Blessed Are Those Who Thirst: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel (17 page)

Finn Håverstad packed up his notes, stuffed them into his back pocket, and left to take a closer look at these two men.

*   *   *

Cecilie had accepted yet another evening at work for her partner without complaint. She was in excellent spirits. Hanne Wilhelmsen was not, however. It was almost seven o’clock, and she was sitting in the operations room with Håkon Sand and Chief Inspector Kaldbakken. The others had gone home. Although they were working on a case of the highest urgency, there was no need to keep people there all night.

Hanne Wilhelmsen, as was her wont, had sketched out the entire case. A flip chart was spread out in the middle of the floor.
The detective inspector had drawn a time line, beginning on May 8 and ending today.

Four Saturday night massacres in five weeks. None on May 29.

“It’s entirely possible, of course, we simply haven’t found it,” Håkon Sand declared. “It might have happened all the same.”

Kaldbakken looked as though he concurred, perhaps just to in order to go home. He was weary, and in addition had caught a summer cold that was not exactly making his airways any easier to cope with.

“There’s also another possibility,” Hanne said, rubbing her face vigorously. Approaching the narrow window, she stood watching the summer evening drift over the capital city. No one said anything for quite some time.

“Now I’m fairly certain,” she announced suddenly, wheeling round. “Something did happen on May twenty-ninth. But it wasn’t a Saturday night massacre.”

As she spoke, she became more animated, as though she were persuading herself rather than aiming to enlighten the others.

“Kristine Håverstad,” she blurted out. “Kristine Håverstad was raped on May twenty-ninth.”

No one attempted to dispute the fact, but neither did they understand what it had to do with this case.

“We must go,” she said loudly, practically shouting. “Meet me at Kristine’s address!”

*   *   *

It obviously could not be him, the first one, the man at Lambertseter. The car was not red. On the other hand, the old man on the first floor might have made a mistake. Although he had noticed a red car, E’s notes made it clear there had been several unknown cars parked at various times that night in the same area.

No, the most decisive aspect was the man’s appearance. At half past five he had arrived, driving. Finn Håverstad had seen
the car immediately, coming around a bend on a narrow road without asphalt in the quiet residential district. The car was newly washed, and the number plate could be read easily. Obviously busy, the man did not go to the bother of putting his car in the garage. When he emerged from the Volvo, Finn Håverstad was able to see him very clearly from where he stood, fifteen meters away with an unrestricted line of sight to the recently built house.

The man was the right height, around six foot one. But he was virtually bald, with only a dark circlet of hair around a large bald crown showing he had probably not been blond since boyhood. Furthermore, he was overweight.

One left. The man in Bærum. Finn Håverstad feared it would take time, and at worst, he would not be able to take a squint at the man that day. It was already past seven o’clock in the evening, and the likelihood was the man had long since come home from work. Håverstad had placed his own car in line with the others parked along the road, which had an average amount of traffic. The address was in a terrace, with a driveway from the street into a garage at every house on the row. When he arrived, he couldn’t decide where he should position himself. On foot he would probably draw attention to himself after a while, as the area was overlooked and most people were obviously heading somewhere. There was nowhere in the neighborhood where it would seem natural to spend time, no bench where he could sit with his newspaper, no playground where he could stand casually watching the children. Not that such a pastime would be such a good idea either, these days, he thought.

The problem resolved itself when a boy appeared and sat behind the wheel of a Golf parked with an excellent view of the driveway Finn Håverstad was interested in. As soon as the Golf departed, he sneaked his car into the empty space, and turning on the radio at low volume, he settled down to wait.

He had already started to hatch an alternative plan. He could ring the doorbell and ask about something. Or offer something for sale. Then he looked down at his attire and realized that by no means did he look like a salesman. Besides, he had nothing to sell.

At twenty to eight, the car arrived. A bright red Opel Astra. It had tinted glass, so Håverstad could not see the driver. The garage door had to be automatic, because as the Opel swung into the driveway, the door started to rise slowly. Slightly too slowly for the driver, who impatiently revved the motor in expectation of the aperture expanding sufficiently to enter.

