The Devil's star

GONE ABROAD. BACK IN FOUR WEEKS, MARIUS

He nodded to Delta One that they could go into action.

Six seconds later the door was open.

Harry told the others to wait outside and he went in alone. Empty. His eyes scanned the room. It was clean and tidy. Too tidy. It did not match the torn poster of Iggy Pop on the wall above the sofa bed. A few tatty paperbacks on the shelf above the cleared desk. Beside the books, five or six keys on a keyring in the shape of a skull. A photo of a suntanned girl smiling. Girlfriend or sister, Harry guessed. Between a book by Bukowski and a ghettoblaster there was a wax thumb painted white and pointing upwards, giving the thumbs up. Everything ready. Everything OK. Was it?

Harry looked at Iggy Pop, the lean, bare body stripped to the waist, the self-inflicted scars, the intense gaze from the deep eye sockets, a man who must have been through a Calvary or two of his own. Harry touched the thumb on the shelf. Too soft to be plaster or plastic, it almost felt like a real finger. Cold, but real. He thought of the dildo he had seen at Barli’s while sniffing the white thumb. It smelled of a mixture of formalin and paint. He held it between two fingers and squeezed. The paint cracked. Harry recoiled as he caught the pungent smell.

‘Beate Lonn.’

‘Harry here. How’s it going with you?’

‘We’re still waiting. Waaler has taken up a position in the hall and chased me and Miss Sivertsen into the kitchen. So much for women’s liberation.’

‘I’m ringing from room 406 in the student block. He’s been here.’

‘Been there?’

‘He carved a devil’s star in the plaster above the door. The boy staying here, a Marius Veland, has gone. The other residents haven’t seen him for several weeks. And there’s a slip of paper hanging on the door saying he’s gone away.’

‘Well, perhaps he really has gone away.’

Harry noticed that Beate had started to take on his speech mannerisms.

‘Hardly,’ Harry said. ‘His thumb is still in his room. In a sort of embalmed state.’

It went quiet at the other end of the line.

‘I’ve rung your lot at Forensics. They’re on their way now.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ Beate said. ‘Haven’t you had the whole building under surveillance?’

‘Well, yes. But not for the 20 days since this happened.’

‘Twenty days. How do you know that?’

‘Because I found his parents’ telephone number and called them. They’d received a letter saying that he was off to Morocco. His father says that it’s the first time he can remember ever receiving a letter from Marius. Usually he phones. The postmark on the letter is from 20 days ago.’

‘Twenty days…’ Beate murmured.

‘Twenty days. In other words, exactly five days before the murder of Camilla Loen. In other words…’

He could hear Beate taking deep breaths on the phone.

‘… five days before what we thought was the first murder,’ he said.

‘My God.’

‘There’s more. We rounded up the occupants of the house and asked if anyone could remember anything from that day and the girl in 303 says she remembers sunbathing on the grass outside the building that afternoon. On her way back she passed a bike courier. She remembers it because they don’t often have couriers here and she’d joked about it with the others in the corridor when the papers had started writing about the Courier Killer a couple of weeks later.’

‘He’s cheated with the sequence of murders then?’

‘No,’ Harry said. ‘It was me being stupid. Do you remember I was wondering if any of the fingers he cut off were also a kind of code? Well. It was the simplest of all. The thumb. He started with the first digit on the left hand and worked his way round. You don’t need to be a genius to work out that Camilla was number two.’

‘Mm.’

Now she’s doing it again, Harry thought.

‘And now we just need number five,’ Beate said. ‘The little finger.’

‘You know what that means, don’t you?’

‘That it’s our turn. That it’s been our turn all along. My God, is he really planning to… you know?’

‘Is his mother sitting beside you?’

‘Yes. Tell me what he’ll do, Harry.’

‘I have no idea.’

‘I know you have no idea, but tell me anyway.’

Harry hesitated.

‘OK. Many serial killers are driven by self-contempt. And since the fifth killing is the last one, the final one, there is a great likelihood that he’s planning to take the life of his progenitor. Or himself. Or both. It’s got nothing to do with his relationship with his mother, but with himself. Anyway, the choice of the location for the murder is logical.’

Silence.

‘Are you there, Beate?’

‘Yes, indeed. He grew up as the son of a German.’

‘Who?’

‘The person on his way here.’

New silence.

‘Why is Waaler waiting on his own in the hall?’

‘Why are you asking?’

‘Because the usual procedure would be for both of you to arrest him. It’s safer than having you sit in the kitchen.’

‘Maybe,’ Beate said. ‘I don’t have much experience in this kind of fieldwork. He must know what he’s doing.’

‘Yes,’ Harry said.

Some thoughts passed through his mind. Thoughts he was trying to repress.

‘Is there anything wrong, Harry?’

‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘I’ve run out of cigarettes.’