The Devil's Star Read Online Free

outfit.
    Harry held open the gate while she carried in two large metal containers.
    ‘Have you just arrived?’
    He tried not to breathe on her as she passed.
    ‘No. I had to come back down to the car for the rest of my stuff. We’ve been here for half an hour. Hit yourself?’
    Harry ran a finger over the scab on his nose.
    ‘Apparently.’
    He followed her through the next door leading into the stairwell.
    ‘What’s it like up there?’
    Beate put the boxes in front of a green lift door, still looking up at him.
    ‘I thought it was one of your principles to look first and ask questions later,’ she said, pressing the lift button.
    Harry nodded. Beate Lønn belonged to that section of the human race who remembered everything. She could recite details from criminal cases he had long forgotten and from before she began Police College. In addition, she had an unusually well-developed fusiform gyrus – the part of the brain that remembers faces. She had had it tested and the psychologists were amazed. Just his luck that she remembered the little he had managed to teach her when they worked together on the spate of bank robberies that swept Oslo the previous year.
    ‘I like to be as open as possible to my impressions the first time I am at the scene of a crime, yes,’ Harry said and gave a start when the lift sprang into action. He began to go through his pockets looking for cigarettes. ‘But I doubt that I’m going to be working on this particular case.’
    ‘Why not?’
    Harry didn’t answer. He pulled out a crumpled pack of Camels from his left-hand trouser pocket and extracted a crushed cigarette.
    ‘Oh yes, now I remember,’ Beate smiled. ‘You said this spring that you were going to go on holiday. To Normandy, wasn’t it? You lucky thing . . .’
    Harry put the cigarette between his lips. It tasted dreadful. And it would hardly do anything for his headache, either. There was only one thing that helped. He took a look at his watch. Mondays, 4 p.m. to 1 a.m.
    ‘There won’t be any Normandy,’ he said.
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘No, so that’s not the reason. It’s because he’s running this case.’
    Harry took a long drag on his cigarette and nodded upwards.
    She gave him a long, hard look. ‘Watch out that he doesn’t become an obsession. Move on.’
    ‘Move on?’ Harry blew out smoke. ‘He hurts people, Beate. You should know that.’
    She blushed. ‘Tom and I had a brief fling, that’s all, Harry.’
    ‘Wasn’t that the time you were going round with a bruised neck?’
    ‘Harry! Tom never . . .’
    Beate stopped when she realised that she was raising her voice. The echo resounded upwards in the stairwell, but was drowned out by the lift coming to a halt in front of them with a brief dull thud.
    ‘You don’t like him,’ she said. ‘So you imagine things. In fact, Tom has a number of good sides you know nothing about.’
    ‘Mm.’
    Harry stubbed his cigarette out on the wall while Beate pulled open the door to the lift and went in.
    ‘Aren’t you coming up?’ she asked, looking at Harry who was still outside intently staring at something. The lift. There was a sliding gate inside the door, a simple iron grille that you push open and close behind you so that the lift can operate. There was the scream again. The soundless scream. He could feel sweat breaking out all over his body. The nip of whisky had not been enough. Nowhere near enough.
    ‘Something the matter?’ Beate asked.
    ‘Not at all,’ Harry answered in a thick voice. ‘I just don’t like these old-fashioned lifts. I’ll take the stairs.’

4
    Friday. Statistics
    The house did have attic flats, two of them. The door to one stood open, but some orange police tape placed it off-limits. Harry stooped to get his full height of 192 centimetres under the tape and quickly took another step to steady his balance when he emerged on the other side. He was standing in the middle of a room with an oak parquet floor, a slanting ceiling