by Jo Nesbo
One of her girlfriends nudged her and nodded towards a man coming up Akersbakken.
‘Look. He’s drunk,’ one girl whispered.
‘Poor man,’ one of the others said.
‘Those are the lost souls Jesus wants to redeem.’
It was Sofie who said that. She always said things like that. The others nodded. Marit did too. And then she realised. This was it, the opportunity. And without a moment’s hesitation she left her throng of girlfriends and stood in the man’s path.
He stopped and peered down at her. He was taller than she had anticipated.
‘Do you know Jesus?’ Marit asked in a loud, clear voice and with a smile.
The man’s face was bright red and his vision was blurred. The conversation behind her had suddenly died, and out of the corner of her eye she could see that Roy and the girls on the steps had turned towards them.
‘Unfortunately, I don’t,’ the man snuffled. ‘And neither do you, my girl, but perhaps you know Roy Kvinsvik?’
Marit could feel her blushes suffusing her face, and her follow-up – Do you know he’s just waiting to meet you? – became ensnared in her throat.
‘Well?’ the man asked. ‘Is he here?’
She took in the man’s cropped skull and his boots. She suddenly went very red. Was this man a neo-Nazi, someone from Roy’s past? Someone come to avenge his betrayal? Or to persuade him to return?
‘I . . .’
But the man had already sidestepped her.
She turned round, just in time to see Roy beat a hasty retreat into the church hall and slam the door behind him.
The drunk strode across the crunching gravel, his upper body tipped like a mast caught in a sudden gust of wind. In front of the steps he slipped and fell to his knees.
‘Oh my God . . .’ one of the girls gasped.
The man got up again.
Marit saw Kristian hurriedly draw back as the man ran up the steps. He stood on the top step, swaying to and fro. For a moment he teetered on the point of falling backwards. Then he regained control over the forces of gravity and snatched at the door handle.
Marit held her hand in front of her mouth.
He pushed. Fortunately Roy had locked the door.
‘Fuck!’ The man shouted in a voice thick with alcohol. He leaned back and then brought his head forward in a bow.
There was the crisp crack of broken glass as his forehead smashed the circular window in the door and the splintered glass fell to the steps.
‘Stop it!’ Kristian shouted. ‘You can’t . . .’
The man turned round and gaped at him. A triangular fragment of glass was protruding from his forehead. Blood ran down from it in a tiny stream and forked at the ridge of his nose.
Kristian didn’t say another word.
The man opened his mouth and began to howl. The sound was as chilling as a steel blade. He began to attack the door again with a fury that Marit had never witnessed before, beating the solid, white door with clenched fists. Howling like a wolf, he struck again and again, flesh against wood. It sounded like axe-blows in the stillness of the morning forest. Then he began to beat the wrought-iron Star of Bethlehem in the circular window. She thought she heard the sound of ripping skin as the splatter of blood began to discolour the white door.
‘Someone do something,’ a voice screamed. She saw Kristian take out his mobile phone.
The iron star was loose. All of a sudden the man sank to his knees.
Marit went closer. The others had moved back, but she had to go nearer. Her heart was thumping in her chest. In front of the steps she felt Kristian’s hand on her shoulder and she stopped. She could hear the man gasping for breath on the steps, like a fish drowning on dry land. It sounded as if he was weeping.
When the police car came to collect him a quarter of an hour later, he was lying in a heap on the steps. They got him to his feet, and he allowed himself to be led to the car without putting up any resistance. One of the policewomen asked if anyone had any damage to report. They just shook their heads, too shocked to give the smashed window another thought.
Then the car was gone and all that was left was the warm summer night. It went through Marit’s mind that it was as if nothing had happened. She hardly noticed Roy emerge, pale and worn, and then disappear, or Kristian put his arm around her. She stared at the damaged star in the window. It was bent over and twisted; two of the five points of the star pointed upwards and one down. Despite the heat of the night, she pulled her jacket tighter round her shoulders.
It was well past midnight, and the moon was reflected in the windows of Police HQ. Bjarne Møller walked across the empty car park and into the custody block. As he entered, he took a quick look around. The three reception desks were unmanned; two officers were staring at the TV in the guard room. As an old Charles Bronson fan, Møller recognised the film. Death Wish. And he recognised the older of the two officers. It was Groth, also known as the ‘Griever’ on account of the liver-coloured scar that ran down from his left eye to the top of his cheek. Groth had worked in the custody block for as long as Møller could remember and everyone knew that to all intents and purposes he ran the place.
‘Hello?’ Møller shouted.
Without taking his eyes off the television screen, Groth raised a finger and pointed to the younger officer who reluctantly twisted in his chair to face him.
Møller flashed his ID card, but apparently that was superfluous. They knew him.
‘Where’s Hole?’ he shouted.
‘The idiot?’ Groth snorted as Charles Bronson raised his gun to exact revenge.
‘Cell five, I think,’ the younger officer said. ‘Check with one of the warders in there, if you can find one.’
‘Thank you,’ Møller said, and went through the door leading to the cells.
