by Jo Nesbo
However, something had happened which made it necessary for her to know that she could trust him. She had something even more precious to lose. She hadn’t said anything to him yet; she hadn’t been sure herself before she went to the doctor three days ago.
She slipped out of bed and tiptoed across the floor. Carefully, she pressed down the door handle while watching his face in the mirror over the dressing table. Then she was in the hallway and, carefully, she closed the door behind her.
The suitcase was a leaden grey colour, modern and bore the Samsonite trademark. It was almost new, yet the sides were scratched and covered with torn stickers from security checks and the names of destinations she had never heard of.
In the dim light she could see that the combination dial showed 0-0-0. It always did. And she didn’t need to feel; she knew the case wouldn’t open. She had never seen the case open, except for when she was lying in bed as he was taking clothes from drawers and putting them in the case. It was pure chance that she had seen it the last time he was packing. Lucky that the number of the combination lock was on the inside. It wasn’t particularly difficult to remember three numbers. Not when you have to. Wasn’t difficult to forget everything else and remember the three numbers of a room in a hotel when they rang and told her that her services were required, told her what she was to wear and about any other special requests.
She listened. His snoring was like the low sound of sawing from behind the door. There were things he didn’t know. Things he didn’t need to know, things she had been forced to do, but it was in the past now. She placed the tips of her fingers on the serrated cogs above the numbers and turned. The future was the only thing that mattered from now on.
The lock sprang open with a soft click.
She stared from her crouching position.
Under the lock, on top of a white shirt, lay an ugly, black metal object.
She didn’t need to touch it to know that the gun was genuine. She had seen them before, in her earlier life.
She swallowed and could feel the tears coming. Pressed her fingers against her eyes. Twice whispered her mother’s name to herself.
It lasted only a few seconds.
Then she took a deep, calming breath. She had to get through this. They had to get through this. At least it explained why he wasn’t able to tell her much about his profession, what allowed him to earn as much money as he obviously did. And the thought had occurred to her, hadn’t it?
She made up her mind.
There were things she didn’t know. Things she didn’t need to know.
She locked the case and turned the dials on the lock back to zero. She listened at the door before she carefully opened it and slipped inside. A rectangle of light fell onto the bed. Had she cast a glance at the mirror before she closed the door, she would have seen one of his eyes open. But she was too preoccupied with her own thoughts. Or rather, the one thought that she returned to again and again as she lay listening to the traffic, the screams from the zoological gardens and his deep, regular breathing. The future was the only thing that mattered from now on.
A scream, a bottle smashed on the pavement, followed by raucous laughter. Cursing and the clatter of running feet dying away up Sofies gate in the direction of Bislett Stadium.
Harry stared at the ceiling and listened to the sounds of the night outside. He had slept three dreamless hours before he woke up and started thinking. About three women, two crime scenes and one man offering a good price for his soul. He tried to find a system in it. To decipher the code. To see the pattern. To understand the dimension above the pattern that Oystein had referred to, the question that preceded ‘how’. Why.
Why did a man dress up as a courier, kill two women and probably also a third? Why did he make it so difficult for himself when he chose the scene of the crime? Why did he leave messages? When all the past models of serial killers suggested they were sexually motivated, why were there no indications of sexual abuse in the cases of Camilla Loen and Barbara Svendsen?
Harry felt a headache coming on. He kicked off the duvet cover and lay on his side. The red numbers on the alarm clock glowed: 2.51. Harry’s last two questions were for himself. Why hold onto your soul so desperately if it broke your heart? And why bother about a system that hated him?
He dropped his feet onto the floor and went into the kitchen and stared at the cupboard door over the sink. He poured water from the tap into a glass and filled it to the brim. Then he opened the cutlery drawer, picked up the black tube, peeled off the grey lid and poured the contents into his palm. A pill would make him sleep. Two with a glass of Jim Beam would make him hyper. Three or more would have more unforeseen consequences.
Harry opened his mouth wide, threw in three tablets and washed them down with lukewarm water.
Then he went into the sitting room, put on a Duke Ellington record he had bought after seeing Gene Hackman sitting on the overnight bus in The Conversation to the sound of some fragile piano notes that were the loneliest Harry had ever heard.
He sat down in the wing chair.
‘I only know of one method,’ Oystein had said.
Harry started at the beginning. With the day when he staggered past Underwater on his way to the address in Ullevalsveien. Friday. Sannergata. Wednesday. Carl Berner. Monday. Three women. Three severed fingers. Left hand. First the index finger, then the middle finger and then the ring finger. Three places. Places with neighbours, no family accommodation. An old apartment building from the turn of the last century, one from the ’30s and an office block from the ’40s. Lifts. He could see the floor numbers over the lift doors. Skarre had talked to the specialist couriers in Oslo and the surrounding district. They hadn’t been able to help with cycle equipment or yellow jerseys, but via an insurance arrangement with emergency services they had at least managed to procure a summary of all the people who in the last six months had bought expensive bikes of the type that couriers used.
