Blessed Are Those Who Thirst by Anne Holt Page B

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: Saturdaynight 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