Jo Nesbo - The Devil's star

She let him buy her a glass of wine, thanked him and walked home alone.

The following day he rang at the door of her tiny basement flat in Strasnice. He never told her how he had found out where she lived. But life went from grey to rosy red in the blink of an eye. She was happy. She was happy.

The newspaper rustled as he turned a page.

She should have known. If it hadn’t been for the gun in the suitcase she would not have given it a second thought.

She decided she would forget it, forget everything except what was important. They were happy. She loved him.

She was sitting in the chair, still wearing her apron. She knew that he liked her in an apron. After all, she knew a bit about what made men tick, the trick was not to let on. She looked down at her lap. She began to smile; she couldn’t stop.

‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she said.

‘Ye-es?’ The newspaper flapped like a sail in the wind.

‘Promise me you won’t get angry,’ she said and could feel her smile spreading.

‘I can’t promise that,’ he said without looking up.

Her smile stiffened. ‘What…’

‘I’m guessing that you’re going to tell me that you went through my suitcase when you got up in the night.’

She noticed for the first time that his accent was different. The sing-song wasn’t there. He put the paper down and looked her in the eye.

Thank God, she didn’t have to lie to him and she knew that she could never have done. She had the proof now. She shook her head, but noticed that she couldn’t control the expression on her face.

He raised an eyebrow.

She swallowed.

The second hand on the clock, the large kitchen clock she had bought at IKEA with his money, ticked soundlessly.

He smiled.

‘And you found piles of letters from my lovers, didn’t you?’

She blinked, totally at sea.

He leaned forward. ‘I’m kidding, Eva. Is anything wrong?’

She nodded.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she whispered quickly, as if there were some sudden rush. ‘I… we… are going to have a baby.’

He sat there, stunned, staring in front of him as she talked about her suspicions, the visit to the doctor and then, finally, the certainty. When she had finished, he got up and left the kitchen. He came back and gave her a little black box.

‘Visit my mother,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You were wondering what I was going to do in Oslo. I’m going to visit my mother.’

‘Have you got a mother…’

That was her first thought. Had he really got a mother? But she added: ‘… in Oslo?’

He smiled and nodded towards the box.

‘Aren’t you going to open it, Liebling. It’s for you. For the child.’

She blinked twice before she could collect herself sufficiently to open it.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said and felt her eyes welling up with tears.

‘I love you, Eva Marvanova.’

The sing-song was back in his accent.

She smiled through her tears as he held her in his arms.

‘Forgive me,’ she whispered. ‘Forgive me. That you love me is all I need to know. The rest is unimportant. You don’t need to tell me about your mother. Or the gun…’

She felt his body harden in her arms. She put her mouth to his ear.

‘I saw the gun,’ she whispered. ‘But I don’t need to know anything. Nothing, do you hear?’

He freed himself from her clasp.

‘Yes, well,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, Eva, but there’s no way out. Not now.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ll have to know who I am.’

‘But I know who you are, darling.’

‘You don’t know what I do.’

‘I don’t know that I want to know.’

‘You have to.’

He took the box from her, took out the necklace inside it and held it up.

‘This is what I do.’

The star-shaped diamond shone like a lover’s eye as it reflected the morning light from the kitchen window.

‘And this.’

He pulled his hand out of his jacket pocket. In his hand was the same gun she had seen in the suitcase. But it was longer and had a large black piece of metal attached to the end of the barrel. Eva Marvanova did not know much about weapons, but she knew what this was. A silencer, an appropriate name.

Harry was woken up by the telephone ringing. He felt as if someone had stuffed a towel in his mouth. He tried to moisten it with his tongue, but it rasped like a piece of stale bread against his palate. The clock on his bedside table showed 10.17. Half a memory, half an image entered his brain. He went into the sitting room. The telephone rang for the sixth time.

He picked up the receiver:

‘Harry. Who is it?’

‘I just wanted to apologise.’

It was the voice he always hoped to hear.

‘Rakel?’

‘It’s your job,’ she said. ‘I have no right to be angry. I’m sorry.’

Harry sat in the chair. Something was trying to struggle out of the undergrowth of his half-forgotten dreams.

‘You have every right to be angry,’ he said.

‘You’re a policeman. Someone has to watch over us.’

‘I’m not talking about the job,’ Harry said.

She didn’t answer. He waited.

‘I long for you,’ she said in a tear-filled voice.

‘You long for the person you wish I could be,’ he said. ‘Whereas I long for -’

‘Bye,’ she said, like a song cutting out in the middle of the intro.

Harry sat staring at the telephone, elated and dejected at the same time. A fragment of the night’s dream made a last attempt to come to the surface, bumping against the underside of ice which grew thicker by the second as the temperature sank. He ransacked the coffee table for cigarettes and found a dog-end in the ashtray. His tongue was still semi-numb. Rakel had probably concluded from his slurred diction that he was out of it again, which was not so far from the truth, except that he was in no mood to have more of the same poison.

He went into the bedroom and glanced at the clock on the bedside table. Time to go to work. Something…

He closed his eyes.

An echo of Duke Ellington hung in his auditory canals. It wasn’t there; he would have to go in further. He kept listening. He heard the pained scream of the tram, a cat’s footsteps on the roof, and an ominous rustling in the bursting green birch foliage in the yard. Even further in. He heard the yard groan, the cracking of the putty in the window frames, the rumble of the empty basement room way down in the abyss. He heard the piercing scraping sound of the sheets against his skin and the clatter of his impatient shoes in the hall. He heard his mother whispering as she used to do before he went to sleep: ‘ Bak skapet bakenfor skapet bakenfor skapet til hans madam…’ And then he was back in the dream.

The dream from the night. He was blind; he must be blind because he could only hear.

He heard a low chanting voice together with a kind of mumbling of prayers in the background. Judging by the acoustics he was in a large, churchlike room, but then there was the continuous drip. From under the high vaulted ceiling, if that was what it was, resounded wildly flapping wings. Pigeons? A priest or a preacher may have been leading a gathering, but the service was strange and alien. Almost like Russian, or speaking in tongues. The congregation joined in a psalm. Odd harmony with short, jagged lines. No familiar words like Jesus or Maria. Suddenly the congregation began to sing and an orchestra began to play. He recognised the melody. From television. Wait a minute. He heard something rolling. A ball. It stopped.

‘Five,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘The number is five.’

The code.

Friday. A Human Number

Harry’s revelations used to be small, ice-cold drips that hit him on the head. Not any more, but, of course, by looking up and following the fall of the drips he could establish the causal connection. This revelation was different. This was a gift, theft, an undeserved favour from an angel, music that could come to people like Duke Ellington, ready-made, straight out of a dream. All you had to do was to sit down and play it.