Suddenly the congregation began to sing and an orchestra began to play. He recognised the melody. From television. Wait a minute. He heard something rolling. A ball. It stopped.
‘Five,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘The number is five.’
The code.
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 noticeboards 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 Moller, Tom Waaler, Beate Lonn and Stale 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. Without any prior warning, the ground suddenly gave way. He had a falling sensation and he lost all sense of reality. There weren’t four colleagues sitting in front of him in an office, it wasn’t a murder case, it wasn’t a warm summer’s day in Oslo, no-one called Rakel and Oleg ever existed. He knew that this brief panic attack could be followed by others and he hung on by his fingertips.
Harry lifted his mug of coffee and drank slowly while he collected himself.
He determined that when he heard the sound of the mug being put down on the desk he would be back, here, in this reality.
He put the mug down.
It landed with a soft thud.
‘First question,’ Harry said. ‘The killer has left his mark on all the victims with a diamond. How many sides does it have?’
‘Five,’ Moller said.
‘Second question. He also cut off one finger on the left hand of every victim. How many fingers are there on a hand? Third question. The killings and the disappearance took place over three consecutive weeks on Friday, Wednesday and Monday respectively. How many days are there between each of them?’
It was quiet for a moment.
‘Five,’ said Waaler.
‘And the time?’
Aune cleared his throat: ‘Around five o’clock.’
‘Fifth and last question. The addresses of the victims appear to have been chosen at random, but the crime scenes have got one thing in common. Beate?’
She pulled a face. ‘Five?’
All four of them stared vacantly at Harry.
‘Oh, bloody…’ Beate exclaimed, stopping in her tracks and blushing. ‘Sorry, I meant… on the fifth floor. All the victims died on the fifth floor.’
‘Exactly.’
Realisation began to dawn on the others’ faces as Harry went to the door.
‘Five.’
Moller spat it out as if it were a revolting word he had just eaten.
It was pitch black when Harry switched off the light. They could only hear his voice as he moved around.
‘Five is a familiar number in a variety of rituals. In black magic. Witchcraft. And in devil worship. Also in Christianity. Five is the number of wounds Christ had on the cross. And there are the five pillars and the five calls to prayer in Islam. In several writings five is referred to as the human number, as we have five senses and go through five stages of life.’
There was a click and all of a sudden a pale illuminated face with black sunken eye sockets and a star on the forehead materialised in front of them in the darkness. A low buzz of whispers ensued.
‘Sorry…’
Harry twisted the projector round so that the square of light shifted from his face and onto the white wall.
‘This is, as you can see, a pentagram or devil’s star, the same as we found carved and drawn near the bodies of Camilla Loen and Barbara Svendsen. Based on the golden section, as it’s known. How’s that worked out again, Stale?’
‘I really haven’t a clue,’ the psychologist sniffed. ‘I loathe exact sciences.’
‘OK,’ Harry said. ‘I made a simple version with a protractor. It’s good enough for our purposes.’
‘Our purposes?’ Moller asked.
‘So far I’ve shown you some numerical coincidences that could well have been chance. This is the proof that they aren’t.’
‘The three killings took place on the edge of a circle with its centre in the heart of Oslo,’ Harry said. ‘In addition, they are separated by an interval of exactly seventy-two degrees. As you can see here, the crime scenes are located…’
‘… on the tips of three points of the star,’ Beate whispered.
‘My God,’ Moller said in amazement. ‘Do you mean that he… that he hasgivenus…’
‘He’s given us a Pole Star,’ Harry said. ‘It’s his code… to tell us about the five murders. Three have already
