Jo Nesbo - The Redbreast

He started up the car with his right hand and revved the engine. He took a last look around before peering through the sights. The distance was barely fifty metres and her coat filled the whole of the circle in the sight lens. He shifted his aim marginally to the right and the black cross-hair found what he was searching for-the white piece of paper. He released the air from his lungs and crooked his finger around the trigger.

'Welcome back,' he whispered.

Part Eight

Vienna. 14 May 2000.

Harry treated himself to three seconds of relishing the sensation of cool leather against the back of his neck and forearms on the seats of Tyrolean Air. Then he went back to his reflections.

Beneath them the countryside lay like an unbroken patchwork of green and yellow, with the Danube glittering in the sun like a weeping brown wound. The air stewardess had just informed them that they were about to land in Schwechat, and Harry prepared himself.

He had never been ecstatic about flying, but in recent years he had begun to be downright frightened. Ellen had once asked him what he was frightened of. 'Crashing and dying, what the fuck else?' he had answered. She had told him that the odds of dying in a plane on the occasional trip were thirty million to one against. He had thanked her for the information and said he wasn't frightened any longer.

Harry breathed in deep and then out as he listened to the changing sounds of the engine. Why did the fear of death get worse as you got older? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Signe Juul was seventy-nine years old. Presumably she had been scared out of her wits. One of the guards at Akershus Fortress had found her. They had received a telephone call during their watch from a sleepless millionaire celebrity at Aker Brygge, informing them that one of the projectors on the southern wall had gone out, and the duty officer had sent one of the young guards out. Harry had questioned him two hours later, and he had told Harry that as he approached the projector he had seen a lifeless woman slumped across it, obstructing the light. At first he had thought she was a junkie, but as he moved closer and saw the grey hair and old-fashioned clothes, he realised she was an elderly woman. His next thought was that she had been taken ill, but then he discovered her hands were tied behind her back. It was only when he was right up close that he saw the gaping hole in her coat.

'I could see that her spine had been smashed,' he had told Harry. 'Shit, I could see her spine.'

Then he had told him how he had propped himself against the rock-face as he threw up, and it was only later when the police had come to take away the body and the light shone on the wall again that he realised what the sticky stuff on his hand was. He had shown Harry his hand, as if it were important.

The Crime Scene Unit had arrived and Weber had walked across to Harry while studying Signe Juul through sleepy eyes. He said God wasn't the bloody judge, it was the bloke down below.

The only witness was a night-watchman who kept an eye on the warehouses. He had met a car going down Akershusstranda on its way east at 2.45, but because the driver's lights had been on full beam he had been dazzled and hadn't been able to see the make of the car or the colour.

It felt as if the pilot was accelerating. Harry imagined they were trying to gain height because the captain had suddenly seen the Alps right in front of the cockpit. Then it felt as if the air beneath the wings of the Tyrolean Air plane had vanished and Harry felt his stomach shoot up under his ears. He groaned out loud when the next moment they bounced up again like a rubber ball. The captain came on to the intercom and said something in German and English about turbulence.

Aune had pointed out that if someone didn't have the capacity to feel fear, they would not survive a single day. Harry squeezed the arm of the chair and tried to find comfort in that thought.

In fact it had been Aune who had supplied the impetus for Harry taking the first available plane to Vienna. Once he'd had the facts laid on the table, he had immediately said that time was of the utmost importance.

'If we're dealing with a serial killer, he's on the point of losing control,' Aune had said. 'Not like the classical serial killer who looks for sexual release, but is then disappointed every time and increases the frequency of the killings out of sheer frustration. This murderer clearly isn't sexually motivated. He has some sick plan or other which has to be completed, and up until now he has been cautious and has behaved rationally. The fact that the murders are close to each other and that he has gone to great lengths to emphasise the symbolism of his actions-as with this execution at Akershus Fortress-suggests that he either feels invincible or he's losing his grip, maybe developing a psychosis.'

'Or perhaps he's still totally in control,' Halvorsen had said. 'He hasn't slipped up yet. We still don't have any clues.'

And he was absolutely bloody right, Halvorsen was. There were no clues.

Mosken had been able to account for his movements. He had picked up the telephone in Drammen when Halvorsen rang in the morning to check, since the surveillance boys hadn't caught a sniff of him in Oslo. Of course they couldn't know if what he said was true: that he had driven to Drammen after Bjerke Stadium closed at half past ten and had arrived at half past eleven. Or if he had arrived at half past two in the morning and had thus been in a position to shoot Signe Juul.

Harry, without much hope, had asked Halvorsen to ring the neighbours and ask if they had heard or seen Mosken arrive. And he had asked Moller to talk to the Public Prosecutor to see if they could get a search warrant for both of Mosken's flats. Harry knew that their arguments were weak and, quite rightly, the Public Prosecutor had answered that he at least wanted to see something that resembled circumstantial evidence before he would give the go-ahead.

No clues. It was time to start panicking.

Harry closed his eyes. Even Juul's face was still imprinted on his retina. Grey, closed. He had sat slumped in the armchair in Irisveien with the dog lead in his hand.

Then the wheels touched down, and Harry could confirm that he was among the thirty million fortunate ones.

The policeman whom the police boss in Vienna had kindly placed at his disposal as driver, guide and interpreter was standing in the arrivals hall with dark suit, sunglasses, bull-like neck and an A4 piece of paper with mr hole written on it in felt-pen.

The bull-neck introduced himself as Fritz (Someone has to be called Fritz, Harry thought) and led Harry to a navy-blue BMW which a moment later was whizzing north west on the motorway towards the city, past the factory chimneys spewing out white smoke and past well-behaved motorists who tucked into the right as Fritz accelerated.

'You'll be staying at the spy hotel,' Fritz said.

'The spy hotel?'

'The venerable old Imperial. That's where the Russian and the Western agents defected during the cold war. Your boss must be floating in funds.'

They arrived at the Karntner Ring and Fritz pointed.

'That's the spire of Stephansdom you can see across the rooftops to the right,' he said. 'Beautiful, isn't it? Here's the hotel. I'll wait while you check in.'

The receptionist at the Imperial smiled when he saw Harry eyeing the reception area with admiration.

'We've renovated it at a cost of forty million schillings so that it's exactly as it was before the war. It was almost completely destroyed by bombing in 1944 and it was fairly run down a few years ago.'

When Harry left the lift on the second floor it was like walking on springy peat, the carpets were so thick and soft. The room was not particularly big, but there was a broad four-poster bed that looked as if it was at least a hundred years old. On opening the window he could smell the bakery of the cake shop across the street.