Devil's Star by Nesbo Jo

Author:Nesbo, Jo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

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 notice-boards 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 Møller, Tom Waaler, Beate Lønn and Ståle 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.

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