Blessed Are Those Who Thirst: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel (11 page)

He was in love with his own appearance. He was a man. He had always wanted to look like this, especially when he was going through puberty as a skinny, cross-eyed boy on the receiving end of daily thrashings from other boys. His mother had not been able to prevent any of it. With breath reeking of mints and alcohol, she had tried despondently to comfort him when he arrived home with black eyes, scraped knees, and burst lips. However, she
stayed hidden behind the curtains rather than intervening when the hooligans in the neighborhood challenged both her and her boy by staging fights ever closer to the apartment block where he lived. He was aware of it, because when he had initially shouted up for help to the kitchen curtains on the first floor, he had seen the movement as she withdrew from the window. She always drew back. What she did not know was that the beatings were caused more by her than by his own puny appearance.

The lads in the street had proper mothers. The kind of cheerful, clever women who offered slices of bread with milk, some of them working, but none of them full-time. The others had annoying, sweet little siblings and, what’s more, fathers. Not all of them lived there; at the beginning of the seventies, the trend toward divorce had even reached the small town where he grew up. But the daddies turned up all the same, in cars on Saturday mornings, with sleeves rolled up, beaming smiles, and fishing rods in the trunk of the car. All except his.

The boys called his mother Alkie-Guri. When he was little, really little, he had thought his mother had such a lovely name. Guri. After Alkie-Guri was mentioned, he hated it. From that day to this, he couldn’t stand women with that name. He couldn’t stand women much in any case.

He survived puberty, barely, and the bullying diminished. He was seventeen and had grown eighteen centimeters in eighteen months. He did not have acne, and his shoulders had broadened. The squint had been repaired in an operation following which he had been required to go about with a humiliating patch over his eye for six months, not exactly increasing his popularity. His hair was blond, and his mother told him he was handsome. For the life of him he could not understand why Aksel, for example, had a girlfriend when no one would even look at him. Aksel was a slightly overweight, bespectacled classmate who, on top of everything else, was at least a head shorter than him.

They weren’t actually nasty but simply avoided him and occasionally threw sarcastic comments in his direction. Especially the ladies.

When the boy was in his second year of senior high school, Alkie-Guri lost her marbles completely. She was committed to a psychiatric hospital. He had visited her once, shortly after her incarceration. She was lying in bed then, festooned with pipes and tubes, with her head in the clouds. He had not known what he should do, what he should say. While he was sitting there, in silence, listening to her nonsense, the quilt had slid halfway off her body. Her nightdress was open at the front, and one breast, a skinny, empty sack of flesh with a dark, almost black nipple, had grimaced at him, like a staring, accusing eyeball. Then he left. Since that time, he had never seen his mother. That day he made up his mind about what he would become. No one would be able to torment him again.

Now he was sitting facing a computer screen, pondering deeply. The choice was not entirely easy. He had to restrict himself to the ones who were absolutely sure things. The ones who had nobody. The ones nobody would miss. Now and again he stood up and stepped over to a filing cabinet, taking out files and looking again at the little passport photograph fastened with a paper clip at the top of the first page. The passport photographs always lied, he knew that from bitter experience. However, they conveyed some inkling.

Eventually he was satisfied. He felt his excitement escalate, a real kick, as good as when he measured his muscles and realized he could expect an increase of at least one centimeter on his upper arms, compared with the last measurement.

It was an ingenious arrangement. And most ingenious of all was that he was fooling the others. Fooling and tormenting them. He knew exactly how things stood with them, the idiots in the Criminal Investigation Department at police headquarters. They were utterly bamboozled by these Saturday night massacres. He even knew that’s what they were calling them: Saturday
night massacres. He smiled. They didn’t even have the brains to decipher the clue he had left them. Cretins, all of them.

He rejoiced.

*   *   *

“Tell me, where are you hanging out these days?” Hanne Wilhelmsen asked, collapsing onto the visitor’s chair in Håkon Sand’s office. He was struggling with a quid of chewing tobacco that was leaking rather too much, and his upper lip formed into a peculiar convex shape as a safeguard against the undoubtedly bitter taste.

