Jo Nesbo - The Devil's star

Finally, he managed it.

‘Thanks.’

Beate Lonn enjoyed her work. She like the routines, the security, the knowledge that she was competent, and she knew that the others at the Forensics Institute at Kjolberggata 21A knew that too. Since work was the only thing in her life she considered important, it was reason enough to get up in the morning. Everything else was a musical interlude. She lived in her mother’s house in Oppsal and had the whole of the top floor to herself. They got on extremely well. She had always been Daddy’s girl when he was alive; she assumed that was why she joined the police force, like him. She had no hobbies. Even though she and Halvorsen, the officer Harry shared his office with, had become a sort of couple, she was not convinced about it. She had read in a women’s magazine that this kind of doubt was natural and that you should take risks. Beate didn’t like taking risks. Or being in doubt. That was why she enjoyed her work.

As she was growing up she blushed at the thought that anyone could be thinking about her and she spent most of her time devising different ways to hide. She still blushed, but she had found good places to hide. She could sit for hours inside the worn redbrick walls of Forensics studying fingerprints, ballistics reports, video recordings, comparisons of voices, the analyses of DNA or textile fibres, footprints, blood and an endless number of technical leads which might resolve important, complicated, controversial cases in total peace and quiet. She had also discovered that working was not nearly as dangerous as it seemed. So long as she spoke loudly and clearly and managed to repress her panic about blushing, losing face, her clothes, standing there exposed and full of shame, for what reason she didn’t know. The office in Kjolberggata was her castle; the uniform and her professional duties her mental armour.

The clock showed 12.30 a.m. when the telephone on her office desk rang, interrupting her reading of the laboratory report on Lisbeth Barli’s finger. Her heart began to quicken with fear when she saw on the display that the caller was ringing from an ‘unknown number’. It could only mean that it was him.

‘Beate Lonn.’

It was him. His words came out in a flurry of blows.

‘Why didn’t you ring me about the fingerprints?’

She held her breath for a second before she replied.

‘Harry said he would pass on the message.’

‘Thank you. I received it. Next time, you ring me first. Is that understood?’

Beate gulped. She didn’t know whether out of fear or anger.

‘Fine.’

‘Anything else you told him that you didn’t tell me?’

‘No. Except that I’ve got the results from the lab on what was under the finger we were sent through the post.’

‘Lisbeth Barli’s? And it was?’

‘Excrement.’

‘What?’

‘Pooh.’

‘Thank you very much. I know what it is. Any idea where it came from?’

‘Er, yes.’

‘Correction. Who it came from.’

‘I don’t know for certain, but I can guess.’

‘Would you be so kind…’

‘The excrement contains blood, perhaps from a haemorrhoid. In this particular case, blood group B. Only seven per cent of the country has this blood group. Wilhelm Barli is a registered blood donor. He has -’

‘Right. And what do you conclude from this?’

‘I don’t know,’ Beate said quickly.

‘But you know that the anus is an erogenous zone, Beate? In men and women. Or had you forgotten?’

Beate squeezed her eyes shut. Please don’t let him start again. Not again. It was a long time ago, she had begun to forget, to get it out of her system. But his voice was there, smooth and tough, like snakeskin.

‘You’re good at playing the very ordinary girl, Beate. I like that. I liked it when you pretended you didn’t want to.’

You know something, I know something, no-one else knows anything, she thought.

‘Does Halvorsen do it to you as well as I did?’

‘I’m putting the phone down now,’ Beate said.

His laughter crackled in her ears. She knew it then. There was nowhere to hide. They could find you anywhere, just as they had found the three women where they felt safest. There was no castle. And no armour.

Oystein was sitting in his cab at the taxi rank in Thereses gate and listening to a Rolling Stones tape when the telephone rang.

‘Oslo Ta -’

‘Hi, Oystein. Harry here. Have you got anyone in the car?’

‘Just Mick and Keith.’

‘What?’

‘The world’s greatest band.’

‘Oystein.’

‘Yep?’

‘The Stones are not the world’s greatest band. Not even the world’s second greatest band. What they are is the world’s most overrated band. And it wasn’t Keith or Mick who wrote “Wild Horses”. It was Gram Parsons.’

‘That’s lies and you know it! I’m ringing off -’

‘Hello? Oystein?’

‘Say something nice to me. Quickly.’

‘“Under My Thumb” is not a bad tune. And “Exile On Main Street” has its moments.’

‘Fine. What do you want?’

‘I need help.’

‘It’s three o’clock in the morning. Shouldn’t you be asleep now?’

‘Can’t do it,’ Harry said. ‘I’m terrified every time I close my eyes.’

‘Same nightmare as before?’

‘The listeners’ request from hell.’

‘The stuff with the lift?’

‘I know exactly what’s coming and I’m just as frightened every time. How quickly can you get here?’

‘I don’t like this, Harry.’

‘How quickly?’

Oystein sighed.

‘Give me six minutes.’

Harry was standing in the doorway wearing just his jeans when Oystein came up the stairs.

They sat down in the sitting room without putting on the lights.

‘Have you got a beer?’ Oystein took off his black cap with the PlayStation logo and brushed back a thin, sweaty lock of hair.

Harry shook his head.

‘Take this,’ Oystein said and placed a black camera-film tube on the table.

‘This is on me. Flunipam. Definite knockout. One pill is more than enough.’

Harry stared at the tube.

‘That’s not why I asked you to come, Oystein.’

‘It isn’t?’

‘No. I need to know how to crack a code. How you go about it.’

‘Do you mean hacking?’ Oystein sent Harry a surprised look. ‘Have you got to crack a password?’

‘In a way. Have you read about the serial killer in the newspaper? I think he’s sending us codes.’

Harry switched on a lamp. ‘Look at this.’

Oystein perused the sheet of paper Harry had put on the table.

‘A star?’

‘A pentagram. He left signs at two of the crime scenes. One was carved into a beam over a bed and the other traced in the dust on a TV screen in a shop opposite the murder scene.’

Oystein examined the star and nodded. ‘And you think I can tell you what it means?’

‘No.’ Harry held his head in his hands. ‘But I hoped you could tell me something about the principles behind cracking codes.’

‘The codes I cracked were mathematical codes, Harry. With interpersonal codes there’s a completely different semantics. For example, I still can’t decode what women are actually saying.’

‘Imagine that this is both. Simple logic and a subtext.’

‘OK, let’s talk about cryptography. Ciphers. To see that you need both logical and what is called analogical thinking. The latter means that you use the subconscious and intuition, in other words, what you don’t realise you already know. And then you combine linear thinking with the recognition of patterns. Have you heard of Alan Turing?’

‘No.’

‘Englishman. He cracked the German codes during the war. In a nutshell, he lost them the Second World War. He said that in order to crack codes, first of all you have to know what dimension your opponent is operating in.’