The Devil's Star

by Jo Nesbo

  Harry had shoved his chair close up to Otto’s so that he could get closer to the screen. He smoked his cigarette unhurriedly while staring intensely at the pictures and studying them one by one. As if there might be something there he hadn’t noticed yet.

  ‘What’s that?’ Harry asked, pointing to one of the pictures on the left-hand screen.

  ‘There?’

  ‘No, higher up. On the fourth floor.’

  Otto stared at a picture of yet another empty corridor with pale yellow walls.

  ‘I can’t see anything special,’ Otto said.

  ‘Over the third door on the right-hand side. In the plaster.’

  Otto squinted. There were some white marks. He wondered at first if they had been made while unsuccessfully trying to mount one of the cameras, but he couldn’t remember making a hole in the wall in that particular spot.

  Falkeid bent forwards. ‘What is that?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ Harry said. ‘Otto, could you magnify just that . . . ?’

  Otto dragged the cursor across the screen and drew a little square above the door. He held down two keys. The section above the door covered the whole of the 21-inch screen.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Harry mumbled.

  ‘Yessir, this is no mean shit,’ Otto boasted, patting the console with affection. He was beginning to take to this Harry character.

  ‘The devil’s star,’ Harry whispered.

  ‘Hey?’

  But the policeman had already turned to Falkeid.

  ‘Ask Delta One or whatever the fuck he’s called to get ready to break into 406. Tell them to wait until they see me.’

  The policeman got up and took out a gun that Otto recognised from late-night surfing on the Net. Glock 21. He didn’t know what, but he knew something was going to happen, something that might mean he got his scoop after all.

  The policeman was already out the door.

  ‘Alpha to Delta One,’ Falkeid said and released the button on the walkie-talkie.

  Noise. Lovely, crackling atmospheric noise.

  Harry stopped in front of the lift inside the entrance, dithered for a second, then grasped the handle and slid open the door. His heart skipped a beat when he saw the black grille. A sliding grille.

  He let the door go as if he had been burned, let it close. It was too late anyway. This was just the pathetic final spurt towards the platform when you know the train has already gone, but you would like to catch a glimpse of it before it completely disappears.

  Harry took the stairs. He tried to walk calmly. When had the man been here? Two days ago? A week ago?

  He couldn’t restrain himself. His shoe soles sounded like sandpaper on the stairs as he began to run. He wanted to catch a glimpse.

  Just as he swung left into the corridor on the fourth floor, three black-clad figures came from the furthest end of the corridor.

  Harry stood under the star carved into the wall. The whiteness shone against the yellow of the wall.

  Beneath the room number – 406 – there was a name. VELAND. And beneath that a piece of paper stuck to the wall with two bits of tape.

  GONE ABROAD. BACK IN FOUR WEEKS, MARIUS

  He nodded to Delta One that they could go into action.

  Six seconds later the door was open.

  Harry told the others to wait outside and he went in alone. Empty. His eyes scanned the room. It was clean and tidy. Too tidy. It did not match the torn poster of Iggy Pop on the wall above the sofa bed. A few tatty paperbacks on the shelf above the cleared desk. Beside the books, five or six keys on a keyring in the shape of a skull. A photo of a suntanned girl smiling. Girlfriend or sister, Harry guessed. Between a book by Bukowski and a ghettoblaster there was a wax thumb painted white and pointing upwards, giving the thumbs up. Everything ready. Everything OK. Was it?

  Harry looked at Iggy Pop, the lean, bare body stripped to the waist, the self-inflicted scars, the intense gaze from the deep eye sockets, a man who must have been through a Calvary or two of his own. Harry touched the thumb on the shelf. Too soft to be plaster or plastic, it almost felt like a real finger. Cold, but real. He thought of the dildo he had seen at Barli’s while sniffing the white thumb. It smelled of a mixture of formalin and paint. He held it between two fingers and squeezed. The paint cracked. Harry recoiled as he caught the pungent smell.

