The Devil's star

20

Wednesday. Cathedral Builders.

Harry and Oleg met Rakel on her way out of the Frogner open-air pool. She ran over to Oleg and flung her arms round him while looking daggers at Harry.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she whispered.

Harry stood there with his arms down by his sides, shifting weight from one foot to the other. He knew he could give her an answer. He could have said that what he was ‘doing’ was trying to save lives in the city, but even that would have been a lie. The truth was he was ‘doing’ his own thing and letting everyone around him pay the price. It had always been like that, and it always would be, and if it happened to save lives, then that was a bonus.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said instead. At any rate, that was the truth.

‘We went somewhere where the serial killer’s been,’ Oleg said overjoyed, but stopped in his tracks when he saw his mother’s look of disbelief.

‘Well -’ Harry began.

‘Don’t,’ Rakel interrupted. ‘Don’t even try.’

Harry shrugged, and smiled sadly at Oleg.

‘Let me drive you home anyway.’

He knew what the response would be before it came. He stood and watched them go. Rakel strode ahead briskly. Oleg turned and waved. Harry waved back.

The sun was pumping behind his eyelids.

The canteen was on the top floor of Police HQ. Harry stood inside the door and his eyes swept around the room. Apart from a person sitting with his back to one of the tables, the large area was totally empty. Harry had driven from Frogner Park straight to Police HQ. On his way through the corridors on the sixth floor he established that Tom Waaler’s office was unoccupied, but the light was on.

Harry went to the counter where the steel shutters were down. On the TV suspended in the corner the draw was being made for the lottery. Harry watched the ball roll down the funnel. The volume was down low, but Harry could hear a woman’s voice say ‘Five, the number is five’. Someone had been lucky. A chair scraped by the table.

‘Hi, Harry. The counter’s closed.’

It was Tom.

‘I know,’ Harry said.

Harry thought about what Rakel had asked, about what he was actually doing.

‘Thought I would just have a smoke.’

Harry nodded towards the door to the roof terrace, which in practice functioned as a year-round smoking room.

The view from the roof terrace was wonderful, but the air was just as hot and still as it was down on the street. The afternoon sun angled across the town and came to rest in Bjorvika, an area of Oslo containing a motorway, a deposit for shipping containers and a refuge for junkies, but it was soon to have an opera house, hotels and millionaires’ apartments. Wealth was beginning to take the whole city by storm. It made Harry think of the catfish in the rivers in Africa, the large, black fish that didn’t have the sense to swim into deeper waters when the drought came and in the end were trapped in one of the muddy pools that slowly dried up. All the building works had started; the cranes stood out like the silhouettes of giraffes against the afternoon sun.

‘It’s going to be really great.’

He hadn’t even heard Tom approach.

‘We’ll see.’

Harry pulled on his cigarette. He wasn’t sure what he had responded to.

‘You’ll like it,’ Waaler said. ‘It’s just a question of getting used to it.’

Harry could see the catfish lying in front of him in the mud after the last water had gone, their tails beating, their mouths wide open as they tried to get used to breathing air.

‘But I need an answer, Harry. I have to know if you’re in or out.’

Drowning in air. The death of the catfish was perhaps no worse than the death of anything else. Death by drowning was supposed to be relatively pleasant.

‘Beate rang,’ Harry said. ‘She’s checked the fingerprints from the TV shop.’

‘Oh?’

‘Just partial prints. And the owner doesn’t remember a thing.’

‘Shame. Aune says that they get good results from hypnosis with forgetful witnesses in Sweden. Perhaps we should try that.’

‘Sure.’

‘And there was an interesting bit of information from Forensics this afternoon. About Camilla Loen.’

‘Mm?’

‘Turns out she was pregnant. Second month. But no-one we’ve talked to in her circle had a clue about who the father could have been. I don’t suppose it has much to do with her death, but it would be interesting to know.’

‘Mm.’

They stood in silence. Waaler went over to the railing and leaned over the edge.

‘I know that you don’t like me, Harry. And I’m not asking you to begin liking me over night.’

He paused.

‘But if we’re going to work together we have to begin somewhere, be a little more open with each other perhaps.’

‘Open?’

‘Yes. Does that sound dodgy?’

‘A bit.’

Tom Waaler smiled. ‘Agreed, but you can start. Ask me anything you’d like to know about me.’

‘Know?’

‘Yes. Anything at all.’

‘Was it you who shot…?’ Harry stopped. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I want to know what it is that makes you tick.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What it is that makes you get up in the morning and do what you do. What you’re after and why.’

