The Devil's Star

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Hold the grille tight, Sven!’ Harry shouted.

  Tom let go of Oleg and tried to pull his arm away. But Harry was too heavy. Tom panicked. He made another desperate attempt to free himself. And another. His feet skidded on the slippery floor. He felt the inside of the lift roof against his shoulder. All reasoning deserted him.

  ‘Don’t, Harry. Stop.’

  He meant to shout, but sobs stifled his words.

  ‘Mercy . . .’

  43

  Monday Night. Rolex.

  Tick, tick, tick.

  Harry sat listening to the second hand with his eyes closed while he counted. He mused that the time would have to be pretty accurate since the ticking was coming from a gold Rolex watch.

  Tick, tick, tick.

  If he had counted correctly he had been sitting in the lift for a quarter of an hour now. Fifteen minutes. Nine hundred seconds since he had pressed the stop button between the ground floor and the basement and announced that now they were safe and would have to wait. For nine hundred seconds they had sat as quiet as mice, listening. For footsteps. Voices. Doors being opened and closed. While Harry, his eyes closed, had counted the nine hundred ticks from the Rolex watch on the wrist of the blood-covered arm on the lift floor, and still attached to his handcuffs.

  Tick, tick, tick.

  Harry opened his eyes. He unlocked the handcuffs and wondered how he was going to get into the boot of the car now that he had swallowed the key.

  ‘Oleg,’ he whispered and gently shook the sleeping boy’s shoulder. ‘I need you to help me.’

  Oleg got to his feet.

  ‘What’s the point?’ Sven asked, looking up at Oleg who was standing on Harry’s shoulders and detaching the strip lighting from the roof of the lift.

  ‘Take it,’ Harry said.

  Sven reached up to Oleg and took one of the two tubes.

  ‘Firstly, so that my eyes get used to the dark before I go out into the basement,’ Harry said. ‘Secondly, so that we don’t stand here in the light blinking when the lift door opens.’

  ‘Waaler? In the basement?’ Sven’s voice was full of disbelief. ‘Come on, no-one can survive that.’

  He pointed with the light tube to the already pale, wax-like arm on the floor.

  ‘Imagine how much blood he lost. And the shock.’

  ‘I’m trying to anticipate every eventuality,’ Harry said.

  Then it went dark.

  Tick, tick, tick.

  Harry stepped out of the lift, moved quickly to the side and crouched down. He heard the door close softly behind him. He waited until he heard the lift start. The arrangement had been that they should stop the lift between the basement and the ground floor where they would be safe.

  Harry listened with bated breath. So far, no sign of ghosts. He stood up. Faint light shone through a door window at the other end of the basement. He made out the shapes of garden furniture, old chests of drawers and the tips of skis behind the wire netting. Harry groped his way along the wall. He found a door and opened it. There was the sweet smell of refuse. He had come to the right place. He trod on torn rubbish bags, eggshells and empty milk cartons as he fumbled his way through the sticky heat generated by the decomposing waste. The gun was over by the wall. One of the bits of tape was still attached. He made sure that it was still loaded before he went out again.

  He moved in a crouch towards the door where the light was coming from.

  It was only when he was close up that he saw the dark outline against the window. It was a face. Harry automatically dropped onto his haunches before he realised that the person could not see him in the dark. He held the gun in front of him with both hands as he crept two steps forward. The face was pressed up tight against the glass so that all the features were distorted. Harry had the face in the sights of his gun. It was Tom. His wide-open eyes stared beyond him and into the dark.

  Harry’s heart thumped so hard he could not keep the sights on the gun still.

  He waited. The seconds came and went. Nothing happened.

  Then he lowered his gun and straightened up.

  He went to the window and looked into Tom’s glazed eyes. They were covered over with a bluish-white film. Harry turned round and tried to penetrate the dark. Whatever Tom had been staring at, it was gone now.

