The Devil's Star

by Jo Nesbo

  Nygård shrugged his shoulders. ‘Whoever did it could have picked the lock.’

  Harry shook his head. ‘People only pick locks in films.’

  ‘Someone might already have been in the flat with her,’ Vibeke said.

  ‘Who?’

  Harry waited in silence. When he considered that no-one was going to break the silence, he got up.

  ‘Someone will call you in for questioning. For the moment, thank you.’

  In the hallway, he turned round.

  ‘By the way, who called the police?’

  ‘It was me,’ Vibeke said. ‘I rang while Anders went to fetch the caretaker.’

  ‘Before you’d found her? How did you know . . . ?’

  ‘There was blood dripping into the pan.’

  ‘Oh? How did you know that?’

  Anders Nygård gave a loud, exaggerated sigh and rested a hand on Vibeke’s neck: ‘It was red, wasn’t it.’

  ‘Well,’ Harry said, ‘there are other things than blood which are red.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Vibeke said. ‘It wasn’t just the colour though.’

  Anders Nygård threw her a look of astonishment. She smiled, but Harry noticed that she moved away from her partner’s hand.

  ‘I used to live with a chef and we ran a little eating house together. That’s when I learned a few things about food. One of which was that blood contains albumin, and if you pour blood into a pan of water over sixty-five degrees, the blood coagulates and becomes lumpy. Just like when an egg cracks in boiling water. When Anders tasted the lumps in the water and said that they tasted of egg, I knew it was blood. And that something terrible had happened.’

  Anders Nygård’s mouth fell open. He went suddenly very pale under his tan.

  ‘Bon appetit,’ Harry mumbled and left.

  5

  Friday. Underwater.

  Harry hated theme pubs: Irish pubs, topless pubs, novelty pubs or, worst of all, celebrity pubs where the walls were lined with portraits of regular customers of some notoriety. The theme of Underwater was a vaguely nautical mix of diving and the romanticism of old wooden ships. But at some point, well into his fourth beer, Harry couldn’t care less about gurgling aquariums of green water, diving helmets and the rustic interiors of creaking wood. It could have been worse. The last time he had been here people had suddenly burst into a round of operatic favourites; for a moment he had the feeling that the musical had finally caught up with reality. He took stock and confirmed with some relief that none of the four guests in the pub looked as though they were considering breaking into song for the time being.

  ‘Everyone on holiday?’ he asked the girl behind the bar as she put his beer in front of him.

  ‘It’s seven o’clock.’ She gave him change for a hundred-kroner note although he had given her two hundred.

  He would have gone to Schrøder if he could, but he had a hazy recollection that he was banned there and he didn’t have the nerve to go and find out. Not today. He remembered fragments of some scene there on Tuesday. Or was it Wednesday? Someone had dragged up the time when he had been on TV and had been referred to as the ‘Norwegian Police Hero’ because he had shot a gunman in Sydney. Some guy had made a few remarks and called him names. Some of what he said had been spot on. Did they end up coming to blows? It was not impossible, but of course the injuries to his knuckles and nose that he woke up with could just as easily have been caused by a fall on the cobblestones in Dovregata.

  Harry’s mobile phone rang. He stared at the number and saw that it wasn’t Rakel this time, either.

  ‘Hello, boss.’

  ‘Harry? Where are you?’ Bjarne Møller sounded concerned.

  ‘Underwater. What’s up?’

  ‘Water?’

  ‘Water. Fresh water. Salt water. Tonic water. You sound . . . What’s the word? Frazzled.’

  ‘Are you drunk?’

  ‘Not drunk enough.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. The battery keeps going, boss.’

  ‘One of the officers at the crime scene threatened to write a report on you. He says you were visibly intoxicated when you arrived.’

  ‘Why “threatened” and not “is threatening”?’

  ‘I persuaded him not to. Were you intoxicated, Harry?’

  ‘Of course I wasn’t, boss.’

  ‘Are you absolutely positive that you are telling me the truth now, Harry?’

  ‘Are you absolutely positive that you want to know?’

  Harry heard Møller’s groan at the other end.