‘I understand.’

Tom thought it over. For quite a while. Then he pointed at the cranes.

‘Do you see those? My great-grandfather emigrated from Scotland with six Sutherland sheep and a letter from the bricklayers’ guild in Aberdeen. He helped to build the houses you can see along the Akerselva and to the east along the railway line. Later his sons followed in his footsteps, and their sons too, right down to my father. My grandfather took a Norwegian surname, but when we moved to the west of Oslo, my father changed it back. Waaler. Wall. There was a little pride involved, but he also thought that Andersen was too common a name for a future judge.’

Harry watched Waaler. He tried to locate the scar on his chin.

‘You were training to become a judge then?’

‘That was the plan when I started law. And I would probably have continued if it hadn’t been for what happened.’

‘What was that?’

Waaler shrugged his shoulders.

‘My father died in an accident at work. It’s strange, but when your father has gone you suddenly discover that the choices you have made were as much for him as for yourself. I was immediately aware that I had nothing in common with the other law students. I suppose I was a kind of naive idealist. I thought it was all about raising the banner for justice and driving the modern democratic state forward. However, I discovered that for most people it was about getting a title and a job and creaming enough to be able to impress the girl next door in Ullern. Well, you did law yourself…’

Harry nodded.

‘Perhaps it’s in the genes,’ Waaler said. ‘At any rate, I’ve always liked building things. Big things. Right from when I was small. I built huge palaces with Lego bricks, much bigger than the things all the other kids built. On the law course I realised I was wired differently from all these tiny-minded people with their tiny-minded thoughts. Two months after my father’s funeral I applied to go to Police College.’

‘Mm. And left as top cadet, according to the rumours.’

‘Second.’

‘And here at Police HQ you had to build your palace?’

‘I didn’t have to. There’s no had to, Harry. When I was small I took Lego bricks off the other children to make my buildings large enough. It’s a question of what you want. Do you want a small, poky house for people with small, poky lives or do you want to have opera houses and cathedrals, majestic buildings that point the way towards something greater than you yourself, something you can strive for.’

Waaler ran his hand along the steel railing.

‘Building cathedrals is a calling, Harry. In Italy they gave masons who died during the construction of a church the status of a martyr. Even though cathedral builders built for humanity there isn’t a single cathedral in human history that was not founded on human bones and human blood. My grandfather used to say that. And that’s the way it will always be. The blood of my family has been used as the mortar of many of the buildings you can see from here. I simply want more justice. For everyone. And I’ll use the building materials that are necessary.’

Harry studied the glow of his cigarette.

‘And I’m a building material?’

Waaler smiled.

‘That’s one way of putting it. But the answer is yes. If you want it. I have alternatives…’

He didn’t complete the sentence, but Harry knew how it ended: ‘… but you don’t.’

Harry took a long drag on his cigarette and asked in a low voice: ‘What if I agree to come on board?’

Waaler raised an eyebrow and fixed Harry with an intent look before answering.

‘You’ll receive your first assignment, which you will carry out on your own and without asking any questions. Everyone before you has done this. As a mark of loyalty.’

‘And it is?’

‘You’ll find that out in good time. But it means burning bridges.’

‘Does it mean breaking Norwegian law?’

‘Probably.’

‘Aha,’ Harry said. ‘So that you’ve got something on me, so that I won’t be tempted to rat on you.’

‘I would perhaps have expressed that in a different way, but you’ve got the idea.’

‘What are we talking about here? Smuggling?’

‘I can’t tell you that yet.’

‘How can you be sure that I’m not a mole from POT or SEFO?’

Waaler leaned further over the railing and pointed down.

‘Do you see her, Harry?’

Harry went to the edge and peered down at the park. People were still lying on the green grass catching the last rays of the sun.

‘Her in the yellow bikini,’ Waaler said. ‘Nice colour for a bikini, isn’t it.’

Harry’s stomach churned, and he stood up straight again.

‘We’re not stupid,’ Waaler said, without taking his eyes off the lawn. ‘We follow the ones we want to join us. She wears well. Smart and independent, from what I can see. But of course she wants what all women want in her position. A man who can provide for her. It’s pure biology. And you don’t have a lot of time. Women like her are not on their own for long.’

Harry’s cigarette fell over the edge. It left behind a stream of sparks.

‘There was a warning about forest fires for all Ostland yesterday,’ Waaler said.

Harry didn’t answer. He just shuddered when he felt Waaler’s hand on his shoulder.

