The Devil's Star

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘’Fraid not,’ Waaler said. ‘They’ve put the other autopsies to one side and prioritised ours, but so far nothing. No semen, no blood, no hair, nothing. The only physical clue the murderer has left is bullet holes.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Aune said.

  Somewhat dejectedly, Møller asked what was so interesting.

  ‘It’s interesting because it suggests that he didn’t attack the victims sexually,’ Aune said. ‘And that’s very unusual for serial killers.’

  ‘Perhaps this is not about sex,’ Møller said.

  Aune shook his head. ‘It’s always sexually motivated. Always.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s like Peter Sellers in Being There,’ Harry said. ‘“I like to watch.”’

  The others stared at him in total incomprehension.

  ‘I mean, perhaps he doesn’t have to touch them to get sexual satisfaction.’

  Harry avoided Waaler’s gaze.

  ‘Perhaps the killing and the sight of the body are enough.’

  ‘That could be right,’ Aune said. ‘What usually happens is that the murderer wants an orgasmic release, but he may have ejaculated without leaving his seed at the scene of the crime. Or he might have had enough self-control to wait until he was in safety.’

  It went quiet for a few seconds. Harry knew they were all thinking the same as he was. What had the killer done with the woman who had disappeared, Lisbeth Barli?

  ‘What about the weapons we found at the crime scene?’

  ‘We’ve checked them,’ Beate said. ‘The tests show that they are ninety-nine point nine per cent certain to be the murder weapons.’

  ‘That’s good enough,’ Møller said. ‘Any idea where the weapons came from?’

  Beate shook her head. ‘As before, the serial numbers have been filed off. The marks are the same as those we see on most of the weapons we confiscate.’

  ‘Hm,’ Møller said. ‘So, the great gun-running fraternity myth again. Surely the security service guys, POT, will get their hands on them soon, won’t they?’

  ‘Interpol has been working on the case for more than four years without anything to show for their efforts,’ Waaler said.

  Harry rocked back on his chair and stole a furtive glance at Waaler. While doing that, to his consternation, he felt something he had never felt for Waaler before: admiration. The same kind of admiration you feel for beasts of prey that have perfected what they do to survive.

  Møller sighed. ‘I know. We’re three-nil down and our opponent still hasn’t given us a sight of the ball. Does no-one have any bright ideas?’

  ‘I’m not exactly sure if it’s an idea . . .’

  ‘Come on, Harry.’

  ‘It’s more like a gut feeling about the crime scenes. They’ve all got something in common, but I can’t put my finger on what it is yet. The first shooting was in an attic flat in Ullevålsveien. The second about a kilometre north-west, in Sannergata. And the third about the same distance again from there, this time towards the east, in an office block by Carl Berners plass. He moves, but I have the feeling that there is a logic behind it.’

  ‘How’s that?’ Beate asked.

  ‘His territory,’ Harry said. ‘The psychologist can probably explain.’

  Møller turned to Aune, who was just taking a gulp of tea.

  ‘Any comment, Aune?’

  Aune grimaced. ‘Well, it’s not exactly Earl Grey.’

  ‘I didn’t mean the tea.’

  Aune sighed.

  ‘It was a joke, Møller. I know what you’re getting at though, Harry. The killer has strong preferences with respect to the geographical location of the crime. Here, in rough terms, we can distinguish between three types.’

  Aune counted on his fingers:

  ‘There is the stationary killer who entices or forces victims into his home and kills them. There is the territorial killer who operates in a restricted area, like Jack the Ripper who only killed in the red-light district, but their territory could easily be a whole town. Finally, there is the nomadic killer who is probably the one with most killings on his conscience. Ottis Toole and Henry Lee Lucas went from state to state in the US and killed more than three hundred people between them.’

  ‘Right,’ Møller said. ‘Though I can’t quite see the logic you were talking about, Harry.’

  Harry shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘As I was saying, boss, just a gut feeling.’

  ‘There is one thing they’ve got in common,’ Beate said.

