her for the information and said he wasn’t
frightened any longer.
Harry breathed in deep and then out as he listened
to the changing sounds of the engine. Why did the
fear of death get worse as you got older? Shouldn’t
it be the other way around? Signe Juul was
seventy-nine years old. Presumably she had been
scared out of her wits. One of the guards at
Akershus Fortress had found her. They had
received a telephone call during their watch from a
sleepless millionaire celebrity at Aker Brygge,
informing them that one of the projectors on the
southern wall had gone out, and the duty officer
had sent one of the young guards out. Harry had
questioned him two hours later, and he had told
Harry that as he approached the projector he had
seen a lifeless woman slumped across it,
obstructing the light. At first he had thought she
was a junkie, but as he moved closer and saw the
grey hair and old-fashioned clothes, he realised
she was an elderly woman. His next thought was
that she had been taken ill, but then he discovered
her hands were tied behind her back. It was only
when he was right up close that he saw the gaping
hole in her coat.
‘I could see that her spine had been smashed,’ he
had told Harry. ‘Shit, I could see her spine.’
Then he had told him how he had propped himself
against the rock-face as he threw up, and it was
only later when the police had come to take away
the body and the light shone on the wall again that
he realised what the sticky stuff on his hand was.
He had shown Harry his hand, as if it were
important.
The Crime Scene Unit had arrived and Weber had
walked across to Harry while studying Signe Juul
through sleepy eyes. He said God wasn’t the
bloody judge, it was the bloke down below.
The only witness was a night-watchman who kept
an eye on the warehouses. He had met a car going
down Akershusstranda on its way east at 2.45, but
because the driver’s lights had been on full beam
he had been dazzled and hadn’t been able to see
the make of the car or the colour.
It felt as if the pilot was accelerating. Harry
imagined they were trying to gain height because
the captain had suddenly seen the Alps right in
front of the cockpit. Then it felt as if the air beneath
the wings of the Tyrolean Air plane had vanished
and Harry felt his stomach shoot up under his ears.
He groaned out loud when the next moment they
bounced up again like a rubber ball. The captain
came on to the intercom and said something in
German and English about turbulence.
Aune had pointed out that if someone didn’t have
the capacity to feel fear, they would not survive a
single day. Harry squeezed the arm of the chair and
tried to find comfort in that thought.
In fact it had been Aune who had supplied the
impetus for Harry taking the first available plane to
Vienna. Once he’d had the facts laid on the table,
he had immediately said that time was of the
utmost importance.
‘If we’re dealing with a serial killer, he’s on the
point of losing control,’ Aune had said. ‘Not like
the classical serial killer who looks for sexual
release, but is then disappointed every time and
increases the frequency of the killings out of sheer
frustration. This murderer clearly isn’t sexually
motivated. He has some sick plan or other which
has to be completed, and up until now he has been
cautious and has behaved rationally. The fact that
the murders are close to each other and that he has
gone to great lengths to emphasise the symbolism
of his actions – as with this execution at Akershus
Fortress – suggests that he either feels invincible
or he’s losing his grip, maybe developing a
psychosis.’
‘Or perhaps he’s still totally in control,’
Halvorsen had said. ‘He hasn’t slipped up yet. We
still don’t have any clues.’
And he was absolutely bloody right, Halvorsen
was. There were no clues.
Mosken had been able to account for his
movements. He had picked up the telephone in
Drammen when Halvorsen rang in the morning to
check, since the surveillance boys hadn’t caught a
sniff of him in Oslo. Of course they couldn’t know
if what he said was true: that he had driven to
Drammen after Bjerke Stadium closed at half past
ten and had arrived at half past eleven. Or if he had
arrived at half past two in the morning and had thus
been in a position to shoot Signe Juul.
Harry, without much hope, had asked Halvorsen
to ring the neigh-bours and ask if they had heard or
seen Mosken arrive. And he had asked Møller to
talk to the Public Prosecutor to see if they could
get a search warrant for both of Mosken’s flats.