The Devil's star hh-5

by Jo Nesbo

  Beate opened her eyes and got up.

  ‘Please forgive me. It’s been a long, hectic day. You’ve been a great help. Thank you very much for coming.’

  ‘Not at all. I only hope that it can help you catch the person who did this.’

  ‘So do we. I’ll call you a taxi.’

  While Beate waited for Oslo Taxis to answer she noticed that the diamond expert was looking at her right hand holding the telephone. Beate smiled.

  ‘That’s a very attractive diamond you’ve got there. Looks like an engagement ring.’

  Beate blushed without quite knowing why.

  ‘I’m not engaged. It’s the engagement ring my father gave my mother. I inherited it when she died.’

  ‘Right. That explains why you are wearing it on your right hand.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Yes, you would usually wear it on your left hand. Or on the middle finger of your left hand, to be precise.’

  ‘The middle finger? I thought your ring finger was next to your little finger.’

  ‘Not if you have the same beliefs as the Egyptians.’

  ‘And what did they believe?’

  ‘They thought that the vein of love, vena amoris, went directly from the heart to the middle finger on the left hand.’

  After the taxi had arrived and the woman had left, Beate stood for a moment looking at her hand, at the middle finger on her left hand.

  Then she rang Harry.

  ‘The gun was Czech, too,’ Harry said when she finished.

  ‘Perhaps there’s something in it,’ Beate said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Harry said. ‘What was the vein called again?’

  ‘ Vena amoris?’

  ‘ Vena amoris,’ Harry mumbled. Then he put down the receiver.

  16

  Monday. Dialogue.

  You’re sleeping. I place my hand against your face. Have you missed me? I kiss your stomach. I go down lower and you begin to stir. Waves. A dance of elfins. You’re silent. You pretend to sleep. You can wake up now, darling. You have been found.

  Harry sat bolt upright in bed. It took a few seconds before he realised that it was his own scream that had woken him. He stared out into the semi-darkness and studied the shadows by the curtains and the wardrobe.

  He laid his head back on the pillow. What had he been dreaming about? He’d been in a dark room. Two people were moving towards each other in a bed. Their faces were hidden. He switched on his torch and was shining it at them when he was woken by his own scream.

  Harry looked at the digits on the clock on his bedside table. It was still two and a half hours away from 7.00. You can dream your way to hell and back in that time. He had to sleep though. Had to. He took a deep breath as if he were going to dive under water, and closed his eyes.

  17

  Tuesday. Profiles.

  Harry watched the second hand on the wall clock over Tom Waaler’s head.

  They’d had to bring in extra chairs to accommodate everyone in the large conference room in the green zone on the sixth floor. There was almost an atmosphere of solemnity in the room: no chatting, no drinking of coffee, no reading of newspapers, just people scribbling on notepads, the silent waiting for the clock to advance to 8.00. Harry counted 17 heads, and that meant that only one person was missing. Tom Waaler stood at the front with his arms crossed, staring at his Rolex wristwatch.

  The second hand on the wall clock moved, stopped and, quivering, stood to attention.

  ‘Let’s start,’ Tom Waaler said.

  There was a rustle of movement as everyone, with one accord, sat up in their chairs.

  ‘I’ll be leading this investigation, assisted by Harry Hole.’

  Heads round the table turned in surprise towards Harry, who sat at the back of the room.

  ‘First of all, I’d like to thank those of you who uncomplainingly cut short your holidays,’ Waaler continued. ‘I’m afraid you’ll be asked to sacrifice more than your holidays in the days to come, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to get round to you all to thank you personally, so let’s just say that this “thank you” is for the whole month. OK?’

  There were smiles and nods round the table. As one smiles and nods to a future divisional commander, Harry thought.

  ‘This is a special day in many ways.’

