by Jo Nesbo
‘No,’ Harry said. ‘It was me being stupid. Do you remember I was wondering if any of the fingers he cut off were also a kind of code? Well. It was the simplest of all. The thumb. He started with the first digit on the left hand and worked his way round. You don’t need to be a genius to work out that Camilla was number two.’
‘Mm.’
Now she’s doing it again, Harry thought.
‘And now we just need number five,’ Beate said. ‘The little finger.’
‘You know what that means, don’t you?’
‘That it’s our turn. That it’s been our turn all along. My God, is he really planning to… you know?’
‘Is his mother sitting beside you?’
‘Yes. Tell me what he’ll do, Harry.’
‘I have no idea.’
‘I know you have no idea, but tell me anyway.’
Harry hesitated.
‘OK. Many serial killers are driven by self-contempt. And since the fifth killing is the last one, the final one, there is a great likelihood that he’s planning to take the life of his progenitor. Or himself. Or both. It’s got nothing to do with his relationship with his mother, but with himself. Anyway, the choice of the location for the murder is logical.’
Silence.
‘Are you there, Beate?’
‘Yes, indeed. He grew up as the son of a German.’
‘Who?’
‘The person on his way here.’
New silence.
‘Why is Waaler waiting on his own in the hall?’
‘Why are you asking?’
‘Because the usual procedure would be for both of you to arrest him. It’s safer than having you sit in the kitchen.’
‘Maybe,’ Beate said. ‘I don’t have much experience in this kind of fieldwork. He must know what he’s doing.’
‘Yes,’ Harry said.
Some thoughts passed through his mind. Thoughts he was trying to repress.
‘Is there anything wrong, Harry?’
‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘I’ve run out of cigarettes.’
29
Saturday. Drowning.
Harry put his mobile phone back in his jacket pocket and leaned back against the sofa. Forensics would probably be hacked off, but there weren’t exactly many leads here to destroy. It was obvious that the killer had done a thorough job of clearing up after himself this time as well. Harry had even detected the faint aroma of soft soap when he put his face to the floor to examine some black lumps of what seemed at first sight to be rubber burned onto the lino.
A face appeared in the doorway.
‘Bjorn Holm, Forensics.’
‘Good,’ Harry said. ‘Have you got a smoke?’
He stood up and walked to the window as Holm and his colleague got down to work. The angular evening light gilded the house fronts, the streets and the trees across Kampen and into Toyen. Harry didn’t know of a more beautiful town than Oslo on evenings like this. There had to be others, but he didn’t know any.
‘I’d like you to find out what these black lumps are.’
Harry pointed to the floor.
‘Fine,’ Holm said.
Harry was dizzy. He had chain-smoked eight cigarettes. It had kept his thirst in check. In check, but not gone completely. He stared at the thumb. Presumably it had been severed with pincers. Paint and glue. A chisel and a hammer to carve the pentagram over the door. He had brought quite a bit of equipment with him this time.
He understood the pentagram. And the finger. But why the glue?
‘Looks like melted rubber,’ Holm said. He squatted on the floor.
‘How do you melt rubber?’ Harry asked.
‘You can set fire to it. Or use an electric iron. Or a heat gun.’
Holm shrugged his shoulders.
‘What do you use melted rubber for?’
‘Vulcanisation,’ his colleague said. ‘You use it for repairing things or making them watertight. Car tyres, for example. Or sealing something that has to be airtight. That kind of thing.’
‘And that?’
‘No idea. Sorry.’
‘Thank you.’
The thumb was pointing to the ceiling. If only it could point to the solution to the code, Harry thought. Obviously it was a code. The killer had attached a ring to their noses and he was leading them like dumb animals wherever he wanted, and so this code had a solution too. Quite a simple solution if it was intended for moderately intelligent idiots like himself.
He stared at the finger. Pointing upwards. OK. Roger. Message understood.
The evening light continued to stream in.
