Jo Nesbo - The Devil's star

Harry looked at Iggy Pop, the lean, bare body stripped to the waist, the self-inflicted scars, the intense gaze from the deep eye sockets, a man who must have been through a Calvary or two of his own. Harry touched the thumb on the shelf. Too soft to be plaster or plastic, it almost felt like a real finger. Cold, but real. He thought of the dildo he had seen at Barli’s while sniffing the white thumb. It smelled of a mixture of formalin and paint. He held it between two fingers and squeezed. The paint cracked. Harry recoiled as he caught the pungent smell.

‘Beate Lonn.’

‘Harry here. How’s it going with you?’

‘We’re still waiting. Waaler has taken up a position in the hall and chased me and Miss Sivertsen into the kitchen. So much for women’s liberation.’

‘I’m ringing from room 406 in the student block. He’s been here.’

‘Been there?’

‘He carved a devil’s star in the plaster above the door. The boy staying here, a Marius Veland, has gone. The other residents haven’t seen him for several weeks. And there’s a slip of paper hanging on the door saying he’s gone away.’

‘Well, perhaps he really has gone away.’

Harry noticed that Beate had started to take on his speech mannerisms.

‘Hardly,’ Harry said. ‘His thumb is still in his room. In a sort of embalmed state.’

It went quiet at the other end of the line.

‘I’ve rung your lot at Forensics. They’re on their way now.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ Beate said. ‘Haven’t you had the whole building under surveillance?’

‘Well, yes. But not for the 20 days since this happened.’

‘Twenty days. How do you know that?’

‘Because I found his parents’ telephone number and called them. They’d received a letter saying that he was off to Morocco. His father says that it’s the first time he can remember ever receiving a letter from Marius. Usually he phones. The postmark on the letter is from 20 days ago.’

‘Twenty days…’ Beate murmured.

‘Twenty days. In other words, exactly five days before the murder of Camilla Loen. In other words…’

He could hear Beate taking deep breaths on the phone.

‘… five days before what we thought was the first murder,’ he said.

‘My God.’

‘There’s more. We rounded up the occupants of the house and asked if anyone could remember anything from that day and the girl in 303 says she remembers sunbathing on the grass outside the building that afternoon. On her way back she passed a bike courier. She remembers it because they don’t often have couriers here and she’d joked about it with the others in the corridor when the papers had started writing about the Courier Killer a couple of weeks later.’

‘He’s cheated with the sequence of murders then?’

‘No,’ Harry said. ‘It was me being stupid. Do you remember I was wondering if any of the fingers he cut off were also a kind of code? Well. It was the simplest of all. The thumb. He started with the first digit on the left hand and worked his way round. You don’t need to be a genius to work out that Camilla was number two.’

‘Mm.’

Now she’s doing it again, Harry thought.

‘And now we just need number five,’ Beate said. ‘The little finger.’

‘You know what that means, don’t you?’

‘That it’s our turn. That it’s been our turn all along. My God, is he really planning to… you know?’

‘Is his mother sitting beside you?’

‘Yes. Tell me what he’ll do, Harry.’

‘I have no idea.’

‘I know you have no idea, but tell me anyway.’

Harry hesitated.

‘OK. Many serial killers are driven by self-contempt. And since the fifth killing is the last one, the final one, there is a great likelihood that he’s planning to take the life of his progenitor. Or himself. Or both. It’s got nothing to do with his relationship with his mother, but with himself. Anyway, the choice of the location for the murder is logical.’

Silence.

‘Are you there, Beate?’

‘Yes, indeed. He grew up as the son of a German.’

‘Who?’

‘The person on his way here.’

New silence.

‘Why is Waaler waiting on his own in the hall?’

‘Why are you asking?’

‘Because the usual procedure would be for both of you to arrest him. It’s safer than having you sit in the kitchen.’

‘Maybe,’ Beate said. ‘I don’t have much experience in this kind of fieldwork. He must know what he’s doing.’

‘Yes,’ Harry said.

Some thoughts passed through his mind. Thoughts he was trying to repress.

‘Is there anything wrong, Harry?’

‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘I’ve run out of cigarettes.’

Saturday. Drowning.

Harry put his mobile phone back in his jacket pocket and leaned back against the sofa. Forensics would probably be hacked off, but there weren’t exactly many leads here to destroy. It was obvious that the killer had done a thorough job of clearing up after himself this time as well. Harry had even detected the faint aroma of soft soap when he put his face to the floor to examine some black lumps of what seemed at first sight to be rubber burned onto the lino.

A face appeared in the doorway.

‘Bjorn Holm, Forensics.’

‘Good,’ Harry said. ‘Have you got a smoke?’

He stood up and walked to the window as Holm and his colleague got down to work. The angular evening light gilded the house fronts, the streets and the trees across Kampen and into Toyen. Harry didn’t know of a more beautiful town than Oslo on evenings like this. There had to be others, but he didn’t know any.

‘I’d like you to find out what these black lumps are.’

Harry pointed to the floor.

‘Fine,’ Holm said.

Harry was dizzy. He had chain-smoked eight cigarettes. It had kept his thirst in check. In check, but not gone completely. He stared at the thumb. Presumably it had been severed with pincers. Paint and glue. A chisel and a hammer to carve the pentagram over the door. He had brought quite a bit of equipment with him this time.

He understood the pentagram. And the finger. But why the glue?

‘Looks like melted rubber,’ Holm said. He squatted on the floor.

‘How do you melt rubber?’ Harry asked.

‘You can set fire to it. Or use an electric iron. Or a heat gun.’

Holm shrugged his shoulders.

‘What do you use melted rubber for?’

‘Vulcanisation,’ his colleague said. ‘You use it for repairing things or making them watertight. Car tyres, for example. Or sealing something that has to be airtight. That kind of thing.’

‘And that?’

‘No idea. Sorry.’

‘Thank you.’

The thumb was pointing to the ceiling. If only it could point to the solution to the code, Harry thought. Obviously it was a code. The killer had attached a ring to their noses and he was leading them like dumb animals wherever he wanted, and so this code had a solution too. Quite a simple solution if it was intended for moderately intelligent idiots like himself.

He stared at the finger. Pointing upwards. OK. Roger. Message understood.

The evening light continued to stream in.

He sucked hard on his cigarette. The nicotine travelled through his veins, through the narrow capillaries from his lungs and northwards. Poisoned, health-damaged, manipulated but primed. Shit!

Harry was racked with a bout of violent coughing.

He pointed to the ceiling. Of room 406. The ceiling on the fourth floor. Of course. Idiot. Idiot.

Harry turned the key, opened the door and found the light switch along the wall. He stepped inside. The loft was high and airy without any windows. Numbered storage rooms, two metres square, abutted against each other and lined the walls. Property was piled up behind the chicken wire in transit from the owner to the rubbish skip: mattresses with holes in, unfashionable furniture, cardboard boxes of clothes, electrical goods that still work and so cannot be thrown out yet.