  Waaler switched on the overhead projector. The front page of Dagbladet appeared on the screen behind him. SERIAL KILLER ON THE LOOSE? No pictures, just this screaming headline in block capitals. It’s rare now for a news desk with any respect for the profession to use question marks on a front page, and what very few people knew – and no-one in Room K615 – was that the decision to add the question mark had been taken only minutes before the paper went to press after the acting editor rang his superior – on holiday in Tvedestrand – for advice.

  ‘We haven’t had a serial killer in Norway – as far as we know at least – since Arnfinn Nesset went berserk in the ’80s,’ Waaler said. ‘Serial killers are rare, so rare that this is going to attract attention beyond the borders of Norway. We’re already the subject of a lot of interest, folks.’

  Tom Waaler’s subsequent pause for effect was unnecessary. All those present had already been made aware of the significance of the case when they were briefed on the phone by Moller the previous evening.

  ‘OK,’ Waaler said. ‘If we’re really up against a serial killer now, we have a number of advantages on our side. Firstly, in our midst we have someone who has investigated and caught a serial killer. I assume you all know about Inspector Harry Hole’s star turn in Sydney. Harry?’

  Harry saw the faces turn towards him and cleared his throat. He could feel his voice threatening to desert him and he cleared his throat again.

  ‘I’m not so sure that the job I did in Sydney was a model investigation.’ He attempted a wry smile. ‘As you perhaps remember, I ended up shooting the man.’

  No laughter, not even so much as the suspicion of a smile. Harry was no future divisional commander.

  ‘We can imagine worse outcomes than that, Harry,’ Waaler said, looking at his Rolex again. ‘Many of you know the psychologist Stale Aune, to whom we have turned for expert advice on several cases. He’s agreed to come and give us a short presentation on the phenomenon of serial killing. For some of you this is nothing new, but going over some old ground won’t do any harm. He should be here at -’

  All heads went up as the door swung open. The man who entered was panting loudly. Above the rotund stomach bursting out of a tweed jacket was a floppy orange necktie and glasses so small that you wondered whether it was possible to see through them at all. Beneath a shiny pate was a forehead glistening with sweat and beneath that a pair of dark, possibly dyed, but at any rate neatly tended eyebrows.

  ‘Talk of the devil…’ Waaler said.

  ‘And here he is!’ Stale Aune completed, pulling out a handkerchief from his breast pocket and drying his forehead. ‘And devilishly hot it is too!’

  He went up to the end of the table and dropped his worn, brown leather bag onto the floor with a bang.

  ‘Good morning, lady and gentlemen. Nice to see so many young people awake at this time of day. Some of you I have met before, others of you have been spared.’

  Harry smiled. He was one of those who had definitely not been spared. Harry first went to see Aune about his drinking problems many years ago. Aune was no expert on drug abuse, but Harry had to admit a relationship had developed between them that bordered on a friendship.

  ‘Notepads out, sluggards!’

  Aune hung his jacket over a chair.

  ‘You look as if you’re at a funeral, and that’s probably true in some respects, but I want to see a few smiles before I leave here. That’s an order. And hang onto my coattails. I’m going to whistle through this.’

  Aune grabbed a marker from the ledge under the flip chart and began to write at breakneck speed while speaking:

  ‘There is every reason to believe that serial killers have ex
isted for as long as there have been men on earth to kill. However, many consider the so-called “Autumn of Terror” in 1888 the first serial killer case of modern times. It’s the first documented case of a serial killer with a purely sexual motive. The murderer killed five women before vanishing into thin air. He was given the epithet “Jack the Ripper”, but he took his real identity with him to the grave. Our most famous national contribution to the list is not Arnfinn Nesset, who, as you will all remember, poisoned twenty patients or so in the ’80s, but Belle Gunness who was that rare thing: a female serial killer. She left for America and married a weed of a man in 1902 and settled down on a farm outside La Porte in the state of Indiana. I say a weed of a man because he weighed seventy kilos and she weighed 120.’

  Aune pulled lightly at the braces on his trousers.

  ‘If you ask me, her weight was just right.’

