The Devil's star hh-5

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Right about what?’ Skarre called out.

  ‘The choice of victim and place suggests the opposite,’ Aune said. ‘That the murderer is moving quickly into the phase where he loses control and begins to kill indiscriminately.’

  ‘How so?’ Moller asked.

  Harry talked without looking up from the table.

  ‘The first shooting, of Camilla Loen, took place in a flat where she lived alone. The killer could go in and out without any risk of being caught or identified. He could carry out the killing and the rituals without being disturbed, but he’s already taking chances when he goes for the second victim. He kidnaps Lisbeth Barli in the middle of a residential area, in broad daylight, probably using a car, and obviously a car has a number plate. The third killing is of course a pure lottery – in the ladies’ lavatory in an office area. True, it’s after normal office hours, but there are so many people around that luck has to be with him if he’s not to be caught or at least identified.’

  Moller turned towards Aune.

  ‘So what’s the conclusion?’

  ‘That we can’t conclude anything,’ Aune said. ‘The most we can assume is that he is a well-integrated sociopath. And we don’t know whether he’s about to go bananas or whether he is still in control of himself.’

  ‘What can we hope for?’

  ‘One scenario is that we are about to witness a bloodbath, but there is a chance that we might nab him as he’ll be taking risks. The other scenario is that there will be longer intervals between each murder, but all our experience tells us that we will not manage to capture him in the foreseeable future. Make your own choice.’

  ‘But where shall we begin to look?’ Moller asked.

  ‘If I believed my statistics-minded colleagues I would say among bedwetters, animal tormentors, rapists and pyromaniacs, particularly pyromaniacs. But I don’t believe them. Unfortunately I have no alternative idols, so I suppose the answer is: I have no idea.’

  Aune put the top on his marker pen. The silence was oppressive.

  Tom Waaler jumped up.

  ‘OK, folks. We’ve got a bit to do. To begin with, I want everyone we have talked to so far to be interviewed again. I want all convicted murderers checked out and I want a review of all the criminals who have been convicted of rape or arson.’

  Harry observed Waaler as he delegated assignments, noted his efficiency and self-assurance, the speed and flexibility with which he dealt with relevant, practical objections, his strength of mind and decisiveness when the objections were not relevant.

  The clock above the door showed 9.15. The day had hardly begun and Harry already felt drained of energy, like an old, dying lion who hung back from the pack when once he could have challenged the leader. Not that he had ever nurtured ambitions of leading the pack, but things had taken a nosedive anyway. All he could do was lie low and hope that someone would throw him a bone.

  And someone had thrown him a bone. A big one.

  The muffled acoustics in the small interview rooms gave Harry the feeling he was talking into a duvet.

  ‘I import hearing aids,’ the short, stout man said, running his hand down his silk tie. A discreet gold tiepin held his tie in place against the white shirt.

  ‘Hearing aids?’ Harry repeated, looking down at the interview sheet which Tom Waaler had given him. In the box for his name the man had written Andre Clausen and under profession, Private Businessman.

  ‘Have you got hearing problems?’ Clausen asked. Harry couldn’t decide whether this sarcasm was being directed towards himself or whether Clausen was being ironic.

  ‘Mm. So you were at Halle, Thune and Wetterlid’s to talk about hearing aids?’

  ‘I just wanted an evaluation of an agency contract. One of your kind colleagues took a copy of it yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘This?’ Harry pointed to a folder.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I was looking at it just now. It was signed and dated two years ago. Is it going to be renewed?’

  ‘No. I just wanted to be sure I wasn’t being conned.’

  ‘Only now?’

  ‘Better late than never.’

  ‘Haven’t you got your own solicitor?’

  ‘Yes, but he’s getting on, I’m afraid.’ There was the flash of a gold filling when Clausen smiled and continued speaking. ‘I asked for an introductory meeting to hear what this firm of solicitors could offer.’

  ‘And you agreed this meeting before the weekend? With a firm which specialises in debt collection?’