  As if operated by remote control, the others turned to face her. Her cheeks immediately flushed and she seemed to regret saying anything. However, she ignored it and went on:

  ‘He intrudes where women feel at their most secure. Into their home. Into a street in broad daylight. Into the Ladies at work.’

  ‘Well done, Beate,’ Harry said, and received a quick flash of gratitude.

  ‘Well observed, young lady,’ Aune chimed in. ‘Since we’re talking about patterns of movement, I’d like to add one more thing. Killers of the sociopath variety are often very self-assured, just as it seems to be in this case. A characteristic feature of theirs is that they follow the investigation closely and tend to take every opportunity to be physically close to whatever is going on. They may interpret the investigation as a game between themselves and the police. Many have expressed pleasure at seeing the police in confusion.’

  ‘Which means that somewhere out there someone is sitting and lapping it up right now,’ Møller said, clapping his hands together. ‘That’s all for today.’

  ‘Just one more little thing,’ Harry said. ‘The diamonds that the murderer has placed on the victims . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘They’ve got five points. Almost like a pentagram.’

  ‘Almost? As far as I know, it’s exactly like a pentagram.’

  ‘A pentagram is drawn with one unbroken line which intersects itself.’

  ‘Aha!’ Aune exclaimed. ‘That pentagram. Drawn using the golden section. Very interesting shape. By the way, did you know that there is a theory that in Viking times the Celts were going to convert Norway to Christianity, so they drew a holy pentagram which they placed over southern Norway and used it to determine the location of towns and churches?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with diamonds?’ Beate asked.

  ‘It’s not the diamonds,’ Harry said. ‘It’s the shape, the pentagram. I know I’ve seen it somewhere, at one of the crime scenes, I just can’t remember which and where. This may sound like rubbish, but I think it’s important.’

  ‘So,’ Møller said, supporting his chin on his hands. ‘You can remember something you can’t quite remember, but you think it’s important?’

  Harry rubbed his face hard with both hands.

  ‘When you go to the scene of a crime, you’re concentrating so hard that the most peripheral things your brain takes in are much more than you can work through. They simply remain there until something happens, until something new crops up, one piece of the jigsaw fits another, but then you can’t remember where you got the first piece from. Your gut feeling tells you that it’s important, though. How does that sound?’

  ‘Like a psychosis,’ Aune said, yawning.

  The other three looked at him.

  ‘Can you not at least smile when I’m being funny?’ he said. ‘Harry, it sounds like an absolutely normal working brain. Nothing to be frightened of.’

  ‘I think there are four brains here that have done enough for one day,’ Møller said and got up.

  At that moment the telephone in front of him rang.

  ‘Møller here . . . Just a minute.’

  He passed the telephone over to Waaler, who took it and placed it against his ear.

  ‘Yes?’

  There was a scraping of chairs, but Waaler motioned with his hand that they should wait.

  ‘Great,’ he said, hanging up.

  The others turned to him with renewed interest.

  ‘A witness has c
alled in. She saw a cyclist coming out of an apartment block in Ullevålsveien near Our Saviour’s Cemetery on the Friday afternoon when Camilla Loen was killed. She remembered it because she thought it was so peculiar that he was wearing a white cloth round his mouth. The courier who nipped off for a beer in St Hanshaugen wasn’t wearing one.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She didn’t know which number it was in Ullevålsveien, but Skarre drove her past. She pointed out the building and it was Camilla Loen’s.’

  Møller slammed his hand down hard on the surface of the table.

  ‘At last!’

  Olaug was sitting on the bed with her hand around her throat and feeling her pulse slowly return to normal.

  ‘How you frightened me,’ she whispered in a voice which was hoarse and unrecognisable now.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Ina said, taking the last Maryland cookie. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

  ‘It’s me who should apologise,’ Olaug said. ‘Bursting in like that. I didn’t see that you were wearing those . . .’

  ‘Headphones,’ Ina laughed. ‘I probably had the music on pretty loud. Cole Porter.’