  Harry stood still, feeling the dogged, insistent throb of his pulse. Tick, tick, tick, it went. He didn’t quite know what it meant. Except that he was alive, because the man on the other side of the door was dead. And that he could unlock the door, put a hand against that man’s skin and feel the body heat leaving him, feel the skin changing texture, losing the substance of life and becoming packaging.

  Harry rested his forehead against Tom Waaler’s. The cold glass of the window burned like ice against his skin.

  44

  Monday Night. The Mumbling.

  They waited at the red lights in Alexander Kiellands plass.

  The windscreen wipers beat to the left and right. In one and a half hours the first flashes of dawn would appear, but for the moment it was night and the clouds lay like a grey-black tarpaulin over the town.

  Harry was sitting in the back seat with his arm round Oleg.

  A woman and a man came staggering down the deserted pavement in Waldemar Thranes gate towards them.

  An hour had passed since Harry, Sven and Oleg had got out of the lift, into the rain and onto solid ground. They found a tall birch tree Harry had seen from Marius’s window and threw themselves onto the dry grass. From there Harry had phoned the editor’s desk at Dagbladet first of all and spoken to the journalist on duty. Then he rang Bjarne Møller, told him what had happened and asked him to run a trace on Øystein Eikeland. Finally, he rang Rakel and woke her up. Twenty minutes later the area in front of the student building was lit up by the flashes of cameras and blue lights with press and police in the same wonderful combination as always.

  Harry, Oleg and Sven had sat under the birch tree watching them run in and out of the student block.

  Then Harry stubbed out his cigarette.

  ‘Oh well,’ Sven said.

  ‘“Character”,’ Harry said.

  Sven nodded and said: ‘I forgot that one.’

  Then they strolled down to the square and Bjarne Møller sprinted out and ushered them into one of the police cars.

  First of all they went to Police HQ to be briefly interviewed by the police, or for a ‘debriefing’, as Møller had considerately called it. When Sven was taken into custody, Harry insisted that two front-line officers should stand guard outside his cell 24 hours a day. Møller, somewhat surprised, asked Harry if he really thought that the risk of him escaping was that great. Harry answered with a shake of his head and Møller complied with his wishes without saying another word.

  Then they contacted the regular uniformed police and got hold of a patrol car to drive Oleg home.

  The bleeping noise accompanying the traffic lights cut into the still night air as the couple crossed Uelands gate. The woman had obviously borrowed the man’s jacket and held it over her head. The man’s shirt was stuck to his body and he was laughing out loud. Harry thought there was something familiar about him.

  The lights changed to green.

  He caught a glimpse of red hair under the woman’s jacket before the couple passed out of sight.

  When they passed Vinderen, it suddenly stopped raining. Like curtains on the stage, the clouds slid away and a new moon shone on them from a black sky over Oslo fjord.

  ‘At last,’ Møller said, turning round in the front passenger seat with a smile.

  Harry assumed he was referring to the rain.

  ‘At last,’ he answered, without taking his eyes off the moon.

  ‘You’re a very brave boy,’ Møller said, patting the boy’s knee. Oleg gave a wan smile and looked up at Harry.

  Møller turned round again and kept his eyes forward on the road ahead.

  ‘My stomach pains have gone,’ he said. ‘Vanish
ed into thin air.’

  They had found Øystein Eikeland in the same place that they took Sven Sivertsen. In the custody block. According to ‘Griever’ Groth’s papers, Øystein had been brought in by Tom Waaler on suspicion of driving a taxi while drunk. The blood sample he had given had in fact also shown some evidence of alcohol. When Møller ordered that Eikeland was to be released and that all formalities were to be dropped, ‘Griever’ Groth, surprisingly enough, had no objections. On the contrary, he was unusually obliging.

  Rakel was standing in the doorway as the police car swung onto the crunching gravel of the drive in front of her house.

  Harry leaned across Oleg and opened the door. Oleg jumped out and ran towards Rakel.

  Møller and Harry stayed in the car and watched the two of them silently hugging each other on the steps.

  Møller’s mobile phone rang and he raised it to his ear. He said ‘Yes’ twice and ‘Right’ once and rang off.