  ‘This cannot go on, Harry. I’ll be forced to put a stop to it.’

  ‘OK. Begin by taking me off this case.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me. I don’t want to work with that bastard. Put someone else on the case.’

  ‘We haven’t got the personnel to . . .’

  ‘Then give me the boot. I don’t give a monkey’s.’

  Harry put his phone back in his inside pocket. He could hear Møller’s voice gently vibrating against his nipple. Actually it was quite a pleasant feeling. He drained the rest of his glass, stood up and staggered out into the warm summer evening. The third taxi he hailed in Ullevålsveien stopped and picked him up.

  ‘Holmenkollveien,’ he said, settling his sweaty neck back against the cool leather of the back seat. As they went along he gazed out of the window at the swallows as they dissected the pale blue sky in their search for food. The insects had come out now. This was the swallows’ window of opportunity, their chance to live. From now until the sun went down.

  The taxi pulled up below a large, dark timber-clad house.

  ‘Shall I drive up?’ the taxi driver asked.

  ‘No, we’ll just wait here for a bit,’ Harry said.

  He stared up at the house. He thought he caught a glimpse of Rakel in the window. Oleg would probably be going to bed soon. He was probably making a fuss right now to stay up longer because it was . . .

  ‘It is Friday today, isn’t it?’

  The taxi driver took a cautious look in his mirror and gave a slight nod.

  The days. The weeks. My God, how quickly young lads grew up. Harry rubbed his face, tried to massage a bit of life into the wan death mask he walked around with. Last winter hadn’t been so bad. He had solved a couple of biggish cases, he had appeared as a witness in the Ellen Gjelten case, he was on the wagon, and he and Rakel had gone from being just a couple of new loves to doing family things together. And he had liked it; he liked the weekend trips and the company of children. Harry did the barbecuing. He liked having his father and Sis over for a Sunday meal, and seeing his sister, who had Down’s syndrome, and nine-year-old Oleg playing together. And best of all: they were very much in love. Rakel had even begun to throw out hints that it might be an idea if Harry moved in. She had used the argument that the house was too big for her and Oleg. Harry had not gone to any great pains to find counter-arguments.

  ‘We’ll see when I’ve done with the Ellen Gjelten case,’ he had said. The trip to Normandy that they had booked – three weeks on an old farm and a week on a riverboat – would be a kind of test to see if they were ready for it.

  Then things started happening.

  He had spent the whole winter working on the Ellen Gjelten case. It was intensive, too intensive, but that was the only way Harry knew how to work. Ellen Gjelten was not just a colleague; she was his closest friend and kindred spirit. Two years had gone by since the two of them had been on the heels of an arms smuggler going by the code name of Prince and since the day a baseball bat had knocked the living daylights out of her. The evidence at the scene of the crime by the Akerselva pointed to Sverre Olsen, an old neo-Nazi the police knew well. Unfortunately they never got to hear his explanation as he was shot through the head when he was alleged to have fired at Tom Waaler during his arrest. Regardless of this, Harry was convinced that the real man behind the murder was Prince, and he had persuaded Møller to let him conduct his own invest
igation. It was personal, so it went against all the principles they worked by in Crime Squad, but Møller had given him permission, short-term, as a kind of reward for the results that Harry had achieved on other cases. The breakthrough had finally come last winter. Someone had seen Sverre Olsen sitting in a red car in Grünerløkka with another person on the night of the murder, just a few hundred metres away from the scene of the crime. The witness was a Roy Kvinsvik, a convicted former neo-Nazi, now a recent Pentecostal convert to the Philadelphian sect. Kvinsvik was not exactly what you would call a model witness, but he had taken a long, hard look at the photograph Harry had shown him and said, Yes, this was the person he had seen in the car with Sverre. The man in the photograph was Tom Waaler.

  Even though he had suspected Waaler for a long time, it came as a shock to receive confirmation. Not least because it meant that there had to be more moles working with him in the department. Prince could not have operated with such a wide network as he had done without help. That in turn meant that Harry could not trust anyone. So he kept his mouth shut about what Roy Kvinsvik had told him because he knew he would only get one chance, and the whole sordid truth would have to come out in one go. And he would have to be absolutely sure that the root came with it; if it didn’t he was done for.