  ‘Beate Lønn.’

  ‘Harry here. How’s it going with you?’

  ‘We’re still waiting. Waaler has taken up a position in the hall and chased me and Miss Sivertsen into the kitchen. So much for women’s liberation.’

  ‘I’m ringing from room 406 in the student block. He’s been here.’

  ‘Been there?’

  ‘He carved a devil’s star in the plaster above the door. The boy staying here, a Marius Veland, has gone. The other residents haven’t seen him for several weeks. And there’s a slip of paper hanging on the door saying he’s gone away.’

  ‘Well, perhaps he really has gone away.’

  Harry noticed that Beate had started to take on his speech mannerisms.

  ‘Hardly,’ Harry said. ‘His thumb is still in his room. In a sort of embalmed state.’

  It went quiet at the other end of the line.

  ‘I’ve rung your lot at Forensics. They’re on their way now.’

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ Beate said. ‘Haven’t you had the whole building under surveillance?’

  ‘Well, yes. But not for the 20 days since this happened.’

  ‘Twenty days. How do you know that?’

  ‘Because I found his parents’ telephone number and called them. They’d received a letter saying that he was off to Morocco. His father says that it’s the first time he can remember ever receiving a letter from Marius. Usually he phones. The postmark on the letter is from 20 days ago.’

  ‘Twenty days . . .’ Beate murmured.

  ‘Twenty days. In other words, exactly five days before the murder of Camilla Loen. In other words . . .’

  He could hear Beate taking deep breaths on the phone.

  ‘. . . five days before what we thought was the first murder,’ he said.

  ‘My God.’

  ‘There’s more. We rounded up the occupants of the house and asked if anyone could remember anything from that day and the girl in 303 says she remembers sunbathing on the grass outside the building that afternoon. On her way back she passed a bike courier. She remembers it because they don’t often have couriers here and she’d joked about it with the others in the corridor when the papers had started writing about the Courier Killer a couple of weeks later.’

  ‘He’s cheated with the sequence of murders then?’

  ‘No,’ Harry said. ‘It was me being stupid. Do you remember I was wondering if any of the fingers he cut off were also a kind of code? Well. It was the simplest of all. The thumb. He started with the first digit on the left hand and worked his way round. You don’t need to be a genius to work out that Camilla was number two.’

  ‘Mm.’

  Now she’s doing it again, Harry thought.

  ‘And now we just need number five,’ Beate said. ‘The little finger.’

  ‘You know what that means, don’t you?’

  ‘That it’s our turn. That it’s been our turn all along. My God, is he really planning to . . . you know?’

  ‘Is his mother sitting beside you?’

  ‘Yes. Tell me what he’ll do, Harry.’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘I know you have no idea, but tell me anyway.’

  Harry hesitated.

  ‘OK. Many serial killers are driven by self-contempt. And since the fifth killing is the last one, the final one, there is a great likelihood that he’s planning to take the life of his progenitor. Or himself. Or both. It’s got nothing to do with his relationship with his mother, but with himself. Anyway, the choice of the location for the murder is logical.’

  Silence.

  ‘Are you there, Beate?’

  ‘Yes,
indeed. He grew up as the son of a German.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The person on his way here.’

  New silence.

  ‘Why is Waaler waiting on his own in the hall?’

  ‘Why are you asking?’

  ‘Because the usual procedure would be for both of you to arrest him. It’s safer than having you sit in the kitchen.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Beate said. ‘I don’t have much experience in this kind of fieldwork. He must know what he’s doing.’

  ‘Yes,’ Harry said.

  Some thoughts passed through his mind. Thoughts he was trying to repress.

  ‘Is there anything wrong, Harry?’

  ‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘I’ve run out of cigarettes.’

  29

  Saturday. Drowning.