‘Strictly speaking, the deadline has already passed, Harry. But to show how kind we are, I’ll give you two more days. If I don’t hear anything in that time, the offer is rescinded.’

Harry swallowed hard and tried to get out the one word, but his tongue refused to obey and his salivary glands felt like the dry river beds in Africa.

Finally, he managed it.

‘Thanks.’

Beate Lonn enjoyed her work. She like the routines, the security, the knowledge that she was competent, and she knew that the others at the Forensics Institute at Kjolberggata 21A knew that too. Since work was the only thing in her life she considered important, it was reason enough to get up in the morning. Everything else was a musical interlude. She lived in her mother’s house in Oppsal and had the whole of the top floor to herself. They got on extremely well. She had always been Daddy’s girl when he was alive; she assumed that was why she joined the police force, like him. She had no hobbies. Even though she and Halvorsen, the officer Harry shared his office with, had become a sort of couple, she was not convinced about it. She had read in a women’s magazine that this kind of doubt was natural and that you should take risks. Beate didn’t like taking risks. Or being in doubt. That was why she enjoyed her work.

As she was growing up she blushed at the thought that anyone could be thinking about her and she spent most of her time devising different ways to hide. She still blushed, but she had found good places to hide. She could sit for hours inside the worn redbrick walls of Forensics studying fingerprints, ballistics reports, video recordings, comparisons of voices, the analyses of DNA or textile fibres, footprints, blood and an endless number of technical leads which might resolve important, complicated, controversial cases in total peace and quiet. She had also discovered that working was not nearly as dangerous as it seemed. So long as she spoke loudly and clearly and managed to repress her panic about blushing, losing face, her clothes, standing there exposed and full of shame, for what reason she didn’t know. The office in Kjolberggata was her castle; the uniform and her professional duties her mental armour.

The clock showed 12.30 a.m. when the telephone on her office desk rang, interrupting her reading of the laboratory report on Lisbeth Barli’s finger. Her heart began to quicken with fear when she saw on the display that the caller was ringing from an ‘unknown number’. It could only mean that it was him.

‘Beate Lonn.’

It was him. His words came out in a flurry of blows.

‘Why didn’t you ring me about the fingerprints?’

She held her breath for a second before she replied.

‘Harry said he would pass on the message.’

‘Thank you. I received it. Next time, you ring me first. Is that understood?’

Beate gulped. She didn’t know whether out of fear or anger.

‘Fine.’

‘Anything else you told him that you didn’t tell me?’

‘No. Except that I’ve got the results from the lab on what was under the finger we were sent through the post.’

‘Lisbeth Barli’s? And it was?’

‘Excrement.’

‘What?’

‘Pooh.’

‘Thank you very much. I know what it is. Any idea where it came from?’

‘Er, yes.’

‘Correction. Who it came from.’

‘I don’t know for certain, but I can guess.’

‘Would you be so kind…’

‘The excrement contains blood, perhaps from a haemorrhoid. In this particular case, blood group B. Only seven per cent of the country has this blood group. Wilhelm Barli is a registered blood donor. He has -’

‘Right. And what do you conclude from this?’

‘I don’t know,’ Beate said quickly.

‘But you know that the anus is an erogenous zone, Beate? In men and women. Or had you forgotten?’

Beate squeezed her eyes shut. Please don’t let him start again. Not again. It was a long time ago, she had begun to forget, to get it out of her system. But his voice was there, smooth and tough, like snakeskin.

‘You’re good at playing the very ordinary girl, Beate. I like that. I liked it when you pretended you didn’t want to.’

You know something, I know something, no-one else knows anything, she thought.

‘Does Halvorsen do it to you as well as I did?’

‘I’m putting the phone down now,’ Beate said.

His laughter crackled in her ears. She knew it then. There was nowhere to hide. They could find you anywhere, just as they had found the three women where they felt safest. There was no castle. And no armour.

Oystein was sitting in his cab at the taxi rank in Thereses gate and listening to a Rolling Stones tape when the telephone rang.

‘Oslo Ta -’

‘Hi, Oystein. Harry here. Have you got anyone in the car?’

‘Just Mick and Keith.’

‘What?’

‘The world’s greatest band.’

‘Oystein.’

‘Yep?’

‘The Stones are not the world’s greatest band. Not even the world’s second greatest band. What they are is the world’s most overrated band. And it wasn’t Keith or Mick who wrote “Wild Horses”. It was Gram Parsons.’

‘That’s lies and you know it! I’m ringing off -’

‘Hello? Oystein?’

‘Say something nice to me. Quickly.’

