Jo Nesbo - The Devil's star

‘Good, Beate,’ Harry said. ‘And then?’

‘He followed her out onto the street and… no, that’s too risky. He stopped her as she got out of the lift. And used chloroform.’

‘No,’ Waaler said firmly. ‘Too risky. Then he would have had to carry her out to a car parked outside and if anyone had seen them, they would have certainly taken note of the car and perhaps the number.’

‘No chloroform,’ Moller said. ‘And the car was parked some distance away. He threatened her with a gun and made her walk in front of him while he followed with the gun hidden in his pocket.’

‘Whatever happened, the victims are chosen at random,’ Harry said. ‘The key is the place the murder is committed. If Wilhelm Barli had taken the lift down from the fifth floor instead of his wife, he would have been the victim.’

‘If it is as you say, it might also explain why the women were not sexually abused,’ Aune said. ‘If the murderer…’

‘The killer.’

‘… the killer did not choose the victims, it means that the fact that they are all women is coincidence. In this case, the victims are not specifically sexual objects. It is the action itself which gives him his satisfaction.’

‘What about the Ladies?’ Beate said. ‘That wasn’t random. Wouldn’t it have been more natural for a man to go to the Gents if the sex of the victim is of no consequence? Then he wouldn’t have risked attracting attention on his way in or out.’

‘Maybe,’ Harry said. ‘But if he’d prepared as thoroughly as it appears he did, he would have known that there are a lot more men than women in a solicitor’s office. Do you see?’

Beate blinked hard with both eyes.

‘Good thinking, Harry,’ Waaler said. ‘In the Ladies there was much less chance of him being disturbed during the ritual.’

It was 2.08 and it was Moller who finally brought the proceedings to an end.

‘OK, folks, that’s enough about the dead. Shall we concentrate on the living?’

The sun had started on the second half of its parabola, and the shadows were edging out into a deserted schoolyard in Toyen where all that could be heard was the monotonous smack of a football being kicked against a wall. In Harry’s hermetically sealed office the air had become a thick broth of evaporated human fluids. The point of the star to the right of Carl Berners plass lay above a property just by Ensjoveien in Kampen. Harry had explained that the building under the tip of the point had been built in 1912 as what was known then as a ‘tuberculosis home’, but had since been converted into a student building. At first, for home economics students, then for student nurses and finally for students in general.

The final tip of the pentagram pointed to a grid of black parallel lines.

‘Railway lines from Oslo Station?’ Moller asked. ‘Nobody lives there, do they?’

‘Careful,’ Harry said, pointing to a small square that had been shaded in.

‘That must be a storage shed. It’s -’

‘No. The map’s right,’ Waaler said. ‘There is in fact a house there. Haven’t you noticed it when you come in by train? That strange detached brick-built house standing completely on its own. There’s a garden and so on…’

‘You mean Villa Valle,’ Aune said. ‘The station master’s house. It’s very well known. I suppose they’re offices now.’

Harry shook his head and informed them that the National Registry Office had a record of one person living there, an elderly lady, Olaug Sivertsen.

‘There’s no fifth floor in the student building or in the station master’s house,’ Harry said.

‘Will that stop him?’ Waaler asked, turning to Aune.

Aune shrugged his shoulders.

‘I don’t believe so. But now we’re talking about predicting features of individual behaviour and here your guess is as good as mine.’

‘OK,’ Waaler said. ‘We can take it that he’s going to strike in the student building tomorrow, and our best chance is to organise a carefully planned operation. Are we agreed?’

Everyone round the table nodded.

‘Good,’ Waaler said. ‘I’ll get in touch with Sivert Falkeid of Special Forces and start working on the detail right away.’

Harry could see the spark of flint in Tom Waaler’s eyes. He understood him. Action. The arrest. The felling of the prey. The tenderloin of police work.

‘I’ll go with Beate to Schweigaards gate to see if we can meet up with Sivertsen,’ Harry said.

‘Be careful,’ Moller shouted to drown the sound of scraping chairs. ‘There mustn’t be any leaks. Remember what Aune said about these Special Forces guys sniffing around close to the investigation.’

The sun was sinking. The temperature was rising.

Friday. Otto Tangen.

Otto Tangen rolled over onto his side. He was soaking with sweat after another tropical night, but that was not what had woken him. He stretched out for the telephone and the broken bed creaked ominously. It had sunk in the middle one night more than a year ago when Otto had been humping Aud-Rita, from the bakery, across the bed. Now, Aud-Rita was only a slip of a girl, but Otto had passed the 110 kilo mark that spring, and it was pitch black in the room when they discovered that beds were built for movement along their length, not across it. Aud-Rita had been underneath him, and Otto had had to drive her to casualty in Honefoss with a fractured collarbone. She was furious, and in her ranting and raving threatened to tell Nils, her partner and Otto’s best, and for that matter only, pal. At that time Nils weighed 115 kilos and was well known for his fiery temperament. Otto had laughed so much that he could hardly breathe and since then Aud-Rita just scowled angrily at him every time he went into the bakery. This saddened him because that night was, despite everything, a very dear memory to him. It was also the last time he had got laid.

‘Harry Sounds,’ he puffed into the phone.

He had named the company after the role Gene Hackman played in the film which had in many ways determined Otto’s professional and future life: The Conversation, a Francis Ford Coppola film from 1974 about a bugging expert. No-one in Otto’s limited circle of acquaintances had seen it. As for himself, he had seen it 38 times. When he realised what insights into other people’s lives a little technical equipment gave you, at the age of 15 he had bought his first microphone and discovered what his mother and father talked about in the bedroom. The following day, he began saving for his first camera.

Now he was 35 years old and had around 100 microphones, 24 cameras and a son of eleven from a woman he had spent the night with in his detector bus in Geilo one damp autumn night. At least he had managed to persuade her to christen the boy Gene. Nevertheless, he would still have said, without batting an eyelid, that emotionally speaking he was closer to his microphones. But then his collection did include Neuman boom microphones from the ’50s and Offscreen directional microphones. The latter were specially designed to be used with military cameras and he had had to go to America to buy them under the counter, but now he bought them off the Net, no trouble at all. Pride of place in his collection, however, went to three Russian espionage microphones the size of pinheads. There was no brand name on them and he had got hold of them at a trade fair in Vienna.

In addition, Harry Sounds was the owner of one of Norway’s only two mobile professional surveillance studios. This meant that he was contacted on the odd occasion by the police, POT and, more rarely, by the intelligence service working at the Ministry of Defence. He wished it were more often; he was sick and tired of setting up surveillance cameras in 7-Eleven shops and Videonova and training the staff who had no understanding of the more sophisticated elements involved in monitoring unsuspecting customers. As far as surveillance work was concerned, it was easier to find kindred spirits in the police force and at the Ministry of Defence, but Harry Sounds’ high-quality equipment cost money and to Otto’s mind he was getting the same old story about budgetary cuts more and more often. They said it was cheaper for them to set up their own equipment in a flat or a house near the surveillance target, and of course they were right. However, occasionally there was not a house in reasonable condition nearby, or the job required quality equipment they didn’t have. Then they would ring Harry Sounds. As they were doing now.