  ‘That was Beate. They’ve found a bag full of cycling equipment in the refuse bin in the yard at Barli’s place.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘It’s going to be hell,’ Møller said. ‘They’re all going to want a chunk of you, Harry. Akersgata, NRK, TV2. Foreign press as well. Just imagine, they’ve heard about the Courier Killer in Spain. Well, you’ve done all that stuff before, so you know how it goes.’

  ‘I’ll survive.’

  ‘I suppose you will. We’ve got some footage of what happened in the student place last night, too. I just wonder how Tangen managed to set up the recording in his bus on Sunday afternoon and then forget to switch it off and catch the train home to Hønefoss.’

  Møller studied Harry’s face, but Harry remained impassive.

  ‘And, on top of that, what a stroke of luck that he’d just wiped the hard disk so that there was enough space for several days’ recording. Incredible actually. You could almost think that it had been planned beforehand.’

  ‘Almost,’ Harry mumbled.

  ‘There’s going to be an internal inquiry. I have contacted SEFO and informed them about Waaler’s activities. We are not discounting the possibility that this case may have ramifications for the Force. I have the first meeting with them tomorrow. We’ll get to the bottom of this, Harry.’

  ‘Fine, boss.’

  ‘Fine? You don’t sound very convinced.’

  ‘Well, are you?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

  ‘Because you don’t know who you can trust, not even you.’

  Møller blinked twice, but failed to get an answer out; he flashed a glance across to the policeman sitting behind the wheel.

  ‘Can you wait for a second, boss?’

  Harry got out of the car. Rakel let go of Oleg and he disappeared through the door.

  She had her arms crossed in front of her chest and her eyes fixed on his shirt as he stood before her.

  ‘You’re wet,’ she said.

  ‘Well, when it rains . . .’

  ‘. . . I get wet.’ She smiled sadly and laid the palm of her hand against his cheek.

  ‘Is it over now?’ she whispered.

  ‘It’s over for now.’

  She closed her eyes and leaned forwards. He took her in his arms.

  ‘He’ll manage OK,’ he said.

  ‘I know. He said he wasn’t afraid. Because you were there.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘And it’s true? It’s all over?’

  ‘Over.’ He mumbled into her hair. ‘Last day at work.’

  ‘Good,’ she said.

  He could feel her body coming closer, filling all the small spaces between them.

  ‘Next week I start the new one. That’ll be good.’

  ‘The one you got via a pal?’ she asked, putting her hand on his neck.

  ‘Yes.’ The smell of her filled his head. ‘Øystein. Do you remember Øystein?’

  ‘The taxi driver?’

  ‘Yes. The exam for the taxi driver’s licence is on Tuesday. I’ve been mugging up street names in Oslo every single day.’

  She laughed and kissed him on the mouth.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘I think you’re crazy.’

  Her laughter rippled like a little brook in his ears. He wiped a tear off her cheek.

  ‘I have to go now,’ he said.

  She tried to smile, but Harry saw that she wouldn’t be able to.

  ‘I won’t manage,’ she blurted out before the sobs shook her voice.

  ‘You’ll manage,’ Harry said.

  ‘I can’t manage . . . without you.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ Harry said, pulling her close. ‘You can manage very well without me. The question is: Can you manage with me?’

  ‘Is that the question?’ she whispered.

  ‘I know you’ll have to think about it.’

  ‘You don’t know anything.’

  ‘Have a think first, Rakel.’

  She tilted back her head and he held the arch of her spine. She contemplated his face. Looking for changes, Harry thought.

  ‘Don’t go, Harry.’

  ‘I’ve got a meeting. If you like, I’ll drop by early tomorrow morning. We could . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I don’t know. I have no plans. Or ideas. Does that sound OK?’

  She smiled.

  ‘That sounds perfect.’

  He looked at her lips. Hesitated. Then he kissed her and left.

  ‘Here?’ the policeman behind the wheel asked, looking in the mirror. ‘Isn’t it closed?’

