‘How much did the bitch pay you, Beavis?’
22
TUESDAY AFTERNOON
MEHMET PULLED THE bathrobe tighter around him. He stared at the screen of his phone and pretended not to see the men coming and going in the rudimentary changing room. The entrance fee to the Cagaloglu Hamam gave no time limit on how long you could spend in the baths. But obviously, if a man were to sit in a changing room for hours looking at other naked men, there was a risk he might become unpopular. That’s why he kept moving about at regular intervals, between the sauna and the perpetually fog-clouded steam room as well as the pools of varying temperatures, from steaming hot to cold. And there was a practical reason, too: the rooms were connected by a number of doors, so he risked not seeing everyone if he didn’t move around. But right now the changing room was so cold that he wanted to get back into the warm. Mehmet looked at the time. Four o’clock. The Turkish tattooist thought he had seen the man with the demon tattoo at the baths early in the afternoon, and there probably wasn’t anything to say that serial killers couldn’t be creatures of habit too.
Harry Hole had explained that Mehmet was the perfect spy. Firstly, he was one of only two people who stood any chance of recognising Valentin Gjertsen’s face. Secondly, as a Turk he wouldn’t stand out in a bathhouse that was mostly frequented by his compatriots. Thirdly, because Valentin, according to Harry, would have spotted a police officer instantly. Besides, they had a mole at Crime Squad who was leaking everything to VG and God knows who else. So Harry and Mehmet were the only two people who knew about this operation. But the moment Mehmet let Harry know he had seen Valentin, it would take less than fifteen minutes before he was on the scene with armed police officers.
And in return, Harry had promised Mehmet that Øystein Eikeland was the perfect stand-in at the Jealousy Bar. A guy who had looked like an old scarecrow when he walked through the door, with the smell of a hard but enjoyable hippie lifestyle clinging to his shabby denim clothes. And when Mehmet asked if he’d stood behind a bar before, Eikeland had stuck a roll-up between his lips and sighed: ‘I’ve spent years in bars, lad. Standing, kneeling and lying down. Never on that side of the counter, though.’
But Eikeland was Harry’s trusted choice, so he just had to hope that nothing too bad happened. A week at most, Harry had said. Then he could go back to his bar. Harry had performed a little bow when he was given the key, on a key ring with a broken plastic heart, the logo of the Jealousy Bar, and told Mehmet that they needed to discuss the music. That there were people over thirty who don’t get dandruff from new music, and that there was even hope for someone bogged down in the Bad Company swamp. The thought of that discussion alone was worth at least a week of tedium, Mehmet thought as he scrolled down VG’s website, even though he must have read the same headlines ten times now.
FAMOUS VAMPIRISTS IN HISTORY. And while he stared at the screen and waited for the rest of the article to load, something odd happened. It was as if he couldn’t breathe for a moment. He looked up. The door to the baths swung shut. He looked around. The other three men in the changing room were the same ones as before. Someone had entered and walked through the room. Mehmet locked his phone in his locker, got up and followed.
The boilers in the next room were rumbling. Harry looked at the time. Five past four. He pushed his chair back, folded his hands behind his head and leaned against the brick wall. Smith, Bjørn and Wyller looked at him.
‘It’s been sixteen hours since Marte Ruud went missing,’ Harry said. ‘Anything new?’
‘Hair,’ Bjørn Holm said. ‘The team at the scene found strands of hair by the main entrance at Schrøder’s. They look like they could be a match for the hairs we got from Valentin Gjertsen off the handcuffs. They’ve been sent for analysis. Hair suggests a struggle, and also that he didn’t clean up after himself this time. And that also means that there couldn’t have been too much blood, so there’s reason to hope that she was alive when they left.’
‘OK,’ Smith said. ‘There’s a chance she’s alive, and that he’s using her as a cow.’
‘Cow?’ Wyller asked.
The boiler room fell silent. Harry grimaced. ‘You mean he … he’s milking her?’
‘The body takes twenty-four hours to reproduce one per cent of the body’s red blood cells,’ Smith said. ‘At best, it might quench his thirst for blood for a while. At worst, it might mean that he’s even more focused on regaining power and control. And that he’s going to try again to find the people who’ve humiliated him. Which means you and yours, Harry.’
‘My wife is under police guard, round the clock, and I’ve left a message for my son telling him to be careful.’
‘So it’s possible that he might attack men as well?’ Wyller asked.
‘Absolutely,’ Smith said.
Harry felt his trouser pocket vibrate. He pulled out his phone. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s Øystein. How do you make a daiquiri? I’ve got a difficult customer and Mehmet isn’t answering.’
‘How should I know? Doesn’t the customer know?’
‘No.’
‘Something to do with rum and lime. Ever heard of Google?’
‘Of course, I’m not an idiot. That’s on the Internet, isn’t it?’
‘Try it, you might like it. I’m hanging up now.’ Harry ended the call. ‘Sorry. Anything else?’
‘Witness statements from people in the vicinity of Schrøder’s,’ Wyller said. ‘No one saw or heard anything. Odd, on such a busy street.’
‘It can be pretty deserted there around midnight on a Monday night,’ Harry said. ‘But getting someone, conscious or unconscious, away from there without being seen? Hardly. He might have been parked right outside.’
‘There’s no vehicle registered to Valentin Gjertsen, and no vehicle was leased under that name yesterday,’ Wyller said.
Harry spun towards him.
Wyller looked back quizzically. ‘I know the chances of him using his real name are pretty much zero, but I checked anyway. Isn’t that …?’
‘Yeah, that’s absolutely fine,’ Harry said. ‘Send the photofit picture to the car-rental companies. And there’s a twenty-four-hour Deli de Luca next to Schrøder’s—’
‘I was at the morning meeting of the investigative team and they’ve checked the security cameras there,’ Bjørn said. ‘Nothing.’
‘OK, anything else I should know about?’
‘They’re working in the USA to get access to the victims’ IP addresses on Facebook using a subpoena rather than going via a court,’ Wyller said. ‘That means we wouldn’t get the contents, but all the addresses of people they’ve sent and received messages to and from. It could be a matter of weeks rather than months.’
Mehmet was standing outside the door of the hararet. He had seen the door close as he emerged into the baths from the changing room. And it was in the hararet that the man with the tattoo had been seen. Mehmet knew it wasn’t very likely that Valentin would show up as soon as this, on the first day. Unless he came several times a week, of course. So why stand there hesitating?
Mehmet swallowed.
Then he pulled the door of the hararet open and went inside. The thick steam moved, swirled around, disappeared out through the door, opening a corridor into the room. And for a moment Mehmet found himself staring at the face of a man sitting on the second bench up. Then the corridor closed again and the face was gone. But Mehmet had seen enough.
It was him. The man who had come into the bar that evening.
Should he run out straight away or sit down for a while first? After all, the man had seen Mehmet staring at him, and if he walked out at once surely he’d get suspicious?