  ‘I only realised that in the course of the meeting. That is, the short while we had before all the uproar.’

  ‘But if you’re looking for a new solicitor, you must have arranged meetings with several,’ Harry said. ‘Can you tell us which ones?’

  Harry didn’t look at Andre Clausen’s face. That wasn’t where a lie would reveal itself. Harry had known immediately they met that Clausen was one of those people who didn’t like his facial expression to reveal what he was thinking. Possibly because of shyness, possibly because his profession required a poker face or possibly because, in his past, self-control had been seen as an essential virtue. Accordingly, Harry kept an eye open for other signs, such as if his hand came up from his lap to stroke his tie again. It didn’t. Clausen just sat looking at Harry. He wasn’t staring, but his eyelids were heavy as if he found the situation irritating, just a little tedious.

  ‘Most solicitors I rang didn’t want to arrange a meeting until after the holidays,’ Clausen said. ‘Halle, Thune and Wetterlid were a great deal more obliging. Tell me: Am I under suspicion for anything?’

  ‘Everyone is under suspicion,’ Harry said.

  ‘Fair enough.’

  Clausen said this in English with a precise BBC accent.

  ‘I’ve noticed that you have a slight accent.’

  ‘Oh? I’ve travelled a lot in recent years. Perhaps that’s why.’

  ‘Where do you travel to?’

  ‘In point of fact, mostly inside Norway. I visit hospitals and institutions. Otherwise I’m often in Switzerland, at the factory where they manufacture the hearing aids. The way products are advancing you have to keep up to date professionally.’

  Again this indefinable sarcasm in the tone of his voice.

  ‘Are you married? Have you got a family?’

  ‘If you look at the form your colleague filled in, you’ll see I haven’t.’

  Harry looked at the form.

  ‘Yes, I see. So you live on your own… let’s see… in Gimle terrasse?’

  ‘No,’ Clausen said. ‘I live with Truls.’

  ‘Exactly. I know.’

  ‘Do you?’ Clausen smiled, his eyelids sinking a little lower. ‘Truls is a golden retriever.’

  Harry could feel a headache coming on behind his eyes. A look at his list showed that he had four interviews before lunch, and five after. He didn’t have the energy to trade blows with them all.

  He asked Clausen to tell him again what had happened, from the time he entered the building in Carl Berners plass until the police arrived.

  ‘More than gladly,’ he said, yawning.

  Harry sat back in the chair as Clausen, fluently and with self-confidence, told him how he had arrived by taxi, taken the lift up and, after a brief exchange with the receptionist, had waited for five or six minutes for her to return with the water. When she didn’t come back, he wandered through to the offices and found Mr Halle’s nameplate on his door.

  Harry saw from Waaler’s notes that Halle had confirmed the time Clausen knocked on the door as 5.05.

  ‘Did you see anyone go into or come out of the Ladies?’

  ‘I couldn’t see the door from where I was waiting in reception. And I didn’t see anyone on the way in or out when I went to the office. In fact, I have repeated this several times now.’

  ‘And there will be even more times,’ Harry said, yawning aloud and running his hand across his face. At that moment Magnus Skarre knocked on t
he window of the interview room and held up his wristwatch. Harry recognised Wetterlid standing behind him. Harry nodded in assent and cast a last look at his interview sheet.

  ‘It says here that you didn’t see any suspicious persons coming into or leaving reception while you were sitting there.’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘Well, thank you very much for your cooperation thus far,’ Harry said, putting the sheet in the folder and pressing the stop button on the tape recorder. ‘We’ll certainly contact you again.’

  ‘No suspicious persons,’ Clausen said, getting up.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said that I didn’t see anyone suspicious in reception, but there was the cleaning lady who came in and went into the offices.’

  ‘Yes, we’ve talked to her. She says she went straight into the kitchen and didn’t see anyone.’

  Harry got up and ran his eye down the list. The next interview was at 10.15 in room four.

  ‘And the courier of course,’ Clausen said.

  ‘Courier?’

