Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

The lock shattered and the door was smashed in. The third man threw a flash grenade and Katrine Bratt covered her ears. The Delta men cast shadows across the corridor in the light from the flat that Katrine registered a fraction of a second before the two explosions that followed.

Three of the men disappeared inside with their MP5s against their shoulders, the fourth stood outside with his weapon trained on the doorway.

She took her hands away from her ears.

The grenade had knocked out Pink Floyd.

‘Clear!’ Falkeid’s voice.

The police officer outside turned to Katrine and nodded.

She took a deep breath and walked towards the door.

Went inside the flat. There was still smoke in the air from the grenade, but surprisingly little smell.

Hall. Living room. Kitchen. The first thing that struck her was that it looked so normal. As if a perfectly ordinary, clean, tidy person lived there. Who made food, drank coffee, watched television, listened to music. No meat hooks hanging from the ceiling, no bloodstains on the wallpaper, no newspaper cuttings about murders and pictures of the victims on the walls.

And the thought hit her. That Aurora had been wrong.

She looked in through the open bathroom door. It was empty, no shower curtain, no toiletries except one object on the shelf below the mirror. She went in. It wasn’t a toiletry. The metal was stained with black paint and red-brown rust. The iron teeth were closed, forming a zigzag pattern.

‘Bratt!’

‘Yes?’ Katrine went into the living room.

‘In here.’ Falkeid’s voice was coming from the bedroom. It sounded calm, measured. As if something was over. Katrine stepped across the threshold and avoided touching the door frame, as if she was already aware that this was a crime scene. The wardrobe door was open, and the Delta men were standing on either side of the double bed with their semi-automatics aimed at the naked body that was lying on top of it, its lifeless eyes staring up at the ceiling. It was giving off a smell that she couldn’t place at first, so she leaned a bit closer. Lavender.

Katrine pulled her phone out, rang a number and got an answer immediately.

‘Have you got him?’ Bjørn Holm sounded out of breath.

‘No,’ she said. ‘But there’s a woman’s body here.’

‘Dead?’

‘Not living, anyway.’

‘Damn. Is it Marte Ruud? Hang on, what do you mean, “not living”?’

‘Not dead, not alive.’

‘What …?’

‘It’s a sex doll.’

‘A what?’

‘A fuck doll. An expensive one, from the looks of it, made in Japan, very lifelike. At first I thought it was a person. Alexander Dreyer is Valentin, at least, the iron teeth are here. So we’ll have to wait and see if he shows up. Heard anything from Harry?’

‘No.’

Katrine’s gaze fell on a coat hanger and a pair of underpants that were lying on the floor in front of the wardrobe. ‘I don’t like it, Bjørn. He wasn’t at the hospital either.’

‘No one likes it. Shall we put out an alert?’

‘For Harry? What would be the point of that?’

‘You’re right. Listen, don’t disturb things too much, there could be evidence of Marte Ruud there.’

‘OK, but I have a feeling that any evidence has been cleaned up. Judging by the flat, Harry was right, Valentin is extremely clean and tidy.’ Her eyes went back to the coat hanger and underpants. ‘Mind you …’

‘What?’ Bjørn said.

‘Fuck,’ Katrine said.

‘Which means?’

‘He threw some clothes in a bag in a hurry and grabbed his toiletries from the bathroom. Valentin knew we were coming …’

Valentin opened the door. And saw who had been shuffling about outside. The cleaner, who had been bent over holding the key card to the door of his hotel room, straightened up.

‘Oh, sorry,’ she smiled. ‘I didn’t know the room was occupied.’

‘I’ll take those,’ he said, and took the towels from her hand. ‘And could you please clean again?’

‘Sorry?’

‘I’m not happy with the cleaning. There are finger marks on the window. Please clean the room again, let’s say in an hour?’

Her surprised face disappeared behind the door as he closed it.

He put the towels on the coffee table, sat down in the armchair and opened his bag.

The sirens had fallen silent. If it was them he had heard, perhaps they were inside his flat now, it wasn’t more than a couple of kilometres up to Sinsen, as the crow flies. It had already been half an hour since the other man had called to say that the police knew where he was and what name he was using, that he had to get out. Valentin had packed only the most important things, and left the car there seeing as they had the name it was registered under.

He took the folder out of the bag and leafed through it. Looked at the pictures, addresses. And he realised that for the first time in a very long while, he didn’t know what to do.

He heard the psychologist’s voice inside his ear.

‘… just a wretched pervert who’s now so out of control that he’s going to make a big mistake very soon .’

Valentin Gjertsen stood up and undressed. Picked up the towels and went into the bathroom. Turned on the hot water in the shower. Stood in front of the mirror, waiting for the water to get scalding hot as he watched the condensation spread across the mirror. He looked at the tattoo. Heard his phone start to ring and knew it was him. Reason. Salvation. With new instructions, new orders. Should he ignore it? Was it time to cut the umbilical cord, the lifeline? Time to break free entirely?

He filled his lungs. And screamed.

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON

‘SEX DOLLS ARE nothing new,’ Smith said, looking down at the plastic and silicon woman on the bed. ‘When the Dutch ruled the seven seas, the sailors used to take a sort of doll-like vagina with them, sewn out of leather. It was so common that the Chinese called it a “Dutch wife”.’

‘Really?’ Katrine asked, watching the white-clad angels of the forensics team as they examined the bedroom. ‘So they spoke English?’

Smith laughed. ‘Got me. The articles in academic journals are in English. In Japan there are brothels containing nothing but sex dolls. The most expensive ones are heated, so they stay at body temperature, they have skeletons which mean you can bend their arms and legs into natural and unnatural positions, and they have automatic lubrication of—’

‘Thank you, I think that’s enough,’ Katrine said.

‘Of course, sorry.’

‘Did Bjørn tell you why he was staying in the boiler room?’

Smith shook his head.

‘He and Lien had things to do,’ Wyller said.

‘Berna Lien? Things to do ?’

‘He just said that as long as this wasn’t assumed to be a murder scene, he’d leave it to the others.’

‘Things to do,’ Katrine muttered as she walked out of the bedroom with the other two hot on her heels. Out of the flat, out to the car park in front of the apartment blocks. They stopped behind the blue Honda where two forensics experts were examining the boot. They had found the keys in the flat, and it had been confirmed that the car was registered to Alexander Dreyer. The sky above them was steel grey, and on the far side of Torshovdalen’s billowing grass-covered slopes Katrine could see the wind grabbing the treetops. The latest forecast said that Emilia was only a matter of hours away.

‘Smart of him not to take the car,’ Wyller said.

‘Yep,’ Katrine said.

‘What do you mean?’ Smith asked.

‘The toll stations, car parks and traffic cameras,’ Wyller said. ‘You can run number-plate recognition software on video recordings, it only takes seconds.’