‘“Under My Thumb” is not a bad tune. And “Exile On Main Street” has its moments.’

‘Fine. What do you want?’

‘I need help.’

‘It’s three o’clock in the morning. Shouldn’t you be asleep now?’

‘Can’t do it,’ Harry said. ‘I’m terrified every time I close my eyes.’

‘Same nightmare as before?’

‘The listeners’ request from hell.’

‘The stuff with the lift?’

‘I know exactly what’s coming and I’m just as frightened every time. How quickly can you get here?’

‘I don’t like this, Harry.’

‘How quickly?’

Oystein sighed.

‘Give me six minutes.’

Harry was standing in the doorway wearing just his jeans when Oystein came up the stairs.

They sat down in the sitting room without putting on the lights.

‘Have you got a beer?’ Oystein took off his black cap with the PlayStation logo and brushed back a thin, sweaty lock of hair.

Harry shook his head.

‘Take this,’ Oystein said and placed a black camera-film tube on the table.

‘This is on me. Flunipam. Definite knockout. One pill is more than enough.’

Harry stared at the tube.

‘That’s not why I asked you to come, Oystein.’

‘It isn’t?’

‘No. I need to know how to crack a code. How you go about it.’

‘Do you mean hacking?’ Oystein sent Harry a surprised look. ‘Have you got to crack a password?’

‘In a way. Have you read about the serial killer in the newspaper? I think he’s sending us codes.’

Harry switched on a lamp. ‘Look at this.’

Oystein perused the sheet of paper Harry had put on the table.

‘A star?’

‘A pentagram. He left signs at two of the crime scenes. One was carved into a beam over a bed and the other traced in the dust on a TV screen in a shop opposite the murder scene.’

Oystein examined the star and nodded. ‘And you think I can tell you what it means?’

‘No.’ Harry held his head in his hands. ‘But I hoped you could tell me something about the principles behind cracking codes.’

‘The codes I cracked were mathematical codes, Harry. With interpersonal codes there’s a completely different semantics. For example, I still can’t decode what women are actually saying.’

‘Imagine that this is both. Simple logic and a subtext.’

‘OK, let’s talk about cryptography. Ciphers. To see that you need both logical and what is called analogical thinking. The latter means that you use the subconscious and intuition, in other words, what you don’t realise you already know. And then you combine linear thinking with the recognition of patterns. Have you heard of Alan Turing?’

‘No.’

‘Englishman. He cracked the German codes during the war. In a nutshell, he lost them the Second World War. He said that in order to crack codes, first of all you have to know what dimension your opponent is operating in.’

‘And that means?’

‘If I can put it this way, it is the level that lies above letters and numerals. Above language. The answers that don’t tell you how, but why. Do you understand?’

‘No, but tell me how you do it.’

‘No-one knows. It has something in common with religious visions and is more like a gift.’

‘Let’s assume that I know why. What happens after that?’

‘You can take the long road. Going through all the permutations until you die.’

‘It’s not me who’s going to die. I’ve only got time for the short road.’

‘I only know of one method.’

‘Yes?’

‘A trance.’

‘Of course, a trance.’

‘I’m not kidding. You keep staring at the data until you stop thinking conscious thoughts. It’s like straining a muscle until it gets cramp and starts doing its own thing. Have you ever seen a climber’s leg go into convulsions when he is stuck in the mountains? No, well, it’s like that. In ’88 I got into the accounts of Den Danske Bank in four nights, on a few frozen drops of LSD. If your subconscious cracks the code, you’ll get there. If it doesn’t…’

‘Yes?’

Oystein laughed. ‘It’ll crack you. Psychiatric departments are full of people like me.’

‘Mm. Trance?’

‘Trance. Intuition. And a tiny bit of pharmaceutical help…’

Harry took the black tube and held it up in front of him.

‘Do you know what, Oystein?’

‘What?’

He threw the tube over the table and Oystein caught it.

‘I was lying about “Under My Thumb”.’

Oystein put the tube on the edge of the table as he tied the laces of a pair of unusually battered Puma trainers bought long before the fashion for retro.

‘I know. Do you see anything of Rakel?’

Harry shook his head.

‘That’s what bothers you, isn’t it?’

‘Maybe,’ Harry said. ‘I’ve been offered a job. I don’t know that I can turn it down.’

‘Well, it’s obviously not the job my boss offered you that you’re talking about.’

Harry smiled.

‘Sorry, I’m not the right man to ask about career advice,’ Oystein said and got up. ‘I’ll put the tube here. Do what you like with it.’