Jo Nesbo - The Devil's star

The lock sprang open with a soft click.

She stared from her crouching position.

Under the lock, on top of a white shirt, lay an ugly, black metal object.

She didn’t need to touch it to know that the gun was genuine. She had seen them before, in her earlier life.

She swallowed and could feel the tears coming. Pressed her fingers against her eyes. Twice whispered her mother’s name to herself.

It lasted only a few seconds.

Then she took a deep, calming breath. She had to get through this. They had to get through this. At least it explained why he wasn’t able to tell her much about his profession, what allowed him to earn as much money as he obviously did. And the thought had occurred to her, hadn’t it?

She made up her mind.

There were things she didn’t know. Things she didn’t need to know.

She locked the case and turned the dials on the lock back to zero. She listened at the door before she carefully opened it and slipped inside. A rectangle of light fell onto the bed. Had she cast a glance at the mirror before she closed the door, she would have seen one of his eyes open. But she was too preoccupied with her own thoughts. Or rather, the one thought that she returned to again and again as she lay listening to the traffic, the screams from the zoological gardens and his deep, regular breathing. The future was the only thing that mattered from now on.

A scream, a bottle smashed on the pavement, followed by raucous laughter. Cursing and the clatter of running feet dying away up Sofies gate in the direction of Bislett Stadium.

Harry stared at the ceiling and listened to the sounds of the night outside. He had slept three dreamless hours before he woke up and started thinking. About three women, two crime scenes and one man offering a good price for his soul. He tried to find a system in it. To decipher the code. To see the pattern. To understand the dimension above the pattern that Oystein had referred to, the question that preceded ‘how’. Why.

Why did a man dress up as a courier, kill two women and probably also a third? Why did he make it so difficult for himself when he chose the scene of the crime? Why did he leave messages? When all the past models of serial killers suggested they were sexually motivated, why were there no indications of sexual abuse in the cases of Camilla Loen and Barbara Svendsen?

Harry felt a headache coming on. He kicked off the duvet cover and lay on his side. The red numbers on the alarm clock glowed: 2.51. Harry’s last two questions were for himself. Why hold onto your soul so desperately if it broke your heart? And why bother about a system that hated him?

He dropped his feet onto the floor and went into the kitchen and stared at the cupboard door over the sink. He poured water from the tap into a glass and filled it to the brim. Then he opened the cutlery drawer, picked up the black tube, peeled off the grey lid and poured the contents into his palm. A pill would make him sleep. Two with a glass of Jim Beam would make him hyper. Three or more would have more unforeseen consequences.

Harry opened his mouth wide, threw in three tablets and washed them down with lukewarm water.

Then he went into the sitting room, put on a Duke Ellington record he had bought after seeing Gene Hackman sitting on the overnight bus in The Conversation to the sound of some fragile piano notes that were the loneliest Harry had ever heard.

He sat down in the wing chair.

‘I only know of one method,’ Oystein had said.

Harry started at the beginning. With the day when he staggered past Underwater on his way to the address in Ullevalsveien. Friday. Sannergata. Wednesday. Carl Berner. Monday. Three women. Three severed fingers. Left hand. First the index finger, then the middle finger and then the ring finger. Three places. Places with neighbours, no family accommodation. An old apartment building from the turn of the last century, one from the ’30s and an office block from the ’40s. Lifts. He could see the floor numbers over the lift doors. Skarre had talked to the specialist couriers in Oslo and the surrounding district. They hadn’t been able to help with cycle equipment or yellow jerseys, but via an insurance arrangement with emergency services they had at least managed to procure a summary of all the people who in the last six months had bought expensive bikes of the type that couriers used.

He could feel the numbing sensation coming. The rough wool on the chair stung his naked thighs and buttocks.

The victims: Camilla, copywriter for an advertising bureau, single, 28 years old, dark, slightly chubby; Lisbeth, singer, married, 33 years old, fair, slim; Barbara, receptionist, 28, living with her parents, medium blonde. All three had been good-looking, nothing outstanding. The times of the murders. Provided that Lisbeth had been murdered immediately, all on weekdays. In the afternoon, after working hours.

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.