‘Here are Lenny Hell’s emails to Valentin before the murders of Elise, Ewa and Penelope.’
The emails were short. Just the victim’s name, address and a date. The date of the murder. And they all ended with the same line. Instructions and keys in agreed location. Instructions to be burned after reading.
‘They don’t say much,’ Tord said. ‘But enough.’
‘Hm.’
‘What?’
‘Why do the instructions have to be burned?’
‘Isn’t it obvious? There were things in them that could lead people to Lenny.’
‘But he didn’t delete the emails from his computer. Is that because he knew that IT experts like you could reconstruct the correspondence anyway?’
Tord shook his head. ‘Nowadays it isn’t that simple. Not if both sender and recipient delete the emails thoroughly.’
‘Lenny would have known how to delete emails thoroughly. So why didn’t he?’
Tord shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘Because he knew that by the time we had his computer, the game would already be up.’
Harry nodded slowly. ‘Maybe Lenny knew that from the start. That one day the war he was waging from his bunker would be lost. And that it would then be time for a bullet to the head.’
‘Maybe.’ Tord looked at his watch. ‘Was there anything else?’
‘Do you know what stylometry is?’
‘Yes. The analysis of variations in writing style. There was a lot of research into stylometry after the Enron scandal. Several hundred thousand emails were made public so that researchers could see if they could identify their senders. They got a hit rate of between eighty and ninety per cent.’
After Tord had left Harry rang the number of VG’s crime desk.
‘Harry Hole. Can I speak to Mona Daa?’
‘Long time, Harry.’ Harry recognised the voice of one of the older crime reporters. ‘You could have done, but Mona vanished a few days ago.’
‘Vanished?’
‘We got a text saying she was taking a few days off and that her phone would be switched off. Probably a good move, that girl’s worked bloody hard over the past year, but the editor was pissed off she didn’t ask, just sent that short message and pretty much disappeared. Kids these days, eh, Harry? Anything I can help you with?’
‘No, thanks,’ Harry said, and hung up. He looked at his phone for a moment before slipping it into his pocket.
By quarter past eleven Bjørn Holm had got hold of the name of the man who had imported the Ruger Redhawk into Norway, a sailor from Farsund. And at half past eleven Harry spoke to his daughter on the phone. She remembered the Redhawk because she had dropped the heavy revolver, which weighed more than a kilo, on her father’s big toe when she was little. But she couldn’t say where it had gone.
‘Dad moved to Oslo when he retired, to be closer to us children. But he was ill towards the end, and did a lot of peculiar things. He started giving away lots of his possessions, as we discovered afterwards when we were trying to sort out his will. I never saw the revolver again, so he could have given it away.’
‘But you don’t know who to?’
‘No.’
‘You said he was ill. I presume that was what led to his death?’
‘No, he died of pneumonia. It was fast and relatively painless, thank goodness.’
‘I see. So what was the other illness, and who was his doctor?’
‘That was just it, we realised he wasn’t very well, but Dad always thought of himself as a big, strong sailor. I suppose he thought it was embarrassing, so he kept it secret, both what was wrong with him and who he saw about it. It wasn’t until his funeral that I heard about it from an old friend he’d confided in.’
‘Would that friend know who your father’s doctor was, do you think?’
‘Hardly, Dad just mentioned the illness, no details.’
‘And what was the illness?’
Harry wrote it down. Looked at the word. A rather lonely Greek term among all the Latin names in the world of medicine.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
39
THURSDAY NIGHT
‘I’M SURE,’ HARRY said into the darkness of the bedroom.
‘Motive?’ Rakel said, curling up beside him.
‘Othello. Oleg was right. First and foremost, it’s not about jealousy. It’s about ambition.’
‘Are you still talking about Othello? Are you sure you don’t want to close the window, it’s supposed to be minus fifteen tonight.’
‘No.’
‘You’re not sure if the window should be closed, but you’re quite sure who the architect behind the vampirist murders is?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re just missing that silly little thing called evidence.’
‘Yes.’ Harry pulled her closer to him. ‘That’s why I need a confession.’
‘So ask Katrine Bratt to call him in for questioning.’
‘Like I said, Bellman won’t let anyone touch the case.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
Harry stared at the ceiling. Felt the heat of her body. Would that be enough? Should they close the window?
‘I’m going to question him myself. Without him knowing that that’s what’s going on.’
‘Just let me remind you, as a lawyer, that an informal confession to you, one to one, has zero value.’
‘So we’ll have to make sure I’m not the only one who hears it, then.’
Ståle Aune rolled over in bed and picked up the phone. Saw who was calling and pressed the button to answer. ‘Yes?’
‘I thought you’d be asleep.’ Harry’s gruff voice.
‘And you still called?’
‘You’ve got to help me with something.’
‘Still you rather than us?’
‘Still humanity. Do you remember we talked about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?’
‘Yes.’
‘I need you to set a monkey trap during Hallstein’s disputation.’
‘Really? You, me, Hallstein and who else?’
Ståle Aune heard Harry take a deep breath.
‘A doctor.’
‘And this is a person you’ve managed to link to the case?’
‘More or less.’
Ståle felt the hairs on his arms stand up. ‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning that I found a hair in Rakel’s room, and in a fit of paranoia I sent it for analysis. It turned out that there was nothing suspicious about the fact that it was there, because it came from this doctor. But then it turned out that the DNA profile of the hair ties him to the scenes of the vampirist murders.’
‘What?’
‘And that there’s a link between this doctor and a young detective who’s been among us the whole time.’
‘What are you saying? You’ve got proof that this doctor and the detective are involved in the vampirist murders?’
‘No,’ Harry sighed.
‘No? Explain.’
When Ståle Aune hung up twenty minutes later, he listened to the silence in the house. The calm. Everyone was asleep. But he knew he wasn’t going to get any more sleep.
40
FRIDAY MORNING
WENCHE SYVERTSEN LOOKED out across Frognerparken as she used the step machine. One of her friends had advised her against it, saying it made your backside bigger. She evidently hadn’t understood the point: Wenche wanted a bigger backside. Wenche had read online that exercise only gave you a more muscular backside rather than one that was bigger and more perfectly formed, and that the solution was oestrogen supplements, eating more, or – simplest of all – implants. But Wenche had ruled out the last, because one of her principles was keeping her body natural, and she had never – never – submitted to the knife. Apart from getting her bust fixed, of course, but that didn’t count. And she was a woman of principle. That was why she had never been unfaithful to herr Syvertsen, in spite of all the offers she got, particularly in gyms like this. It was often young men, who took her for a cougar on the prowl. But Wenche had always preferred men who were more mature. Not as old as the wrinkled, battered old man on the cycle beside her, but like her neighbour. Harry Hole. Men who were inferior to her intellectually and in terms of maturity were actually a turn-off, she needed men who could stimulate her, entertain her, spiritually as well as in material terms. It really was that simple, there was no point pretending otherwise. And herr Syvertsen had done a good job of the last of these. But Harry was unavailable, apparently. And then there was that business of her principles, too. Besides, herr Syvertsen had become unreasonably jealous and had threatened to interfere with her privileges and lifestyle on the few occasions he had found out that she had been unfaithful. Which of course was before she had established the principle of not being unfaithful.