The Devil's Star

by Jo Nesbo

Harry was blinded and his first reflex action was to hold up his arms in front of his face. A second came and went. Nothing happened. No shots, no blows. Harry lowered his arms.

  He recognised the man standing in front of him.

  ‘What on earth are you up to?’ the man asked.

  He was wearing a pink dressing gown, but otherwise did not look as if he had just got up. The side parting in his hair was immaculate.

  It was Anders Nygård.

  ‘I was woken up by the noise,’ Nygård said, pushing a cup of filter coffee in front of Harry. ‘My first thought was that someone had realised that it was vacant upstairs and had broken in. So I went up to check.’

  ‘Understandable,’ said Harry. ‘Though I thought I had locked the door after me.’

  ‘I’ve got the caretaker’s key. Just in case.’

  Harry heard the shuffle of feet and turned round.

  Vibeke Knutsen, wearing a dressing gown, appeared in the doorway with a sleepy face and red hair sticking out in all directions. Without makeup and in the harsh light of the kitchen she looked older than the version Harry had seen before. She gave a start when she discovered he was there.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she mumbled, her eyes darting between Harry and her partner.

  ‘I was checking a few things out in Camilla’s flat,’ Harry quickly interposed when he saw her forebodings. ‘I was sitting on the bed and resting my eyes for a couple of seconds and then I nodded off. Nygård, here, heard noises and woke me up. It’s been a long day.’

  Without being absolutely sure why, Harry yawned demonstratively.

  Vibeke peered at her partner.

  ‘What are you wearing?’

  Anders Nygård looked at the pink dressing gown as if he had only just realised he was wearing it.

  ‘Wow, I must look like a regular drag queen.’

  He sniggered.

  ‘It’s a present I bought you, love. It was still in my suitcase and it was all I could find in my haste. Here you are.’

  He loosened the belt, tore the gown off and threw it to Vibeke. She was taken aback but caught it.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, bewildered.

  ‘It’s a surprise to see you up, by the way,’ he purred. ‘Didn’t you take your sleeping pill?’

  Vibeke cast an embarrassed glance over to Harry.

  ‘Goodnight,’ she mumbled and left.

  Anders went to the coffee machine and put back the jug of coffee. His back and upper arms were pale, almost white, but his lower arms were brown, exactly the way lorry drivers’ arms are in the summer. The same sharp division was apparent on his knees.

  ‘Normally she sleeps like a log all night,’ he said.

  ‘But you don’t?’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Well, since you know that she sleeps like a log.’

  ‘That’s what she says.’

  ‘And so someone only has to walk across the floor above you and you’re awake?’

  Anders looked at Harry. He nodded.

  ‘You’re right, Inspector. I don’t sleep. It’s not so easy after all that has happened. You lie awake thinking and come up with all sorts of possible theories.’

  Harry took a sip of his coffee. ‘Any you want to share with the rest of us?’

  Anders shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘I don’t know that much about mass murderers. If that’s what it really is.’

  ‘It’s not. It’s a serial killer. Big difference.’

  ‘Right, but haven’t you noticed that the victims have something in common?’

  ‘They’re young women. Anything else?’

  ‘They’re promiscuous, or they were.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You can read about it in the papers. What you read about these women’s pasts speaks for itself.’

  ‘Lisbeth Barli was a married woman and, as far as I know, faithful.’

  ‘After she was married, yes, but before that she was in a band travelling all over the country playing at dances. You’re not so naive, are you, Inspector?’

  ‘Mm. What do you conclude from this similarity then?’

  ‘This kind of murderer who acts as an arbiter over life and death has elevated himself into the position of God. And, in our Bible, in Hebrews, chapter 13, verse 4, it says that God will judge whosoever commits fornication.’

  Harry nodded and raised his wrist to check the time.

  ‘I’ll make a note of that.’

  Nygård fidgeted with his cup.

  ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’

  ‘You could say that. I found a pentagram. I suppose that since you deal with the interiors of churches you’ll know what that is.’

