Jo Nesbo - The Devil's star

‘My mother used to play it to me,’ the man said. ‘She said it was difficult.’

‘You have a good mother. Who played pieces she thought were too difficult for you.’

‘Yes, she was good. Saintly.’

There was something about the man’s lopsided smile that confused Nikolai. It was a self-contradictory smile. Open and closed, friendly and cynical, laughing and pained. But he was probably reading too much into things, as usual.

‘Thank you for your help,’ the man said, moving towards the door.

‘Not at all.’

Nikolai turned his attention to the piano and focused his concentration. He pressed down a key gently enough for it to touch, but make no sound – he could feel the felt lying against the piano string – and it was then he became aware that he had not heard the door shut. He turned round and saw the man standing there, his hand on the door handle, staring at the star in the smashed window.

‘Something wrong?’

The man looked up.

‘No. I was just wondering what you meant when you said it was inappropriate that the star was hanging upside down.’

Nikolai released a laugh which rebounded off the walls.

‘It’s the upside-down pentagram, isn’t it.’

From the expression on the man’s face it was clear to Nikolai that he didn’t understand.

‘The pentagram is an old religious symbol, not just for Christianity. As you can see, it is a five-pointed star made up of a continuous line that intersects itself a number of times: it has been found carved into headstones dating back several thousand years. However, when it hangs upside down with one point downwards and two points upwards, it’s something completely different. It’s one of the most important symbols in demonology.’

‘Demonology?’

The man asked questions in a calm yet firm voice, like someone who was used to getting answers, Nikolai thought.

‘The study of evil. The term originates from the time when people thought that evil emanated from the existence of demons.’

‘Hm. And now the demons have been abolished?’

Nikolai swivelled round on his piano stool. Had he misjudged the man? He seemed to be a bit too sharp for a drug addict or a down-and-out.

‘I’m a policeman,’ the man said, as if answering his thoughts. ‘We tend to ask questions.’

‘Alright, but why are you asking about this in particular?’

The man shrugged his shoulders.

‘I don’t know. I’ve seen this symbol just recently, but I can’t put my finger on where. I’m not sure if it’s significant or not. Which demon uses this symbol?’

‘Tchort,’ Nikolai said, gently pressing down three keys. Dissonance. ‘Also called Satan.’

In the afternoon Olaug Sivertsen opened the French doors to the balcony facing Bjorvika, sat down on a chair and watched the red train glide past her house. It was quite an ordinary house, a detached redbrick building dating back to 1891; what was so extraordinary was its location. Villa Valle – named after the man who designed it – stood on its own beside the railway track just outside Oslo Central Station, inside railway domain. The nearest neighbours were some low sheds and workshops belonging to Norwegian Railways. Villa Valle was built to accommodate the station master, his family and servants and was designed with extra thick walls so that the station master and his wife would not be awakened every time a train passed. In addition, the station master had asked the builder – who had got the job because it was well known that he used a special mortar to make the walls extra solid – to strengthen it even further. In the event that a train came off the rails and hit the house, the station master wanted the train driver to take the brunt of the collision and not him and his family. So far no train had crashed into the elegant station master’s house that stood in such strange isolation, like a castle in the air above a wilderness of black gravel in which the rails gleamed and wriggled like snakes in the sun.

Olaug closed her eyes and basked in the warmth of the sun.

As a young woman she hadn’t liked the heat. Her skin went red and itched and she had longed for the cool, damp summers of northwest Norway. Now she was old – almost 80 – she preferred the hot to cold, light to darkness, company to solitude, sound to silence.

It hadn’t been like that when, in 1941 and at 16 years of age, she had left Averoya and gone to Oslo on those same rails and begun work as a maidservant for Gruppenfuhrer Ernst Schwabe and his wife Randi in Villa Valle. He was a tall, good-looking man, and she came from an aristocratic family. Olaug was terrified in the first few days. However, they treated her well and showed her respect, and soon Olaug realised that she had nothing to fear so long as she did her job with the thoroughness and punctuality that Germans are, not unjustifiably, famous for.

Ernst Schwabe was responsible for the WLTA, the Wehrmacht’s Landtransportabteilung, their transport division, and he himself chose the house by the railway station. His wife, Randi, probably also worked in the WLTA, but Olaug never saw her in uniform. Olaug’s room faced south, overlooking the garden and the tracks. During the first weeks the clattering of the long trains, the shrill whistles and all the other noises of a town kept her awake at night, but gradually she became used to it. When she went home on her first holiday the year after, she lay in bed in the house she had grown up in, listening to the silence and the nothingness and longed for the sounds of life and living people.

Living people, there had been many of them in Villa Valle during the war. The Schwabes were very active socially, and both Germans and Norwegians were present at social engagements. If only people knew which heads of Norwegian society had been here, eating, drinking and smoking with the Wehrmacht as their hosts. One of the first things she was told to do after the war was to burn the seating cards she had been hoarding. She did what she was told and never said a word to anyone. Of course, she had felt an occasional urge to disobey when photographs of the selfsame persons appeared in the press, which went on about living under the yoke of the German occupation. However, she kept her mouth shut for one reason only: when peace came, they threatened to take away her young son and he was all she had ever had or valued in the world. The fear was still well entrenched within her.

Olaug screwed up her eyes in the weak sun. It was flagging now, not so unremarkable since it had been shining all day and had done its best to kill her flowers in the window boxes. Olaug smiled. My goodness, she had been so young, no-one had ever been so young. Did she yearn to be young again? Maybe not, but she yearned for company, life, people milling around. She had never understood what they meant when they said that old people were lonely, but now…

It was not so much being alone as not being there for someone. She had become so deeply sad from waking up in the morning knowing that she could stay in bed all day and it would not make any difference to anybody.

That was why she had taken in a lodger, a cheerful young girl from Trondelag.

It was odd to think that Ina, who was only a few years older than she had been when she moved to Oslo, was now staying in the same room as she had. She probably lay awake at night thinking about how she longed to be far from the din of town life, back in the silence of somewhere small in North Trondelag.

Olaug may have been wrong, though. Ina had a gentleman friend. She hadn’t seen him, let alone met him, but from her bedroom she had heard his footsteps up the back staircase, the entrance to Ina’s room. It was not possible to forbid Ina from receiving men in her room, unlike when Olaug had been a maid, not that she wanted to, anyway. Her only hope was that no-one would come and take Ina away. She had become a close friend, even like a daughter, the daughter she had never had.