The Devil's Star Read online

  ‘How much do you propose to pay me for the lessons?’

  The woman in rags threw back her head and put her hands on her hips.

  ‘Oh, I know what’s right. A lady friend of mine gets French lessons for eighteen pence an hour from a real French gentleman. Well, you wouldn’t have the face to ask me the same for teaching me my own language as you would for French; so I won’t give more than a shilling. Take it or leave it.’

  Wilhelm Barli sat in the twelfth row and let his tears flow freely. He could feel them running down his neck and in under his silk Thai shirt, over his chest; he felt the salt make his nipples smart before the tears continued down over his stomach.

  They would not stop.

  He held a hand in front of his mouth so that his sobs would not distract the actors or the stage director in the fifth row.

  He gave a start when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned round and saw a tall man towering over him. A premonition rooted him to his chair.

  ‘Yes?’ he whispered in a strangulated voice.

  ‘It’s me,’ the man whispered. ‘Harry Hole. Police.’

  Wilhelm Barli took his hand away from his mouth and studied Harry’s face in detail.

  ‘Of course it is,’ he said with relief in his voice. ‘Sorry, Inspector. It’s so dark. I thought . . .’

  The policeman sat down in the seat beside Wilhelm.

  ‘You thought what?’

  ‘You’re dressed in black.’

  Wilhelm blew his nose in a handkerchief.

  ‘I thought you were a priest. A priest coming . . . with bad news. Stupid, isn’t it?’

  The policeman didn’t answer.

  ‘You caught me at a rather emotional moment, Inspector. We have the first dress rehearsal today. Look at her.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Eliza Doolittle. Up there. When I saw her on the stage, I thought for a moment it was Lisbeth and that

  I had only been dreaming she was gone.’

  Wilhelm was taking deep breaths and trembling.

  ‘But then she began to speak, and my Lisbeth disappeared.’

  Wilhelm discovered that the policeman was staring at the stage in amazement.

  ‘A striking resemblance, isn’t it? That’s why I brought her in. It was supposed to be Lisbeth’s musical.’

  ‘Is it . . . ?’ Harry started to say.

  ‘Yes, that’s her sister.’

  ‘Toya? I mean Toy-A.’

  ‘We’ve managed to keep it secret so far. The press conference is later today.’

  ‘Right. That ought to create a bit of publicity.’

  Toya swung herself round and cursed loudly when she stumbled. Her partner raised his arms in desperation and his eyes sought the director.

  Wilhelm sighed.

  ‘Publicity isn’t everything. As you can see, there is quite a lot of work to do. She has a sort of raw talent, but appearing on the stage of the National Theatre is rather different to singing cowboy songs at the community centre in a small town in central Norway. It took me two years to teach Lisbeth how to behave on stage, but with her up there we’ll have to do it in two weeks.’

  ‘If I’m disturbing you, I can run through this very quickly, herr Barli.’

  ‘Run through it quickly?’

  Wilhelm tried to read the expression on Harry’s face in the dark. Fear had him in its grip again, and when Harry opened his mouth, instinct took over and Wilhelm interrupted.

  ‘You’re not disturbing at all, Inspector. I’m just the producer. You know, someone who gets things moving. The others take over now.’

  He waved his hand towards the stage where the man dressed in tweeds was loudly proclaiming at that moment:

  ‘I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe!’

  ‘Director, stage designer, actors,’ Barli said. ‘As from tomorrow I’ll be a mere onlooker watching this . . .’ He continued to wave his hand in the air until he found the word. ‘. . . comedy.’

  ‘Well, we all have to discover our own talents.’

  Wilhelm gave a hollow laugh, but stopped when he saw the silhouette of the director’s head turn suddenly towards them. He leaned over to the policeman and whispered: ‘You’re right. I was a dancer for 20 years. A very bad dancer if you have to know, but there’s always a desperate shortage of male dancers in opera so they take almost anyone who can half dance. Anyway, we’re pensioned off when we reach 40 and then I had to find something new. It was then that I realised that my real talent lay in getting others to dance. Stage management, Inspector. That’s the only thing I can do. But do you know what? We become pathetic at the merest hint of success. Because things happen to go our way on a couple of productions we believe we are gods who can control all the variables and that we are the architects of our fortunes in all areas. And then something like this happens, and we discover how helpless we are. I . . .’

