Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

‘When did you last see Elise?’ Wyller asked.

The three girls looked at each other again. ‘ We didn’t see her, but …’

One of them giggled, then clapped her hand to her mouth when she realised how inappropriate that was. The girl who had opened the door to them cleared her throat. ‘Enrique rang this morning and said he and Alfa stopped for a pee down in the archway on their way home.’

‘They’re, like, really stupid,’ the tallest of them said.

‘They were just a bit drunk,’ the third one said. She giggled again.

The girl who had opened the door shot the other two a pull-yourselves-together look. ‘Whatever. A woman walked in while they were standing there, and they called to say sorry in case their behaviour made us look bad.’

‘Which was pretty considerate of them,’ Wyller said. ‘And they think this woman was …?’

‘They know . They read online that ‘a woman in her thirties’ had been murdered, and saw the picture of the front of our building, so they googled and found a photo of her in one of the online papers.’

Truls grunted. He hated journalists. Fucking scavengers, the lot of them. He went over to the window and looked down at the street. And there they were, on the other side of the police cordon, with the long lenses of their cameras that made Truls think of vultures’ beaks when they held them in front of their faces in the hope of getting a glimpse of the body when it was carried out. Beside the waiting ambulance stood a guy in a Rasta hat with green, yellow and red stripes, talking to his white-clad colleagues. Bjørn Holm, from the Criminal Forensics Unit. He nodded to his people, then disappeared back inside the building again. There was something hunched, huddled about Holm’s posture, as if he had stomach ache, and Truls wondered if it had anything to do with the rumours that the fish-eyed, moon-faced bumpkin had recently been dumped by Katrine Bratt. Good. Someone else could experience what it felt like to be ripped to shreds. Wyller’s high-pitched voice buzzed in the background: ‘So their names are Enrique and …?’

‘No, no!’ The girls laughed. ‘Henrik. And Alf.’

Truls caught Wyller’s eye and nodded towards the door.

‘Thanks a lot, girls, that’s all,’ Wyller said. ‘By the way, I’d better get some phone numbers.’

The girls looked at him with a mixture of fear and delight.

‘For Henrik and Alf,’ he added with a wry smile.

Katrine was standing in the bedroom behind the forensics medical officer, who was crouched by the bed. Elise Hermansen was lying on her back on top of the duvet. But the blood on her blouse was distributed in a way that showed she had been standing upright when the blood gushed out. She had probably been standing in front of the mirror in the hallway, where the rug was so drenched in blood that it had stuck to the parquet floor underneath. The trail of blood between the hall and the bedroom, and its limited quantity, indicated that her heart had probably stopped beating out in the hallway. Based on body temperature and rigor mortis, the forensics officer had estimated the time of death at between 2300 hours and one o’clock in the morning, and that the cause of death was probably loss of blood after her carotid artery was punctured by one or more of the incisions on the side of her throat, just above the left shoulder.

Her trousers and knickers were pulled down to her ankles.

‘I’ve scraped and cut her nails, but I can’t see any traces of skin with the naked eye,’ the forensics officer said.

‘When did you lot start doing Forensics’ work for them?’ Katrine asked.

‘When Bjørn told us to,’ she replied. ‘He asked so nicely.’

‘Really? Any other injuries?’

‘She’s got a scratch on her lower left arm, and a splinter of wood on the inside of her left middle finger.’

‘Any signs of sexual assault?’

‘No visible sign of violence to the genitals, but there’s this …’ She held a magnifying glass above the body’s stomach. Katrine looked through it and saw a thin, shiny line. ‘Could be saliva, her own or someone else’s, but it looks more like precum or semen.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ Katrine said.

‘Let’s hope she was sexually assaulted?’ Bjørn Holm had walked in and was standing behind her.

‘If she was, all the evidence suggests that it happened post-mortem,’ Katrine said without turning round. ‘So she was already gone by then. And I’d really like some semen.’

‘I was joking,’ Bjørn said quietly in his amiable Toten dialect.

Katrine closed her eyes. Of course he knew that semen was the ultimate ‘open sesame’ in a case like this. And of course he was only joking, trying to lighten the weird, wounded atmosphere that had existed between them in the three months that had passed since she had moved out. She was trying, too. She just couldn’t quite manage it.

The forensics officer looked up at them. ‘I’m done here,’ she said, adjusting her hijab.

‘The ambulance is here – I’ll get my people to take the body down,’ Bjørn said. ‘Thanks for your help, Zahra.’

The forensics officer nodded and hurried out, as if she had also noticed the strained atmosphere.

‘Well?’ Katrine said, forcing herself to look at Bjørn. Forcing herself to ignore the sombre look in his eyes that was more sad than pleading.

‘There’s not much to say,’ he said, scratching the bushy red beard that stuck out below his Rasta hat.

Katrine waited, hoping that they were still talking about the murder.

‘She doesn’t seem to have been particularly bothered about housework. We’ve found hairs from a whole load of people – mainly men – and it’s hardly likely that they were all here last night.’

‘She was a lawyer,’ Katrine said. ‘A single woman with a demanding job like that might not prioritise cleaning as highly as you.’

He smiled briefly without responding. And Katrine recognised the pang of the guilty conscience he always managed to give her. Obviously they had never argued about cleaning, Bjørn had always been too quick to deal with the washing-up, sweeping the steps, putting the clothes in the machine, cleaning the bath and airing the sheets, without any reproach or discussion. Like everything else. Not one single damn argument during the whole year they had lived together, he always wriggled out of them. And whenever she let him down or just couldn’t be bothered, he was there, attentive, sacrificial, inexhaustible, like some fucking irritating robot who made her feel more like a pea-brained princess the higher he built her pedestal.

‘How do you know that the hairs come from men?’ she sighed.

‘A single woman with a demanding job …’ Bjørn said without looking at her.

Katrine folded her arms. ‘What are you trying to say, Bjørn?’

‘What?’ His pale face flushed lightly and his eyes bulged more than usual.

‘That I’m easy? OK, if you really want to know, I—’

‘No!’ Bjørn held his hands up as if to defend himself. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. It was just a bad joke.’

Katrine knew she ought to feel pity. And she did, to an extent. Just not the sort of pity that makes you want to give someone a hug. This particular type of pity was more like derision, the sort of derision that made her want to slap him, humiliate him. And that was why she had walked out on him – because she didn’t want to see Bjørn Holm, a perfectly good man, humiliated. Katrine Bratt took a deep breath.

‘So, men?’

‘Most of the hairs are short,’ Bjørn said. ‘We’ll have to wait and see if the analysis confirms that. We’ve certainly got enough DNA to keep the National Forensic Lab busy for a while.’