The Redbreast(148)

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.