  Harry put his mobile phone back in his jacket pocket and leaned back against the sofa. Forensics would probably be hacked off, but there weren’t exactly many leads here to destroy. It was obvious that the killer had done a thorough job of clearing up after himself this time as well. Harry had even detected the faint aroma of soft soap when he put his face to the floor to examine some black lumps of what seemed at first sight to be rubber burned onto the lino.

  A face appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Bjørn Holm, Forensics.’

  ‘Good,’ Harry said. ‘Have you got a smoke?’

  He stood up and walked to the window as Holm and his colleague got down to work. The angular evening light gilded the house fronts, the streets and the trees across Kampen and into Tøyen. Harry didn’t know of a more beautiful town than Oslo on evenings like this. There had to be others, but he didn’t know any.

  ‘I’d like you to find out what these black lumps are.’

  Harry pointed to the floor.

  ‘Fine,’ Holm said.

  Harry was dizzy. He had chain-smoked eight cigarettes. It had kept his thirst in check. In check, but not gone completely. He stared at the thumb. Presumably it had been severed with pincers. Paint and glue. A chisel and a hammer to carve the pentagram over the door. He had brought quite a bit of equipment with him this time.

  He understood the pentagram. And the finger. But why the glue?

  ‘Looks like melted rubber,’ Holm said. He squatted on the floor.

  ‘How do you melt rubber?’ Harry asked.

  ‘You can set fire to it. Or use an electric iron. Or a heat gun.’

  Holm shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘What do you use melted rubber for?’

  ‘Vulcanisation,’ his colleague said. ‘You use it for repairing things or making them watertight. Car tyres, for example. Or sealing something that has to be airtight. That kind of thing.’

  ‘And that?’

  ‘No idea. Sorry.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The thumb was pointing to the ceiling. If only it could point to the solution to the code, Harry thought. Obviously it was a code. The killer had attached a ring to their noses and he was leading them like dumb animals wherever he wanted, and so this code had a solution too. Quite a simple solution if it was intended for moderately intelligent idiots like himself.

  He stared at the finger. Pointing upwards. OK. Roger. Message understood.

  The evening light continued to stream in.

  He sucked hard on his cigarette. The nicotine travelled through his veins, through the narrow capillaries from his lungs and northwards. Poisoned, health-damaged, manipulated but primed. Shit!

  Harry was racked with a bout of violent coughing.

  He pointed to the ceiling. Of room 406. The ceiling on the fourth floor. Of course. Idiot. Idiot.

  Harry turned the key, opened the door and found the light switch along the wall. He stepped inside. The loft was high and airy without any windows. Numbered storage rooms, two metres square, abutted against each other and lined the walls. Property was piled up behind the chicken wire in transit from the owner to the rubbish skip: mattresses with holes in, unfashionable furniture, cardboard boxes of clothes, electrical goods that still work and so cannot be thrown out yet.

  ‘Hellfire,’ mumbled Falkeid as he and two of the men from Special Forces came in.

  Harry thought it a very accurate image. The sun outside may have been low in the sky and losing power over to the west, but it had spent all day charging the roof tiles, which now radiated with the force of storage heaters and turned the loft into a veritable sauna.

  ‘Looks like the storage room for 406 is this way,’ Harry said, heading to the right.

  ‘Why are you so sure that he’ll be in the loft?’

  ‘Well, because the killer has himself pointed out the obvious fact that the fifth floor is above the fourth. In this case, the loft.’

  ‘Pointed out?’

  ‘A kind of rebus.’

  ‘Are you aware that it’s absolutely impossible for there to be a body up here?’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘We came up here yesterday with a dog. A body lying here in this heat for four weeks . . . Transfer a dog’s olfactory organs to our own sense of hearing and it would have been like searching for a wailing siren inside here. It would have been impossible for a dog not to find it, even a less competent dog. And the one we had yesterday was first rate.’

  ‘Even if the body is wrapped in something that prevents the smell escaping?’