  ‘You mean a five-pointed star?’

  ‘Yes, drawn with one continuous line. Do you have any idea what a sign like that might symbolise?’

  Harry’s head was bent over the table, but he was furtively studying Nygård’s face.

  ‘Quite a lot,’ Nygård said. ‘Five is the most important figure in black magic. Did it have one or two points sticking upwards?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘So it’s not the sign of evil then. The sign you’re describing might symbolise both vitality and passion. Where did you find it?’

  ‘On a beam above her bed.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Nygård said. ‘That’s a simple one then.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It’s what we call a mare cross, or a devil’s star.’

  ‘A mare cross?’

  ‘A pagan symbol. They used to carve it over beds or doorways to keep away the mare.’

  ‘The mare?’

  ‘The mare, yes. As in nightmare. A female demon who sits on the chest of a sleeping person and rides him so that he has bad dreams. The pagans thought she was a spirit. Not that strange since “mare” is derived from the Indo-Germanic “mer”.’

  ‘Have to confess that my Indo-Germanic is not up to much.’

  ‘It means “death”.’ Nygård stared down into his cup of coffee. ‘Or to be more precise, “murder”.’

  There was a message on Harry’s answerphone when he arrived home. It was from Rakel. She wondered if Harry could possibly stay with Oleg in the swimming pool in Frogner the following day as she had an appointment at the dentist’s from three till five. Oleg had asked, she said.

  Harry sat and played the recording over and over again to see if he could hear any breathing, like the call he had received a few days previously, but without any success.

  He undressed and got into bed naked. The night before he had taken the duvet out of the cover and slept with only the cover over him. He kicked it around for a while, slept, got his foot caught in the opening, panicked and woke up to the splitting sound of the cotton material. The darkness outside had already taken on a grey hue. He threw what remained of the duvet cover onto the floor and lay facing the wall.

  And then she came. She sat astride him. She pushed the bridle into his mouth and pulled. His head spun round. She leaned down over him and blew her hot breath into his ear. A fire-breathing dragon. A wordless message, a hiss, on the telephone answerphone. She whipped his flanks, his haunches, and the pain was sweet, and soon, she said, she would be the only woman he would be able to love, so he may as well learn that from the outset.

  She didn’t let go until the sun shone over the highest roof tiles.

  19

  Wednesday. Under Water.

  When Harry parked outside the open-air pool in Frogner a little before 3.00 he realised where all the people who were left in Oslo had gone. There was a queue a hundred metres long in front of the ticket window. He read Verdens Gang while the queue shuffled forward towards their chlorine redemption.

  There was nothing new in the serial killer case, but they had still dug up enough material to cover four whole pages. The headlines were somewhat cryptic and directed at readers who had been following the case for a while. They referred to the murders as the ‘courier killings’ now. Everything was
in the open, the police were no longer one step ahead of the press, and Harry guessed that the morning meetings with the editors would be identical to those he had with other detectives on the case. He read the statements of the witnesses they had themselves interviewed at Police HQ, but who remembered even more for the papers. He read newspaper surveys in which people said that they were afraid, very afraid or terrified, and about courier businesses who thought they should receive compensation because they couldn’t do their jobs if people wouldn’t let them in, and ultimately it was the authorities’ responsibility to catch this man, wasn’t it? The connection between the courier killings and Lisbeth Barli’s disappearance was no longer referred to as speculative, it was a fact. A big photograph below the headline ‘Takes Over From Sister’ showed Toya Harang and Wilhelm Barli standing in front of the National Theatre. The caption under the photograph ran: ‘The dynamic producer has no intention of cancelling.’

  Harry’s eyes ran down to the main text where Wilhelm Barli was quoted as saying:

  ‘“The show must go on” is more than a cheap cliché, it is deadly serious in our line of business, and I know that Lisbeth is behind us on this, whatever has happened to her. Naturally, the situation has had an impact, but, nevertheless, we are trying to stay positive. The show will be a tribute to Lisbeth; she is a great artist who has still not realised her potential, but she will. I simply cannot allow myself to think otherwise.’

