‘He asked after you. He seemed upset that you’d left his mother on her own.’
Harry nodded and drank some coffee.
‘They often get angry and full of moral indignation at that age,’ Steffens said. ‘They shift the blame for anything that goes wrong onto their father, and the man they once wanted to become suddenly represents everything they don’t want to become.’
‘Are you speaking from experience?’
‘Of course, we do that all the time.’ Steffens’s smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
‘Hm. Can I ask a personal question, Steffens?’
‘By all means.’
‘Does it end up positive?’
‘Sorry?’
‘The joy of saving lives minus the despair at losing people you could have saved.’
Steffens looked Harry in the eye. Perhaps it was the situation, two men sitting opposite each other in a largely darkened room, that made it a natural question. Ships passing in the night. Steffens took his glasses off and ran his hands over his face as if to wipe the tiredness away. He shook his head. ‘No.’
‘But you still do it.’
‘It’s a calling.’
‘Yes, I saw the crucifix in your office. You believe in callings.’
‘I think you do too, Hole. I’ve seen you. Maybe not a calling from God, but you still feel it all the same.’
Harry looked down at his cup. Steffens was right about the coffee being intriguingly bad. ‘Does that mean you don’t like your job?’
‘I hate my job,’ the senior consultant smiled. ‘If it had been up to me, I’d have chosen to be a concert pianist.’
‘You’re a good pianist?’
‘That’s the curse, isn’t it? When you’re not good at what you love, and good at something you hate.’
Harry nodded. ‘That’s the curse. We do jobs where we can be useful.’
‘And the lie is that there’s a reward for someone who follows a calling.’
‘Perhaps sometimes the work in itself is reward enough.’
‘Only for the concert pianist who loves music, or the executioner who loves blood.’ Steffens pointed to the name badge on his white coat. ‘I was born and raised a Mormon in Salt Lake City, and I’m named after John Doyle Lee, a God-fearing, peace-loving man who in 1857 was ordered by the elders of his parish to massacre a group of ungodly immigrants who had strayed into their territory. He wrote about his torments in his diary, about the terrible calling that fate had dealt him, but that he simply had to accept it.’
‘The Mountain Meadows massacre.’
‘So, you know your history, Hole.’
‘I studied serial murders at the FBI, and we went through the most famous mass killings as well. I have to confess that I don’t remember what happened to your namesake.’
Steffens looked at his watch. ‘Hopefully his reward was waiting in heaven, because on earth everyone betrayed John Doyle Lee, including our spiritual leader, Brigham Young. John Doyle was sentenced to death. But my father still thought he had set an example worth following, abandoning the cheap love of your fellows in favour of following a calling you hate.’
‘Maybe he didn’t hate it as much as he claimed.’
‘How do you mean?’
Harry shrugged. ‘An alcoholic hates and curses drink because it ruins his life. But at the same time it is his life.’
‘Interesting analogy.’ Steffens stood up, went over to the window and pulled the curtains open. ‘What about you, Hole? Is your calling still ruining your life, even though it is your life?’
Harry shaded his eyes and tried to look at Steffens, but was blinded by the sudden light. ‘Are you still a Mormon?’
‘Are you still working on the case?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘We don’t have a choice, do we? I need to get back to work, Harry.’
When Steffens had gone Harry called Gunnar Hagen’s number.
‘Hello, boss, I need a police guard at Ullevål Hospital,’ he said. ‘Immediately.’
Wyller was standing where he had been told to, beside the bonnet of the car, which was parked untidily in front of the main entrance.
‘I saw a police officer arrive,’ he said. ‘Everything OK?’
‘We’re putting a guard outside her door,’ Harry said, getting in the passenger seat.
Wyller tucked his pistol back in his holster and got in behind the wheel. ‘And Valentin?’
‘God knows.’
Harry took the strand of hair from his pocket. ‘This is probably just paranoia, but get Forensics to do an urgent analysis of this, just to rule out the possibility that it matches anything from the crime scenes, OK?’
They glided through the streets. It was like spooling back a slow-motion replay of their frantic drive twenty minutes earlier.
‘Do Mormons actually use crucifixes?’ Harry asked.
‘No,’ Wyller said. ‘They believe the cross symbolises death and is heathen. They believe in the resurrection.’
‘Hm. So a Mormon with a crucifix on his wall would be like …’
‘A Muslim with a drawing of Muhammad.’
‘Exactly.’ Harry turned the radio up. The White Stripes. ‘Blue Orchid’. Guitars and drums. Sparseness. Clarity.
He turned it up even louder, without knowing what it was he was trying to drown out.
Hallstein Smith was twiddling his thumbs. He was alone in the boiler room, and without the others there wasn’t a great deal he could do. He had completed his concise profile of the vampirist, and had surfed the Net reading the most recent articles about the vampirist murders. Then he had gone back and read what the media had written during the five days that had passed since the first murder. Hallstein Smith was wondering if he should make the most of the time to work on his PhD thesis when his phone rang.
‘Hello?’
‘Smith?’ a woman’s voice said. ‘This is Mona Daa from VG.’
‘Oh?’
‘You sound surprised.’
‘Only because I didn’t think we had any coverage down here.’
‘Speaking of coverage, can you confirm that the vampirist is probably responsible for the disappearance of a female member of staff from Schrøder’s Restaurant last night?’
‘Confirm? Me?’
‘Yes, you work for the police now, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I suppose so, but I’m not in a position to say anything at all.’
‘Because you don’t know or because you can’t say?’
‘Both, perhaps. If I were to say something, it would have to be something general. As an expert on vampirism, in other words.’
‘Great! Because I’ve got a podcast—’
‘A what?’
‘Radio. VG has its own radio station.’
‘Oh, OK.’
‘Could we invite you in to talk about the vampirist? In general terms, of course.’
Hallstein Smith thought about it. ‘I’d have to get permission from the lead detective.’
‘Good, I’ll wait to hear from you. On a different subject, Smith. I wrote that piece about you. Which I assume you were happy with. Seeing as it did indirectly get you to the centre of the action.’
‘Yes. Sure.’
‘In return, could you tell me who at Police HQ lured me out to the container terminal yesterday?’
‘Lured you to do what?’
‘Never mind. Have a good day.’
Hallstein Smith was left staring at his phone. Container terminal? What was she talking about?
Truls Berntsen let his eyes roam across the rows of pictures of Megan Fox on his computer. It was almost frightening, the way she’d let herself go. Was it just the pictures or the fact that she’d turned thirty? Or knowing what childbirth must have done to the body that had defined perfection in the 2007 film Transformers? Or was it the fact that he himself had lost eight kilos of fat in the past two years, replacing them with four kilos of muscle and nine women fucked? Had that made his distant dreams of Megan Fox that bit less distant? The way one light year is less than two. Or was it simply the fact that in ten hours’ time he would be sitting with Ulla Bellman, the only woman he had ever lusted after more than Megan Fox?