  ‘Yes. He went out through the front door just before I went to look for the solicitor. Must have delivered something or picked something up. Why are you looking at me like that, Inspector? A standard courier in solicitors’ offices is, quite frankly, not particularly suspicious.’

  Half an hour later, after checking with the firm of solicitors and several courier companies in Oslo, Harry was clear about one thing: no-one had registered the delivery or collection of anything at all at the offices of Halle, Thune amp; Wetterlid on Monday.

  Two hours after Clausen had left Police HQ, just before the sun reached its peak, he was picked up at his office and brought back to describe the courier again.

  He couldn’t tell them very much: height around one metre 80; average build. Clausen had not exactly studied the man’s physical details. He considered that sort of thing both uninteresting and inappropriate for men, he said, and repeated that the courier was wearing what bike couriers usually wear: a yellow and black cycle shirt in some tight-fitting material, shorts and cycling shoes which clicked even when he walked on the carpet. His face was masked by the helmet and sunglasses.

  ‘His mouth?’ Harry asked.

  ‘White cloth covering his mouth,’ Clausen said. ‘Like Michael Jackson uses. I thought bike couriers wore them to protect themselves from inhaling exhaust fumes.’

  ‘In New York and Tokyo, yes. This is Oslo.’

  Clausen shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, it didn’t strike me as unusual.’

  Clausen was given leave to go and Harry went to Tom Waaler’s office. Waaler was sitting with the phone to his ear, mumbling uh-huh and m-hm when Harry walked in.

  ‘I think I’ve got an idea how the killer got into Camilla Loen’s flat,’ Harry said.

  Tom Waaler put down the phone without finishing the conversation.

  ‘There’s a video camera connected to the intercom at the main entrance to the block where she lived, isn’t there?’

  ‘Yes…?’ Waaler leaned forwards.

  ‘Who can ring any bell, stick a masked face up into the camera and still be fairly sure that they’ll be let in?’

  ‘Father Christmas?’

  ‘Hardly, but you would let in a person carrying an express package or a bunch of flowers, a courier, wouldn’t you.’

  Waaler pressed the engaged button on his phone.

  ‘Just a little over four minutes passed from the moment Clausen arrived until he saw the courier leave through reception. A courier runs in, delivers and runs out again, he doesn’t spend four minutes hanging about.’

  Waaler nodded slowly.

  ‘A courier on a bike,’ he said. ‘It’s ingeniously simple. Someone with a plausible reason for calling in on all manner of people, with a cloth round his mouth. Someone everyone can see, but nobody notices.’

  ‘A Trojan horse,’ Harry said. ‘What a dream setup for a serial killer.’

  ‘No-one gives a courier leaving somewhere with great haste a second thought. And he’s using an unregistered form of transport, probably the most effective way to make a getaway in a city.’ Waaler placed his hand on the telephone.

  ‘I’ll get some of the boys to make enquiries about a bike courier at the murder scenes at the relevant times.’

  ‘There’s one other thing we’ll have to think about,’ Harry said.

  ‘Yes,’ Waaler said. ‘Whether we need to warn people about unfamiliar couriers.’

  ‘Right. Will you take that up with Moller?’

  ‘Yes. And Harry…’

  Harry stopped in the doorway.

  ‘Bloody good work,’ Waaler said.

  Harry gave a brief nod and left.

  Three minutes later the rumours were swirling around Crime Squad that Harry had a lead.

  18

  Tuesday. The Pentagram.

  Nikolai Loeb pressed down gently on the keys. The notes from the piano sounded delicate and frail in the bare room. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-Flat Minor. Many pianists thought it was weird and lacked elegance, but to Nikolai’s ears no-one had ever written more beautiful music. It made him feel homesick just to play the few bars he knew by heart, and it was always these notes that his fingers automatically searched for when he sat down at the untuned piano in the assembly room in Gamle Aker church hall.

  He looked out of the open window. The birds were singing in the cemetery. It reminded him of summers in Leningrad and his father, who had taken him to the old battlefields outside the towns where his grandfather and all of Nikolai’s uncles lay in long-forgotten mass graves.

