Jo Nesbo - The Devil's star

A sudden gust of wind blew the duvet away and gave her goosepimples.

Odd how dreams sometimes just slide away from you, like slippery soap, she thought as she rolled over. Oleg was gone. She raised herself on her elbows and looked around her.

The next second she was on her feet.

‘Oleg!’

She began to run.

She found him by the diving pool. He was sitting on the edge talking to a boy she thought she had seen before. Could have been a boy in his class.

‘Hi, Mummy.’ He squinted up at her and smiled.

Rakel grabbed his arm, harder than she had intended.

‘I told you not to clear off without saying a word.’

Oleg was taken aback and a little embarrassed. His friend fell back a couple of paces.

She let go. Sighed and stared at the horizon. The sky was blue apart from one single white cloud that seemed to be pointing upwards as if someone had just fired a rocket.

‘It’s nearly five. We’re going home now,’ she said. Her voice was a long way off. ‘Time to eat.’

In the car on the way home Oleg asked if Harry was coming.

Rakel shook her head.

While they were waiting for the lights to change on the Smestad crossing she bent forwards to look up and find the cloud again. It had not moved, but it was a bit higher now and there was a tinge of grey at the bottom.

She remembered to lock the door when they arrived home.

Monday. Meetings.

Roger Gjendem stopped at the window of Underwater to stare at the water bubbling in the aquarium. An image flickered past. A seven-year-old boy swimming towards him with hurried, frantic strokes and the panic visible on his face, as if he, Roger, his big brother, was the only person in the world who could save him. Roger had called out to him with a laugh, but Thomas had not realised that he was already in shallow water and all he had to do was put his feet on the bottom. Now and then Roger mused that he had managed to teach his brother how to swim in water; it was on land that he had gone under.

He stood in the doorway to Underwater for a few seconds to let his eyes grow accustomed to the dark. Apart from the barman he could only see one single person in the room, a red-haired woman sitting with her back half turned towards him with half a glass of beer in front of her and a cigarette between her fingers. Roger went down the steps to the lower floor and peered in. Not a soul. He decided to wait by the bar on the ground floor. The wooden planks creaked under his feet and the red-haired woman looked up. Shadows fell across her face, but there was something about the way she was sitting, her bearing, that made him think that she was nice-looking. Or had been. He noticed that she had a bag beside the table. Perhaps she was waiting for someone too.

He ordered a beer and checked the time on his watch.

He had walked round the block a few times so that he would not arrive before 5.00, as arranged. He didn’t want to give the impression he was too keen – that would arouse suspicion. Though who could mistrust a journalist for being too keen when it was information that might lead to the biggest case of the summer being turned on its head? If indeed that was what this was all about.

Roger had kept an eye open while trudging up and down the streets. For a car parked where it shouldn’t be, someone standing and reading a paper at the corner of the street, a tramp sleeping on a bench, perhaps. He hadn’t spotted anything though. They were professionals of course. That was what frightened him most. The certainty that they could carry out their threat and get away with it. He had heard a colleague mumbling in his cups that there were some things going on at Police HQ that the public would not believe, even if it had been reported in the papers, but Roger shared the public’s view.

He looked at his watch again. Seven minutes past.

Would they storm in the minute Harry Hole arrived? They hadn’t told him a thing, they just said that he should turn up as arranged and behave as he normally would when working on a job. Roger took another large gulp in the hope that the alcohol would settle his nerves.

Ten minutes past. The barman was sitting in the corner of the bar reading a holiday brochure.

‘Excuse me,’ Roger said.

The barman scarcely raised his eyes.

‘A guy hasn’t just been in here, has he? Tall, blond hair with…’

‘Sorry,’ the barman said, licking his thumb and flipping the page. ‘I just started my shift before you came in. Ask her over there.’

Roger hesitated. He drank down as far as the Ringnes logo on the glass and got up.

‘Excuse me…’

The woman looked up at him with a strained smile.

‘Yes?’

It was then that he saw. It wasn’t shadows he had seen across her face. It was bruises. On the forehead. On the cheekbones. And on her neck.

‘I was supposed to meet a guy here, but I’m afraid he must have gone again. About one ninety with short cropped blond hair.’

‘Oh? Young?’

‘Well. About thirty-five, I think. Looks a bit ravaged.’

‘Red nose and blue eyes that seem both old and young at the same time?’

She was still smiling, but in such an introverted way that he sensed the smile was not for him.

‘That could be him, yes,’ Roger dithered. ‘Has he…’

‘No, I’m sitting waiting for him myself.’

Roger looked her over. Was she with the others? A battered, fairly attractive woman in her mid-thirties? It seemed unlikely.

‘Do you think he’s going to come?’ Roger asked.

‘No.’ She raised her glass. ‘The ones you want to come, never do. It’s the others who come.’

Roger went back to the bar. His glass had been removed. He ordered another beer.

The barman put on some music. Gluecifer did their best to lighten the gloom.

‘I got a war, baby. I got a war with you. ’

He wasn’t coming. Harry Hole was not coming. What did it mean? It sure as shit wasn’t his fault.

At 5.30 the door opened.

Roger looked up hopefully.

A man in a leather jacket stood and eyeballed him.

Roger shook his head.

The man cast a quick glance around the bar. He ran a flat hand across his throat. Then he was gone again.

Roger’s first thought was to run after him. Ask him what he meant by his gesture. That they were suspending operations. Or that Thomas… His mobile phone rang. He took it out of his pocket.

‘No show?’ a voice said.

It was not the man wearing the leather jacket, and it was definitely not Harry. There was something familiar about the voice though.

‘What shall I do?’ Roger asked quietly.

‘Stay there until eight o’clock,’ the voice said. ‘And ring the number you were given if he turns up. We have to push on.’

‘Thomas…’

‘Nothing will happen to your little brother as long as you do what we tell you. And none of this will come out.’

‘Of course not. I…’

‘Have a good evening, Gjendem.’

Roger put the phone back in his pocket and plunged into his beer. He was gasping for air when he came up again. Eight o’clock. Two and a half hours.

‘What did I tell you?’

Roger turned his head. She was standing right behind him holding up her index finger to the barman, who reluctantly dragged himself to his feet.

‘What did you mean by “the others”?’ he asked.

‘Which others?’

‘You said that the others come instead of the ones you want to come.’

‘The ones you have to make do with, my dear.’

‘Yes?’

‘People like you and me.’

Roger turned right round. There was something about the way she had said that. No drama, no earnest tone, but with a slight resignation in her voice. There was something there he recognised, a sort of affinity. And now he could see more too. Her eyes. The red lips. She had certainly been good-looking at one time.