There were approximately a hundred detention cells and the number of inmates varied according to the season. Now it was definitely low season. Møller didn’t bother going to the warders’ guard room and began to walk down the corridors between the metal cubicles. His footsteps reverberated. He had always loathed the custody block. Firstly, it was absurd that living people should be incarcerated here. Secondly, there was the atmosphere of the gutter and ruined lives. Thirdly, he knew the kind of thing that went on here. Such as the time a prisoner had reported Groth for using a fire hose on him. SEFO rejected the claim when they took out the fire hose and discovered that it only reached halfway to the cell where the hosing down was alleged to have taken place. It seemed that SEFO were the only people at Police HQ who didn’t know that when Groth knew there would be a spot of bother, he would just cut a chunk off the fire hose.
Like all the other cells, number five had no lock and key, just a basic device for opening the door from the outside.
Harry was sitting on the floor with his head in his hands. The first thing that Møller noticed was that the bandage on Harry’s right hand was soaked in blood. Harry raised his head slowly and looked at him. He had a plaster on his forehead and his eyes were swollen as if he had been crying. There was the smell of vomit.
‘Why don’t you lie on the bunk?’ Møller asked.
‘Don’t want to sleep,’ Harry whispered in an unrecognisable voice. ‘Don’t want to dream.’
Møller pulled a face to hide the fact that he was shaken. He had seen Harry down before, but not like this, not so low. Never crushed.
He cleared his throat.
‘Let’s go.’
‘Griever’ Groth and the young officer did not even cast a glance their way as they passed the guard room, but Møller caught Groth’s telling shake of the head.
Harry threw up in the car park. He stood bent over, spitting and cursing as Møller lit a cigarette and passed it over to him.
‘This is out of hours,’ Møller said. ‘It’s staying unofficial.’
Harry choked on his laughter. ‘Thanks, boss. It’s good to know I’ll get the boot with a slightly better record than it might have bee
n.’
‘That’s not why I said that. It’s because otherwise I would have had to suspend you with immediate effect.’
‘And so?’
‘I need a detective like you for the next few days. That is, the detective you are when you’re sober. So the question is whether you can stay sober.’
Harry straightened up and exhaled the cigarette smoke.
‘You know I can, boss. But do I want to?’
‘I don’t know. Do you want to, Harry?’
‘You have to have a reason, boss.’
‘Yes. I suppose you do.’
Møller surveyed his inspector thoughtfully. He considered the situation. Here they were, standing in the middle of a deserted car park one summer’s night in Oslo, under the light of the moon and a lamp full of dead insects. He thought of all the things they had been through together, all the things they had achieved and hadn’t achieved. In spite of everything, after all these years, was it going to be here, like this, as banal as it sounded, that they would finally go their separate ways?
‘For as long as I’ve known you, there’s only been one thing that’s kept you going,’ Møller said, ‘and that’s work.’
Harry didn’t answer.
‘I’ve got a job for you. If you want it.’
‘And that would be . . . ?’
‘I received this in a brown padded envelope today. I’ve been trying to get hold of you ever since.’
Møller opened his hand and studied Harry’s reaction. The moon and the lamp shone on the palm of Møller’s hand and one of the Forensics department’s plastic bags.
‘Mm,’ Harry said. ‘And the rest of her body?’
In the plastic bag was a long, slim finger with a red-lacquered nail. The finger was wearing a ring. The jewel set in the ring was in the shape of a star with five points.
‘That’s all we’ve got,’ Møller said. ‘The middle finger of the left hand.’
‘Did forensics manage to identify the finger?’
Bjarne Møller nodded.
‘So quickly?’
Møller pressed his hand against his stomach and nodded again.
‘Right,’ Harry said. ‘So it is Lisbeth Barli then.’
Part Three
13
Monday. Touch.
You are on television, darling. There is a whole wall of you. There are twelve clones of you, all moving in step, copies in almost imperceptible variations of colour and shade. You are walking down a catwalk in Paris. You stop, raise a hip and look down at me with that cold, hate-filled look that you learned, and turn your back on me. It works. Rejection works every time, you know that, darling, don’t you.
Then the news item is over, and you give me twelve severe looks while you read twelve similar news broadcasts and I read from 24 red lips, but you are silent and I love you for your silence.
Then there are pictures of a flood somewhere in Europe. Look, my love, we are wading through the streets. I drag my finger across a television screen and draw your star sign. Even though the television is dead, I can feel the tension between the dusty screen and my finger. The electricity. The encapsulated life. And it is my touch that brings it to life.
The tip of one of the points of the star meets the pavement outside the redbrick building on the other side of the crossroads, darling. I can stand here in the television shop and study it through the gaps between the sets. This is one of Oslo’s busiest crossroads and usually there are long queues of cars out there, but today there are only cars on two of the roads which radiate out from the tarmac heart. Five roads, darling. You have been in bed all day waiting for me. I just have to do this and then I’m coming. If you like I can take the letter out from behind the wall and whisper the words to you. ‘My darling! You are in my thoughts all the time. I can still feel your lips against mine, your skin against mine.’