  ‘Listen,’ his father had said. ‘How beautiful and how futile their singing.’

  Nikolai became aware of someone clearing his throat and twisted round.

  A tall man in a T-shirt and jeans was standing in the doorway. He had a bandage round one hand. The first thing Nikolai thought was that it was one of those drug addicts who turned up from time to time.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Nikolai called out. The severe acoustics in the room made his voice sound less friendly than he had intended.

  The man stepped in over the threshold.

  ‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to make amends.’

  ‘I’m so pleased,’ Nikolai said. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t receive confessions here. There’s a list in the hall with a timetable. And you’ll have to go to our chapel in Inkognitogata.’

  The man came over to him. Nikolai concluded from the dark circles under his bloodshot eyes that the man had not slept for a while.

  ‘I want to make amends for destroying the star on the door.’

  It took Nikolai a few seconds to take in what the man was referring to.

  ‘Oh, now I’m with you. That’s not really anything to do with me. Except that I can see that the star is loose and is hanging upside down.’ He smiled. ‘A little inappropriate in a religious house, to put it mildly.’

  ‘So you don’t work here?’

  Nikolai shook his head.

  ‘We have to borrow these rooms on occasion. I’m from the church of the Holy Apostolic Princess Olga.’

  Harry raised his eyebrows.

  ‘The Russian Orthodox Church,’ Nikolai added. ‘I am a pastor and chief administrator. You need to go to the church office and see if you can find someone to help you there.’

  ‘Mm. Thank you.’

  The man didn’t make a move to leave.

  ‘Tchaikovsky, wasn’t it? First Piano Concerto?’

  ‘Correct,’ Nikolai said with surprise in his voice. Norwegians were not exactly what you might call a cultured people. On top of that, this one was wearing a T-shirt and looked like a down-and-out.

  ‘My mother used to play it to me,’ the man said. ‘She said it was difficult.’

  ‘You have a good mother. Who played pieces she thought were too difficult for you.’

  ‘Yes, she was good. Saintly.’

  There was something about the man’s lopsided
smile that confused Nikolai. It was a self-contradictory smile. Open and closed, friendly and cynical, laughing and pained. But he was probably reading too much into things, as usual.

  ‘Thank you for your help,’ the man said, moving towards the door.

  ‘Not at all.’

  Nikolai turned his attention to the piano and focused his concentration. He pressed down a key gently enough for it to touch, but make no sound – he could feel the felt lying against the piano string – and it was then he became aware that he had not heard the door shut. He turned round and saw the man standing there, his hand on the door handle, staring at the star in the smashed window.

  ‘Something wrong?’

  The man looked up.

  ‘No. I was just wondering what you meant when you said it was inappropriate that the star was hanging upside down.’

  Nikolai released a laugh which rebounded off the walls.

  ‘It’s the upside-down pentagram, isn’t it.’

  From the expression on the man’s face it was clear to Nikolai that he didn’t understand.

  ‘The pentagram is an old religious symbol, not just for Christianity. As you can see, it is a five-pointed star made up of a continuous line that intersects itself a number of times: it has been found carved into headstones dating back several thousand years. However, when it hangs upside down with one point downwards and two points upwards, it’s something completely different. It’s one of the most important symbols in demonology.’

  ‘Demonology?’

  The man asked questions in a calm yet firm voice, like someone who was used to getting answers, Nikolai thought.

  ‘The study of evil. The term originates from the time when people thought that evil emanated from the existence of demons.’

  ‘Hm. And now the demons have been abolished?’

  Nikolai swivelled round on his piano stool. Had he misjudged the man? He seemed to be a bit too sharp for a drug addict or a down-and-out.

  ‘I’m a policeman,’ the man said, as if answering his thoughts. ‘We tend to ask questions.’

  ‘Alright, but why are you asking about this in particular?’

  The man shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve seen this symbol just recently, but I can’t put my finger on where. I’m not sure if it’s significant or not. Which demon uses this symbol?’