  ‘You know I’m not so up to date with modern music.’

  ‘Cole Porter is an old jazz musician. He’s dead, in fact.’

  ‘Dear me, someone as young as you shouldn’t be listening to dead people.’

  Ina laughed again. When she had felt something touch her cheek she had automatically struck out with her hand and had hit the tray with the teaset on. There was still a fine layer of white sugar on the carpet.

  ‘Someone played me his records.’

  ‘That’s such a secretive smile,’ Olaug said. ‘Was it your gentleman friend?’

  She regretted her question the moment she asked it. Ina would think she was spying on her.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Ina said, her eyes a-twinkle.

  ‘He’s older than you then, is he?’ Olaug wanted to intimate indirectly that she hadn’t gone out of her way to catch a glimpse of him. ‘Since he likes old music, I mean.’

  She could hear that was the wrong thing to say, too. Now she was asking questions and probing like an old tittle-tattle. In a flash of panic, she saw Ina mentally looking for somewhere else to live already.

  ‘A bit older, yes.’

  Ina’s playful smile confused Olaug.

  ‘Much like you and Herr Schwabe perhaps.’

  Olaug laughed happily along with Ina, mostly out of relief.

  ‘Just imagine. He was sitting exactly where you’re sitting now,’ Ina said out of the blue.

  Olaug ran her hand across the blanket on the bed.

  ‘Yes, just imagine.’

  ‘When he was crying that evening was it because he couldn’t have you?’

  Olaug was still stroking the blanket. The rough wool felt good under her hand.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I didn’t dare ask. Instead I made up my own answers, the ones I liked best, dreams I could cosset at night. That was probably why I was so much in love as I was.’

  ‘Did you ever go out together?’

  ‘Yes. He took me once in his car to Bygdøy. We went swimming. That is, I went swimming while he sat and watched. He called me his very own nymph.’

  ‘Did his wife find out that her husband was the father when you became pregnant?’

  Olaug gave Ina a lingering look. Then she shook her head.

  ‘They left the country in May of 1945. I never saw them again. It was only in July that I discovered I was pregnant.’

  Olaug slapped the blanket with her hand.

  ‘But you must be sick and tired of my old stories, my dear. Let’s talk about you. Who is your gentleman friend?’

  ‘He’s a fine man.’

  Ina still had the dreamy expression on her face that she usually wore when Olaug was telling her about her first and last lover, Ernst Schwabe.

  ‘He’s given me something,’ Ina said, opening a drawer in the desk and holding up a little packet tied with a golden ribbon.

  ‘He said I couldn’t open it until we got engaged.’

  Olaug smiled and stroked Ina’s cheek. She was happy for her.

  ‘Are you fond of him?’

  ‘He’s different from all the others. He’s not so . . . he’s old-fashioned. He wants us to wait. With . . . you know what.’

  Olaug nodded. ‘It sounds like he’s serious.’

  ‘Yes.’ A little sigh escaped her.

  ‘You’ll have to make sure he’s the man for you before you let him go any further,’ Olaug said.

  ‘I know,’ Ina said. ‘That’s what’s so difficult. He’s just been here, and before he left, I told him I needed time to think. He said he understood, I am so much younger than him.’

  Olaug was going to ask if he had a dog, but caught herself in time. She had done enough prying and probing. She ran her hand across the blanket for the last time and stood up.

  ‘I’m going to go back and put on some more tea, my dear.’

  It was a revelation. Not a miracle, just a revelation.

  It was half an hour since the others had left and Harry had just finished reading the interview transcripts of the two women who lived together across from Lisbeth Barli. He turned off the reading lamp on the desk, blinked in the dark and suddenly it came to him. Perhaps because he had turned off the light as you do when you go to bed. Or perhaps because he had stopped thinking for a moment. Whatever the reason, it was as if someone had thrust a clear, sharp photograph in his face.

