The Devil's star

29

Saturday. Drowning.

Harry put his mobile phone back in his jacket pocket and leaned back against the sofa. Forensics would probably be hacked off, but there weren’t exactly many leads here to destroy. It was obvious that the killer had done a thorough job of clearing up after himself this time as well. Harry had even detected the faint aroma of soft soap when he put his face to the floor to examine some black lumps of what seemed at first sight to be rubber burned onto the lino.

A face appeared in the doorway.

‘Bjorn Holm, Forensics.’

‘Good,’ Harry said. ‘Have you got a smoke?’

He stood up and walked to the window as Holm and his colleague got down to work. The angular evening light gilded the house fronts, the streets and the trees across Kampen and into Toyen. Harry didn’t know of a more beautiful town than Oslo on evenings like this. There had to be others, but he didn’t know any.

‘I’d like you to find out what these black lumps are.’

Harry pointed to the floor.

‘Fine,’ Holm said.

Harry was dizzy. He had chain-smoked eight cigarettes. It had kept his thirst in check. In check, but not gone completely. He stared at the thumb. Presumably it had been severed with pincers. Paint and glue. A chisel and a hammer to carve the pentagram over the door. He had brought quite a bit of equipment with him this time.

He understood the pentagram. And the finger. But why the glue?

‘Looks like melted rubber,’ Holm said. He squatted on the floor.

‘How do you melt rubber?’ Harry asked.

‘You can set fire to it. Or use an electric iron. Or a heat gun.’

Holm shrugged his shoulders.

‘What do you use melted rubber for?’

‘Vulcanisation,’ his colleague said. ‘You use it for repairing things or making them watertight. Car tyres, for example. Or sealing something that has to be airtight. That kind of thing.’

‘And that?’

‘No idea. Sorry.’

‘Thank you.’

The thumb was pointing to the ceiling. If only it could point to the solution to the code, Harry thought. Obviously it was a code. The killer had attached a ring to their noses and he was leading them like dumb animals wherever he wanted, and so this code had a solution too. Quite a simple solution if it was intended for moderately intelligent idiots like himself.

He stared at the finger. Pointing upwards. OK. Roger. Message understood.

The evening light continued to stream in.

He sucked hard on his cigarette. The nicotine travelled through his veins, through the narrow capillaries from his lungs and northwards. Poisoned, health-damaged, manipulated but primed. Shit!

Harry was racked with a bout of violent coughing.

He pointed to the ceiling. Of room 406. The ceiling on the fourth floor. Of course. Idiot. Idiot.

Harry turned the key, opened the door and found the light switch along the wall. He stepped inside. The loft was high and airy without any windows. Numbered storage rooms, two metres square, abutted against each other and lined the walls. Property was piled up behind the chicken wire in transit from the owner to the rubbish skip: mattresses with holes in, unfashionable furniture, cardboard boxes of clothes, electrical goods that still work and so cannot be thrown out yet.

‘Hellfire,’ mumbled Falkeid as he and two of the men from Special Forces came in.

Harry thought it a very accurate image. The sun outside may have been low in the sky and losing power over to the west, but it had spent all day charging the roof tiles, which now radiated with the force of storage heaters and turned the loft into a veritable sauna.

‘Looks like the storage room for 406 is this way,’ Harry said, heading to the right.

‘Why are you so sure that he’ll be in the loft?’

‘Well, because the killer has himself pointed out the obvious fact that the fifth floor is above the fourth. In this case, the loft.’

‘Pointed out?’

‘A kind of rebus.’

‘Are you aware that it’s absolutely impossible for there to be a body up here?’

‘Why’s that?’

‘We came up here yesterday with a dog. A body lying here in this heat for four weeks… Transfer a dog’s olfactory organs to our own sense of hearing and it would have been like searching for a wailing siren inside here. It would have been impossible for a dog not to find it, even a less competent dog. And the one we had yesterday was first rate.’

‘Even if the body is wrapped in something that prevents the smell escaping?’

‘Molecules of air move quickly and can penetrate even microscopic openings. It is not possible for -’

‘Vulcanisation,’ Harry said.

‘Eh?’

Harry stopped in front of one of the storage areas. Instantly the two uniformed men were on the spot with their crowbars.

‘Let’s try it this way first, boys.’

Harry dangled the bunch of keys with the skull on in front of them.

The smallest key fitted the padlock.

‘I’ll go in alone,’ Harry said. ‘The forensics people don’t like the place being trampled under foot.’

He borrowed a torch and stood in front of a tall, broad white wardrobe with double doors which took up most of the room in the storage area. He laid his fingers on the handle and steeled himself before jerking open the door. The smell of musty clothes, dust and wood met his nostrils. He switched on the torch. There were three generations of blue suits hanging in a row on the bar which Marius must have inherited. Harry shone the torch inside and ran his hand across the material. Coarse wool. One of them had a thin plastic cover over it. Inside was a grey protective bag for a suit.

Harry shut the wardrobe doors and turned towards the back wall of the storage space where there was a pair of curtains – home-made by the look of them – hanging over a clothes horse. Harry heaved them off. A set of small sharp predator teeth snarled silently at him. What was left of its coat was grey and the brown marble-like eyes needed a polish.

‘A marten,’ Falkeid said.

‘Mm.’

Harry cast his eyes around. There weren’t many places left to look. Had he really been mistaken?

Then he spotted the roll of carpet. It was Persian – at least, that was what he thought – and was lodged against the chicken wire and reached halfway up to the roof. Harry pushed a wicker chair up against the carpet, climbed onto it and shone the torch down into the carpet. The policemen standing outside stared at him with tense expressions on their faces.

‘Right,’ Harry said, getting down from the chair and switching off the torch.

‘Well?’ Falkeid said.

Harry shook his head. A sudden fury possessed him and he kicked the side of the wardrobe so that it began to stand and sway like a belly dancer. The dogs barked. A drink, one drink, a moment without torment. He turned to leave the room when he heard a scraping noise. As if something was sliding down a wall. He turned instantaneously and just saw the wardrobe door shoot open before the suit bag leapt onto him and knocked him to the ground.

Harry knew he must have been out for a second because when he opened his eyes again he was lying on his back and could feel a dull ache at the back of his head. He breathed in a cloud of dust that had risen from the dry wooden floor. The weight of the suit bag had knocked the air out of him and he felt as if he were drowning, lying underneath a big plastic bag filled with water. He hit out in panic and felt his fist strike the smooth surface and, inside, something soft that gave way.

Harry went rigid and remained totally still. Slowly he managed to focus his eyes; just as slowly the feeling that he was drowning began to wear off. And was replaced by the feeling that he had drowned.

Glazed eyes stared back at him from behind a grey plastic membrane.

They had found Marius Veland.