  Ripples of laughter.

  ‘This pleasantly plump lady killed her husband, some children and an unknown number of suitors whom she lured to the farm through lonely heart advertisements in the Chicago press. Their bodies were discovered one day in 1908 when the farm burned down under mysterious circumstances. Among them was the burned and unusually voluminous torso of a woman with her head chopped off. The woman was presumably placed there by Belle to dupe investigators into believing it was her. The police received several reports from witnesses who said they had seen Belle in various places throughout America, but she was never found. And that is my point, dear friends. Unfortunately the cases of Jack and Belle are quite typical of serial killers.’

  Aune finished writing with a round smack of his marker against the flip chart.

  ‘They do not get caught.’

  The assembly looked at him in silence.

  ‘So,’ Aune said, ‘the concept of the serial murderer is just as controversial as everything else I’m going to tell you now. This is because psychology is a science that is still in its infancy and because psychologists are quarrelsome by nature. I’ll tell you what we know about serial killers – it’s much the same as what we don’t know. By the way, “serial killer” is a term which many competent psychologists consider meaningless since it is used to describe a set of mental illnesses that other psychologists claim do not exist. Is that clear? Well, some of you are smiling anyway, and that’s good.’

  Aune tapped his index finger against the first point he had written up on the flip chart.

  ‘The typical serial killer is a white man between 24 and 40 years of age. As a rule he acts alone, but he can work with others, in a pair, for example. Brutality against the victim is an indication that he is acting alone. The victims can be anyone, though generally they fall into the same ethnic group as the killer, and in exceptional cases they may be known to him.

  ‘Usually he finds the first victim in an area he knows well. In the public imagination there are always special rituals connected with the murders. This is not true, but when rituals do occur, it is often in connection with a serial killing.’

  Aune pointed to the next point where he had written

  PSYCHOPATH/SOCIOPATH.

  ‘However, the most characteristic trait of the serial killer is that he’s American. Only God – and perhaps a couple of psychology professors at Blindern – knows why. That’s why it is interesting that the people who know most about serial killings – the FBI and the American legal profession – distinguish between two types of serial murderer: the psychopath and the sociopath. The professors I mentioned believe that both the distinction and the concepts stink, but in the homeland of the serial killer most law courts follow the McNaughten Rules which decree that it is only the psychopath who does not know what he’s doing while committing the crime. The psychopath, therefore, unlike the sociopath, escapes a prison sentence or – as is probably the case in God’s own country – execution. Apropos serial killers, it is my opinion that, hm…’

  He sniffed at the marker pen and raised a surprised eyebrow.

  Waaler put up his hand. Aune nodded.

  ‘What sentence is apportioned is very interesting,’ Waaler began, ‘but first we have to catch him. Have you any practical advice we can use?’

  ‘Are you crazy? I’m a psychologist, aren’t I?’

  Laughter. Aune, gratified, bows.

  ‘Yes, I’ll be coming to that, Inspector Waaler. Let me first say that if any of you are already becoming impatient, you have a tough time ahead of you. From experience, nothing takes as long as catching a serial killer. If they are the wrong type, at any rate.’

  ‘What’s the wrong type?’ It was Magnus Skarre’s question.

  ‘First of all, let’s have a look at how the people who draw up psychological profiles for the FBI distinguish between psychopaths and sociopaths. The psychopath is often a maladjusted individual without a job, without any education, with a criminal record and a variety of social problems. Unlike the sociopath, who is intelligent, apparently successful and living a normal life. The psychopath stands out and easily falls under suspicion, whereas the sociopath can disappear in the crowd. It always comes as quite a shock to neighbours and friends when a sociopath is uncovered. I was talking to a psychologist who works as a profiler for the FBI and she told me that the first thing she considered was the timing of the killings. Killing takes time of course. A useful lead for her was whether the killings had taken place on weekdays, at weekends or on national holidays. The latter would suggest that the killer had a job and would increase the likelihood that you were dealing with a sociopath.’

