The Devil's Star (28 page)

Duke Ellington was playing fast. As if his head was full of notes he had to squeeze in. And now he had almost completely stopped. He was just adding the essential full stops.

Harry had not gone into the backgrounds of the victims, he hadn’t talked to relatives or friends, he had just skimmed through the reports without finding anything to catch his attention. That wasn’t where the answers lay. It wasn’t who the victims were, but what they were, what they represented. For this killer the victims were no more than an exterior, more or less randomly chosen, like everything around them. It was just a question of catching a glimpse of what it was, seeing the pattern.

Then the chemicals kicked in with a vengeance. The effect was more like that of a hallucinogen than sleeping tablets. Thinking gave way to thoughts, and completely out of control – as if in a barrel – he sailed down a river. Time pulsated, pumped like an expanding universe. When he came to, everything around him was still, there was only the sound of the stylus on the record player scratching against the label.

He went into the bedroom, sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed and fixed his attention on the devil’s star. After a while it began to dance in front of his eyes. He closed them. It was just a question of keeping it in sight.

When it became light outside he was beyond everything. He sat, he heard and he saw, but he was dreaming. The thud of the
Aftenposten
on the stairs woke him up. He lifted his head and focused on the devil’s star, which was no longer dancing.

Nothing danced. It was over. He had seen the pattern.

The pattern of a benumbed man in a desperate search for genuine feelings. A naive idiot who believed that where there was someone who loved, there was love, that where there were questions, there were answers. Harry Hole’s pattern. In a fit of fury he headbutted the cross on the wall. He saw sparks in front of his eyes and he dropped onto his bed. His gaze fell on the alarm clock: 5.55. The duvet cover was wet and warm.

Then – as if someone had switched off the light – he passed out.

She was pouring coffee into his cup. He grunted a
Danke
and turned the pages of the
Observer
which he would buy at the hotel on the corner. Along with fresh croissants that Hlinka, the local baker, had started making. She had never been abroad, only to Slovakia, which wasn’t really abroad, but he assured her that now Prague had everything they had in other big cities in Europe. She had wanted to travel. Before she met him, an American businessman had fallen in love with her. She had been bought for him as a present by a business connection in Prague, an executive from a pharmaceutical company. He was a sweet, innocent, rather plump man and would have given her everything so long as she had gone home with him to Los Angeles. Of course, she had said yes. But when she told Tomas, her pimp and half-brother, he went to the American’s room and threatened him with a knife. The American left the following day and she had never seen him since. Four days later she was sitting, downcast, in the Grand Hotel Europa drinking wine when he turned up. He sat on a chair at the back of the room and watched her giving importunate men the brush-off. That was what he fell for, he always said, not the fact that she was very much in demand by other men, but that she was absolutely unmoved by their courtship, so effortlessly apathetic, so completely chaste.

She let him buy her a glass of wine, thanked him and walked home alone.

The following day he rang at the door of her tiny basement flat in Strasnice. He never told her how he had found out where she lived. But life went from grey to rosy red in the blink of an eye. She was happy. She was happy.

The newspaper rustled as he turned a page.

She should have known. If it hadn’t been for the gun in the suitcase she would not have given it a second thought.

She decided she would forget it, forget everything except what was important. They were happy. She loved him.

She was sitting in the chair, still wearing her apron. She knew that he liked her in an apron. After all, she knew a bit about what made men tick, the trick was not to let on. She looked down at her lap. She began to smile; she couldn’t stop.

‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she said.

‘Ye-es?’ The newspaper flapped like a sail in the wind.

‘Promise me you won’t get angry,’ she said and could feel her smile spreading.

‘I can’t promise that,’ he said without looking up.

Her smile stiffened. ‘What . . .’

‘I’m guessing that you’re going to tell me that you went through my suitcase when you got up in the night.’

She noticed for the first time that his accent was different. The sing-song wasn’t there. He put the paper down and looked her in the eye.

Thank God, she didn’t have to lie to him and she knew that she could never have done. She had the proof now. She shook her head, but noticed that she couldn’t control the expression on her face.

He raised an eyebrow.

She swallowed.

The second hand on the clock, the large kitchen clock she had bought at IKEA with his money, ticked soundlessly.

He smiled.

‘And you found piles of letters from my lovers, didn’t you?’

She blinked, totally at sea.

He leaned forward. ‘I’m kidding, Eva. Is anything wrong?’

She nodded.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she whispered quickly, as if there were some sudden rush. ‘I . . . we . . . are going to have a baby.’

He sat there, stunned, staring in front of him as she talked about her suspicions, the visit to the doctor and then, finally, the certainty. When she had finished, he got up and left the kitchen. He came back and gave her a little black box.

‘Visit my mother,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You were wondering what I was going to do in Oslo. I’m going to visit my mother.’

‘Have you got a mother . . .’

That was her first thought. Had he really got a mother? But she added: ‘. . . in Oslo?’

He smiled and nodded towards the box.

‘Aren’t you going to open it,
Liebling
. It’s for you. For the child.’

She blinked twice before she could collect herself sufficiently to open it.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said and felt her eyes welling up with tears.

‘I love you, Eva Marvanova.’

The sing-song was back in his accent.

She smiled through her tears as he held her in his arms.

‘Forgive me,’ she whispered. ‘Forgive me. That you love me is all I need to know. The rest is unimportant. You don’t need to tell me about your mother. Or the gun . . .’

She felt his body harden in her arms. She put her mouth to his ear.

‘I saw the gun,’ she whispered. ‘But I don’t need to know anything. Nothing, do you hear?’

He freed himself from her clasp.

‘Yes, well,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, Eva, but there’s no way out. Not now.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ll have to know who I am.’

‘But I know who you are, darling.’