  Wilhelm suddenly broke off.

  ‘I’m boring you, aren’t I?’

  The other man shook his head and cleared his throat.

  ‘It’s about your wife.’

  Wilhelm screwed up his eyes as if waiting to hear an unpleasant, loud noise.

  ‘We received a package. Containing a severed finger. I’m afraid it belonged to her.’

  Wilhelm swallowed hard. He had always seen himself as a man of love, but now he could feel it growing again. The lump under his heart that had been there ever since that day. The tumour that was driving him to the edge of insanity. He sensed that it had a colour, he sensed that hatred was yellow.

  ‘Do you know what, Inspector? It’s almost a relief. I’ve known it all the time. That he would harm her.’

  ‘Harm?’

  Wilhelm detected a note of anxious surprise in the other man’s voice.

  ‘Can you promise me something, Harry? Is it OK if I call you Harry?’

  The policeman nodded.

  ‘Find him. Find him, Harry. And punish him. Punish him severely. Will you promise me?’

  Wilhelm thought he saw the other man nod, but he wasn’t sure. His tears distorted everything.

  Then the man was gone. Wilhelm took a deep breath and tried to concentrate on the stage again.

  ‘No! I’ll call the police, I will,’ Toya shouted.

  Harry sat in his office staring at the desk top. He was so tired he didn’t know if he was capable of doing any more.

  The escapades of the previous day – his time in the cell and another night of nightmares – they had taken their toll. It was the meeting with Wilhelm Barli, however, that had really drained him. Sitting there and promising that they would catch the perpetrator, holding back when Barli said that his wife was ‘harmed’. For if there was one thing Harry was certain about, it was that Lisbeth Barli was dead.

  Harry had felt the gnawing ache for alcohol from the moment he woke up that morning. First as an instinctive physical craving, then as a panic-stricken fear because he had put a distance between himself and his medicine by not taking his hip flask or any money with him to work. Now the ache was entering a new phase in which it was both a wholly physical pain and a feeling of blank terror that he would be torn to pieces. The enemy below was pulling and tugging at the chains, the dogs were snarling up at him from the pit, somewhere in his stomach beneath his heart. God, how he hated them. He hated them as much as they hated him.

  Harry got to his feet. He had stashed away half a bottle of Bell’s in the filing cabinet on Monday. Had that just occurred to him now or had he been aware of it the whole time? Harry was used to Harry playing tricks on Harry in hundreds of ways. He was just about to pull out the drawer when suddenly he looked up. He had spotted a movement. Ellen was smiling at him from her photo. Was he going mad or had her mouth just moved?

  ‘What are you looking at, you bitch?’ he mumbled, and the very next moment the picture fell from the wall, hitting the floor and smashing the glass to smithereens. Harry stared at Ellen who was smiling imperturbably up at him from the broken fr
ame. He held his right hand where the pain was throbbing under the bandages.

  It was only when he turned to open the drawer that he noticed the two of them standing in the doorway. He realised that they must have been standing there for quite a while and that it must have been their reflection in the glass of the picture frame that he had seen moving.

  ‘Hi,’ Oleg said, looking at Harry with a mixture of wonder and fear.

  Harry swallowed. His hand let go of the drawer.

  ‘Hi, Oleg.’

  Oleg was wearing trainers, a pair of blue trousers and the yellow national strip of Brazil. Harry knew that on the back of his shirt there was a number nine with the name of Ronaldo above it. He had bought it at a petrol station one Sunday when Rakel, Oleg and he had been on their way to Norefjell to go skiing.

  ‘I found him downstairs,’ Tom Waaler said.

  He had his hand on Oleg’s head.

  ‘He was asking for you in reception, so I brought him up here. So you play football then, Oleg?’