He sucked hard on his cigarette. The nicotine travelled through his veins, through the narrow capillaries from his lungs and northwards. Poisoned, health-damaged, manipulated but primed. Shit!
Harry was racked with a bout of violent coughing.
He pointed to the ceiling. Of room 406. The ceiling on the fourth floor. Of course. Idiot. Idiot.
Harry turned the key, opened the door and found the light switch along the wall. He stepped inside. The loft was high and airy without any windows. Numbered storage rooms, two metres square, abutted against each other and lined the walls. Property was piled up behind the chicken wire in transit from the owner to the rubbish skip: mattresses with holes in, unfashionable furniture, cardboard boxes of clothes, electrical goods that still work and so cannot be thrown out yet.
‘Hellfire,’ mumbled Falkeid as he and two of the men from Special Forces came in.
Harry thought it a very accurate image. The sun outside may have been low in the sky and losing power over to the west, but it had spent all day charging the roof tiles, which now radiated with the force of storage heaters and turned the loft into a veritable sauna.
‘Looks like the storage room for 406 is this way,’ Harry said, heading to the right.
‘Why are you so sure that he’ll be in the loft?’
‘Well, because the killer has himself pointed out the obvious fact that the fifth floor is above the fourth. In this case, the loft.’
‘Pointed out?’
‘A kind of rebus.’
‘Are you aware that it’s absolutely impossible for there to be a body up here?’
‘Why’s that?’
‘We came up here yesterday with a dog. A body lying here in this heat for four weeks… Transfer a dog’s olfactory organs to our own sense of hearing and it would have been like searching for a wailing siren inside here. It would have been impossible for a dog not to find it, even a less competent dog. And the one we had yesterday was first rate.’
‘Even if the body is wrapped in something that prevents the smell escaping?’
‘Molecules of air move quickly and can penetrate even microscopic openings. It is not possible for -’
‘Vulcanisation,’ Harry said.
‘Eh?’
Harry stopped in front of one of the storage areas. Instantly the two uniformed men were on the spot with their crowbars.
‘Let’s try it this way first, boys.’
Harry dangled the bunch of keys with the skull on in front of them.
The smallest key fitted the padlock.
‘I’ll go in alone,’ Harry said. ‘The forensics people don’t like the place being trampled under foot.’
He borrowed a torch and stood in front of a tall, broad white wardrobe with double doors which took up most of the room in the storage area. He laid his fingers on the handle and steeled himself before jerking open the door. The smell of musty clothes, dust and wood met his nostrils. He switched on the torch. There were three generations of blue suits hanging in a row on the bar which Marius must have inherited. Harry shone the torch inside and ran his hand across the material. Coarse wool. One of them had a thin plastic cover over it. Inside was a grey protective bag for a suit.
Harry shut the wardrobe doors and turned towards the back wall of the storage space where there was a pair of curtains – home-made by the look of them – hanging over a clothes horse. Harry heaved
them off. A set of small sharp predator teeth snarled silently at him. What was left of its coat was grey and the brown marble-like eyes needed a polish.
‘A marten,’ Falkeid said.
‘Mm.’
Harry cast his eyes around. There weren’t many places left to look. Had he really been mistaken?
Then he spotted the roll of carpet. It was Persian – at least, that was what he thought – and was lodged against the chicken wire and reached halfway up to the roof. Harry pushed a wicker chair up against the carpet, climbed onto it and shone the torch down into the carpet. The policemen standing outside stared at him with tense expressions on their faces.
‘Right,’ Harry said, getting down from the chair and switching off the torch.
‘Well?’ Falkeid said.
Harry shook his head. A sudden fury possessed him and he kicked the side of the wardrobe so that it began to stand and sway like a belly dancer. The dogs barked. A drink, one drink, a moment without torment. He turned to leave the room when he heard a scraping noise. As if something was sliding down a wall. He turned instantaneously and just saw the wardrobe door shoot open before the suit bag leapt onto him and knocked him to the ground.
