Jo Nesbo - The Devil's star

‘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

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 throat 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.’