He could feel the numbing sensation coming. The rough wool on the chair stung his naked thighs and buttocks.
The victims: Camilla, copywriter for an advertising bureau, single, 28 years old, dark, slightly chubby; Lisbeth, singer, married, 33 years old, fair, slim; Barbara, receptionist, 28, living with her parents, medium blonde. All three had been good-looking, nothing outstanding. The times of the murders. Provided that Lisbeth had been murdered immediately, all on weekdays. In the afternoon, after working hours.
Duke Ellington was playing fast. As if his head was full of notes he had to squeeze in. And now he had almost completely stopped. He was just adding the essential full stops.
Harry had not gone into the backgrounds of the victims, he hadn’t talked to relatives or friends, he had just skimmed through the reports without finding anything to catch his attention. That wasn’t where the answers lay. It wasn’t who the victims were, but what they were, what they represented. For this killer the victims were no more than an exterior, more or less randomly chosen, like everything around them. It was just a question of catching a glimpse of what it was, seeing the pattern.
Then the chemicals kicked in with a vengeance. The effect was more like that of a hallucinogen than sleeping tablets. Thinking gave way to thoughts, and completely out of control – as if in a barrel – he sailed down a river. Time pulsated, pumped like an expanding universe. When he came to, everything around him was still, there was only the sound of the stylus on the record player scratching against the label.
He went into the bedroom, sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed and fixed his attention on the devil’s star. After a while it began to dance in front of his eyes. He closed them. It was just a question of keeping it in sight.
When it became light outside he was beyond everything. He sat, he heard and he saw, but he was dreaming. The thud of the Aftenposten on the stairs woke him up. He lifted his head and focused on the devil’s star, which was no longer dancing.
Nothing danced. It was over. He had seen the pattern.
Then – as if someone had switched off the light – he passed out.
She was pouring coffee into his cup. He grunted a Danke and turned the pages of the Observer which he would buy at the hotel on the corner. Along with fresh croissants that Hlinka, the local baker, had started making. She had never been abroad, only to Slovakia, which wasn’t really abroad, but he assured her that now Prague had everything they had in other big cities in Europe. She had wanted to travel. Before she met him, an American businessman had fallen in love with her. She had been bought for him as a present by a business connection in Prague, an executive from a pharmaceutical company. He was a sweet, innocent, rather plump man and would have given her everything so long as she had gone home with him to Los Angeles. Of course, she had said yes. But when she told Tomas, her pimp and half-brother, he went to the American’s room and threatened him with a knife. The American left the following day and she had never seen him since. Four days later she was sitting, downcast, in the Grand Hotel Europa drinking wine when he turned up. He sat on a chair at the back of the room and watched her giving importunate men the brush-off. That was what he fell for, he always said, not the fact that she was very much in demand by other men, but that she was absolutely unmoved by their courtship, so effortlessly apathetic, so completely chaste.
She let him buy her a glass of wine, thanked him and walked home alone.
The following day he rang at the door of her tiny basement flat in Strasnice. He never told her how he had found out where she lived. But life went from grey to rosy red in the blink of an eye. She was happy. She was happy.
The newspaper rustled as he turned a page.
She should have known. If it hadn’t been for the gun in the suitcase she would not have given it a second thought.
She decided she would forget it, forget everything except what was important. They were happy. She loved him.
She was sitting in the chair, still wearing her apron. She knew that he liked her in an apron. After all, she knew a bit about what made men tick, the trick was not to let on. She looked down at her lap. She began to smile; she couldn’t stop.
‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she said.
‘Ye-es?’ The newspaper flapped like a sail in the wind.
‘Promise me you won’t get angry,’ she said and could feel her smile spreading.
‘I can’t promise that,’ he said without looking up.
Her smile stiffened. ‘What…’
‘I’m guessing that you’re going to tell me that you went through my suitcase when you got up in the night.’
She noticed for the first time that his accent was different. The sing-song wasn’t there. He put the paper down and looked her in the eye.
Thank God, she didn’t have to lie to him and she knew that she could never have done. She had the proof now. She shook her head, but noticed that she couldn’t control the expression on her face.
He raised an eyebrow.
She swallowed.
The second hand on the clock, the large kitchen clock she had bought at IKEA with his money, ticked soundlessly.
He smiled.
‘And you found piles of letters from my lovers, didn’t you?’
She blinked, totally at sea.
He leaned forward. ‘I’m kidding, Eva. Is anything wrong?’
She nodded.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she whispered quickly, as if there were some sudden rush. ‘I… we… are going to have a baby.’
He sat there, stunned, staring in front of him as she talked about her suspicions, the visit to the doctor and then, finally, the certainty. When she had finished, he got up and left the kitchen. He came back and gave her a little black box.
