Mehmet and Sølle studied the picture. They both shook their heads.
‘You know what, forget the beer,’ Sølle said. ‘I just remembered I need to get home.’
‘As you can see, I’ve already poured it,’ Mehmet said.
‘The dog needs walking – give it to our police officer here, he looks thirsty.’
‘One last question, Sølle. In your witness statement, you said she told you about a stalker who had been following her and threatening men she was with. Did you get the impression that was true?’
‘True?’
‘It wasn’t just something she was saying to keep you away?’
‘Ha, right. You tell me. Presumably she had her own methods of getting rid of frogs.’ Geir Sølle’s attempt at a smile turned into a grimace. ‘Like me.’
‘And do you think she’d had to kiss a lot of frogs?’
‘Tinder can be disappointing, but you never give up hope, do you?’
‘This stalker, did you get the impression he was just a passing nutter, or someone she’d had a relationship with?’
‘No.’ Geir pulled the zip of his gilet all the way up to his chin, even though it was mild outside. ‘I’m going now.’
‘A man she’d had a relationship with?’ the bartender said, giving him his change. ‘I thought these murders were just about drinking blood. And sex.’
‘Maybe,’ Harry said. ‘But it’s usually about jealousy.’
‘And if it isn’t?’
‘Then it might be about what you said.’
‘Blood and sex?’
‘About winning.’ Harry looked down into the glass. Beer had always made him feel bloated and tired. He used to like the first few sips, but after that it just tasted dull. ‘Talking of winning. Looks like Galatasaray are going to lose, so would you mind turning over to The Sunday Magazine on NRK1 instead?’
‘What if I’m a Beşiktaş fan?’
Harry nodded to the corner of the top shelf in front of the mirror. ‘Then you probably wouldn’t have a Galatasaray banner up there next to that bottle of Jim Beam, Mehmet.’
The bartender looked at Harry. Then he grinned, shook his head and pressed the remote.
‘We can’t say with one hundred per cent certainty that the man who attacked the woman in Hovseter yesterday is the same person who killed Elise Hermansen and Ewa Dolmen,’ Katrine said, and it struck her how quiet the studio was, as if everything around them was listening. ‘But what I can say is that we have physical evidence and witness statements linking a specific individual to the attack. And because this person is already a wanted man, an escaped prisoner who was convicted of sex offences, we’ve decided to go public with his name.’
‘And this is the first time you’ve done that, here on The Sunday Magazine?’
‘That’s right. His real name is Valentin Gjertsen, but he’s probably using a different name.’
She saw that the presenter looked a bit disappointed because she’d said the name so quickly, without any build-up. He would clearly have liked to have had time to do a verbal drum roll beforehand.
‘And this is an artist’s impression that shows what he looked like three years ago,’ she said. ‘He’s probably had extensive plastic surgery since then, but it does at least give an idea.’ Katrine held up the picture towards the rows of seats containing the audience of some fifty or so people who, according to the director, were there to give the programme more ‘edge’. Katrine waited, saw the red light of the camera in front of her come on, and let the picture sink in with the people watching at home in their living rooms. The presenter was gazing at her with a look of satisfaction.
‘We would ask anyone with any information to call our hotline,’ she said. ‘This picture, his name and known aliases, as well as our phone number, can all be found on the Oslo Police District website.’
‘And of course it’s urgent,’ the presenter said, addressing the camera. ‘Because there’s a risk that he might strike again as early as this evening.’ He turned to Katrine. ‘At this very moment, even. That’s a possibility, isn’t it?’
Katrine saw that he wanted her help to implant the image of a vampire drinking fresh blood right now.
‘We don’t want to rule anything out,’ she said. That was the phrase Bellman had drummed into her, word for word. He had explained that, unlike ‘we can’t rule anything out’, ‘we don’t want to’ gave the impression that the Oslo Police had a good enough overview of the situation to be able to rule things out, but nonetheless chose not to. ‘But I have received reports suggesting that in the time between the most recent attack and the results of the analysis which has now identified him, Valentin Gjertsen may have left the country. It’s highly plausible that he has a hiding place outside Norway, a place he has been using since his escape from prison four years ago.’
Bellman hadn’t needed to explain this choice of words to her, she was a fast learner. ‘I have received reports’ prompted thoughts of surveillance, secret informants and thorough police work, and the fact that she was talking about a timescale when there would have been plenty of options for flights, trains and ferries didn’t necessarily mean that she was lying. The claim that it was plausible that he had been out of the country was defensible, as long as it wasn’t directly improbable. It also had the advantage of discreetly nudging responsibility for the fact that Valentin Gjertsen hadn’t been caught in the past four years onto ‘outside Norway’.
‘So how do you go about catching a vampirist?’ the presenter said, turning towards the second chair. ‘We’ve brought in Hallstein Smith, a professor of psychology and author of a series of articles about vampirism. Can you answer that for us, Professor Smith?’
Katrine looked at Smith, who had sat down on the third chair off-camera. He was wearing large glasses and a fancy, colourful jacket that looked as if it was home-made. It was in stark contrast to the sombreness of Katrine’s black leather trousers, fitted black jacket and glossy, slicked-back hair. She knew she looked good, and that there would be comments and invitations on their website when she checked later that evening. But she didn’t care, Bellman hadn’t said anything about how to dress. She just hoped that Lien bitch was watching.
‘Er,’ Smith said, smiling dumbly.
Katrine could see that the presenter was worried that the psychologist had frozen and was about to jump in.
‘To start with, I’m not a professor, I’m still working on my PhD. But if I pass, I’ll let you know.’
Laughter.
‘And the articles I’ve written haven’t been published in professional journals, just in dubious magazines dedicated to the more obscure corners of psychology. One of them was called Psycho, after the film. That probably marks the low point of my academic career.’
More laughter.
‘But I am a psychologist,’ he said, turning to the audience. ‘A graduate of Mykolas Romeris University in Vilnius, with grades well above average. And I have got the sort of couch where you can lie and look up at the ceiling for fifteen hundred kroner an hour while I pretend to take notes.’
For a moment it looked like the amused audience and presenter had forgotten the seriousness of the subject. Until Smith brought them back.
‘But I don’t know how to catch vampirists.’
Silence.
‘At least not in general terms. Vampirists are rare, and they come up to the surface even more rarely than that. Let me just point out, to start with, that we need to differentiate between two types of vampirist. One is relatively harmless – people who feel attracted by the myth of the immortal, bloodsucking demigod upon which modern vampire stories such as Dracula are based. This type of vampirism has clear erotic undertones and even drew comment from dear old Sigmund Freud himself. They rarely kill anyone. Then there are people who suffer from what we call clinical vampirism, or Renfield’s syndrome, which means that they’re obsessed with drinking blood. Most of the articles on this subject have been published in journals of forensic psychiatry, because they generally deal with extremely violent crimes. But vampirism as a phenomenon has never been acknowledged within established psychology, it gets rejected as sensationalist, an arena for charlatans. In fact it isn’t even mentioned in psychiatric reference books. Those of us researching vampirism have been accused of inventing a type of human being that doesn’t exist. And for the past three days I have wished that they were right. Unfortunately, they are wrong. Vampires don’t exist, but vampirists do.’