Harry knew he must have been out for a second because when he opened his eyes again he was lying on his back and could feel a dull ache at the back of his head. He breathed in a cloud of dust that had risen from the dry wooden floor. The weight of the suit bag had knocked the air out of him and he felt as if he were drowning, lying underneath a big plastic bag filled with water. He hit out in panic and felt his fist strike the smooth surface and, inside, something soft that gave way.
Harry went rigid and remained totally still. Slowly he managed to focus his eyes; just as slowly the feeling that he was drowning began to wear off. And was replaced by the feeling that he had drowned.
Glazed eyes stared back at him from behind a grey plastic membrane.
They had found Marius Veland.
30
Saturday. The Arrest
The express train glided past outside, shiny silver, quiet as a tentative puff of air. Beate watched Olaug Sivertsen. She straightened her head and looked out of the window, blinking again and again. Her wrinkled, sinewy hands on the kitchen table resembled a bird’s-eye view of the countryside. The wrinkles were long valleys, the blue-black veins rivers and the knuckles chains of mountains with the skin stretched over like a grey-white tent canvas. Beate examined her own hands. She thought about what hands can do in the course of a lifetime. And what they cannot do. Or what they don’t manage to achieve.
At 21.56 Beate heard the gate open and the sound of steps on the gravel path outside.
She stood up, her heart beating as quickly and lightly as a Geiger counter.
‘That’s him,’ Olaug said.
‘Are you sure?’
Olaug gave her a distressed smile. ‘I’ve heard his steps on the gravel path ever since he was a little boy. When he was old enough to go out in the evening I used to wake up to the second step he took. He used to take twelve steps. Just count.’
Suddenly Waaler was standing in the kitchen doorway.
‘Someone’s coming,’ he said. ‘I want you to stay there. Whatever happens. OK?’
‘It’s him,’ Beate said, nodding in Olaug’s direction.
Waaler gave a brief nod. Then he was gone again.
Beate put her hand on the old lady’s.
‘It’ll be alright,’ she said.
‘You’ll see that there’s been a mistake,’ Olaug said, without meeting her eyes.
Eleven, twelve. Beate heard the door opening in the hall.
Then she heard Waaler shout:
‘Police! My ID card is on the floor in front of you. Drop the gun or I’ll shoot!’
She felt Olaug’s hand jerk.
‘Police! Put down your gun or I’ll be forced to shoot!’
Why was he shouting so loudly? They couldn’t be more than five or six metres apart.
‘For the last time!’ Waaler shouted.
Beate got up and took her revolver out of the holster she had in the belt across her shoulder.
‘Beate…’ Olaug’s voice shook.
Beate looked up and met the old lady’s imploring eyes.
‘Drop your weapon! You’re shooting at a policeman.’
Beate took the four steps to the door, pulled it open and stepped into the hallway with her weapon raised. Tom Waaler was two metres away, with his back to her. In the doorway stood a man wearing a grey suit. He was holding a suitcase in one hand. Beate had taken a decision based on what she thought she would see. That was why her first reaction was one of confusion.
‘I’ll shoot!’ Waaler shouted.
Beate could see the open mouth and the stunned face of the man standing in line with the front door. Waaler had already thrust his shoulder forward to take the recoil when he pulled the trigger.
‘Tom…’
She said it in a low voice, but Tom Waaler’s back went as rigid as if she had shot him from behind.
‘He hasn’t got a gun, Tom.’
Beate had the feeling she was watching a film. An absurd scene where someone had pressed the pause button and the picture was locked in position, frozen; the picture quivered and jerked and time stood still. She waited for the crack of the gun, but it didn’t come. Tom Waaler was not crazy. Not in a clinical sense. He didn’t lack control where his impulses were concerned. That was presumably what had frightened her most at that time. The cold control as he abused her.
‘Since you’re here, anyway…’ Waaler said finally. His voice sounded strained. ‘… perhaps you can put the handcuffs on our prisoner.’