‘Visit my mother,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘You were wondering what I was going to do in Oslo. I’m going to visit my mother.’
‘Have you got a mother…’
That was her first thought. Had he really got a mother? But she added: ‘… in Oslo?’
He smiled and nodded towards the box.
‘Aren’t you going to open it, Liebling. It’s for you. For the child.’
She blinked twice before she could collect herself sufficiently to open it.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said and felt her eyes welling up with tears.
‘I love you, Eva Marvanova.’
The sing-song was back in his accent.
She smiled through her tears as he held her in his arms.
‘Forgive me,’ she whispered. ‘Forgive me. That you love me is all I need to know. The rest is unimportant. You don’t need to tell me about your mother. Or the gun…’
She felt his body harden in her arms. She put her mouth to his ear.
‘I saw the gun,’ she whispered. ‘But I don’t need to know anything. Nothing, do you hear?’
He freed himself from her clasp.
‘Yes, well,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, Eva, but there’s no way out. Not now.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ll have to know who I am.’
‘But I know who you are, darling.’
‘You don’t know what I do.’
‘I don’t know that I want to know.’
‘You have to.’
He took the box from her, took out the necklace inside it and held it up.
‘This is what I do.’
The star-shaped diamond shone like a lover’s eye as it reflected the morning light from the kitchen window.
‘And this.’
He pulled his hand out of his jacket pocket. In his hand was the same gun she had seen in the suitcase. But it was longer and had a large black piece of metal attached to the end of the barrel. Eva Marvanova did not know much about weapons, but she knew what this was. A silencer, an appropriate name.
Harry was woken up by the telephone ringing. He felt as if someone had stuffed a towel in his mouth. He tried to moisten it with his tongue, but it rasped like a piece of stale bread against his palate. The clock on his bedside table showed 10.17. Half a memory, half an image entered his brain. He went into the sitting room. The telephone rang for the sixth time.
He picked up the receiver:
‘Harry. Who is it?’
‘I just wanted to apologise.’
It was the voice he always hoped to hear.
‘Rakel?’
‘It’s your job,’ she said. ‘I have no right to be angry. I’m sorry.’
Harry sat in the chair. Something was trying to struggle out of the undergrowth of his half-forgotten dreams.
‘You have every right to be angry,’ he said.
‘You’re a policeman. Someone has to watch over us.’
‘I’m not talking about the job,’ Harry said.
She didn’t answer. He waited.
‘I long for you,’ she said in a tear-filled voice.
‘You long for the person you wish I could be,’ he said. ‘Whereas I long for -’
‘Bye,’ she said, like a song cutting out in the middle of the intro.
Harry sat staring at the telephone, elated and dejected at the same time. A fragment of the night’s dream made a last attempt to come to the surface, bumping against the underside of ice which grew thicker by the second as the temperature sank. He ransacked the coffee table for cigarettes and found a dog-end in the ashtray. His tongue was still semi-numb. Rakel had probably concluded from his slurred diction that he was out of it again, which was not so far from the truth, except that he was in no mood to have more of the same poison.
He went into the bedroom and glanced at the clock on
the bedside table. Time to go to work. Something…
He closed his eyes.
An echo of Duke Ellington hung in his auditory canals. It wasn’t there; he would have to go in further. He kept listening. He heard the pained scream of the tram, a cat’s footsteps on the roof, and an ominous rustling in the bursting green birch foliage in the yard. Even further in. He heard the yard groan, the cracking of the putty in the window frames, the rumble of the empty basement room way down in the abyss. He heard the piercing scraping sound of the sheets against his skin and the clatter of his impatient shoes in the hall. He heard his mother whispering as she used to do before he went to sleep: ‘ Bak skapet bakenfor skapet bakenfor skapet til hans madam…’ And then he was back in the dream.
The dream from the night. He was blind; he must be blind because he could only hear.
He heard a low chanting voice together with a kind of mumbling of prayers in the background. Judging by the acoustics he was in a large, churchlike room, but then there was the continuous drip. From under the high vaulted ceiling, if that was what it was, resounded wildly flapping wings. Pigeons? A priest or a preacher may have been leading a gathering, but the service was strange and alien. Almost like Russian, or speaking in tongues. The congregation joined in a psalm. Odd harmony with short, jagged lines. No familiar words like Jesus or Maria. Suddenly the congregation began to sing and an orchestra began to play. He recognised the melody. From television. Wait a minute. He heard something rolling. A ball. It stopped.
‘Five,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘The number is five.’
The code.
23
Friday. A Human Number
Harry’s revelations used to be small, ice-cold drips that hit him on the head. Not any more, but, of course, by looking up and following the fall of the drips he could establish the causal connection. This revelation was different. This was a gift, theft, an undeserved favour from an angel, music that could come to people like Duke Ellington, ready-made, straight out of a dream. All you had to do was to sit down and play it.