“I hardly get a glimpse of you, you know!”

“Court,” he mumbled, endeavoring to help the chewing tobacco back into place with his tongue. Having to give up, he stuck his index finger under his lip and pulled out the entire splodge. He shook his finger on the edge of the wastepaper basket, and wiped the remainder on his trousers.

“Pig,” Hanne Wilhelmsen muttered.

“I’ve got a hell of a lot of pressure at the moment, you see,” he said, disregarding the comment. “First of all, I’m in court just about every day. Secondly, I have to take my turn with other cases far too often, since people take an excessive amount of sick leave. I’m inundated.”

He pointed to one of the customary piles of green that polluted everyone’s existence at present.

“I haven’t even had a chance to look at them yet! Not so much as a glimpse!”

Leaning forward, Hanne Wilhelmsen opened a folder she had brought with her, setting it down in front of him. She drew her chair up to the desk, so they were sitting there like two friendly first-year pupils sharing a reading book.

“Here you’ll at least get to see something exciting. The Saturday night massacres. I’ve just spoken to Forensics. They aren’t finished yet, but the preliminary results are quite interesting. Look at this.”

She produced a rigid file with photographs attached, two on each page. There were three sheets, six photos in total. Small white arrows were affixed in two or three places on each photograph, taken from different angles. It was quite difficult to keep the folder open, as its stiffness and inflexibility were causing it to close continually. Lifting it up, she ripped the pages apart. That helped.

“This is from the first one. The woodshed at Tøyen. I requested three samples, taken from different places.”

What was the point of that? Håkon Sand wondered but said nothing.

“It turned out to be a damn good idea,” Hanne Wilhelmsen commented, reading his thoughts.

“Because here . . .”

She indicated the first picture, where there were only two arrows mounted.

“Here, it was human blood. From a woman. I’ve asked for a full analysis, but that’ll take some time.

“But here . . .” she continued, pointing to the second arrow, then leafing through to the next page and pointing at yet another arrow, on a picture containing three of the little indicators.

“Here we have something different, you understand. Animal blood!”

“Animal blood?”

“Yes. Probably from a pig, but we don’t know yet. We’ll find out soon.”

The sample of human blood had been taken from approximately the middle of the bloodbath. The animal blood had been situated on the periphery.

She folded up the file but remained sitting beside him without any hint of moving. They said not a word. Hanne noticed he smelled good, a faint scent of aftershave she did not recognize. Neither of them had any idea what the blood sample results might mean.

“If all the blood had come from an animal, the prankster theory
would have been considerably reinforced,” Hanne mumbled after a while, more to herself than to Håkon. “But now it turns out it’s not only from an animal . . .”

Glancing at the clock, she jumped.

“I must dash. Friday beer with my old buddies. Have a good weekend.”

“Yes, it’s sure to be a good one,” he muttered, feeling discouraged. “I’m on duty from Saturday through to Sunday. It’ll probably be mayhem. In this weather. I can’t remember what cold feels like, you know.”

“Have a good shift, then.” She smiled, heading for the door.

*   *   *

An occasional beer on Fridays with the old gang from police college, the summer party, and Christmas dinner. That was the contact she had with her colleagues, socially and outside office hours. Pleasant and rather distant. She parked her motorcycle, slightly doubtful about leaving it so exposed in the middle of Vaterland, but decided to put it to the test. For safety’s sake, she used both chains, coiling them through their respective wheels and attaching them to two conveniently positioned metal posts.

Then she yanked off her helmet, ruffling her flattened hair, and climbed the stairs to the questionable joint with the most eccentric location of any pub in the entire city—literally underneath an overpass.

It was almost half past four, and the others were well under way, on half liters number two or three, judging by the level of noise. She was welcomed with applause and deafening cheers. There were no other girls there. In fact, there was nobody other than the seven police officers on the whole premises. A tiny waitress of Asiatic appearance scurried toward them from the inner recesses.

“A beer for my lady friend,” bellowed Billy T., the monster who had frightened the wits out of Finn Håverstad that very morning.