  Oleg didn’t answer, he just looked at Harry. With those dark eyes of his mother’s that could at times be so unendingly gentle and at others so hard and pitiless. At this moment Harry couldn’t read which they were, but then, it was dark.

  ‘A striker, eh?’ Waaler asked, smiling and ruffling the young boy’s hair.

  Harry stared at his colleague’s strong, sinewy fingers, Oleg’s dark strands of hair against the back of Waaler’s tanned hand, hair that stood up on its own. He could feel his legs giving way under him.

  ‘No,’ Oleg said, with his eyes still firmly fixed on Harry. ‘I play in defence.’

  ‘No,’ Oleg said, with his eyes still firmly fixed on Harry. ‘I play in defence.’

  ‘Hey, Oleg,’ Waaler said, looking over at Harry enquiringly. ‘Harry has still got a bit of shadow-boxing to do in here – I do the same when something gets on my nerves – but perhaps you and I could go up top and see the view from the roof terrace while Harry tidies up.’

  ‘I’m staying here,’ Oleg stated unequivocally.

  Harry nodded.

  ‘OK. Nice to meet you, Oleg.’

  Waaler patted the boy on his shoulder and left. Oleg stood in the doorway.

  ‘How did you get here?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Metro.’

  ‘On your own?’

  Oleg nodded.

  ‘Does Rakel know you’re here?’

  Oleg shook his head.

  ‘Don’t you want to come in?’ Harry’s throat was dry.

  ‘I want you to come home,’ Oleg said.

  Four seconds after Harry pressed the bell, Rakel tore open the door. Her eyes were black with fury.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’

  For an instant Harry thought that the question was directed to them both before her eyes swept past Harry and beamed in on Oleg.

  ‘I didn’t have anyone to play with,’ Oleg said with his head bowed. ‘I took the metro to town.’

  ‘The metro. On your own? But how . . . ?’

  Her voice failed her.

  ‘I slipped out,’ Oleg said. ‘I thought you would be happy, Mummy. After all you said you also wanted . . .’

  She suddenly took Oleg into her arms.

  ‘Do you realise how worried I’ve been about you, my lad?’

  She viewed Harry askance while she hugged Oleg.

  Rakel and Harry stood by the fence at the back of the garden and gazed down over Oslo and Oslo fjord. They were silent. The sailing boats stood out against the blue sea like tiny white triangles. Harry turned to face the house. Summer birds took off from the lawn and flitted between the apple trees in front of the open windows. It was a large house, with black timber cladding – a house constructed for winter, not for summer.

  Harry looked at her. Her legs were bare and she was wearing a thin, red cotton button-up jacket over a light blue dress. The sun glistened on the droplets of sweat on her bare skin under the necklace with the cross that she had inherited from her mother. Harry mused that he knew everything about her: the smell of the cotton jacket, the gentle curve of her back under the dress, the smell of her skin when it was sweaty and salty, what she wanted from her life, why she didn’t say anything.

  All this knowledge to no end.

  ‘How’s it going?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’ve rented a log cabin. We can’t have it until August. I was late getting in.’

  The tone was neutral, the accusation scarcely perceptible.

  ‘Have you injured your hand?’

  ‘Just a cut,’ Harry said.

  A strand of hair blew across her face. He resisted the temptation to brush it away.

  ‘I had someone round to value the house yesterday,’ she said.

  ‘To value it? You’re not thinking of selling it, are you?’

  ‘The house is too big for only two people, Harry.’

  ‘Yes, but you love this house. You grew up here. And so did Oleg.’

  ‘You don’t need to remind me. The thing is that the work over the winter cost twice as much as I had imagined. And now the roof has to be redone. It’s an old house.’

  ‘Mm.’

  Harry watched Oleg kicking a ball against the garage door. He smashed the ball again and as soon as it left his foot he closed his eyes and raised his arms to an imaginary crowd of fans.

  ‘Rakel.’

  She sighed.

  ‘What is it, Harry?’

  ‘Can’t you at least look at me when I’m talking?’

  ‘No.’ Her voice was neither angry nor upset; she was just establishing a fact.

  ‘Would it make any difference if I gave it up?’