  That was why Harry had secretly begun to work on assembling a watertight case against Waaler. However, since he didn’t know who it was safe to talk to, this turned out to be more difficult than he had imagined. He began to trawl through the archives after the others had gone home for the day, to tap into the internal computer network, to print out e-mails and lists of incoming and outgoing telephone calls from people he knew Waaler associated with. In the afternoons he sat in a car near Youngstorget and kept an eye on Herbert’s Pizza. Harry’s theory was that the neo-Nazis frequenting the pizzeria were also smuggling arms. When this theory did not produce any leads he began to shadow Waaler and a number of his colleagues. He concentrated on those he knew spent a lot of time with guns at the firing range in Økern. He followed them from a safe distance, sat outside their homes, shivering in his car while they slept indoors, and returned home to Rakel early in the morning, totally exhausted. He slept for a couple of hours and then went to work again. After a while she asked him to sleep in his own flat on the nights when he had double shifts. He hadn’t told her that his night work was off the record, off the time sheets, off the awareness of his superiors, off almost everything.

  Then he started doing a turn off Broadway too.

  First of all, he dropped by Herbert’s Pizza one evening, then another, chatting with the guys, buying rounds of beer. Of course they knew who he was, but free beer was free beer and they drank it, grinned and kept their mouths shut. He gradually realised that they didn’t know anything, but he still continued to go there, he wasn’t quite sure why, perhaps because it gave him the feeling that he was close to something, the dragon’s lair. All he had to do was be patient, he only had to wait and the dragon would emerge. But neither Waaler nor any of his acquaintances ever turned up. So he went back to watching the block where Waaler lived.

  One night, at 20 degrees below freezing point, the streets completely deserted, a man wearing a short, thin jacket came walking towards his car with the rolling gait that characterises junkies. He stopped outside the entrance leading to Waaler’s block, looked right then left and attacked the lock with a crowbar. Harry sat and watched, fully aware that he risked being exposed if he intervened. The man was presumably too stoned to attach the crowbar properly and as he yanked it down, a large chunk of wood detached itself from the door with a splintering sound. As he did it, he fell backwards and landed in a pile of snow at the front of the block. And that was where he stayed. Lights came on in a couple of windows. The curtains in Waaler’s flat moved. Harry waited. Nothing happened. Twenty degrees below zero. The light was still on in Waaler’s window. The junkie didn’t stir. Afterwards, Harry often wondered what the hell he should have done. The battery on his mobile had gone flat because of the cold, so he couldn’t have rung casualty. He waited. The minutes ticked by. Bloody junkie. Twenty-one below. Sodding junkie. Of course he could have driven away, gone to casualty and told them about him. Something moved by the entrance. It was Waaler. He looked comical in dressing gown, boots, cap and mittens. He was carrying two woollen blankets. Harry could not believe his eyes as Waaler checked the junkie’s pulse and pupils before wrapping him in the blankets. Waaler just stood there flapping his arms around to keep himself warm and peering in the direction of Harry’s car. A few minutes later the ambulance rolled up in front of the block of flats.

  That night Harry went home, sat down in his wing chair, lit a cigarette and listened to the Raga Rockers and Duke Ellington. Then he went to work, although he had not been out of his clothes for 48 hours.

  Rakel and Harry had their first row one evening in April. He had cancelled a weekend trip at the last moment, and she pointed out that this was the third time he had broken a promise within a very short space of time. A promise to Oleg, she said. He accused her of using Oleg as an excuse and that what she really wanted was for him to prioritise her needs over finding the person who had taken Ellen’s life. She said Ellen was a ghost, that he had shut himself up with a corpse, that it wasn’t normal, that he was feeding on the tragedy, that it was necrophilia, that it wasn’t Ellen who was driving him but his own lust for vengeance.

  ‘You’ve been hurt,’ she said. ‘And you’ve let everything else go so that you can get your revenge.’

