‘You’re joking, aren’t you? You’re not really that macho and childish?’
Falkeid grinned and shrugged.
‘You know what?’ Bratt had leaned closer, moistened her red lips and lowered her voice. ‘I kind of like that.’
Falkeid laughed. He was happily married, but if he hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have turned down a dinner date with Katrine Bratt and a chance to look into those dark, dangerous eyes and listen to those rolling Bergen rrs that sounded like a growling beast of prey.
‘One minute!’ he said loudly, and the seven men lowered their visors in an almost perfectly synchronised movement.
‘A Ruger Redhawk, was that what you said he had?’
‘That’s what Harry Hole said he had in the bar.’
‘Did you hear that, men?’
They nodded. The manufacturer claimed that the plastic in the new visors could stop a 9mm bullet heading for your face, but not one from the larger-calibre Redhawk. And Falkeid thought maybe that was just as welclass="underline" a false sense of security seemed to have a debilitating effect.
‘And if he resists?’ Bratt said.
Falkeid cleared his throat. ‘Then we shoot him.’
‘Do you have to?’
‘Someone will no doubt come up with an opinion with the benefit of hindsight, but we prefer to be wise in foresight, and shoot people who are contemplating shooting us. Knowing that that’s OK plays an important role in our workplace satisfaction. Looks like we’re here.’
He was standing by the window. Noticed two greasy marks left by fingers on the glass. He had a view across the city, but couldn’t see anything, just heard the sirens. No cause for alarm, you heard sirens all the time. People got caught in house fires, slipped on the bathroom floor, tortured their partners, and that’s when you heard sirens. Irritating, nagging sirens telling people to get out of the way.
On the other side of the wall someone was having sex. In the middle of the working day. Infidelity. To spouses, to employers, probably both.
The sirens rose and fell over the buzzing sound of radio voices behind him. They were on their way, people with uniforms and authority, but without purpose or meaning. All they knew was that it was urgent, that if they didn’t get there in time something terrible would happen.
The air-raid siren. Now, there was a siren that meant something. The sound of doomsday. A wonderful sound that could make your hair stand on end. Hearing that sound, looking at the time, seeing that it wasn’t noon precisely and realising that it wasn’t a test. That was when he would have bombed Oslo, twelve noon. Not a soul would have run for the shelters, they’d just have stood there, staring up at the sky in surprise and wondering what sort of weather it was. Or they’d have lain there fucking with a guilty conscience, unable to act any differently. Because we can’t. We do what we have to because we are who we are. The idea of willpower allowing us to act differently from what’s dictated by who we are, that’s a misunderstanding. It’s the opposite, the only thing willpower does is follow our nature, even when circumstances make that difficult. Raping a woman, breaking down or outsmarting her resistance, running from the police, taking revenge, hiding night and day, doesn’t all this entail defying the obstacles in order to make love to this woman?
The sirens were further away now. The lovers had finished.
He tried to remember how it sounded, the alarm that meant important message, listen to the radio. Did they still use that one? When he was a boy there was one radio station, but which one should you listen to in order to hear that message, which must be incredibly important, yet not quite dramatic enough to mean that you had to run to the shelters. Maybe the plan made provision for them to take over all radio stations, for a voice to announce … what? That it was already too late. That the shelters were closed, because they couldn’t save you, nothing could. That what mattered now was to gather your loved ones around you, say your goodbyes, and then die. Because he had learned this much. That many people organise their entire lives to facilitate one single goaclass="underline" not to die alone. Few succeed, but the lengths people were prepared to go to because of this desperate fear of crossing that threshold without having someone to hold their hand. Ha. He’d held their hands. How many? Twenty? Thirty? And they hadn’t looked any less terrified or alone as a result. Not even the ones he had loved. Now, they obviously hadn’t had time to love him back, but they had been surrounded by love all the same. He thought about Marte Ruud. He should have treated her better, not let himself get dragged along. He hoped she was dead now, and that it had happened quickly and painlessly.
He heard the shower on the other side of the wall, and the radio voices on his phone.
‘… when the vampirist in some sections of academic literature is described as intelligent and showing no signs of mental illness or social pathology, that creates an impression that we are dealing with a strong and dangerous enemy. But the so-called “Sacramento Vampire”, the vampirist Richard Chase, is probably a more typical comparison when it comes to Valentin Gjertsen’s case. Both demonstrated mental disorders from an early age, bed-wetting, a fascination with fire, impotence. They were both diagnosed with paranoia and schizophrenia. Chase, admittedly, had taken the more common path of drinking animal blood. He also injected himself with chicken blood and made himself ill. Whereas Valentin as a boy was more interested in torturing cats. At his grandfather’s farm, Valentin hid newborn kittens, he kept them in a secret cage so that he could torment them without any of the adults knowing. But both Valentin Gjertsen and Chase become obsessional after they carry out their first vampirist attack. Chase kills all seven of his victims within the space of just a few weeks. And, just like Gjertsen, he kills most of them in their own homes, he goes round Sacramento in December 1977 trying doors, and if they’re open, he takes that as an invitation and goes in, as he explains later under questioning. One of his victims, Teresa Wallin, was three months pregnant, and when Chase found her home alone, he shot her three times and raped her corpse while stabbing her with a butcher’s knife and drinking her blood. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?’
Yes, he thought. But what you daren’t mention is that Richard Trenton Chase removed several of her internal organs, cut off one of her nipples, and collected dog shit from the backyard which he forced into her mouth. Or that he used one victim’s penis as a straw to drink the blood of another of his victims.
‘And the similarities don’t end there. Just like Chase, Valentin Gjertsen is coming to the end of the road. I can’t see him killing more people now.’
‘What makes you so sure of that, herr Smith? You’re working with the police, have you got any specific leads?’
‘What makes me so sure has nothing to do with the investigation, which I naturally can’t comment on, either directly or indirectly.’
‘So why?’
He heard Smith take a deep breath. He could see the absent-minded psychologist in front of him, sitting there taking notes. Eagerly asking about childhood, bed-wetting, early sexual experiences, the forest he set light to, and particularly the cat-fishing, as he called it, which involved getting his grandfather’s fishing rod, throwing the line over the beam in the barn, attaching the hook under the chin of one of the kittens, winding the line back until it was hanging in mid-air, then watching the kitten’s hopeless attempts to climb up and free itself.