‘You don’t know what I do.’

‘I don’t know that I want to know.’

‘You have to.’

He took the box from her, took out the necklace inside it and held it up.

‘This is what I do.’

The star-shaped diamond shone like a lover’s eye as it reflected the morning light from the kitchen window.

‘And this.’

He pulled his hand out of his jacket pocket. In his hand was the same gun she had seen in the suitcase. But it was longer and had a large black piece of metal attached to the end of the barrel. Eva Marvanova did not know much about weapons, but she knew what this was. A silencer, an appropriate name.

Harry was woken up by the telephone ringing. He felt as if someone had stuffed a towel in his mouth. He tried to moisten it with his tongue, but it rasped like a piece of stale bread against his palate. The clock on his bedside table showed 10.17. Half a memory, half an image entered his brain. He went into the sitting room. The telephone rang for the sixth time.

He picked up the receiver:

‘Harry. Who is it?’

‘I just wanted to apologise.’

It was the voice he always hoped to hear.

‘Rakel?’

‘It’s your job,’ she said. ‘I have no right to be angry. I’m sorry.’

Harry sat in the chair. Something was trying to struggle out of the undergrowth of his half-forgotten dreams.

‘You have every right to be angry,’ he said.

‘You’re a policeman. Someone has to watch over us.’

‘I’m not talking about the job,’ Harry said.

She didn’t answer. He waited.

‘I long for you,’ she said in a tear-filled voice.

‘You long for the person you wish I could be,’ he said. ‘Whereas I long for –’

‘Bye,’ she said, like a song cutting out in the middle of the intro.

Harry sat staring at the telephone, elated and dejected at the same time. A fragment of the night’s dream made a last attempt to come to the surface, bumping against the underside of ice which grew thicker by the second as the temperature sank. He ransacked the coffee table for cigarettes and found a dog-end in the ashtray. His tongue was still semi-numb. Rakel had probably concluded from his slurred diction that he was out of it again, which was not so far from the truth, except that he was in no mood to have more of the same poison.

He went into the bedroom and glanced at the clock on the bedside table. Time to go to work. Something . . .

He closed his eyes.

An echo of Duke Ellington hung in his auditory canals. It wasn’t there; he would have to go in further. He kept listening. He heard the pained scream of the tram, a cat’s footsteps on the roof, and an ominous rustling in the bursting green birch foliage in the yard. Even further in. He heard the yard groan, the cracking of the putty in the window frames, the rumble of the empty basement room way down in the abyss. He heard the piercing scraping sound of the sheets against his skin and the clatter of his impatient shoes in the hall. He heard his mother whispering as she used to do before he went to sleep: ‘
Bak skapet bakenfor skapet bakenfor skapet til hans madam
 . . .’ And then he was back in the dream.

The dream from the night. He was blind; he must be blind because he could only hear.

He heard a low chanting voice together with a kind of mumbling of prayers in the background. Judging by the acoustics he was in a large, churchlike room, but then there was the continuous drip. From under the high vaulted ceiling, if that was what it was, resounded wildly flapping wings. Pigeons? A priest or a preacher may have been leading a gathering, but the service was strange and alien. Almost like Russian, or speaking in tongues. The congregation joined in a psalm. Odd harmony with short, jagged lines. No familiar words like Jesus or Maria. Suddenly the congregation began to sing and an orchestra began to play. He recognised the melody. From television. Wait a minute. He heard something rolling. A ball. It stopped.

‘Five,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘The number is five.’

The code.

23

Friday. A Human Number

Harry’s revelations used to be small, ice-cold drips that hit him on the head. Not any more, but, of course, by looking up and following the fall of the drips he could establish the causal connection. This revelation was different. This was a gift, theft, an undeserved favour from an angel, music that could come to people like Duke Ellington, ready-made, straight out of a dream. All you had to do was to sit down and play it.

And Harry was in the process of doing just that. He had summoned the concert audience to his own office at 1.00. That was enough time for him to fit the most essential part, the last part of the code. For that he needed the Pole Star. And a star chart.

On his way to work he slipped into a stationer’s to buy a ruler, a protractor, a pair of compasses, a felt tip with the finest point they had and a couple of overhead transparencies. He set to work as soon as he got to his office. He found the large Oslo map he had torn down, mended a rip, smoothed the surface of the noticeboards and pinned the map up again on the long wall in his office. Then he drew a circle on the transparency, divided it up into five sectors of exactly 72 degrees each and then, using the felt pen and the ruler, joined up each of the two points furthest away from each other in one continuous line. When he had finished he lifted the transparency up to the light. The devil’s star.

The overhead projector in the conference room had gone missing, so Harry went into the Crime Division’s conference room where Chief Inspector Ivarsson held his regular lecture – known as ‘How I became so clever’ among colleagues – to a group of press-ganged holiday stand-ins.

‘High priority,’ Harry said, pulling out the plug and rolling out the projector trolley past an astonished Ivarsson.

Back in his office, Harry put the transparency on the projector, pointed the square of light towards the map and switched off the main light.

In the darkened, windowless room he could hear his own breathing as he twisted the transparency round, moved the projector closer and further away and adjusted the focus of the black outline of a star until it matched. It did match. Of course it matched. He stared at the map, circled two street numbers and made a couple of telephone calls.

Then he was ready.

At 1.05 Bjarne Møller, Tom Waaler, Beate Lønn and Ståle Aune were sitting on borrowed chairs, crushed into Harry and Halvorsen’s shared office, as quiet as mice.

‘It’s a code,’ Harry said. ‘A very simple code. A common denominator we should have seen ages ago. We were given it very clearly. A numerical figure.’

They looked at him.

‘Five,’ Harry said.

‘Five?’

‘The number is five.’

Harry watched the four puzzled faces.