by Jo Nesbo
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 Møller?’
‘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?’
‘Tchort,’ Nikolai said, gently pressing down three keys. Dissonance. ‘Also called Satan.’
In the afternoon Olaug Sivertsen opened the French doors to the balcony facing Bjørvika, sat down on a chair and watched the red train glide past her house. It was quite an ordinary house, a detached redbrick building dating back to 1891; what was so extraordinary was its location. Villa Valle – named after the man who designed it – stood on its own beside the railway track just outside Oslo Central Station, inside railway domain. The nearest neighbours were some low sheds and workshops belonging to Norwegian Railways. Villa Valle was built to accommodate the station master, his family and servants and was designed with extra thick walls so that the station master and his wife would not be awakened every time a train passed. In addition, the station master had asked the builder – who had got the job because it was well known that he used a special mortar to make the walls extra solid – to strengthen it even further. In the event that a train came off the rails and hit the house, the station master wanted the train driver to take the brunt of the collision and not him and his family. So far no train had crashed into the elegant station master’s house that stood in such strange isolation, like a castle in the air above a wilderness of
black gravel in which the rails gleamed and wriggled like snakes in the sun.
Olaug closed her eyes and basked in the warmth of the sun.
As a young woman she hadn’t liked the heat. Her skin went red and itched and she had longed for the cool, damp summers of northwest Norway. Now she was old – almost 80 – she preferred the hot to cold, light to darkness, company to solitude, sound to silence.
It hadn’t been like that when, in 1941 and at 16 years of age, she had left Averøya and gone to Oslo on those same rails and begun work as a maidservant for Gruppenführer Ernst Schwabe and his wife Randi in Villa Valle. He was a tall, good-looking man, and she came from an aristocratic family. Olaug was terrified in the first few days. However, they treated her well and showed her respect, and soon Olaug realised that she had nothing to fear so long as she did her job with the thoroughness and punctuality that Germans are, not unjustifiably, famous for.
Ernst Schwabe was responsible for the WLTA, the Wehrmacht’s Landtransportabteilung, their transport division, and he himself chose the house by the railway station. His wife, Randi, probably also worked in the WLTA, but Olaug never saw her in uniform. Olaug’s room faced south, overlooking the garden and the tracks. During the first weeks the clattering of the long trains, the shrill whistles and all the other noises of a town kept her awake at night, but gradually she became used to it. When she went home on her first holiday the year after, she lay in bed in the house she had grown up in, listening to the silence and the nothingness and longed for the sounds of life and living people.
Living people, there had been many of them in Villa Valle during the war. The Schwabes were very active socially, and both Germans and Norwegians were present at social engagements. If only people knew which heads of Norwegian society had been here, eating, drinking and smoking with the Wehrmacht as their hosts. One of the first things she was told to do after the war was to burn the seating cards she had been hoarding. She did what she was told and never said a word to anyone. Of course, she had felt an occasional urge to disobey when photographs of the selfsame persons appeared in the press, which went on about living under the yoke of the German occupation. However, she kept her mouth shut for one reason only: when peace came, they threatened to take away her young son and he was all she had ever had or valued in the world. The fear was still well entrenched within her.
Olaug screwed up her eyes in the weak sun. It was flagging now, not so unremarkable since it had been shining all day and had done its best to kill her flowers in the window boxes. Olaug smiled. My goodness, she had been so young, no-one had ever been so young. Did she yearn to be young again? Maybe not, but she yearned for company, life, people milling around. She had never understood what they meant when they said that old people were lonely, but now . . .
It was not so much being alone as not being there for someone. She had become so deeply sad from waking up in the morning knowing that she could stay in bed all day and it would not make any difference to anybody.
That was why she had taken in a lodger, a cheerful young girl from Trøndelag.
It was odd to think that Ina, who was only a few years older than she had been when she moved to Oslo, was now staying in the same room as she had. She probably lay awake at night thinking about how she longed to be far from the din of town life, back in the silence of somewhere small in North Trøndelag.
Olaug may have been wrong, though. Ina had a gentleman friend. She hadn’t seen him, let alone met him, but from her bedroom she had heard his footsteps up the back staircase, the entrance to Ina’s room. It was not possible to forbid Ina from receiving men in her room, unlike when Olaug had been a maid, not that she wanted to, anyway. Her only hope was that no-one would come and take Ina away. She had become a close friend, even like a daughter, the daughter she had never had.
However, Olaug was aware that in a relationship between an old lady and a young girl such as Ina it would always be the young girl who offered friendship and the old lady who received it. Consequently, she took care not to be obtrusive. Ina was always friendly, but Olaug thought that may have had something to do with the low rent.