“No, no,” she deflected him, and ordered a Munkholm.

One minute later a Clausthaler was sitting in front of her. It was obviously all the same to the waitress, though it certainly wasn’t for Hanne. But she made no protest.

“What’re you up to these days, babe?” Billy T. asked, putting his arm around her.

“You should get rid of that beard,” Hanne replied, tugging the gigantic red whiskers he had acquired in record time.

He pulled back his head, feigning offense.

“My beard! My beautiful beard! You should see my boys. They were scared to death the first time they saw me with it, but now they want one themselves, every single one of them!”

Billy T. had four sons. Every second Friday he drove around the city, stopping at four different houses to pick up his boys. On Sunday evening he drove the same route to hand over four dog-tired, delighted boys to the protective custody and control of their respective mothers.

“You, Billy T., you who know everything,” Hanne ventured after he, insulted by the comment about his beard, had released his grip on her shoulders.

“Ho-ho, what are you after now?” He grinned.

“No, nothing. But d’you know where you could get hold of blood? Huge quantities of blood?”

Everything was suddenly quiet, with the exception of one man in the middle of a good story who had not caught what she said. When he realized the others had, and were more interested in Hanne’s question than his joke, he clutched his glass and downed his beer.

“Blood? Human blood? What’s going on in your neck of the woods?”

“No, animal blood. Pig blood, for example. Or whatever, only it’s from an animal. One found here in Norway, of course.”

“Well, Hanne. That’s quite elementary. At a slaughterhouse, naturally!”

As though she hadn’t thought of that herself.

“Yes, I appreciate that, of course,” she said patiently. “But can anyone at all simply stroll in and collect whatever they want? Can you buy vast quantities of blood at a slaughterhouse?”

“I remember my mother used to buy blood when I was little,” the leanest of the police lads interjected. “She came home with horrible blood in a container, to make black pudding and stuff like that. Blood pancakes as well.” He grimaced at the revolting childhood memory.

“Yes, I know that,” Hanne said, still patient. “Some slaughterhouses still have blood for sale. But wouldn’t it raise eyebrows if someone came in asking for ten liters?”

“Is this these Saturday night massacres you’re working on?” Billy T. inquired, more interested now. “Have you been told it’s animal blood?”

“Some of it,” Hanne informed him, without going into greater detail about what she meant by that.

“Check with the slaughterhouses here in the city, then, whether anyone has demonstrated a noticeable interest in blood with a discount for quantity. That shouldn’t be too hard. Even for you lazybones in Homicide!”

They were no longer alone in the gloomy premises. Two women in their mid-twenties had sat down at the other end of the bar. Naturally it didn’t escape the notice of seven men in their prime. A couple of them seemed especially interested, and Hanne concluded they must be the two among them who didn’t have girlfriends at the moment. She took a quick peep at the women herself, and her heart sank. They were lesbians. Not that they had any characteristic, stereotypical appearance. One of them had long hair, and both of them looked fairly ordinary. Hanne Wilhelmsen, however, like all lesbians, possessed built-in radar making it possible to ascertain such things in a split second. When they suddenly leaned toward each other, discreetly exchanging a kiss, she was not the only one to know.

Hanne steamed. Public displays of affection drove her crazy, and it provoked her even more, if possible, that she had fallen into the trap of becoming so incensed.

“Carpet munchers,” whispered one of the police officers, the one originally most interested in the two newcomers. The others laughed boisterously, all except Billy T. Another, a fair-haired, broad-built guy Hanne had never actually liked but simply tolerated, was seizing the opportunity to embark on some coarse joke or other, when Billy T. interrupted him.

“Cut that out,” he ordered. “What those ladies are doing is none of our fuckin’ business. What’s more . . .”

A colossal forefinger pounded on his blond companion’s chest.

“What’s more, those jokes of yours are always so bloody awful. Listen to this one instead.”

Thirty seconds later they erupted into laughter again. A fresh round of beers arrived at the table, but for Hanne it was now simply a case of allowing an adequate amount of time between the unfortunate episode and her own departure from the scene. Half an hour would do the trick.