  He went into the office where the keys for the crime scenes were kept and found the one he was looking for. Then he drove to Sofies gate, collected his torch and walked to Ullevålsveien. It was almost midnight. The first floor was locked and the launderette was closed. In the shop selling headstones there was a spotlight in the window lighting up ‘Rest in Peace’.

  Harry let himself into Camilla Loen’s flat.

  None of the furniture or anything else had been removed, but still his footsteps echoed. It was as if the demise of the owner had lent the flat a physical void it hadn’t had before. At the same time he had the feeling that he wasn’t alone. Harry believed in the existence of the soul. Not that he was particularly religious as such, but it was one thing which always struck him when he saw a dead body: the body was bereft of something, something that wasn’t to do with the processes of physical change that bodies undergo. Bodies looked like the empty shells of insects in a spider’s web – the creature had gone, the light had gone, there was not the illusory afterglow that long-since burned-out stars have. The body was missing its soul and it was this absence of the soul that made Harry believe.

  He didn’t put on the light; the light of the moon through the skylights was enough. He went straight into the bedroom where he switched on his torch and shone it at the load-bearing beam beside the bed. A sharp intake of breath. It wasn’t a heart round a triangle as he had first thought.

  Harry sat down on the bed and ran the tips of his fingers over the grooves in the beam. The cuts in the brown, aged wood were so clear that they had to be fresh. And it was clear it had to be one cut. One long cut consisting of straight lines which doubled back and intersected each other. A pentagram.

  Harry shone the torch on the floor. There were a fine layer of dust and a couple of hefty dustballs on the wood. Camilla Loen obviously had not done the cleaning before she departed. But there, by one of the legs at the top of the bed, he saw what he had been looking for. Wood shavings.

  Harry lay back on the bed. The mattress was soft and giving. He stared up at the slanting ceiling while trying to think. If it really was the killer who had carved the star in the beam above the bed, what did it mean?

  ‘Rest in peace,’ Harry mumbled, closing his eyes.

  He was too tired to think clearly. There was another question churning around in his brain. Why hadn’t he actually noticed the pentagram? Why hadn’t he put the two things together, the star and the diamonds? Or had he? Perhaps he had been t
oo quick, perhaps his subconscious had connected the pentagram with something else, something he had seen at one of the killings, but he hadn’t managed to draw out.

  He tried to establish a mental picture of the crime scenes.

  Lisbeth in Sannergata. Barbara in Carl Berners plass. And Camilla here in the shower, in the room next door. She was almost naked. Wet skin. He had felt it. The hot water had made it seem as if she had been dead for less time than she really had. He had felt her skin. Beate watched him. He couldn’t stop touching her. It was like running your fingers over warm, smooth rubber. He looked up and saw that they were alone, and it was only then that he felt the warm stream of water from the shower. His eyes wandered down again; he saw her staring up at him with an odd gleam in her eyes. He gave a start and withdrew his hands; her stare faded away like on a television screen when the set has been switched off. Odd, he thought, and put a hand against her cheek. He waited while the hot water from the shower soaked through his clothes. The gleam came slowly back. He placed his other hand on her stomach. Her eyes became alive and he could feel her body stir beneath his fingers. He knew that it was touch that brought her back to life, that without touch she would disappear, die. He rested his forehead against her forehead. The water ran down the inside of his clothing, soaked his skin and lay like a warm filter between them. It was then that he noticed that her eyes were not blue, but brown. And her lips were no longer pale, but red and full of life. Rakel. He put his lips against hers. He recoiled when he discovered that they were ice cold.

  She stared at him. Her mouth moved.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Harry’s heart stopped beating, partly because the echo of the words still hung in the room so that he knew it could not have been a dream, and partly because the voice did not belong to a woman, but mostly because there was someone standing in front of the bed, leaning over him.

  His heart began to race again and he flung himself round in an attempt to grope for the torch that was still switched on. It fell on the floor with a soft thud and rolled around in a circle as the beam of light and the shadow of the figure ran across the walls.

  Then the ceiling lights came on.