares now!’
And if she did see a comment that looked suspicious, what was she going to do? Report it to Katrine Bratt & co.? Maybe. She owed Truls Berntsen that much. Or she could call the blond one, Wyller. Make him indebted to her. Even if you’re not on Tinder, you still swipe left and right.
She yawned. Walked over to her desk and picked up her bag.
‘I’m going to the gym,’ she said.
‘Now? It’s practically the middle of the night!’
‘Call me if anything happens.’
‘Your shift ended an hour ago, Daa, other people can—’
‘This is my story, so you call me, OK?’
She heard someone laugh as the door closed behind her. Maybe they were laughing at her walk, maybe at her provocative clever-girl-can-do-it-all-herself attitude. She didn’t care. She did have a funny walk. And she could do it all herself.
Lift, airlock, swing doors, then she was outside the building, its glass facade lit up by the moonlight. Mona breathed in. Something big was going on, she just knew it. And she knew that she was going to be part of it.
Truls Berntsen had parked the car beside the steep, winding road. The brick buildings below him lay silent in the darkness: Oslo’s abandoned industrial district, railway tracks with grass growing between the sleepers. And, further away, the architects’ new toy building blocks, Barcode, the playground of the new business world, in marked contrast to the sombre seriousness of the working life of the past, where minimalism was a matter of cost-saving practicality, not an aesthetic ideal.
Truls looked up at the house bathed in moonlight, up on the crest of the hill.
There were lights in the windows and he knew that Ulla was in there. Maybe she was sitting in her usual place, on the sofa with her legs tucked beneath her, reading a book. If he took his binoculars in among the trees further up the hill he’d find out. And if she was doing that, he’d see her brush her blonde hair behind one ear, as if she were listening out for something. In case the children woke up. In case Mikael wanted something. Or perhaps just listening out for predators, like a gazelle at a watering hole.
There was a buzz and a crackle and voices relaying short messages before disappearing again. The sounds of the city conveyed through a police radio soothed him more than music.
Truls looked at the glove compartment he’d just opened. The binoculars were tucked behind his service pistol. He had promised himself that he was going to stop. That it was time, that he didn’t need this any more, not now he’d found out there were other fish in the sea. OK. Monkfish, sculpins and weevers. Truls heard himself grunt. It was his laugh that had earned him the nickname Beavis. That, and his heavy lower jaw. And there she was, up there, imprisoned in that oversized, overpriced house with a terrace that Truls had helped construct, and where he had buried the corpse of a drug dealer in wet cement, a corpse that only Truls knew about, and which had never given him so much as one sleepless night.
A scraping sound on the radio. The voice from Emergency Control.
‘Have we got any cars near Hovseter?’
‘Car 31, in Skøyen.’
‘Hovseterveien 44, doorway B. We got a pretty hysterical resident saying there’s a madman in the stairwell assaulting a woman there, but that they daren’t intervene because he’s smashed the light on the stairs and it’s pitch-black.’
‘Assaulting with a weapon?’
‘They don’t know. They say they saw him bite her before it went dark. The caller’s name was Amundsen.’