The Devil's star hh-5

by Jo Nesbo

  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 Moller 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?’ Moller asked.

  ‘Don’t want to sleep,’ Harry whispered in an unrecognisable voice. ‘Don’t want to dream.’

  Moller 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 Moller caught Groth’s telling shake of the head.

  Harry threw up in the car park. He stood bent over, spitting and cursing as Moller lit a cigarette and passed it over to him.

  ‘This is out of hours,’ Moller 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 been.’

  ‘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.’

  Moller 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,’ Moller 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.’

  Moller opened his hand and studied Harry’s reaction. The moon and the lamp shone on the palm of Moller’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,’ Moller said. ‘The middle finger of the left hand.’

  ‘Did forensics manage to identify the finger?’

  Bjarne Moller nodded.

  ‘So quickly?’

  Moller 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 Moller.

  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 Lonn 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,’ Moller 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.’

  Moller 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.

  Moller 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 throa
t 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.

  Moller 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.

  Moller saw Harry staring at Waaler.

  ‘To sum up,’ Moller 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.

  ‘How much do you propose to pay me for the lessons?’

  The woman in rags threw back her head and put her hands on her hips.

  ‘Oh, I know what’s right. A lady friend of mine gets French lessons for eighteen pence an hour from a real French gentleman. Well, you wouldn’t have the face to ask me the same for teaching me my own language as you would for French; so I won’t give more than a shilling. Take it or leave it.’

  Wilhelm Barli sat in the twelfth row and let his tears flow freely. He could feel them running down his neck and in under his silk Thai shirt, over his chest; he felt the salt make his nipples smart before the tears continued down over his stomach.

  They would not stop.

  He held a hand in front of his mouth so that his sobs would not distract the actors or the stage director in the fifth row.

  He gave a start when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned round and saw a tall man towering over him. A premonition rooted him to his chair.

  ‘Yes?’ he whispered in a strangulated voice.

  ‘It’s me,’ the man whispered. ‘Harry Hole. Police.’

  Wilhelm Barli took his hand away from his mouth and studied Harry’s face in detail.

  ‘Of course it is,’ he said with relief in his voice. ‘Sorry, Inspector. It’s so dark. I thought…’

  The policeman sat down in the seat beside Wilhelm.

  ‘You thought what?’

  ‘You’re dressed in black.’

  Wilhelm blew his nose in a handkerchief.

  ‘I thought you were a priest. A priest coming… with bad news. Stupid, isn’t it?’

  The policeman didn’t answer.

  ‘You caught me at a rather emotional moment, Inspector. We have the first dress rehearsal today. Look at her.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Eliza Doolittle. Up there. When I saw her on the stage, I thought for a moment it was Lisbeth and that

  I had only been dreaming she was gone.’

  Wilhelm was taking deep breaths and trembling.

  ‘But then she began to speak, and my Lisbeth disappeared.’

  Wilhelm discovered that the policeman was staring at the stage in amazement.

  ‘A striking resemblance, isn’t it? That’s why I brought her in. It was supposed to be Lisbeth’s musical.’

  ‘Is it…?’ Harry started to say.

  ‘Yes, that’s her sister.’

  ‘Toya? I mean Toy-A.’

  ‘We’ve managed to keep it secret so far. The press conference is later today.’

  ‘Right. That ought to create a bit of publicity.’

  Toya swung herself round and cursed loudly when she stumbled. Her partner raised his arms in desperation and his eyes sought the director.

  Wilhelm sighed.

  ‘Publicity isn’t everything. As you can see, there is quite a lot of work to do. She has a sort of raw talent, but appearing on the stage of the National Theatre is rather different to singing cowboy songs at the community centre in a small town in central Norway. It took me two years to teach Lisbeth how to behave on stage, but with her up there we’ll have to do it in two weeks.’

  ‘If I’m disturbing you, I can run through this very quickly, herr Barli.’

  ‘Run through it quickly?’

  Wilhelm tried to read the expression on Harry’s face in the dark. Fear had him in its grip again, and when Harry opened his mouth, instinct took over and Wilhelm interrupted.

  ‘You’re not disturbing at all, Inspector. I’m just the producer. You know, someone who gets things moving. The others take over now.’

  He waved his hand towards the stage where the man dressed in tweeds was loudly proclaiming at that moment:

  ‘I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe!’

  ‘Director, stage designer, actors,’ Barli said. ‘As from tomorrow I’ll be a mere onlooker watching this…’ He continued to wave his hand in the air until he found the word. ‘… comedy.’

  ‘Well, we all have to discover our own talents.’

  Wilhelm gave a hollow laugh, but stopped when he saw the silhouette of the director’s head turn suddenly towards them. He leaned over to the policeman and whispered: ‘You’re right. I was a dancer for 20 years. A very bad dancer if you have to know, but there’s always a desperate shortage of male dancers in opera so they take almost anyone who can half dance. Anyway, we’re pensioned off when we reach 40 and then I had to find something new. It was then that I realised that my real talent lay in getting others to dance. Stage management, Inspector. That’s the only thing I can do. But do you know what? We become pathetic at the merest hint of success. Because things happen to go our way on a couple of productions we believe we are gods who can control all the variables and that we are the architects of our fortunes in all areas. And then something like this happens, and we discover how helpless we are. I…’

  Wilhelm suddenly broke off.

  ‘I’m boring you, aren’t I?’

  The other man shook his head and cleared his throat.

  ‘It’s about your wife.’

  Wilhelm screwed up his eyes as if waiting to hear an unpleasant, loud noise
.

  ‘We received a package. Containing a severed finger. I’m afraid it belonged to her.’

  Wilhelm swallowed hard. He had always seen himself as a man of love, but now he could feel it growing again. The lump under his heart that had been there ever since that day. The tumour that was driving him to the edge of insanity. He sensed that it had a colour, he sensed that hatred was yellow.

  ‘Do you know what, Inspector? It’s almost a relief. I’ve known it all the time. That he would harm her.’

  ‘Harm?’

  Wilhelm detected a note of anxious surprise in the other man’s voice.

  ‘Can you promise me something, Harry? Is it OK if I call you Harry?’

  The policeman nodded.

  ‘Find him. Find him, Harry. And punish him. Punish him severely. Will you promise me?’

  Wilhelm thought he saw the other man nod, but he wasn’t sure. His tears distorted everything.

  Then the man was gone. Wilhelm took a deep breath and tried to concentrate on the stage again.

  ‘No! I’ll call the police, I will,’ Toya shouted.

  Harry sat in his office staring at the desk top. He was so tired he didn’t know if he was capable of doing any more.

  The escapades of the previous day – his time in the cell and another night of nightmares – they had taken their toll. It was the meeting with Wilhelm Barli, however, that had really drained him. Sitting there and promising that they would catch the perpetrator, holding back when Barli said that his wife was ‘harmed’. For if there was one thing Harry was certain about, it was that Lisbeth Barli was dead.