It had become a sort of fixed ritual: Olaug made some tea and knocked on Ina’s door carrying a tray of biscuits at around 7.00 in the evening. Olaug preferred them to be there. It was strange, but this room was still the room where she felt most at home. They chatted about everything under the sun. Ina was especially interested in the war and what had gone on in Villa Valle. And Olaug told her. About how much Ernst and Randi had loved each other, about how they would sit for hours in the living room just talking and tenderly touching, brushing away a lock of hair, resting a head on a shoulder. Olaug told her how sometimes she secretly observed them from behind the kitchen door. She described Ernst Schwabe’s erect figure, his thick black hair and his high, open forehead, how the expression of his eyes could alternate between joking and seriousness, anger and laughter, self-assurance in the larger things of life and boyish confusion in smaller, trivial things. Mostly, though, she watched Randi Schwabe with her shiny red hair, her slim white neck and bright eyes with a pale blue iris surrounded by a circle of dark blue. They were the most beautiful eyes Olaug had ever seen.
Seeing them like this, Olaug thought the two were made for each other, that they were soulmates and nothing would ever be able to tear them apart. Yet, she told Ina, the happy atmosphere at parties in Villa Ville could disintegrate into furious rows as soon as the guests had gone home.
It was following one such row, after Olaug had gone to bed, that Ernst Schwabe knocked on her door and entered her bedroom. Without switching on the light, he sat down on the edge of her bed and told her that his wife had left the house in a rage and had gone to a hotel for the night. Olaug could smell from his breath that he had been drinking, but she was young and didn’t know what you do when a man 20 years her senior, a man she respected, admired and was even a little in love with, asked her to take off her nightdress so that he could see her naked.
He didn’t touch her the first night, he just looked at her, caressed her cheek, told her she was beautiful, more beautiful than she would ever be able to understand, and then he got up. As he was leaving he appeared to be on the verge of tears.
Olaug stood up and closed the balcony doors. It was almost 7.00. She took a peek at the door at the top of the back steps and saw a pair of smart men’s shoes on the doormat outside Ina’s door. So she had a visitor. Olaug sat down on the bed and listened.
At 8.00 the door opened. She could hear someone putting on their shoes and going down the steps, but there was another sound, a scuffling, scratching sound, like a dog’s paws. She went into the kitchen and put on some hot water for tea.
When she knocked on Ina’s door a few minutes later, she was surprised to find that Ina didn’t answer, especially since she could hear the sound of soft music coming from her room.
She knocked again, but still there was no answer.
‘Ina?’
Olaug pushed the door and it swung open. The first thing she noticed was how stuffy the air was. The window was closed and the curtains were drawn so it was almost completely black inside.
‘Ina?’
No-one answered. Perhaps she was asleep. Olaug went in and had a look behind the door where the bed was. Empty. Strange. Her old eyes were used to the darkness now, and she spotted Ina. She was sitting in the rocking chair by the window and it did look as if she was sleeping. Her eyes were closed and her head hung to the side. Olaug still couldn’t make out where the low hum of music was coming from.
She went over to the chair.
‘Ina?’
Her lodger didn’t react now, either. Olaug held the tray with one hand and gently placed her other hand against the young girl’s cheek.
There was a soft thud as the teapot met the carpet. Followed immediately by two teacups, a silver sugar bowl with the German imperial eagle on, a plate and six Maryland cookies.
At the same moment that Olaug’s – or, t
o be more precise, the Schwabe family’s – teacups hit the floor, Ståle Aune raised his cup – or, to be more precise, Oslo Police Department’s.
Bjarne Møller studied the plump psychologist’s distended little finger and wondered to himself how much was playacting and how much was just a distended little finger.
Møller had called a meeting in his office and in addition to Aune he had asked those leading the investigation – Tom Waaler, Harry Hole and Beate Lønn – to attend.
They all looked jaded, largely perhaps because the hope that had sprung into life with the discovery of the bogus courier was beginning to fade.
Tom Waaler had just gone through the results of the appeal for information they had put out over TV and radio. Twenty-four calls they had received, 13 of which were from their regulars who always rang in whether they had seen something or not. Of the other eleven calls, seven turned out to be genuine couriers on genuine jobs. Four callers told them what they already knew: that there had been a courier near Carl Berners plass on Monday at around 5 p.m. What was new was that he had been seen cycling down Trondheimsveien. The only interesting call came from a taxi driver who had seen a cyclist wearing a helmet, glasses, and a yellow and black shirt outside the Art and Technical School on his way up Ullevålsveien at around the time when Camilla Loen was killed. None of the courier services had taken on jobs anywhere near the Ullevålsveien area at that time of day. Then someone from Førstemann Courier Services had called in to say that he had nipped up Ullevålsveien on his way to the terrace restaurant in St Hanshaugen for a beer.
‘In other words, our inquiries have led nowhere.’ Møller said.
‘Still early days,’ Waaler said.
Møller nodded, but his expression indicated that he was not encouraged. Apart from Aune, everyone in the room knew that the first responses were the important ones. People forget quickly.
‘What do they say in the understaffed Institute of Forensic Medicine?’ Møller asked. ‘Have they found anything that can help identify our man?’