  ‘Twelve till three in the morning on workdays,’ Harry said.

  The driver pulled into the kerb outside the Boxer.

  ‘Are you coming too, boss?’

  Møller shook his head.

  ‘He wants to talk to you on his own.’

  Serving had long since finished and the last guests were in the process of leaving the bar.

  The head of Kripos was sitting at the same table as on the previous occasion. His deep eye sockets lay in shadow. The beer in front of him was almost finished. A crack opened in his face.

  ‘Congratulations, Harry.’

  Harry squeezed his way in between the bench and the table.

  ‘Really good work. But you must tell me how you worked out that Sven Sivertsen was not the Courier Killer.’

  ‘I saw a photo of Sivertsen in Prague and remembered that I’d seen a photo of Wilhelm and Lisbeth in the same place. On top of that, forensics examined the remains of the excrement under . . .’

  The Chief Superintendent leaned across the table and placed his hand on Harry’s arm. His breath smelled of beer and tobacco.

  ‘I don’t mean proof, Harry. I mean the idea. The suspicion. Whatever made you link the clues with the right man. What was the moment of inspiration? What was it that made you formulate the thought?’

  Harry shrugged his shoulders. ‘You think all sorts of thoughts all the time. But . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It all fitted too well.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Harry scratched his chin. ‘Did you know that Duke Ellington used to ask the piano tuners not to tune the piano to perfect pitch?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When a piano is tuned to perfection, it doesn’t sound good. There’s nothing wrong, it just loses some of the warmth, the feeling of genuineness.’

  Harry poked at a piece of varnish on the table that was coming loose.

  ‘The Courier Killer gave us a perfect code that told us where and when. But not why. In this way he made us focus on actions rather than the motive. Every hunter knows that if you want to see your prey in the dark, you mustn’t focus on it directly, but beside it. It was when I stopped staring at facts that I heard it.’

  ‘Heard it?’

  ‘Yes. I could hear that these so-called serial killings were too perfect. They sounded right, but they didn’t sound genuine.
The killings followed the formula down to the last detail; they gave us an explanation that was as plausible as any lie, but seldom as plausible as the truth.’

  ‘And you knew that?’

  ‘No, but I stopped being so myopic and my vision cleared.’

  The head of Kripos nodded while staring down into the bulbous beer glass which he kept rotating between his hands on the table. It sounded like a grindstone in the quiet, almost deserted bar.

  He cleared his throat.

  ‘I was wrong about Tom Waaler, Harry. And I apologise.’

  Harry didn’t answer.

  ‘What I wanted to say to you is that I didn’t sign your dismissal papers. I would like you to continue working. I want you to know that you have my confidence. My complete and unreserved confidence. And I hope, Harry . . .’

  He raised his head and an opening – a kind of smile – appeared in the lower half of his face.

  ‘. . . that I have yours.’

  ‘I’ll have to think about it,’Harry said.

  The opening closed.

  ‘About the job,’ he added.

  The head of Kripos smiled again. This time it also reached his eyes.

  ‘Of course. Let me buy you a beer, Harry. They’ve closed but if I say.’

  ‘I’m an alcoholic.’

  The head of Kripos was caught off-balance for a moment. Then he chuckled.

  ‘Apologies. Thoughtless of me. But one other thing, Harry. Have you . . .’

  Harry waited as the glass completed another circuit.

  ‘Have you thought about how you’re going to present this case?’

  ‘Present?’

  ‘Yes. In the report. And to the press. They’re going to want to talk to you. And they’ll put the whole service under the magnifying glass if this arms smuggling of Waaler’s comes out. For this reason it’s vital that you don’t say . . .’

  Harry searched for his packet of cigarettes while the Chief Superintendent searched for words.

  ‘. . . that you don’t give them a version which leaves room for misinterpretation,’ he said finally.

  Harry stretched his lips in a thin smile and looked at his last cigarette.

  The head of Kripos made up his mind, resolutely downed the last of his beer and dried his mouth with the back of his hand.