  ‘So if our man kills during the national holidays it suggests that he has a job and is a sociopath?’ Beate Lonn asked.

  ‘It is somewhat premature to draw such conclusions of course, but taking that into account with what we already know, perhaps. Is that practical enough for you?’

  ‘Practical, yes,’ Waaler said, ‘but it’s also bad news if I read you right?’

  ‘Correct. Our man looks a lot like the wrong type of serial killer. The sociopath.’

  Aune gave the gathering a couple of seconds to let that sink in before going on.

  ‘According to the American psychologist, Joel Norris, the serial killer goes through a mental process involving six phases with each killing. The first is called the aura phase where the person gradually loses their grip on reality. The totem phase, the fifth phase, is the killing itself, the serial killer’s climax, or, to be more precise, the anticlimax, because the killing is never able to fulfil the hopes and expectations of catharsis and purification that the killer associates with the taking of a life. That’s why the killer goes straight into the sixth phase, the depressed phase. This in turn leads into a new aura phase in which he builds himself up, ready for the next killing.’

  ‘Round and round in circles then,’ said Bjarne Moller, who had crept in unnoticed and was standing by the door. ‘Like a perpetuum mobile.’

  ‘Except that a perpetual motion machine repeats the operations without any changes,’ Aune said. ‘However, the serial killer goes through a process that changes his behaviour over the long term. Characterised, fortunately, by a decreasing level of control, but, unfortunately, also by an increasing level of brutality. The first murder is always the one that is most difficult to recover from and thus the so-called cooling-down period afterwards is also the longest. It produces a long aura phase in which he builds himself up for the next killing and he gives himself a good long time to plan it. If the killer has taken a great deal of care with details at the scene of a crime, if the rituals have been carried out with precision and the risk of discovery is small, it suggests that he is still at the beginning of the process. In this phase he is perfecting his technique to become even more efficient. This is the worst phase for the people trying to catch him. However, after he has killed a few times, the cooling-down periods typically become shorter and shorter. He has less time to plan, the murder scenes are messier, the rituals less neatly performed and he takes greater risks. All of this indicates that his frustrat
ion is growing. Or let me put it another way, that his thirst for blood is escalating. He loses self-control and is easier to catch. But if at this time attempts to capture him fail, he can be frightened off and he will stop killing for a while. In this way he has time to calm down and he will begin at the beginning again. I hope these examples are not too depressing?’

  ‘We’re surviving,’ Waaler said. ‘Could you say a little about this particular case?’

  ‘Fine,’ Aune replied. ‘Here we have three premeditated murders -’

  ‘Two!’ It was Skarre again. ‘For the time being, Lisbeth Barli is only reported missing.’

  ‘Three murders,’ Aune said. ‘Believe me, young man.’

  Some of the policemen exchanged glances. Skarre seemed to want to say something, but then changed his mind. Aune continued.

  ‘The three murders have been committed with the same number of days between each one. And the ritual of mutilation and decorating the body has been carried out in all three cases. He cuts off one finger and compensates by giving the victim a diamond. Compensation is, by the way, a familiar feature with this kind of brutality, typical of killers who have been brought up according to strict moral principles. Perhaps this is a lead you can follow up since there is not much morality left in homes around Norway.’

  No laughter.

  Aune sighed.

  ‘It’s called gallows humour. I’m not trying to be cynical and my points could probably be better made, but I am trying not to let this case bury me before we have even started. I recommend you do the same. Anyway, in this particular case, the intervals between the killings and the fact that rituals are being performed indicate self-control and an early phase.’

  Someone cleared their throat gently.

  ‘Yes, Harry?’ Aune said.

  ‘Choice of victim and place,’ Harry said.

  Aune rubbed his index finger against his chin, considered for a moment and nodded.

  ‘You’re right, Harry.’

  Others round the table exchanged enquiring looks.