  ‘You can’t give it up, Harry.’

  ‘I mean the police.’

  ‘I guessed that.’

  He kicked at the grass.

  ‘I may not have a choice,’ he said.

  ‘Haven’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why the hypothetical question then?’

  She blew away the strand of hair.

  ‘I could find a quieter job, be at home more, take care of Oleg. We could –’

  ‘Stop it, Harry!’

  Her voice was like a whiplash. She bowed her head and crossed her arms as if she were frozen in the burning sun.

  ‘The answer’s no,’ she whispered. ‘It won’t make any difference. It’s not your job that’s the problem. It’s . . .’

  She breathed in, turned round and looked him in the eyes.

  ‘It’s you, Harry. You’re the problem.’

  Harry saw the tears welling up in her eyes.

  ‘Go now,’ she whispered.

  He wanted to say something, but changed his mind. Instead he nodded towards the sailing boats on the fjord.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I am the problem. I’ll have a chat with Oleg and then I’ll be off.’

  He took a few steps, then stopped and turned round.

  ‘Don’t sell the house, Rakel. Don’t do it, do you hear? I’ll come up with something.’

  She smiled through her tears.

  ‘You’re a strange man,’ she whispered and reached out a hand as if she was going to stroke his cheek, but he was too far away and she let it drop again.

  ‘Take care of yourself, Harry.’

  As Harry left, a shiver ran down his spine. It was 5.15. He would have to hurry to get to the meeting.

  I’m in the building. It smells of cellar. I’m standing quite still and studying the names on the noticeboard in front of me. I can hear voices and footsteps on the stairs, but I’m not afraid. They cannot see that, but I am invisible. Did you hear? They cannot see that, but . . . It isn’t a paradox, darling. I just expressed it in that way to sound like one. Everything can be formulated as a paradox. It isn’t difficult. It’s just that true paradoxes don’t exist. True paradoxes, ha, ha. Do you see how easy it is? It’s just words, the lack of precision in language. I have finished with words. With language. I’m looking at my watch.
This is my language. It’s clear and there are no paradoxes. I’m ready.

  14

  Monday. Barbara.

  Barbara Svendsen had begun to think a lot about time of late, not that she was particularly philosophical by nature; most people she knew would have said exactly the opposite. It was just that she had never given it a thought before. She had never considered that there was a time for everything and that this time was being eaten away. She had realised several years ago that she was never going to make it as a model and would have to be satisfied with the title of ex-mannequin. It sounded good even if the word originating from Dutch did mean ‘little man’. Petter had told her that. As he had told her most things he thought she ought to know. He had got her the job in the bar at Head On. And because of the pills she hadn’t felt like going straight from work to Blindern University, where she was studying to become a sociologist.

  However, the time for Petter, pills and dreams of becoming a sociologist was over and one day she found herself alone with debts for unfinished studies and pills to pay off, and a job at the most boring bar in Oslo. So Barbara dropped everything, borrowed money from her parents and went off to Lisbon to get her life back on an even keel and perhaps learn a little Portuguese. Lisbon was a wonderful time. The days passed in a whirl, but this didn’t bother her. Time was simply something that came and went, until the money stopped coming, until Marco was no longer ‘true until eternity’ and the fun was over. She returned home a few experiences older; she had learned, for example, that Ecstasy was cheaper in Portugal than in Norway, but it made a mess of your life in just the same way, that Portuguese was an extremely difficult language and that time was a limited, nonrenewable resource.

  Then she went with, and allowed herself to be kept by, Rolf, Ron and Roland in chronological order. It sounded like more fun than it was, except in Roland’s case. Roland was wonderful, but time passed and Roland with it.

  It was only when she moved back into her old room at her parents’ house that the world stopped spinning and time slowed down. She stopped going out, managed to give up the pills and she began to play with the idea that she might resume her studies. In the meantime, she did temp work for Manpower. After four weeks’ contract work with a firm of solicitors called Halle, Thune & Wetterlid who were geographically situated in Carl Berners plass and hierarchically in the lower reaches of solicitors specialising in debt collection, she was offered a permanent job.