Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

He thought about Katrine Bratt. In her uniform.

That evening he would go to a bar. A popular, busy bar, not like the Jealousy Bar. It was against the rules to go out among people for anything but food, the baths and the agenda, but he would glide about in tantalising anonymity and isolation. Because he needed to. Needed to, to stop himself going mad. He let out a quiet laugh. Mad. The counsellors said he needed to see a psychiatrist. And of course he knew what they meant by that: that he needed someone who could prescribe medication.

He took a pair of freshly polished cowboy boots from the shoe rack, and looked for a moment at the woman at the back of the wardrobe. She was hung up on the pegs in the wall behind her, and her eyes stared out between the suits. She smelt faintly of the lavender perfume he had rubbed on her chest. He closed the door again.

Mad? They were incompetent idiots, the whole lot of them. He had read the definition of personality disorder in a dictionary, that it was a mental illness that leads to ‘discomfort and difficulties for the individual concerned and those around them’. Fine. In his case that merely applied to those around him. He had just the personality he wanted. Because when you have access to drink, what could be more pleasant, more rational and more normal than feeling thirsty?

He looked at the time. In half an hour it would be dark enough outside.

‘This is what we found around the injuries to her neck,’ Bjørn Holm said, pointing to the image on the screen. ‘The three fragments on the left are rusted iron, and on the right, black paint.’

Katrine had sat down with the others in the conference room. Bjørn had been out of breath when he arrived, and his pale cheeks were still glistening with sweat.

He tapped on his laptop and a close-up of the neck appeared.

‘As you can see, the places where the skin has been punctured form a pattern, as if she’d been bitten by someone, but if that was the case, the teeth must have been razor-sharp.’

‘A satanist,’ Skarre said.

‘Katrine wondered if it was someone who had sharpened his teeth, but we’ve checked, and where the teeth have almost gone through the other side of the fold of skin, we can see that the teeth don’t actually meet, but have slotted in perfectly between the other set of teeth. So this could hardly be an ordinary human bite, where the lower and upper teeth are positioned so that they meet each other, tooth for tooth. The fact that we found rust therefore leads me to think that the perpetrator used some sort of iron dentures.’

Bjørn tapped at the computer.

Katrine felt a quiet gasp go through the room.

The screen showed an object which at first put Katrine in mind of an old, rusty animal trap she had once seen at her grandfather’s in Bergen, something he called a bear trap. The sharp teeth formed a zigzag pattern, and the upper and lower jaws were fixed together by what looked to be a spring-loaded mechanism.

‘This picture is taken from a private collection in Caracas, and is said to date from the days of slavery, when they used to bet on slaves fighting each other. Two slaves would each be given a set of dentures, their hands would be tied behind their backs, and then they would be put in the ring. The one who survived went through to the next round. I assume. But to get back to the point—’

‘Please,’ Katrine said.

‘I’ve tried to find out where you could get hold of a set of iron teeth like these. And it isn’t exactly the sort of thing you can get through mail order. So if we were able to find someone who’s sold contraptions like this in Oslo or elsewhere in Norway, and who to, I’d say we’d be looking at a very limited number of people.’

Katrine realised that Bjørn had gone far beyond the usual duties of a forensics officer, but decided not to comment on the fact.

‘One more thing,’ Bjørn said. ‘There’s not enough blood.’

‘Not enough?’

‘The blood contained in an adult human body makes up, on average, seven per cent of bodyweight. It differs slightly from person to person, but even if she was at the low end of the scale, there’s almost half a litre missing when we add up what was left in the body, on the carpet in the hallway, on the wooden floor and the small quantity on the bed. So, unless the murderer took the missing blood away with him in a bucket …’

‘… he drank it,’ Katrine concluded, giving voice to what they were all thinking.

For three seconds there was total silence in the conference room.

Wyller cleared his throat. ‘What about the black paint?’

‘There’s rust on the inside of the flakes of paint, so it came from the same source,’ Bjørn said, disconnecting his laptop from the projector. ‘But the paint isn’t that old. I’m going to analyse that tonight.’

Katrine could see that the others hadn’t really absorbed the bit about the paint, they were still thinking about the blood.

‘Thanks, Bjørn,’ Katrine said, standing up and looking at her watch. ‘OK, about that bar crawl. It’s bedtime, so how about we send the people with kids home while us poor barren souls stay behind and split into teams?’

No response, no laughter, not so much as a smile.

‘Good, we’ll do that, then,’ Katrine said. She could feel how tired she was. And thrust her weariness aside. Because she had a nagging sense that this was only the beginning. Iron dentures and no DNA. Half a litre of missing blood.

The sound of scraping chairs.

She gathered her papers, glanced up and saw Bjørn disappearing through the door. Recognised the peculiar feeling of relief, guilty conscience and self-loathing. And thought that she felt … wrong.

THURSDAY EVENING AND NIGHT

MEHMET KALAK LOOKED at the two people in front of him. The woman had an attractive face, an intense look in her eyes, tight hipster clothes and such a finely proportioned body that it didn’t seem unlikely that she might have picked up the handsome young man who had to be ten years her junior. They were just the sort of clientele he was after, which was why he had given them an extra generous smile when they walked through the door of the Jealousy Bar.

‘What do you think?’ the woman said. She spoke with a Bergen accent. He had only managed to see the surname on her ID card. Bratt.

Mehmet lowered his eyes again and looked at the photograph they had put down on the bar in front of him.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘Yes, she was here. Yesterday evening.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘She was sitting right where you’re standing now.’

‘Here? Alone?’

Mehmet could see that she was trying to hide her excitement. Why did people bother? What was so dangerous about showing what you felt? He wasn’t particularly keen on selling out the only regular he had, but they had police ID.

‘She was with a guy who’s here a fair bit. What’s happened?’

‘Don’t you read the papers?’ her blond colleague asked in a high voice.

‘No, I prefer something with news in it,’ Mehmet said.

Bratt smiled. ‘She was found murdered this morning. Tell us about the man. What were they doing here?’

Mehmet felt as if someone had emptied a bucket of ice-cold water over him. Murdered? The woman who had been standing here right in front of him less than twenty-four hours ago was now a corpse? He pulled himself together. And felt ashamed of the next thought that automatically popped into his head: if the bar got mentioned in the papers, would that be good or bad for business? After all, there was a limit to how much worse it could get.

‘A Tinder date,’ he said. ‘He usually meets his dates here. Calls himself Geir.’

‘Calls himself?’