Harry Hole is pushed to his limits when the woman who saved his life is put in grave danger, and he has no choice but to return to Oslo, the city that haunts him, and hunt for a murderer. When the killer took his first victim, he left an unusual signature, giving police reason to suspect he will strike again. They are facing a killer unlike any other, and as the evidence mounts, it becomes clear that there is more to this case than meets the eye ... And for Harry, this just got personal.
‘Oslo,’ the man said, raising the glass of whiskey to his lips.
‘That’s the place you love the most?’ Lucille asked.
He stared ahead, seeming to think about his answer before he nodded. She studied him while he drank. He was tall; even sitting down on the bar stool next to her he towered above her. He had to be at least ten, maybe twenty years younger than her seventy-two; it was hard to tell with alcoholics. His face and body seemed carved from wood, lean, pure and rigid. His skin was pale, a fine mesh of blue veins visible on his nose, which together with bloodshot eyes, the irises the colour of faded denim, suggested he had lived hard. Drunk hard. Fallen hard. And loved hard too, perhaps, for during the month he had become a regular at Creatures she had glimpsed a hurt in his eyes. Like that of a beaten dog, kicked out of the pack, always on his own at the end of the bar. Next to Bronco, the mechanical bull that Ben, the bar owner, had taken from the set of the giant turkey Urban Cowboy, where he had worked as a propman. It served as a reminder that Los Angeles wasn’t a city built on movie successes but on a garbage heap of human and financial failure. Over eighty per cent of all the films made bombed completely and lost money; the city had the highest homeless population in the USA, living at a density comparable to Mumbai. Traffic congestion was in the process of choking the life out of the city, though street crime, drugs and violence might get there first. But the sun was shining. Yes, that damn Californian dentist’s lamp never switched off, but shone relentlessly, making all the baubles in this phoney town glitter like real diamonds, like true stories of success. If only they knew. Like she, Lucille, knew, because she had been there, on the stage. And backstage.
The man sitting next to her had definitely not been on the stage; she recognised people in the industry immediately. But neither did he look like someone who had stared in admiration, hope or envy up at the stage. He looked more like someone who couldn’t care less. Someone with their own thing going on. A musician, perhaps? One of those Frank Zappa types, producing his own impenetrable stuff in a basement up here in Laurel Canyon, who had never been – and would never be – discovered?
After he had been in a few times, Lucille and the new guy had begun to exchange nods and brief words of greeting, the way morning guests at a bar for serious drinkers do, but this was the first time she had sat down next to him and bought him a drink. Or rather, she had paid for the drink he had already ordered when she saw Ben hand him back his credit card with an expression that told her it was maxed out.
‘But does Oslo love you back?’ she asked. ‘That’s the question.’
‘Hardly,’ he said. She noticed his middle finger was a metal prosthetic as he ran a hand through a brush of short, dirty-blond hair, tinged with grey. He was not a handsome man, and the liver-coloured scar in the shape of a J running from the corner of his mouth to his ear – as though he were a fish caught on a hook – didn’t help matters. But he had something, something almost appealing and slightly dangerous about him, like some of her colleagues here in town. Christopher Walken. Nick Nolte. And he was broad-shouldered. Although that might have been down to the rest of him being so lean.
‘Uh-huh, well, they’re the ones we want the most,’ Lucille said. ‘The ones who don’t love us back. The ones we think will love us if we just try that little bit more.’
‘So, what do you do?’ the man asked.
‘Drink,’ she said, raising her own whiskey. ‘And feed cats.’
‘Hm.’
‘What you really want to know, I guess, is who I am. Well, I’m . . .’ She drank from her glass while considering which version to give him. The one for parties or the truth. She put down her drink and decided on the latter. Screw it.
‘An actor who played one big role. Juliet, in what remains the best film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, but which nobody remembers any more. One big part doesn’t sound like much, but it’s more than most actors in this town get. I’ve been married three times, twice to well-off film-makers who I left with favourable divorce settlements, also more than most actors get. The third was the only one I loved. An actor, and an Adonis, lacking in money, discipline and conscience. He used up every penny I had then left me. I still love him, may he rot in hell.’
She finished the contents of her glass, put it on the bar and signalled to Ben for one more. ‘And, because I always fall for what I can’t get, I’ve invested money I don’t have in a movie project with an enticingly big part for an older lady. A project with an intelligent script, actors who can actually act, and a director who’ll give people food for thought, in short, a project that any rational individual would realise is doomed to failure. So that’s me, a daydreamer, a loser, a typical Angelino.’
