The Devil's star

23

Friday. A Human Number

Harry’s revelations used to be small, ice-cold drips that hit him on the head. Not any more, but, of course, by looking up and following the fall of the drips he could establish the causal connection. This revelation was different. This was a gift, theft, an undeserved favour from an angel, music that could come to people like Duke Ellington, ready-made, straight out of a dream. All you had to do was to sit down and play it.

And Harry was in the process of doing just that. He had summoned the concert audience to his own office at 1.00. That was enough time for him to fit the most essential part, the last part of the code. For that he needed the Pole Star. And a star chart.

On his way to work he slipped into a stationer’s to buy a ruler, a protractor, a pair of compasses, a felt tip with the finest point they had and a couple of overhead transparencies. He set to work as soon as he got to his office. He found the large Oslo map he had torn down, mended a rip, smoothed the surface of the noticeboards and pinned the map up again on the long wall in his office. Then he drew a circle on the transparency, divided it up into five sectors of exactly 72 degrees each and then, using the felt pen and the ruler, joined up each of the two points furthest away from each other in one continuous line. When he had finished he lifted the transparency up to the light. The devil’s star.

The overhead projector in the conference room had gone missing, so Harry went into the Crime Division’s conference room where Chief Inspector Ivarsson held his regular lecture – known as ‘How I became so clever’ among colleagues – to a group of press-ganged holiday stand-ins.

‘High priority,’ Harry said, pulling out the plug and rolling out the projector trolley past an astonished Ivarsson.

Back in his office, Harry put the transparency on the projector, pointed the square of light towards the map and switched off the main light.

In the darkened, windowless room he could hear his own breathing as he twisted the transparency round, moved the projector closer and further away and adjusted the focus of the black outline of a star until it matched. It did match. Of course it matched. He stared at the map, circled two street numbers and made a couple of telephone calls.

Then he was ready.

At 1.05 Bjarne Moller, Tom Waaler, Beate Lonn and Stale Aune were sitting on borrowed chairs, crushed into Harry and Halvorsen’s shared office, as quiet as mice.

‘It’s a code,’ Harry said. ‘A very simple code. A common denominator we should have seen ages ago. We were given it very clearly. A numerical figure.’

They looked at him.

‘Five,’ Harry said.

‘Five?’

‘The number is five.’

Harry watched the four puzzled faces.

Then something happened which he had experienced now and then, more frequently as time went on, after long periods of drinking. Without any prior warning, the ground suddenly gave way. He had a falling sensation and he lost all sense of reality. There weren’t four colleagues sitting in front of him in an office, it wasn’t a murder case, it wasn’t a warm summer’s day in Oslo, no-one called Rakel and Oleg ever existed. He knew that this brief panic attack could be followed by others and he hung on by his fingertips.

Harry lifted his mug of coffee and drank slowly while he collected himself.

He determined that when he heard the sound of the mug being put down on the desk he would be back, here, in this reality.

He put the mug down.

It landed with a soft thud.

‘First question,’ Harry said. ‘The killer has left his mark on all the victims with a diamond. How many sides does it have?’

‘Five,’ Moller said.

‘Second question. He also cut off one finger on the left hand of every victim. How many fingers are there on a hand? Third question. The killings and the disappearance took place over three consecutive weeks on Friday, Wednesday and Monday respectively. How many days are there between each of them?’

It was quiet for a moment.

‘Five,’ said Waaler.

‘And the time?’

Aune cleared his throat: ‘Around five o’clock.’

‘Fifth and last question. The addresses of the victims appear to have been chosen at random, but the crime scenes have got one thing in common. Beate?’

She pulled a face. ‘Five?’

All four of them stared vacantly at Harry.

‘Oh, bloody…’ Beate exclaimed, stopping in her tracks and blushing. ‘Sorry, I meant… on the fifth floor. All the victims died on the fifth floor.’

‘Exactly.’

Realisation began to dawn on the others’ faces as Harry went to the door.

‘Five.’

Moller spat it out as if it were a revolting word he had just eaten.

It was pitch black when Harry switched off the light. They could only hear his voice as he moved around.

‘Five is a familiar number in a variety of rituals. In black magic. Witchcraft. And in devil worship. Also in Christianity. Five is the number of wounds Christ had on the cross. And there are the five pillars and the five calls to prayer in Islam. In several writings five is referred to as the human number, as we have five senses and go through five stages of life.’

There was a click and all of a sudden a pale illuminated face with black sunken eye sockets and a star on the forehead materialised in front of them in the darkness. A low buzz of whispers ensued.

‘Sorry…’

Harry twisted the projector round so that the square of light shifted from his face and onto the white wall.

‘This is, as you can see, a pentagram or devil’s star, the same as we found carved and drawn near the bodies of Camilla Loen and Barbara Svendsen. Based on the golden section, as it’s known. How’s that worked out again, Stale?’

‘I really haven’t a clue,’ the psychologist sniffed. ‘I loathe exact sciences.’

‘OK,’ Harry said. ‘I made a simple version with a protractor. It’s good enough for our purposes.’

‘Our purposes?’ Moller asked.

‘So far I’ve shown you some numerical coincidences that could well have been chance. This is the proof that they aren’t.’

‘The three killings took place on the edge of a circle with its centre in the heart of Oslo,’ Harry said. ‘In addition, they are separated by an interval of exactly seventy-two degrees. As you can see here, the crime scenes are located…’

‘… on the tips of three points of the star,’ Beate whispered.