Directly after the car disappeared into the garage, the man emerged, turning immediately to the opening. Håverstad saw he was holding a little gizmo in front of him, probably the remote control. The garage door slid down, and the man scurried across a little paved path toward the actual entrance of the terraced house.

It was him. It was the rapist. There wasn’t a shred of doubt. For one thing, he matched Kristine’s description, down to the minutest detail. Second, and far more important, Finn Håverstad could feel it in his bones. He knew the moment the man left the garage and turned around. He couldn’t have had more than a glimpse of his face, but it was enough.

The father of Kristine Håverstad, brutally raped in her own residence on May 29, knew who his daughter’s assailant was. He knew his name, address, and date of birth. He knew what kind of car he drove and what kind of curtains he had. He even knew he had recently cut his grass.

*   *   *

“Didn’t you go?” he asked, incredulous, when she arrived home just as the sun was taking its leave. “I thought you were going to the cottage?”

When she turned to reply, he was pained harder than ever. She looked like a tiny bird, despite her height. Shoulders slumped and eyes disappeared somewhere inside her skull. Her mouth had an expression that reminded him more and more of his dead wife.

It was unbearable.

“Sit down for a while, then,” he suggested, without waiting for her to explain the change of plan. “Sit down here for a while.”

He patted the sofa beside him, but she chose the chair directly opposite. He tried desperately to make eye contact, but it was impossible.

“Where have you been?” he asked, to no avail. He went to fetch her something to drink. Surprisingly enough, she turned down the glass of red wine he offered her.

“Have we any beer?”

Have
we
any beer. She was referring to them as belonging together. That was at least something. A second later he returned, having exchanged the stemmed glass for a foaming tankard. His daughter drank half the contents in one gulp.

She had patrolled the streets for hours, but she did not mention that. She had been in her own apartment but said nothing about that either. Moreover, she had found out who had done it. But she would not tell him that.

“Out,” she said softly instead. “I’ve been out.”

Throwing out her arms expressively, she stood with her arms extended and remained frozen in a despairing pose.

“What will I do, Dad? What on earth will I do?”

Suddenly she had a powerful urge to tell him what she had seen earlier in the day. She wanted to pour it all out over him, let her father take control, responsibility, put her life in his hands. She was preparing to speak when she noticed him bend forward suddenly, head between his knees.

Kristine Håverstad had seen her father cry twice before in her
life. The first time was a distant, blurred memory from her mother’s funeral. The other time was only three years before, when her grandfather died unexpectedly, out of the blue, only seventy years old, after a minor prostate operation.

When she realized he was sobbing, she knew she could not tell him any of it. Instead she sat facing him and lifted his large head on to her lap.

It didn’t last very long. He sat up abruptly, wiping away his tears, and cupped his hands carefully around her narrow face.

“I’m going to kill him,” he said slowly.

Many times had he threatened to kill her, and other people too, when he was really annoyed. It struck her how pointless it was to say such a thing when you didn’t mean it. For a dark, breathless moment she saw it plainly. This time was deadly serious. She felt terror stricken.

*   *   *

Agitated, Hanne Wilhelmsen had waited more than ten minutes for them, glancing at her watch every other minute while leaning against her parked motorcycle. When the others finally arrived at the newly renovated gray apartment building, the sky had a dark-blue, almost indigo hue, indicating that the following day would be equally radiant.

“Look at this,” she said when Kaldbakken and Håkon Sand, having managed at last to install the unmarked police car in a tiny space, approached the spot where she stood waiting fretfully beside the entrance. “Look at that name there.”

She pointed at the doorbell with its name tag untidily attached, just a scrap of paper taped on the glass.

“Asylum seeker. All on her lonesome.”

She rang the doorbell, but there was no response. She rang again. Still no answer. Kaldbakken cleared his throat impatiently, unable to fathom why he was required to travel here so late in the
evening. If Hanne Wilhelmsen had something important to impart concerning the case, she could have come out with it at the station.