  ‘Molecules of air move quickly and can penetrate even microscopic openings. It is not possible for –’

  ‘Vulcanisation,’ Harry said.

  ‘Eh?’

  Harry stopped in front of one of the storage areas. Instantly the two uniformed men were on the spot with their crowbars.

  ‘Let’s try it this way first, boys.’

  Harry dangled the bunch of keys with the skull on in front of them.

  The smallest key fitted the padlock.

  ‘I’ll go in alone,’ Harry said. ‘The forensics people don’t like the place being trampled under foot.’

  He borrowed a torch and stood in front of a tall, broad white wardrobe with double doors which took up most of the room in the storage area. He laid his fingers on the handle and steeled himself before jerking open the door. The smell of musty clothes, dust and wood met his nostrils. He switched on the torch. There were three generations of blue suits hanging in a row on the bar which Marius must have inherited. Harry shone the torch inside and ran his hand across the material. Coarse wool. One of them had a thin plastic cover over it. Inside was a grey protective bag for a suit.

  Harry shut the wardrobe doors and turned towards the back wall of the storage space where there was a pair of curtains – home-made by the look of them – hanging over a clothes horse. Harry heaved them off. A set of small sharp predator teeth snarled silently at him. What was left of its coat was grey and the brown marble-like eyes needed a polish.

  ‘A marten,’ Falkeid said.

  ‘Mm.’

  Harry cast his eyes around. There weren’t many places left to look. Had he really been mistaken?

  Then he spotted the roll of carpet. It was Persian – at least, that was what he thought – and was lodged against the chicken wire and reached halfway up to the roof. Harry pushed a wicker chair up against the carpet, climbed onto it and shone the torch down into the carpet. The policemen standing outside stared at him with tense expressions on their faces.

  ‘Right,’ Harry said, getting down from the chair and switching off the torch.

  ‘Well?’ Falkeid said.

  Harry shook his head. A sudden fury possessed him and he kicked the side of the wardrobe so that it began to stand and sway like a belly dancer. The dogs barked. A drink, one drink, a moment without torment. He turned to leave the room when he heard a scraping noise. As if something was sliding down a wall. He turned instantaneously and just saw the wardrobe door shoot open before the suit bag leapt onto him and knocked him to the ground.

  Harry knew he must have been out for a second because when he opened his eyes again he was lying on his bac
k and could feel a dull ache at the back of his head. He breathed in a cloud of dust that had risen from the dry wooden floor. The weight of the suit bag had knocked the air out of him and he felt as if he were drowning, lying underneath a big plastic bag filled with water. He hit out in panic and felt his fist strike the smooth surface and, inside, something soft that gave way.

  Harry went rigid and remained totally still. Slowly he managed to focus his eyes; just as slowly the feeling that he was drowning began to wear off. And was replaced by the feeling that he had drowned.

  Glazed eyes stared back at him from behind a grey plastic membrane.

  They had found Marius Veland.

  30

  Saturday. The Arrest

  The express train glided past outside, shiny silver, quiet as a tentative puff of air. Beate watched Olaug Sivertsen. She straightened her head and looked out of the window, blinking again and again. Her wrinkled, sinewy hands on the kitchen table resembled a bird’s-eye view of the countryside. The wrinkles were long valleys, the blue-black veins rivers and the knuckles chains of mountains with the skin stretched over like a grey-white tent canvas. Beate examined her own hands. She thought about what hands can do in the course of a lifetime. And what they cannot do. Or what they don’t manage to achieve.

  At 21.56 Beate heard the gate open and the sound of steps on the gravel path outside.

  She stood up, her heart beating as quickly and lightly as a Geiger counter.

  ‘That’s him,’ Olaug said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Olaug gave her a distressed smile. ‘I’ve heard his steps on the gravel path ever since he was a little boy. When he was old enough to go out in the evening I used to wake up to the second step he took. He used to take twelve steps. Just count.’

  Suddenly Waaler was standing in the kitchen doorway.