Jo Nesbo - The Devil's star

‘Have you ever felt a statue, Harry? It’s quite remarkable how the skin of a dead person feels. It’s not really warm, and it’s not really cold.’

Wilhelm stroked the blue mattress.

Harry could feel the cold freezing his insides, as if someone had given him an injection of ice water. He felt his throat constrict when he said: ‘You know you’re finished, don’t you?’

Wilhelm stretched out across the bed.

‘Why should I be, Harry? I’m just a storyteller who’s told you a story. You can’t prove a thing.’

He stretched over for something on the bedside table. There was a flash of metal and Harry’s muscles went taut. Wilhelm raised it in the air. A wristwatch.

‘It’s late, Harry. Shall we say visiting time is over? It doesn’t matter if you go before she’s out of the shower.’

Harry didn’t move. ‘Finding the killer was only half the promise you made me make, Wilhelm. The other half was that I should punish him. Severely. And I think you meant it. Part of you is longing to be punished, isn’t that right?’

‘Freud has passed its sell-by date, Harry. Just like this visit.’

‘Don’t you want to hear the proof first?’

Wilhelm sighed with irritation.

‘If it’ll make you leave, go on.’

‘I really should have known everything when we received Lisbeth’s finger with the diamond ring in the post. Third finger on the left hand. Vena amoris. She was the one the murderer wanted to love him. Paradoxically enough, it was also this finger that gave him away.’

‘Gave away…’

‘To be precise, the excrement under the nail…’

‘With my blood. Yes, but that’s old news, Harry. And I’ve already explained that we liked to…’

‘Yes, and when we found that out, the excrement was investigated more carefully. Usually this does not reveal a great deal. The food we eat takes twelve to twenty-four hours to travel from mouth to rectum and in the course of this time the stomach and the network of intestines has turned the food into an unrecognisable waste product. So unrecognisable that even under the microscope it is difficult to determine what a person has eaten. Nevertheless, there are still some things that manage to pass through the digestive tract unscathed. Grape pips and -’

‘Can you skip the lecture, Harry?’

‘Seeds. We found two seeds. Nothing special about that. So it was only today, when I realised who the killer might be, that I asked the laboratory to examine the seeds closer. And do you know what they found?’

‘No idea.’

‘There was a complete fennel seed.’

‘So what?’

‘I had a chat with the chef at the Theatre Cafe. You were right when you told me that it was the only place in Norway where they make fennel bread with complete seeds. It goes so well with -’

‘Herring,’ Wilhelm said. ‘You know I eat there. What are you getting at?’

‘Earlier you said that the Wednesday Lisbeth disappeared you had herring for breakfast at the Theatre Cafe as usual. Somewhere between nine and ten o’clock in the morning. What I’m wondering is how the seed got from your stomach to under Lisbeth’s nail.’

Harry waited to be sure that Wilhelm was taking everything in.

‘You said that Lisbeth had left the flat at about five o’clock. So, around eight hours after you ate herring for breakfast. Suppose that the last thing you did before she went out was to make love and she penetrated you with her finger. However efficiently your intestines worked they would not have been able to shift the fennel seed to your rectum within eight hours. It’s a medical impossibility.’

Harry noticed a slight twitch in Wilhelm’s open-mouthed face as he enunciated the word ‘impossibility’.

‘The earliest the fennel seed could have reached the rectum is at nine o’clock. So you must have had Lisbeth’s finger inside you at some point in the evening, the night or the following day. All after you had reported her missing. Do you understand what I’m saying, Wilhelm?’

Wilhelm stared at Harry. That is, he was staring in Harry’s direction, but his eyes were fixed on a point a lot further away.

‘That’s what we call forensic evidence,’ Harry said.

‘I understand.’ Wilhelm nodded slowly. ‘Forensic evidence.’

‘Yes.’

‘A specific, irrefutable fact?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Judges and juries love that sort of thing, don’t they. It’s better than a confession, isn’t it, Harry.’

The policeman nodded.

‘A farce, Harry. I thought it was all a farce. People rushing on stage and then off again. I made sure we stayed on the terrace so that the neighbours over the way would see us before I asked Lisbeth to come into the bedroom with me where I took a gun out of the toolbox and she stared – yes, just like in a farce – with widening eyes at the long barrel with the silencer.’

Wilhelm took his hand out from underneath the duvet. Harry stared at the gun with the black lump round the barrel, which was now pointed at him.

‘Sit down, Harry.’

Harry felt the chisel sticking into his side as he dropped down onto the chair again.

‘She misunderstood me in the most amusing way. It would have been such poetic justice. To have her riding on my hand as I ejaculated hot lead into where she’d let him come.’

Wilhelm got up from the bed, which rippled and gurgled behind him.

‘But the essence of farce is speed, speed, so I was forced to arrange a hasty departure.’

He stood up naked in front of Harry and raised the gun.

‘I placed the mouth of the gun against her forehead. She frowned in surprise as she always did when she thought the world was unjust or simply confusing. Like the evening I told her about Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion on which My Fair Lady is based. In it, Eliza Doolittle does not marry Professor Higgins, the man who trained her and transformed her from a market girl into a well-mannered young woman. Instead she runs off with young Freddy. Lisbeth was furious and said that Eliza owed that much to the professor, and that Freddy was a dull person of no consequence. Do you know what, Harry? I started crying.’

‘You’re crazy,’ Harry whispered.

‘Apparently,’ Wilhelm said gravely. ‘What I’ve done is monstrous. There’s none of the control you find in people motivated by hatred. I’m just a simple man who has followed the dictates of his heart. And it dictates love, the love that is given to us by God and makes us God’s instrument. Weren’t the prophets and Jesus thought to be crazy, too, perhaps? Of course we’re crazy, Harry. Crazy, and yet the sanest on this earth. When people say that what I’ve done is insane, that my heart must be crippled inside, then I say: Whose heart is more crippled, the heart that cannot stop loving or the one that is loved but cannot return that love?’

A long silence ensued. Harry cleared his throat.

‘And so you shot her?’

Wilhelm nodded slowly.

‘There was a little lump in her forehead,’ he said with surprise in his voice. ‘And a little black hole. Just as when you hammer a nail into sheet metal.’

‘And then you concealed her. In the only place even a police dog would not find her.’

‘It was hot in the flat.’ Wilhelm had fixed his gaze somewhere above Harry’s head. ‘A fly was buzzing by the window, and I took all my clothes off so that I wouldn’t get any blood on them. Everything was carefully laid out in the toolbox. I used the pincers to cut off the middle finger of her left hand. Then I undressed her, took out the silicon foam spray and quickly sealed the bullet hole, the wound on her finger and all the other orifices of her body. I had let some water out of the bed earlier in the day so that it was only half full. I hardly spilled a drop as I stuffed her in through the hole I’d cut in the mattress. Then I sealed it again with glue, rubber and a heat gun. It went a lot better than the first time.’