Jo Nesbo - The Devil's star

‘I couldn’t see the door from where I was waiting in reception. And I didn’t see anyone on the way in or out when I went to the office. In fact, I have repeated this several times now.’

‘And there will be even more times,’ Harry said, yawning aloud and running his hand across his face. At that moment Magnus Skarre knocked on the window of the interview room and held up his wristwatch. Harry recognised Wetterlid standing behind him. Harry nodded in assent and cast a last look at his interview sheet.

‘It says here that you didn’t see any suspicious persons coming into or leaving reception while you were sitting there.’

‘That’s correct.’

‘Well, thank you very much for your cooperation thus far,’ Harry said, putting the sheet in the folder and pressing the stop button on the tape recorder. ‘We’ll certainly contact you again.’

‘No suspicious persons,’ Clausen said, getting up.

‘What?’

‘I said that I didn’t see anyone suspicious in reception, but there was the cleaning lady who came in and went into the offices.’

‘Yes, we’ve talked to her. She says she went straight into the kitchen and didn’t see anyone.’

Harry got up and ran his eye down the list. The next interview was at 10.15 in room four.

‘And the courier of course,’ Clausen said.

‘Courier?’

‘Yes. He went out through the front door just before I went to look for the solicitor. Must have delivered something or picked something up. Why are you looking at me like that, Inspector? A standard courier in solicitors’ offices is, quite frankly, not particularly suspicious.’

Half an hour later, after checking with the firm of solicitors and several courier companies in Oslo, Harry was clear about one thing: no-one had registered the delivery or collection of anything at all at the offices of Halle, Thune amp; Wetterlid on Monday.

Two hours after Clausen had left Police HQ, just before the sun reached its peak, he was picked up at his office and brought back to describe the courier again.

He couldn’t tell them very much: height around one metre 80; average build. Clausen had not exactly studied the man’s physical details. He considered that sort of thing both uninteresting and inappropriate for men, he said, and repeated that the courier was wearing what bike couriers usually wear: a yellow and black cycle shirt in some tight-fitting material, shorts and cycling shoes which clicked even when he walked on the carpet. His face was masked by the helmet and sunglasses.

‘His mouth?’ Harry asked.

‘White cloth covering his mouth,’ Clausen said. ‘Like Michael Jackson uses. I thought bike couriers wore them to protect themselves from inhaling exhaust fumes.’

‘In New York and Tokyo, yes. This is Oslo.’

Clausen shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, it didn’t strike me as unusual.’

Clausen was given leave to go and Harry went to Tom Waaler’s office. Waaler was sitting with the phone to his ear, mumbling uh-huh and m-hm when Harry walked in.

‘I think I’ve got an idea how the killer got into Camilla Loen’s flat,’ Harry said.

Tom Waaler put down the phone without finishing the conversation.

‘There’s a video camera connected to the intercom at the main entrance to the block where she lived, isn’t there?’

‘Yes…?’ Waaler leaned forwards.

‘Who can ring any bell, stick a masked face up into the camera and still be fairly sure that they’ll be let in?’

‘Father Christmas?’

‘Hardly, but you would let in a person carrying an express package or a bunch of flowers, a courier, wouldn’t you.’

Waaler pressed the engaged button on his phone.

‘Just a little over four minutes passed from the moment Clausen arrived until he saw the courier leave through reception. A courier runs in, delivers and runs out again, he doesn’t spend four minutes hanging about.’

Waaler nodded slowly.

‘A courier on a bike,’ he said. ‘It’s ingeniously simple. Someone with a plausible reason for calling in on all manner of people, with a cloth round his mouth. Someone everyone can see, but nobody notices.’

‘A Trojan horse,’ Harry said. ‘What a dream setup for a serial killer.’

‘No-one gives a courier leaving somewhere with great haste a second thought. And he’s using an unregistered form of transport, probably the most effective way to make a getaway in a city.’ Waaler placed his hand on the telephone.

‘I’ll get some of the boys to make enquiries about a bike courier at the murder scenes at the relevant times.’

‘There’s one other thing we’ll have to think about,’ Harry said.

‘Yes,’ Waaler said. ‘Whether we need to warn people about unfamiliar couriers.’

‘Right. Will you take that up with Moller?’

‘Yes. And Harry…’

Harry stopped in the doorway.

‘Bloody good work,’ Waaler said.

Harry gave a brief nod and left.

Three minutes later the rumours were swirling around Crime Squad that Harry had a lead.

Tuesday. The Pentagram.

Nikolai Loeb pressed down gently on the keys. The notes from the piano sounded delicate and frail in the bare room. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-Flat Minor. Many pianists thought it was weird and lacked elegance, but to Nikolai’s ears no-one had ever written more beautiful music. It made him feel homesick just to play the few bars he knew by heart, and it was always these notes that his fingers automatically searched for when he sat down at the untuned piano in the assembly room in Gamle Aker church hall.

He looked out of the open window. The birds were singing in the cemetery. It reminded him of summers in Leningrad and his father, who had taken him to the old battlefields outside the towns where his grandfather and all of Nikolai’s uncles lay in long-forgotten mass graves.

‘Listen,’ his father had said. ‘How beautiful and how futile their singing.’

Nikolai became aware of someone clearing his throat and twisted round.

A tall man in a T-shirt and jeans was standing in the doorway. He had a bandage round one hand. The first thing Nikolai thought was that it was one of those drug addicts who turned up from time to time.

‘Can I help you?’ Nikolai called out. The severe acoustics in the room made his voice sound less friendly than he had intended.

The man stepped in over the threshold.

‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to make amends.’

‘I’m so pleased,’ Nikolai said. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t receive confessions here. There’s a list in the hall with a timetable. And you’ll have to go to our chapel in Inkognitogata.’

The man came over to him. Nikolai concluded from the dark circles under his bloodshot eyes that the man had not slept for a while.

‘I want to make amends for destroying the star on the door.’

It took Nikolai a few seconds to take in what the man was referring to.

‘Oh, now I’m with you. That’s not really anything to do with me. Except that I can see that the star is loose and is hanging upside down.’ He smiled. ‘A little inappropriate in a religious house, to put it mildly.’

‘So you don’t work here?’

Nikolai shook his head.

‘We have to borrow these rooms on occasion. I’m from the church of the Holy Apostolic Princess Olga.’

Harry raised his eyebrows.

‘The Russian Orthodox Church,’ Nikolai added. ‘I am a pastor and chief administrator. You need to go to the church office and see if you can find someone to help you there.’

‘Mm. Thank you.’

The man didn’t make a move to leave.

‘Tchaikovsky, wasn’t it? First Piano Concerto?’

‘Correct,’ Nikolai said with surprise in his voice. Norwegians were not exactly what you might call a cultured people. On top of that, this one was wearing a T-shirt and looked like a down-and-out.