  As Harry fumed out of the house he caught a glimpse of Oleg’s pyjamas and red eyes behind the stair rails.

  After that he stopped doing anything that did not have a direct connection with his pursuit of those guilty of Ellen’s murder. He read e-mails under the low light of table lamps, stared at the dark windows of detached houses and blocks of flats waiting for people who never came out, and snatched a few hours’ sleep in his flat in Sofies gate.

  The days grew longer and lighter, but he had made absolutely no progress. One night, out of the blue, a nightmare from his childhood returned: Sis, her long hair trapped, the expression of horror on her face. He was rigid with fear. It returned the following night. And the night after.

  Øystein Eikeland, a childhood friend who drank at Malik’s when he wasn’t driving his taxi, told Harry that he looked shattered and offered him some cheap speed. Harry refused. Exhausted and angry, he continued with the relentless search.

  It was just a question of time before it all unravelled. Something as prosaic as an unpaid bill was all it took to trigger it. It was the end of May and he hadn’t spoken to Rakel for several days. He was woken in his office chair by the phone ringing. Rakel said that the travel company had reminded her that they hadn’t paid for the farm in Normandy. They had a week’s grace, after that the travel company would rent the farm out to someone else.

  ‘Friday is the deadline,’ were Rakel’s last words before ringing off.

  Harry went to the lavatory, splashed some cold water over his face and confronted his reflection in the mirror. Beneath his wet, closely cropped fair hair he saw a pair of bloodshot eyes with dark bags under them and drawn, hollow cheeks. He tried a smile. Yellowing teeth grinned back at him. He didn’t recognise himself. And he knew that Rakel was right, it was a deadline. For him and Ellen. For him and Tom Waaler.

  The same day he went to his closest superior officer, Bjarne Møller, who was the only person at Police HQ he trusted 100 per cent. Møller had alternately nodded and shaken his head as Harry told him what he wanted. Fortunately, he had said, that was not his pigeon and Harry would have to take it up directly with the Chief Superintendent. Nevertheless, he thought that Harry should think twice before he went to see him. Harry went straight from Møller’s square office to the oval office of the head of Kripos. He knocked, went in and presented what he had to say, about the witness who had seen Tom Waaler together with Sverre Olsen, and the fact that it was none other than Tom Waaler who had
shot Olsen while arresting him. That was it. That was all he had after five months’ slog, five months’ shadowing, five months on the verge of madness.

  The head of Kripos asked Harry what he thought Tom Waaler’s motive might be in killing Ellen Gjelten.

  Harry answered that Ellen was in possession of dangerous information. The same evening she was killed she left a message on Harry’s answerphone that she knew who Prince was. She knew the name of the ringleader behind the illegal importing of weapons and the person responsible for arming Oslo’s criminal community to the teeth with service handguns.

  ‘Unfortunately it was too late when I rang back,’ Harry said, trying to read the Chief Superintendent’s expression.

  ‘And Sverre Olsen?’ the Superintendent asked.

  ‘When we picked up Sverre Olsen’s trail, Prince killed him so that he wouldn’t be able to reveal the name of Ellen’s killer.’

  ‘And this Prince, you said, is . . . ?’

  Harry repeated Tom Waaler’s name and the head of Kripos nodded in silence and said: ‘One of our own then. One of our most respected detective inspectors.’

  For the next ten seconds Harry felt as if he was sitting in a vacuum, with no air and no sound. He knew that his police career could finish right there on the spot.

  ‘Alright, Hole. I’ll meet this witness of yours before I make up my mind what our next step should be.’

  The Superintendent stood up.

  ‘I assume that you understand, until further notice, this is a matter which must remain between you and me.’

  ‘How long are we supposed to stay here?’

  Harry gave a start at the sound of the taxi driver’s voice. He had been asleep.

  ‘Go back,’ he said, taking a last look at the timber house.

  As they went back down Kirkeveien his mobile phone rang. It was Beate.

  ‘We think we’ve found the weapon,’ she said. ‘And you were right. It is a handgun.’

  ‘In that case, congratulations to us both.’