I open the shop door to go out. The sun floods in. Sun. Flood. I’ll soon be with you.
The day had started badly for Møller.
The previous night he had collected Harry from custody, and then in the morning he had been awoken by pains in his stomach, which was shaped like an overinflated beach ball.
It was to get even worse though.
But at 9.00 things did not seem so bad when an apparently sober Harry came walking in through the door of the Crime Squad meeting room on the sixth floor. Already sitting round the table were Tom Waaler, Beate Lønn and four of the division’s detectives responsible for case strategy along with two specialist colleagues summoned from their holidays the night before.
‘Good morning, everyone,’ Møller began. ‘I assume you are already aware of what we have on our hands here: two cases, perhaps two killings, with some indication that the perpetrator is one and the same person. In brief, it looks suspiciously like the nightmare that we all have at some point.’
Møller put the first overhead transparency on the projector.
‘What we can see on the left is Camilla Loen’s left hand with the severed index finger. On the right, we can see the middle finger of Lisbeth Barli’s left hand, which was sent to me by post. Although we don’t have a body to match as yet, Beate identified the finger by comparing the fingerprint with those she had taken in Barli’s flat. Good initiative and good work, Beate.’
Beate blushed while drumming her pencil on her notepad and trying to look unaffected.
Møller changed the overhead transparency.
‘We found this precious stone under Camilla’s eyelid, a red diamond in the shape of a five-pointed star. This ring on the right was on Lisbeth’s finger. As you can see, the diamond on the ring is paler, but the shape is identical.’
‘We have tried to find out where the first diamond comes from,’ Waaler said. ‘Without success. We sent photos to two of the biggest diamond-cutting establishments in Antwerpen, but they say that this type of workmanship probably originates from somewhere else in Europe. They suggested Russia or southern Germany.’
‘We contacted a diamond expert working for De Beers, by far the biggest buyer of uncut diamonds in the world,’ Beate said. ‘According to her, it is possible to use spectrometry and microtomography to identify precisely where a diamond comes from. She is flying from London this evening to help us.’
Magnus Skarre, one of the younger detectives and relatively new to Crime Squad, put up his hand.
‘Going back to what you said at the beginning, sir, I don’t understand why this is such a nightmare if this is a double murder. After all, we are only looking for one killer instead of two, so all of us here can work with the same focus. In my opinion, it should be the opposite . . .’
Magnus Skarre heard a deep clearing of a throat and the meeting’s attention turned to where Harry Hole had remained sunken in his chair until now.
‘What’s your name again?’ Harry asked.
‘Magnus.’
‘Surname.’
‘Skarre.’ The voice betrayed irritation. ‘You’ll have to remember –’
‘No, Skarre, I won’t remember. But you try to remember what I’m saying to you now. When detectives are confronted with a premeditated, and in this case carefully planned, murder, they know that the perpetrator has a number of clear advantages. He may have removed all the forensic evidence, established an apparently solid alibi for the time of the death, disposed of the weapon and so on. But there is one thing the killer can, so to speak, never hide from an investigation. And what is that?’
Magnus Skarre blinked a couple of times.
‘The motive,’ Harry said. ‘Basic stuff, isn’t it? The motive, that’s where we start our investigation. It’s so fundamental that sometimes we forget it. Until one day, out of the blue, up he pops: the killer out of every detective’s worst nightmare. Or wet dream, all depending on how your head’s wired. And the nightmare is the killer who has no motive. Or to be more precise: who has no motive that is humanly possible to comprehend.’
‘Now you’re just painting a devil on the wall, Inspector
Hole, aren’t you.’ Skarre looked round at the others. ‘We don’t know yet whether there is a motive behind these killings or not.’
Tom Waaler cleared his throat.
Møller saw the muscles in Harry’s jaw tighten.
‘He’s right,’ Waaler said.
‘Of course I’m right,’ Skarre said. ‘It’s obvious that –’
‘Shut up, Skarre, Inspector Hole’s right. We’ve worked on these two cases for ten and fifteen days respectively without finding one single thing that might be a connection between these murder victims. And when the only connection between the victims is the way they were dispatched, the rituals and things that look like coded messages, then we begin to think about a word that I suggest we don’t say out loud yet, but all of us have at the back of our minds. I also suggest that Skarre and the other new boys from college keep their mouths shut from now on and open their ears when Inspector Hole speaks.’
The room went quiet.
Møller saw Harry staring at Waaler.
‘To sum up,’ Møller said, ‘we’re trying to keep two thoughts in our minds at the same time. On the one hand, we are working systematically as if these were two run-of-the-mill killings. On the other hand, we are painting a big, fat, nasty devil on the wall. No-one else speaks to the press except me. The next meeting is at five. Now get cracking.’
The man in the spotlight was elegantly dressed in tweeds, holding a Sherlock Holmes pipe and rocking on his heels as he looked upon the woman in rags in front of him with a sympathetic expression.