Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

She heard shuffling footsteps behind the door to the basement, heard the lock turn and a man in a security guard’s uniform came out. He locked the door with a white key, turned round, caught sight of her looking down and seemed to start back in surprise.

He let out a laugh. ‘I didn’t hear you. Sorry.’

‘Is there a problem?’

‘There’ve been a few break-ins in basement storerooms recently, so the housing association have ordered extra patrols.’

‘So you work for us?’ Ewa tilted her head a little. He wasn’t bad-looking. And he wasn’t as young as most other security guards either. ‘In that case, could I maybe ask you to check my flat? I’ve had a break-in too, you know. And now I can see that there’s a light on, even though I know I turned everything off before I went out.’

The guard shrugged. ‘We’re not supposed to go into people’s flats, but OK.’

‘Finally, a man who’s useful for something,’ she said, and looked him up and down once more. A grown-up security guard. Probably not all that smart, but solid, safe. And easy to handle. The common denominator for the men in her life had been that they had everything: came from good families, were looking at a decent inheritance, education, a bright future. And they had worshipped her. But sadly they had also drunk so much that their mutually bright future vanished into the depths with them. Maybe it was time to try something new. Ewa half turned away and bobbed her hip rather provocatively as she went through her keys. God, so many keys. And maybe she was a tiny bit drunker than she had thought.

She found the right one, unlocked the door, didn’t bother to kick her shoes off in the hall, and went into the kitchen. She heard the security guard follow her.

‘No one here,’ he said.

‘Except you and me,’ Ewa smiled, leaning back against the worktop.

‘Nice kitchen.’ The guard was standing in the doorway, running his hand over his uniform.

‘Thanks. If I’d known I’d be having a visitor I’d have tidied up.’

‘And maybe done the washing-up.’ Now he smiled.

‘Yeah, yeah, there are only twenty-four hours in a day.’ She brushed a lock of hair away from her face, and stumbled slightly on her high heels. ‘Would you mind checking the rest of the flat while I mix us a cocktail. What do you say?’ She put her hand on the smoothie blender.

The guard looked at his watch. ‘I need to be at the next address in twenty-five minutes, but we’ve probably got time to check if anyone’s hiding.’

‘A lot can happen in that time,’ she said.

The guard met her gaze, chuckled quietly, rubbed his chin and walked out of the room.

He headed towards what he assumed was the bedroom door, and was struck by how thin the walls were. He could make out individual words being spoken by a man in the next flat. He opened the door. Dark. He found a light switch. A weak ceiling lamp came on.

Empty. Unmade bed. Empty bottle on the bedside table.

He carried on, opened the door to the bathroom. Dirty tiles. A mouldy shower curtain pulled in front of the bath. ‘Looks like it’s safe!’ he called back towards the kitchen.

‘Sit yourself down in the living room,’ she called back.

‘OK, but I have to leave in twenty minutes.’ He went into the living room and sat down on the sagging sofa. Heard the chink of glasses in the kitchen, then her shrill voice.

‘Would you like a drink?

‘Yes.’ He thought how unpleasant her voice was, the sort of voice that could make a man wish he had a remote control. But she was voluptuous, almost a bit motherly. He fiddled with something in the pocket of his guard’s uniform, it had got caught on the lining.

‘I’ve got gin, white wine,’ the voice whined from the kitchen. Like a drill. ‘A bit of whiskey. What would you like?’

‘Something else,’ he said in a low voice to himself.

‘What did you say? I’ll bring everything!’

‘D-do, Mother,’ he whispered, freeing the metal contraption from the lining of his pocket. He put it down gently on the coffee table in front of him, where he was sure she would see it. He could feel his erection already. Then he took a deep breath. It felt like he was emptying the room of oxygen. He leaned back in the sofa and put his cowboy boots up on the table, next to the iron teeth.

Katrine Bratt let her eyes wander over the pictures in the light of the desk lamp. It was impossible to tell that they were sex offenders just by looking at them. That they had raped women, men, children, old people, in some instances torturing them, and in a few cases murdering them. OK, if you were told what they had done in the most gruesome detail, you could probably see something in the downcast and often frightened eyes in these custody photographs. But if you passed them in the street, you would walk on without having the faintest idea that you had been observed, evaluated and hopefully rejected as a victim. She recognised some of the men from her time in Sexual Offences, but not others. There were a lot of new ones. A new perpetrator was born every day. An innocent little bundle of humanity, the child’s cries drowned out by its mother’s screams, linked to life by an umbilical cord, a gift to make its parents weep with joy, a child who in later life would slice open the crotch of a bound woman while he masturbated, his hoarse groans drowned out by the woman’s screams.

Half the investigative team had started to contact these offenders, those with the most brutal records first. They were gathering and checking alibis, but hadn’t yet managed to place a single one in the vicinity of the crime scene. The other half were busy interviewing former boyfriends, friends, colleagues and relatives. The murder statistics for Norway were very clear: in eighty per cent of cases the murderer knew the victim, and in over ninety per cent if the victim was a woman killed in her own home. Even so, Katrine didn’t expect to find him in that statistic. Because Harry was right. This wasn’t that sort of murder. The identity of the victim was less important than the act itself.

They had also been through the list of offenders that Elise’s clients had testified against, but Katrine didn’t think the perpetrator – as Harry had suggested – was killing two birds with one stone: sweet revenge and sexual gratification. Gratification, though? She tried to imagine the murderer lying with one arm round the victim after the hideous act, with a cigarette in his mouth, smiling as he whispered, ‘That was wonderful.’ In marked contrast, Harry used to talk about the serial killer’s frustration at never quite being able to attain what he was after, making it necessary to keep going, in the hope that next time he would manage it, everything would be perfect, he would be delivered and born again to the sound of a screaming woman before he severed the umbilical cord to the rest of humanity.

She looked at the picture of Elise Hermansen on her bed again. Tried to see what Harry could have seen. Or heard. Music – wasn’t that what he said? She gave up and buried her face in her hands. What was it that had made her think she had the right mentality for a job like this? ‘Bipolarity is never a good starting point for anyone but artists,’ her psychiatrist had said the last time they’d met, before he wrote a fresh prescription for the little pink pills that kept her afloat.

It was almost the weekend, normal people were doing normal things, they weren’t sitting in an office looking at terrible crime-scene photographs and terrible people because they thought one of the faces might reveal something, only to move on to looking for a Tinder date to fuck and forget. But right now she desperately longed for something to connect her to normality. A Sunday lunch. When they were together, Bjørn had invited her to Sunday lunch with his parents out at Skreia several times, it was only half an hour’s drive away, but she had always found an excuse to say no. Right now, though, there was nothing she would have liked more than to be sitting round a table with her in-laws, passing the potatoes, complaining about the weather, boasting about the new sofa, chewing dried-up elk steak as the conversation ground on tediously but comfortingly, and the looks and the nods would be warm, the jokes old, the moments of irritation bearable.