They heard the echo of the doorbell one more time, without any movement inside. Hanne Wilhelmsen stepped onto the small patch of grass separating the wall of the building from the sidewalk, standing on tiptoe and stretching up to the shaded window. Nothing stirred inside. She gave up and made a sign that the two others should return to their car. Once seated, Kaldbakken lit a cigarette while waiting restlessly for an explanation. Slipping into the rear seat, Hanne Wilhelmsen leaned forward to her two colleagues, supporting her elbows on the front seats and resting her head on her folded hands.

“What’s this all about, Wilhelmsen?” Kaldbakken asked in an indescribably weary voice from the front.

It suddenly dawned on her she needed more time.

“I’ll explain it all later,” she said. “Tomorrow, maybe. Yes, definitely. Tomorrow.”

*   *   *

He knew who it was going to be this Saturday. Today he had made up his mind. She claimed to be from Afghanistan, but he knew for certain she was lying. Pakistani, he was sure, but prettier than they usually were.

He was in bed. Not at one side of the large double bed, but right in the middle so he could feel the join in the mattress hard against his spine. The quilts were on the floor, and he was naked. In his hands he held dumbbells, slowly and regularly pulling them as far apart as possible, and then letting them crash together on outstretched arms above his perspiring rib cage.

“Ninety-one,
puff.
Ninety-two,
puff.
”

He felt happier than he had in a long time. At ease, free, full of strength.

He knew exactly whom he was going to lay his hands on. He
knew exactly where he was going to do it. He also knew precisely what he was going to do.

Reaching one hundred, he heaved himself up into a sitting position. The massive wall mirror opposite showed him what he wanted to see. Then he headed for the shower.

*   *   *

For some reason, the idea of going home was not appealing. Hanne Wilhelmsen sat on a bench outside the police station at Grønlandsleiret 44, pondering life. She was exhausted, but not sleepy. Earlier it had been so clear to her there was some kind of connection between the Saturday night massacres and the rape of the sweet young medical student. But nothing was clear any longer.

She felt powerless to move from the spot. Their work of plotting and directing, sending troops here and there, in many ways felt effective. However, very little had come of it. The investigation was so technical. They were searching for hairs, fibers, and other specific clues. Every last drop of spittle was examined, and they received incomprehensible results from experts about DNA structures and blood types. Naturally, all that was necessary, but it was miles from being adequate. The Saturday man was not normal. In some ways there was intelligence behind his actions, a kind of absurd logic. He kept to a particular day of the week. If the hypothesis was true, that there were another three foreign women buried somewhere out there, then he was also rather smart. At the same time, he had chosen to put them on his trail by obliquely telling them whom he had mutilated.

Hanne Wilhelmsen had—in sharp contrast to the majority of her colleagues—some sort of respect for psychologists. She agreed that they spoke a lot of nonsense, but some of it made sense. It was obviously a branch of science, if not so terribly exact. On several occasions, she had ridden roughshod over opposition
to procure psychological profiles of unidentified criminals. She didn’t need that this time. As she leaned back on the bench, observing that it was now almost completely dark, it struck her that the harsh reality out there, in Europe, in the world, had long impacted criminality in Norway. They just didn’t want to acknowledge it. It was too frightening. Twenty years earlier, serial murderers belonged in America. For the past decade, people had been able to read about similar cases in England.

There were not many mass murderers in Norwegian legal history. The few who existed had crazy and sad histories. Colleagues in Halden had recently arrested one of them. Chance murders presumably committed by the same man, over a long period of time, apparently without any motive other than cash. Some years before, a young man had killed three people he lived with in a commune in Slemdal, because they had reminded him about thirty thousand kroner he owed in rent. The expert forensic psychiatrist had concluded that he was definitely not insane.

What was the Saturday man’s motive? She could only guess at that. From the textbooks she knew that criminals could possess a more or less subconscious desire to be caught.