‘I’m sure that’s correct, Harry.’
‘I’ll come back to that, but let me first deal with something that is a mystery.’
Katrine sat up in her chair. She didn’t yet know what was going on, but she knew Harry, could feel the vibration of the inaudible, low-frequency growl that lay beneath his voice.
‘When Valentin Gjertsen goes into your barn at midnight, he weighs 74.7 kilos,’ Harry said. ‘But when he leaves, he weighs 73.2 kilos, according to the security camera footage. Exactly one and a half kilos lighter.’ Harry gestured with his hand. ‘The obvious explanation is, of course, that the weight difference is the result of the blood he lost in your office.’
Katrine heard the chairman’s discreet but impatient cough.
‘But then I realised something,’ Harry said. ‘We’d forgotten the revolver! The one Valentin had brought with him, and which was still in the office when he left. A Ruger Redhawk weighs around 1.2 kilos. So, for the sums to add up, Valentin had only lost 0.3 kilos of blood …’
‘Hole,’ the chairman said. ‘If there is a question to the candidate here …’
‘First a question to an expert in blood,’ Harry said, and turned to face the audience. ‘Senior Consultant John Steffens, you’re a haematologist, and you happened to be on duty when Penelope Rasch was taken to hospital …’
John Steffens felt sweat break out on his forehead when all eyes turned to look at him. Just as they had looked at him when he had been on the witness stand explaining how his wife had died. How she had been stabbed, how she had literally bled to death in his arms. All eyes, then as now. Anders’s eyes, then as now.
He swallowed.
‘Yes, I was.’
‘You demonstrated then that you have a good eye for estimating blood quantities. Based on a photograph from the crime scene, you estimated the amount of blood she had lost at one and a half litres.’
‘Yes.’
Harry took a photograph out of his jacket pocket and held it up. ‘And based on this picture from Hallstein Smith’s office, which was shown to you by one of the paramedics, you estimated the amount of blood here also to be one and a half litres. In other words, one and a half kilos. Is that correct?’
Steffens swallowed. Knew that Anders was staring at him from behind. ‘That’s correct. Give or take a decilitre or two.’
‘Just to be clear, is it possible for someone to get to their feet and escape even if they’ve lost a litre and a half of blood?’
‘It differs from individual to individual, but yes, if the person has the physique and determination.’
‘Which brings me to my very simple question,’ Harry said.
Steffens felt a bead of sweat trickle down his forehead.
Harry turned back to the podium.
‘How come, Smith?’
Katrine gasped. The silence that followed felt like a physical weight in the room.
‘I’ll have to pass on that, Harry, I don’t know,’ Smith said. ‘I hope that doesn’t mean that my doctorate is at risk, but in my defence I would like to point out that this question is outside the frame of my dissertation.’ He smiled, but garnered no laughter this time. ‘But it’s within the parameters of the police investigation, so perhaps you ought to answer that yourself, Harry?’
‘Very well,’ Harry said, and took a deep breath.
No, Katrine thought, and held her breath.
‘Valentin Gjertsen didn’t have a revolver on him when he arrived. It was already in your office.’
‘What?’ Smith’s laughter sounded like the cry of a lone bird in the auditorium. ‘How on earth could it have got there?’
‘You took it there,’ Harry said.
‘Me? I’ve got nothing to do with that revolver.’
‘It was your revolver, Smith.’
‘Mine? I’ve never owned a revolver in my life, you only have to check the firearms register.’
‘In which this revolver is registered to a sailor from Farsund. Whom you treated. For schizophrenia.’
‘A sailor? What are you talking about, Harry? You said yourself that Valentin threatened you with the revolver in the bar, when he killed Mehmet Kalak.’
‘You got it back after that.’
A wave of anxiety spread around the auditorium, and there was a sound of low muttering and chairs being moved.
The chairman stood up, and looked like a cockerel spreading his feathers as he raised his gowned arms to appeal for calm. ‘Sorry, herr Hole, but this is a disputation. If you have information for the police, might I suggest that you address it to the correct authorities and not bring it into the world of academe.’
‘Herr Chairman, opponents,’ Harry said, ‘is it not of fundamental importance to the examination of this doctoral thesis if it is based upon a misinterpreted case study? Isn’t that the sort of thing that’s supposed to be illuminated in a disputation?’
‘Herr Hole—’ the chairman began, with thunder in his voice.
‘—is right,’ Ståle Aune said from the front row. ‘My dear chairman, as a member of the adjudication committee, I am very interested to hear what herr Hole wishes to say to the candidate.’
The chairman looked at Aune. Then at Harry. And finally at Smith, before sitting down again.
‘Well, then,’ Harry said. ‘I would like to ask the candidate if he held Lenny Hell hostage in his own house, and if it was him rather than Hell who was directing Valentin Gjertsen?’
An almost inaudible gasp ran round the auditorium, followed by a silence so complete that it seemed to suck all the air out of the room.
Smith shook his head in disbelief. ‘This is a joke, isn’t it, Harry? This is something you’ve cooked up in the boiler room to liven up the disputation, and now—’
‘I suggest you answer, Hallstein.’
Perhaps it was the use of his first name that made Smith realise that Harry was serious. Katrine at least thought she saw something sink in as he stood there at the podium.
‘Harry,’ he said quietly, ‘I had never been in Hell’s house before Sunday, when you took me there.’
‘Yes, you had,’ Harry said. ‘You were very careful to get rid of the evidence from anywhere you might have left fingerprints and DNA. But there was one place you forgot. The water pipe.’
‘The water pipe? We all left our DNA on that damn water pipe on Sunday, Harry!’
‘Not you.’
‘Yes, me too! Ask Bjørn Holm, he’s sitting right there!’
‘What Bjørn Holm can confirm is that your DNA was found on the water pipe, not that it got there on Sunday. Because on Sunday you came down to the cellar when I was already there. Silently, I didn’t hear you come, if you remember? Silently, because you didn’t hit your head on the water pipe. You ducked. Because your brain remembered.’
‘This is laughable, Harry. I hit that water pipe on Sunday, you just didn’t hear it.’
‘Perhaps because you were wearing this, which cushioned the blow …’ Harry pulled a black woollen hat from his pocket and put it on his head. On the front of the hat was a skull, and Katrine read the name St. Pauli. ‘But how can someone leave DNA, in the form of skin or blood or hair, when they’re wearing this pulled down over their forehead?’
Hallstein blinked hard.
‘The candidate isn’t answering,’ Harry said. ‘So let me answer for him. Hallstein Smith walked into that water pipe the first time he was there, which was a long time ago, before the vampirist set to work.’
In the silence that followed, Hallstein Smith’s low chuckle was the only sound.
‘Before I say anything,’ Smith said, ‘I think we should give former detective Harry Hole a generous round of applause for this fantastic story.’
Smith started to clap his hands, and a few others joined in before the applause died out.
‘But for this to be more than just a story, it requires the same thing as a doctoral thesis,’ Smith said. ‘Evidence! And you have none, Harry. Your entire deduction is based upon two highly dubious assumptions. That some very old scales in a barn shows exactly the right weight of a person who stands on it for barely a second, scales that I can tell you have a tendency to stick. And that because I was wearing a woollen hat I couldn’t have left DNA on the water pipe on Sunday. A hat that I can tell you I took off when I was going down those steps before I hit my head on the water pipe, and put on again seeing as it was colder down in the cellar. The fact that I have no scar on my forehead now is because I heal quickly. My wife can also confirm that I had a mark on my forehead when I returned home.’