31
Saturday. ‘Isn’t it wonderful to have someone to hate?’
It was almost midnight when for the second time Bjarne Moller met the press outside the entrance to Police HQ. Only the brightest of stars shone through the heat-haze over Oslo, but he had to shield his eyes against the flashbulbs and the camera lights. Short, stabbing questions rained down on him.
‘One at a time,’ Moller said, pointing to a raised arm. ‘And please introduce yourself.’
‘Roger Gjendem, Aftenposten. Has Sven Sivertsen confessed?’
‘At the present moment the suspect is being interviewed by the man leading the investigation, Inspector Tom Waaler. Until the interviews are over I cannot answer your question.’
‘Is it true that you found weapons and diamonds in Sivertsen’s case? And that the diamonds are identical to those you found on the victims’ bodies?’
‘I can confirm that this is true. Over there, yes please.’
A young woman’s voice. ‘Earlier this evening you said that Sven Sivertsen lives in Prague, and in fact I have been able to find out his official address. It’s a boarding house, but they say that he left there more than a year ago and no-one seems to know where he lives. Do you?’
The other journalists were taking notes before Moller answered.
‘Not yet.’
‘I managed to get talking to a couple of the residents there,’ the woman’s voice said with barely concealed pride. ‘They said Sven Sivertsen had a young girlfriend. They didn’t know her name, but one of them suggested she was a prostitute. Are the police aware of this?’
‘We weren’t until this minute,’ Moller said. ‘But we appreciate your help.’
‘And we do, too,’ shouted one voice in the crowd, followed by all-male hyena laughter. The woman smiled uncertainly.
A question in Ostfold dialect: ‘ Dagbladet. How’s his mother taking it?’
Moller caught the journalist’s eye and bit his lower lip to prevent himself from snarling in anger.
‘I cannot make any judgment on that. Yes. Please.’
‘ Dagsavisen. We’re wondering how it’s possible that Marius Veland’s body could lie for four weeks in the loft of his building, in the hottest summer ever without anyone discovering it.’
‘We are as yet uncertain about
the precise timing of this, but it looks as if a plastic bag was used, similar to a suit bag which was then sealed and made airtight before being…’ Moller searched for the right words, ‘hung in the wardrobe in the loft of the student block.’
A low mumble ran through the throng of journalists and Moller wondered if he had given away too much detail.
Roger Gjendem was asking another question.
Moller saw his mouth moving as he listened to the tune that was buzzing round in his head. ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You.’ She had sung it so well on Beat for Beat, her sister, the one who was taking over the main role in the musical, what was her name again?
‘I apologise,’ Moller said. ‘Could you repeat that, please.’
Harry and Beate were sitting on a low wall set back from the jostling crowd of journalists, watching and smoking a cigarette. Beate had announced that she was a social smoker and took one from the packet that Harry had just bought.
Harry himself didn’t feel any need to be sociable. Just to sleep.
They saw Tom Waaler coming out of the main entrance smiling into the hail of flashbulbs going off. The shadows were dancing a victory jig against the wall of Police HQ.
‘He’ll be a celebrity now,’ Beate said. ‘The man who led the investigation and single-handedly arrested the Courier Killer.’
‘With two guns and stuff?’ Harry smiled.
‘Yes, it was just like the Wild West. And can you tell me why you would ask someone to put down a weapon they don’t have?’
‘Waaler probably meant the weapon Sivertsen was carrying. I would’ve done the same.’
‘Of course, but do you know where we found his gun? In his suitcase.’
‘For all Waaler knew, he could have been the fastest gun in the West from a standing suitcase.’
Beate laughed. ‘You’re coming afterwards for a beer, aren’t you?’
Their eyes met and her smile became fixed as her blush spread over her neck and face.
‘I didn’t mean…’
‘It’s fine. You can celebrate for us both, Beate. I’ve done my bit.’
‘You could come with us, anyway?’
‘Don’t think so. This was my last case.’