“After all, people are inclined to believe that what is happening is a result of what’s gone before, and not the other way around.”
The man with the J-shaped scar smiled.
‘OK, I’m all out of self-deprecation here,’ she said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Harry.’
‘You don’t talk much, Harry.’
‘Hm.’
‘Swedish?’
‘Norwegian.’
‘You running from something?’
‘That what it looks like?’
‘Yeah. I see you’re wearing a wedding ring. You running from your wife?’
‘She’s dead.’
‘Ah. You’re running from grief.’ Lucille raised her glass in a toast. ‘You wanna know the place I love the most? Right here, Laurel Canyon. Not now, but at the end of the sixties. You should’ve been here, Harry. If you were even born then.’
‘Yeah, so I’ve heard.’
She pointed towards the framed photos on the wall behind Ben.
‘All the musicians hung out here. Crosby, Stills, Nash and . . . what was the name of that last guy?’
Harry smiled again.
‘The Mamas and the Papas,’ she continued. ‘Carole King. James Taylor. Joni Mitchell.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Looked and sounded like a Sunday-school girl, but she laid some of the aforementioned. Even got her claws into Leonard – he shacked up with her for a month or so. I was allowed to borrow him for one night.’
‘Leonard Cohen?’
‘The one and only. Lovely, sweet man. He taught me a little something about writing rhyming verse. Most people make the mistake of opening with their one good line, and then write some half-decent forced rhyme on the next one. The trick is to put the forced rhyme in the first sentence, then no one will notice it. Just take a look at the banal first line of “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” and compare it with the beauty of the second line. There’s a natural elegance to both sentences. We hear it that way, because we think the writer is thinking in the same sequence as he writes. Little wonder really; after all, people are inclined to believe that what is happening is a result of what’s gone before, and not the other way around.’
‘Hm. So what happens is a result of what will happen?’
‘Exactly, Harry! You get that, right?’
‘I don’t know. Can you give me an example?’
‘Sure.’ She downed her drink. He must have heard something in her tone because she saw him raise an eyebrow and quickly scan the bar.
‘What’s happening, at present, is that I’m telling you about how I owe money on a movie in development,’ she said, looking through the dirty window with the half-closed blinds at the dusty parking lot outside. ‘That’s no coincidence, rather a consequence of what will happen. There’s a white Camaro parked next to my car outside here.’
‘With two men inside,’ he said. ‘It’s been there for twenty minutes.’
She nodded. Harry had just confirmed that she was not mistaken in what she guessed to be his line of work.
‘I noticed that car outside my place up in the Canyon this morning,’ she said. ‘No big surprise, they’ve already given me a warning and told me they’d send collectors. And not the certified type. This loan wasn’t taken out at a bank, if you follow me. Now, when I walk out to my car these gentlemen are probably going to want to have words with me. I’m guessing they’ll still make do with that, warnings and threats, that is.’
‘Hm. And why tell me this?’
‘Because you’re a cop.’
Once more he raised an eyebrow. ‘Am I?’
‘My father was a cop and, clearly, you guys are recognisable the world over. The point is I want you to keep an eye out from here. If they get vocal and turn threatening, I’d like you to come out onto the porch and . . . you know, look like a cop, so they beat it. Listen, I’m pretty sure it’s not going to come to that, but I’d feel safer if you kept an eye out.’
Harry studied her for a moment. ‘OK,’ he simply said.
Lucille was surprised. Hadn’t he allowed himself to be persuaded a little too easily? At the same time there was something unwavering in his eyes that made her trust him. On the other hand, she had trusted the Adonis. And the director. And the producer.
‘I’m leaving now,’ she said.
“There was an old Beretta handgun underneath the mattress in his room back at the boarding house. He had bought it for twenty-five dollars from a homeless guy living in one of the blue tents down on Skid Row. There were three bullets in it.”
Harry Hole held the glass in his hand. Listened to the almost inaudible hiss of ice cubes melting. Didn’t drink. He was broke, at the end of the line, and was going to drag this drink out and enjoy it. His gaze settled on one of the pictures behind the bar. It was a photograph of one of the favourite authors of his youth, Charles Bukowski, outside Creatures. Ben had told him it was from the seventies. Bukowski was standing with his arm around a buddy, at what looked like dawn; both were wearing Hawaiian shirts, their eyes swimming, pinpricks for pupils, and grinning triumphantly, as though they had just reached the North Pole after a gruelling journey.
Harry lowered his eyes to look at the credit card which Ben had tossed on the bar in front of him.
