Page 192 of The Sleepwalker

The adrenaline is making every muscle in his body tingle in intense anticipation.

Without a sound, they take up their positions.

Petrus counts them in, and on three they swing around the door and secure the room.

It was just a pile of folded towels that had fallen from the shelf and blocked the door.

The air is heavy with the earthy stench of blood and urine.

Weapons drawn, they continue through to the bedroom, where the blackout blinds are half-closed.

‘Jeez .?.?.’ Danny mumbles.

On the floor, a dead man is sprawled in a huge pool of blood. His head has rolled beneath the bed.

Over on the nightstand, his phone screen lights up with a message, and in its sudden glow the two officers see that the room resembles a slaughterhouse.

Blood has sprayed across the furniture and walls, dripping from the ceiling and lampshades and glistening on the fringing on the edge of the bedspread.

The door to the bathroom is ajar.

Danny moves over and opens it. He trains his pistol on the darkness inside, fumbling in vain for a light switch.

In the soft light from the frosted window, he can make out the rough sandstone tiles on the floor and walls. There is a round bathtub, an open shower with two ceiling-mounted heads and an invisible drain.

Danny feels the shock of the scene wash over him, and the gun in his hand starts shaking so much that he has to steady it with the other.

As if in a daze, he hears Pingu talking on the radio, saying that the victim has been beheaded and that the killer has likely already left the scene.

‘We think Nina is still upstairs.’

Danny needs to get out into the cold air. He feels like he is about to fall apart, like he might implode from fear.

Petrus glances in his direction, then comes over, gives him a hug and says that the emotions will have to wait.

He lets go of his young colleague and studies him for a moment.

‘You OK?’

‘Think so. Thanks,’ Danny replies, tugging down the zip of his coat.

Petrus hears a soft scraping noise, but he can’t quite localise the sound. He turns around, raises his gun, moves back over to the bathroom door and peers inside.

His heart rate picks up as he realises that the sound could have been one of the clothes hangers in the dressing room.

He turns back towards the bedroom and sees Danny bracing himself against the wall with one hand, the other pressed to his mouth.

The low scraping starts again, but this time it doesn’t sound like metal on metal. It sounds like metal on rock, like the blade of an axe on rough sandstone tiles.

66

Joona is driving down the narrow roads between the grand villas at high speed, tyres roaring against the frozen ground. Flurries of snow dance in his blue lights.

He reads his colleagues’ tyre tracks on the ground up ahead, sees their skid marks and the collision with the rubbish bin, and he eases off the gas, cuts over the snowy patch in the middle of the road and accelerates out of the bend.

* * *

It all happens so quickly, as it often does when a person’s fate is sealed. A brief moment of both supernatural greatness and vulgar normality.