  When Harry finally made his way through the entrance, he stopped and looked around. It must have been 20 years since he last came to the open-air pool in Frogner, but apart from the renovated exteriors of the buildings and a large blue water slide in the shallow end, not a great deal had changed. There was still the smell of chlorine, the fine spray which drifted from the showers into the pools making small rainbows, the sound of the patter of feet on the asphalt, shivering children in wet bathing costumes queuing in the shade in front of the kiosk.

  He found Rakel and Oleg on the grass slope beneath the children’s pool.

  ‘Hi.’

  Rakel smiled with her mouth, but it was difficult to see what her eyes were doing behind the large Gucci sunglasses. She was wearing a yellow bikini. There are not many women who can make a yellow bikini look good, but Rakel was one of them.

  ‘Do you know what?’ Oleg burst out, his head cocked to one side as he tried to shake the water out of his ears. ‘I jumped off the five-metre board.’

  Harry sat down on the grass beside them, even though there was plenty of space on the rug.

  ‘Now you’re telling me whoppers.’

  ‘I’m telling you the truth, I am.’

  ‘Five metres? You’re a real stunt man.’

  ‘Have you ever jumped from five metres, Harry?’

  ‘Only just.’

  ‘From seven?’

  ‘Well, I did a belly flop.’

  Harry sent Rakel a meaningful look, but she was looking at Oleg who suddenly stopped shaking his head and asked in a low voice:

  ‘From ten?’

  Harry glanced up at the diving pool, from where all the screams of pleasure and the braying voice of the lifeguard on the loudhailer were coming. Ten metres. The diving tower stood out like a black-and-white T against the blue sky. It wasn’t true that the last time he had been here was 20 years ago. He had come here one summer’s night a few years after that. He and Kristin had clambered over the fence, gone up the steps on the diving tower and lay side by side on the top board. They had stayed like that and just talked and talked, with the rough, rigid matting sticking into their skin and the starry sky twinkling above them. He had thought she was the only love he would ever have.

  ‘No, I’ve never jumped from ten metres,’ he said.

  ‘Never.’

  Harry could hear the disappointment in Oleg’s voice.

  ‘Never. Just dived.’

  ‘Dived?’ Oleg leapt up. ‘But that’s even cooler. Did many people see you?’

  Harry shook his head. ‘I did it at night. All on my own.’

  Oleg groaned. ‘What’s the point of that? What’s the point of being brave if no-one sees you . . . ?’

  ‘I wonder about that too now and then.’

  Harry tried to catch Rakel’s eye, but her sunglasses were too dark. She had packed her bag, put on a T-shirt and a blue denim miniskirt over her bikini.

  ‘But that’s what the most difficult thing about it is,’ Harry said. ‘Being alone with no-one watching.’

  ‘Thanks for doing me this favour, Harry,’ Rakel said. ‘It’s really good of you.’

  ‘The pleasure’s all mine,’ he said. ‘Take all the time you need.’

  ‘The dentist needs,’ she said. ‘Which is not too long, I hope.’

  ‘How did you land?’ Oleg asked.

  ‘The usual way,’ Harry said without taking his eyes off Rakel.

  ‘I’ll be back at five,’ she said. ‘Don’t move position.’

  ‘We won’t move a thing,’ Harry said and regretted it the instant he had said it. This was not the time and place to be pathetic. There would be more suitable occasions.

  Harry watched her go until she had disappeared. He wondered how difficult it had been to get an appoint ment in the middle of the national holiday.

  ‘Will you watch me jumping from five?’ Oleg asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Harry said, taking off his T-shirt.

  Oleg stared at him.

  ‘Don’t you ever sunbathe, Harry?’

  ‘Never.’

  After Oleg had jumped twice, Harry took off his jeans and joined him on the diving board. His droopy boxer shorts with the EU flag on were attracting disapproving stares from a couple of boys in the queue as he was telling Oleg how to do a jackknife. He held his hand out flat.