Maxed out. Emptied. Nothing left. Mission accomplished. Which had been this, to drink until there was indeed nothing left. No money, no days, no future. All that remained was to see if he had the courage – or the cowardice – to round it all off. There was an old Beretta handgun underneath the mattress in his room back at the boarding house. He had bought it for twenty-five dollars from a homeless guy living in one of the blue tents down on Skid Row. There were three bullets in it. He laid the credit card in the flat of his hand and curled his fingers around it. Turned to look out the window. Watched the old lady as she strutted out to the parking lot. She was so small. Slight, delicate and strong as a sparrow. Beige trousers and a short matching jacket. There was something 1980s about her archaic, but tasteful, clothing style. Walking the same way as how she swept into the bar every morning. Making an entrance. For an audience of between two and eight people.
‘Lucille is here!’ Ben would proclaim before, unbidden, he began mixing her usual poison, whiskey sour.
But it wasn’t the way she took a room that reminded Harry of his mother, who had died at the Radium Hospital when he was fifteen, putting the first bullet hole through his heart. It was the gentle, smiling, yet sad look in Lucille’s eyes, like that of a kind, but resigned soul. The concern she displayed for others when she asked for the latest news about their health problems, love lives, and their nearest and dearest. And the consideration she showed by letting Harry sit in peace at the far end of the bar. His mother, that taciturn woman who was the family’s control tower, its nerve centre, who pulled the strings so discreetly one could easily believe it was his father who called the shots. His mother, who had always offered a safe embrace, had always understood, whom he had loved above all else and who therefore had become his Achilles heel. Like that time in second grade when there had been a gentle knock on the classroom door and his mother was standing there with the lunch box he had left at home. Harry had brightened up automatically at the sight of her, before hearing some of his classmates laugh, whereupon he had marched out to her in the hall and, in a fury, had told her she was embarrassing him, she had to leave, he didn’t need food. She had merely smiled sadly, given him the lunch box, stroked his cheek and left. He didn’t mention it later. Of course, she had understood, the way she always did. And when he went to bed that night, he also understood. She was not the reason he had felt uncomfortable. It was the fact they had all seen it. His love. His vulnerability. He had thought about apologising several times over the following years, but that would probably just have felt stupid.
A cloud of dust rose up on the gravelled area outside, enveloping for a moment Lucille, who was holding her sunglasses in place. He saw the passenger door of the white Camaro open, and a man in sunglasses and a red polo shirt emerge. He walked to the front of the car, blocking Lucille’s path to her own.
He expected to observe a conversation between the two. But instead the man took a step forward and grabbed hold of Lucille’s arm. Began pulling her towards the Camaro. Harry saw the heels of her shoes dig into the gravel. And now he also saw that the Camaro didn’t have American number plates. In that instant he was off the bar stool. Running towards the door, he burst it open with his elbow, was blinded by sunlight and almost stumbled on the two steps down from the porch. Realised he was far from sober. Then zeroed in on the two cars. His eyes gradually adjusting to the light. Beyond the parking lot, on the other side of the road winding its way up the green hillside, lay a sleepy general store, but he couldn’t see any other people apart from the man and Lucille, who was being dragged towards the Camaro.
‘Police!’ he shouted. ‘Let her go!’
‘Please stay out of this, sir,’ the man called back.
Harry surmised the man must have a similar background to his own, only policemen employed polite language in this type of situation. Harry also knew that a physical intervention was unavoidable, and that the first rule in close combat was simple: don’t wait, he who attacks first and with maximum aggression wins. So he didn’t slow down, and the other man must have realised Harry’s intention, because he let go of Lucille and reached for something he had behind him. His hand swung back around. In it he held a shiny handgun Harry recognised instantly. A Glock 17. Now pointed directly at him.
Harry slowed down but continued moving forwards. Saw the other man’s eye aiming from behind the gun. His voice was half drowned out by a passing pickup on the road.
‘Run back to where you came from, sir. Now!’
But Harry carried on walking towards him. Became aware he was still holding the credit card in his right hand. Was this how it ended? In a dusty parking lot in a foreign country, bathed in sunlight, broke and half drunk, while trying to do what he hadn’t been able to do for his mother, hadn’t been able to do for any of those he had ever cared about?
He almost closed his eyes and squeezed his fingers around the credit card, so his hand formed a chisel.
The title of the Leonard Cohen song swirled through his mind: ‘Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye.’
Fuck that, the hell it wasn’t.
Extracted from Killing Moon by Jo Nesbo, out now.
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