Jo Nesbo - The Devil's star

‘Mixers,’ she said holding up her bag. ‘To mix drinks so that they aren’t too strong. And my betrothed is away. If it’s so dodgy here, you ought to rescue the girl and take her somewhere safe.’

She nodded towards his block of flats.

‘I can make you a cup of coffee,’ he said.

‘Oh?’

‘Nescafe. That’s all I have to offer.

When Harry came into the sitting room carrying boiling water and a coffee glass, Vibeke Knutsen was sitting on the sofa with her legs drawn up underneath her and her shoes on the floor. Her milky white skin shone in the semidarkness. She lit another cigarette, her own this time. A foreign brand Harry had not seen before. No filter tip. In the flickering light from the match he could see that the dark red varnish on her toenails was chipped.

‘I don’t know that I can go on any longer,’ she said. ‘He’s changed. When he comes home he’s just restless and either paces up and down in the sitting room or goes out training. It feels as if he can’t wait to get away and travel again. I try to talk to him, but he cuts me short or else just looks at me in total incomprehension. We really do come from two different planets.’

‘It’s the combination of the distance between the planets and the mutual attraction that keeps them in orbit,’ Harry said, spooning out the freeze-dried coffee grains.

‘More playing with words?’ Vibeke plucked a strand of tobacco off the tip of her pink, wet tongue.

Harry chuckled. ‘Something I read in a waiting room. I probably hoped it was true. For my own sake.’

‘Do you know what the strangest part is? He doesn’t like me. And yet I know that he’ll never let me go.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘He needs me. I don’t know what for, exactly, but it’s like he’s lost something and that’s why he needs me. His parents…’

‘Yes?’

‘He doesn’t have any contact with them. I’ve never met them. I don’t think they even know I exist. Not so long ago the telephone rang and there was a man asking after Anders. I immediately sensed it was his father. You can sort of hear it in the way that parents say the names of their children. In one way it’s something they’ve said so many times it’s the most natural thing in the world. But then in another way it’s so intimate that the word strips them bare to the skin so they say it quickly, almost with embarrassment. ‘Is Anders there?’ When I said that I would have to wake him first the voice suddenly started to babble away in a foreign language, or… not foreign exactly, but more like you and I would speak if we had to find words in a hurry. The way they speak at religious meetings in chapels when they’re well underway, sort of.’

‘Speaking in tongues?’

‘Yes, that’s probably what it’s called. Anders grew up with this stuff, though he never talks about it. I listened for a while. First of all, there was a fair sprinkling of words like “satan” and “sodom”. Then it got dirtier. “Cunt” and “whore” and things like that. So I put the phone down.’

‘What did Anders say to that?’

‘I never mentioned it to him.’

‘Why not?’

‘I… it’s like a place I’ve never been allowed to enter. And I don’t want to go there, either.’

Harry drank his coffee. Vibeke didn’t touch her own.

‘Don’t you get lonely sometimes, Harry?’

His eyes rose to meet hers.

‘Sort of alone. Don’t you wish you were with someone?’

‘That’s two different things. You’re together with someone and you’re lonely.’

She shivered as if a cold front was passing through the room.

‘Do you know what?’ she said. ‘I feel like a drink.’

‘Sorry, I’ve run out of that sort of thing.’

She opened her handbag. ‘Can you fetch two glasses, precious?’

‘We’ll only need one.’

‘Well, OK.’

She unscrewed the lid of her hip flask, tipped back her head and drank.

‘I’m not allowed to move at all,’ she said laughing. A shiny brown droplet ran down her chin.

‘What?’

‘Anders doesn’t like me to move. And I have to lie still, without moving. I mustn’t say a word or moan. I have to pretend that I’m asleep. He says that he loses the urge when I show passion.’

‘And?’

She took another swig and screwed the lid back while looking at him.

‘It’s a nigh on impossible feat.’

Her stare was so direct that Harry automatically breathed a little deeper, and to his irritation he could feel his erection beginning to throb against the inside of his trousers.

She raised an eyebrow as if she could feel it too.

‘Come and sit on the sofa,’ she whispered.

Her voice had become rough and husky. Harry saw the bulge in the thick blue artery in her white neck. It’s just a reflex action, Harry thought. A slavering Pavlovian dog that stands up when it hears the signal for food, a conditioned reaction, that’s all.

‘I don’t think I can,’ he said.

‘Are you afraid of me?’

‘Yes,’ Harry said.

A sad sweetness filled his lower abdomen, the silent lament of his sex.

She laughed out loud, but stopped when she saw his eyes. She pouted and said in a pleading child’s voice: ‘But Harry, go on…’

‘I can’t. You’re so wonderful, but…’

Her smile was intact but she blinked as if he had slapped her.

‘It’s not you I want,’ Harry said.

Her eyes wavered. The corners of her mouth pulled as if she were going to laugh.

‘Hah,’ she said.

It was meant ironically, it was supposed to have been an exaggerated theatrical exclamation. Instead it came out as a weary, resigned groan. The play was over, they had both forgotten their lines.

‘Sorry,’ Harry said.

Her eyes filled with water.

‘Oh, Harry,’ she whispered.

He wished she hadn’t said that, so he could have asked her to leave right away.

‘Whatever it is you want from me, I haven’t got it,’ he said. ‘She knows it. Now you know it, too.’

Part Four

Saturday. The Soul. The Day.

As the sun streamed across Ekeberg Ridge on Saturday morning, with the promise of another record-breaking temperature, Otto Tangen was going over the mixing console for the last time.

It was dark and cramped in the bus, and there was the smell of mouldy clothes that neither Otto’s Elvis Presley car fresheners nor his roll-up tobacco would ever succeed in dispersing. Sometimes he felt like he was sitting in a bunker in the trenches with the stench of death in his nostrils, but still isolated from what was going on immediately outside.

The student building stood in the middle of a piece of land at the top of Kampen with a view down towards Toyen. On each side of and almost parallel with the old four-storey red-brick building were two taller blocks of flats from the ’50s. The same paint and the same type of windows were used in the student building as in the blocks of flats, presumably in an attempt to give the area a unified look. However, the age difference could not be camouflaged; it still looked as if a waterspout had sucked up the student building and gently planted it down in the middle of a housing cooperative.

Harry and Waaler agreed to locate the bus in the car park with all the other cars, directly in front of the student building, where reception was good and the bus was not too conspicuous. Passers-by who still might cast a cursory glance its way would assume that the rusty, blue Volvo bus with the isoprene-covered windows belonged to the rock band ‘Kindergarden Accident’, which was painted in black letters on the side with skulls as dots over the two ‘i’s.

Otto dried his sweat and checked that all the cameras were working, that all the angles were covered and that everything that moved outside the building was picked up by at least one camera, so that they could follow the target from the moment he entered the hallway to the doorway of any one of the 80 student rooms in the eight corridors on the four floors.