  ‘The trick is to stay horizontal in the air. It looks really weird. People think you’re going to land as flat as pancake. But then at the last minute . . .’

  Harry pressed his thumb against his index finger.

  ‘. . . you bend in the middle, like a jackknife, and break the surface of the water with your hands and feet at the same time.’

  Harry took a run up and jumped. He just caught the lifeguard’s whistle as he jackknifed and the surface of the water hit his forehead.

  ‘Hey, you, I said five was off-limits,’ he heard the megaphone voice bray as he reemerged from the water.

  Oleg made a sign from the diving platform and Harry raised his thumb to show that he had understood.

  He got out of the water, stepped gingerly down the stairs and stood by one of the windows looking into the diving pool. He ran two fingers across the cool glass and made a drawing in the condensation while staring through the green and blue underwater landscape. Up at the surface he could see swimming costumes, kicking legs and the contours of a cloud in the blue sky. He thought of Underwater.

  Then Oleg arrived. He braked sharply with a cloud of bubbles, but instead of swimming up to the surface he gave a couple of kicks and swam to the window where Harry was standing.

  They looked at each other. Oleg was smiling, waving his arms and pointing. His face was pale, greenish. Harry couldn’t hear a sound from inside the pool; he could just see Oleg’s mouth moving and his black hair floating weightlessly above his head, dancing like sea grass, and him pointing upwards. It reminded Harry of something, something he didn’t want to think about at this moment. Standing there, with Oleg on the opposite side of the glass, with the sun burning down from the sky, amid all the joyful sounds of life around him, yet in absolute stillness, Harry had a sudden premonition that something terrible was going to happen.

  The very next minute he had forgotten and the premonition was replaced by another feeling when Oleg gave a kick and disappeared from view. Harry stayed with his eyes glued to the vacant TV screen. The vacant TV screen. With the lines he had drawn in the condensation. Now he knew where he had seen it.

  ‘Oleg!’ He sprinted up the stairs.

  By and large, Karl was not
that interested in people. Although he had been running the television shop in Carl Berners plass for more than 20 years, he had never been interested enough, for example, to find out a few details about his namesake, who had given his name to the square. Nor was he interested in finding out anything about the tall man standing in front of him with the police ID card, or the boy with wet hair standing beside him. Or the girl the policeman was talking about, the one they had found in the toilet at the solicitors’ place across the street. The only person Karl was interested in right now was the girl on the front of Vi Menn and how old she was, and if she really came from Tønsberg and liked sunbathing in the nude on the balcony of her flat so that men passing by could see her.

  ‘I was here the day Barbara Svendsen was murdered,’ the policeman said.

  ‘If you say so,’ Karl said.

  ‘Can you see the TV by the window? It’s not plugged in,’ the policeman said, pointing with his finger.

  ‘Philips,’ Karl said, shoving Vi Menn to one side. ‘Nice, isn’t it? Fifty Hertz. Flat screen. Surround sound, teletext and radio. It sells for seven nine, but you can have it for five nine.’

  ‘Someone’s been drawing in the dust on the screen. Can you see?’

  ‘OK then,’ Karl sighed. ‘Five six.’

  ‘I don’t give a shit about the TV,’ the policeman said. ‘I want to know who did it.’

  ‘Why?’ Karl said. ‘I wasn’t really thinking of reporting it.’

  The policeman leaned over the counter. Karl could see by the colour of his face that he didn’t like the answers he was getting.

  ‘Listen to me carefully. We are trying to find a killer and I have reason to believe that he’s been in here drawing on that TV screen. Is that good enough?’

  Karl nodded mutely.

  ‘Excellent. And now I want you to have a good think.’

  The policeman turned as a bell rang behind him. A woman with a metal case appeared in the doorway.

  ‘The Philips TV,’ the policeman said, pointing.

  She nodded without saying a word, crouched down in front of the wall where the TV was and opened her case.

  Karl stared at them with his eyes open wide.

  ‘Well?’ said the policeman.