‘My God,’ Moller said in amazement. ‘Do you mean that he… that he hasgivenus…’

‘He’s given us a Pole Star,’ Harry said. ‘It’s his code… to tell us about the five murders. Three have already been carried out and there are still two to come. Which, according to the star, should occur here and here.’

Harry pointed to the rings he had drawn on the map around two of the points.

‘And we know when,’ Tom Waaler said.

Harry nodded.

‘My God,’ Moller said. ‘With five days between each murder, that’ll be…’

‘Saturday,’ Beate said,

‘Tomorrow,’ Aune said.

‘My God,’ Moller said for the third time. The invocation sounded heartfelt.

Harry continued talking, interrupted by the excited voices of the others, as the sun arced high across the pale, scorched summer sky above the small white sails of boats making drowsy, half-hearted attempts to find their way back to land. In Bjorvika at the raised intersection known popularly as the Traffic Machine, a carrier bag floated on the warm air currents above the roads, which wound in and out of one another like entangled vipers in a nest. On the seaward side of a storage shed on the future building site of the opera house, a man was working hard to find a vein under an already inflamed sore; he was scowling around him like an emaciated leopard over its prey, conscious that he would have to hurry before the hyenas appeared.

‘Wait a moment,’ Tom Waaler said. ‘How could the killer know that Lisbeth Barli lived on the fifth floor if he was waiting down on the street?’

‘He wasn’t waiting around on the street,’ Beate said. ‘He was in the stairwell. We checked out what Barli said about the door not closing properly, and it’s true. He kept an eye on the lift to see if anyone was coming down from the fifth floor and hid in the passage down to the basement if anyone turned up.’

‘Good, Beate,’ Harry said. ‘And then?’

‘He followed her out onto the street and… no, that’s too risky. He stopped her as she got out of the lift. And used chloroform.’

‘No,’ Waaler said firmly. ‘Too risky. Then he would have had to carry her out to a car parked outside and if anyone had seen them, they would have certainly taken note of the car and perhaps the number.’

‘No chloroform,’ Moller said. ‘And the car was parked some distance away. He threatened her with a gun and made her walk in front of him while he followed with the gun hidden in his pocket.’

‘Whatever happened, the victims are chosen at random,’ Harry said. ‘The key is the place the murder is committed. If Wilhelm Barli had taken the lift down from the fifth floor instead of his wife, he would have been the victim.’

‘If it is as you say, it might also explain why the women were not sexually abused,’ Aune said. ‘If the murderer…’

‘The killer.’

‘… the killer did not choose the victims, it means that the fact that they are all women is coincidence. In this case, the victims are not specifically sexual objects. It is the action itself which gives him his satisfaction.’

‘What about the Ladies?’ Beate said. ‘That wasn’t random. Wouldn’t it have been more natural for a man to go to the Gents if the sex of the victim is of no consequence? Then he wouldn’t have risked attracting attention on his way in or out.’

‘Maybe,’ Harry said. ‘But if he’d prepared as thoroughly as it appears he did, he would have known that there are a lot more men than women in a solicitor’s office. Do you see?’

Beate blinked hard with both eyes.

‘Good thinking, Harry,’ Waaler said. ‘In the Ladies there was much less chance of him being disturbed during the ritual.’

It was 2.08 and it was Moller who finally brought the proceedings to an end.

‘OK, folks, that’s enough about the dead. Shall we concentrate on the living?’

The sun had started on the second half of its parabola, and the shadows were edging out into a deserted schoolyard in Toyen where all that could be heard was the monotonous smack of a football being kicked against a wall. In Harry’s hermetically sealed office the air had become a thick broth of evaporated human fluids. The point of the star to the right of Carl Berners plass lay above a property just by Ensjoveien in Kampen. Harry had explained that the building under the tip of the point had been built in 1912 as what was known then as a ‘tuberculosis home’, but had since been converted into a student building. At first, for home economics students, then for student nurses and finally for students in general.

The final tip of the pentagram pointed to a grid of black parallel lines.

‘Railway lines from Oslo Station?’ Moller asked. ‘Nobody lives there, do they?’

‘Careful,’ Harry said, pointing to a small square that had been shaded in.

‘That must be a storage shed. It’s -’

‘No. The map’s right,’ Waaler said. ‘There is in fact a house there. Haven’t you noticed it when you come in by train? That strange detached brick-built house standing completely on its own. There’s a garden and so on…’

‘You mean Villa Valle,’ Aune said. ‘The station master’s house. It’s very well known. I suppose they’re offices now.’

Harry shook his head and informed them that the National Registry Office had a record of one person living there, an elderly lady, Olaug Sivertsen.

‘There’s no fifth floor in the student building or in the station master’s house,’ Harry said.

‘Will that stop him?’ Waaler asked, turning to Aune.

Aune shrugged his shoulders.

‘I don’t believe so. But now we’re talking about predicting features of individual behaviour and here your guess is as good as mine.’

‘OK,’ Waaler said. ‘We can take it that he’s going to strike in the student building tomorrow, and our best chance is to organise a carefully planned operation. Are we agreed?’

Everyone round the table nodded.

‘Good,’ Waaler said. ‘I’ll get in touch with Sivert Falkeid of Special Forces and start working on the detail right away.’

Harry could see the spark of flint in Tom Waaler’s eyes. He understood him. Action. The arrest. The felling of the prey. The tenderloin of police work.

‘I’ll go with Beate to Schweigaards gate to see if we can meet up with Sivertsen,’ Harry said.

‘Be careful,’ Moller shouted to drown the sound of scraping chairs. ‘There mustn’t be any leaks. Remember what Aune said about these Special Forces guys sniffing around close to the investigation.’

The sun was sinking. The temperature was rising.