The Leopard hh-8

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘Don’t get up, boss.’

  ‘It’s your chair. I’ll be going soon.’

  ‘Uh-uh?’

  Harry inferred that it was bad news. Bad news of a certain significance. Bosses don’t hasten down the culvert to Botsen Prison to tell you your travel invoice has been completed incorrectly.

  Hagen remained standing, so Holm was the only person in the room to be seated.

  ‘I’m afraid I have to inform you that Kripos has already discovered that you are working on the murders. And I have no choice but to close the investigation.’

  In the ensuing silence Harry could hear the boiler rumbling in the adjacent room. Hagen ran his eyes over them, meeting each gaze in turn and stopping at Harry. ‘I can’t say this is an honourable discharge, either. I gave you clear instructions that this was to be a discreet operation.’

  ‘Well,’ Harry said, ‘I asked Beate Lonn to leak information about a certain ropery to Kripos, but she promised she would do it in a way that made Krimteknisk appear to be the source.’

  ‘And I’m sure she did,’ Hagen said. ‘It was the County Officer in Ytre Enebakk who gave you away, Harry.’

  Harry rolled his eyes and uttered a low curse.

  Hagen clapped his hands together and a dry bang resounded between the brick walls. ‘So that’s why, sadly, I have to command you to drop all investigative work with immediate effect. And to clear this office within forty-eight hours. Gomen nasai.’

  Harry, Kaja and Bjorn looked at one another as the iron door closed and Hagen’s hurried footsteps faded down the culvert.

  ‘Forty-eight hours,’ Bjorn said at length. ‘Anyone want fresh coffee?’

  Harry kicked the bin beside the desk. It hit the wall with a crash, spilling its modest contents and rolling back towards him.

  ‘I’ll be at Rikshospital,’ he said and strode towards the door.

  Harry had positioned the hard wooden chair by the window and listened to his father’s regular breathing as he flicked through the newspaper. A wedding and a funeral side by side. On the left, pictures of Marit Olsen’s funeral, showing the Norwegian Prime Minister’s serious, compassionate face, party colleagues’ black suits, and the husband, Rasmus Olsen, behind a pair of large, unbecoming sunglasses. On the right, an article announcing that the shipping magnate’s daughter, Lene, would get her Tony in the spring, with photos of the (A-list) wedding guests who would all be flown in to St Tropez. On the back page, it said that the sun would go down today at precisely 16.58 in Oslo. Harry looked at his watch and established that it was in fact doing that now, behind the low clouds that would not release either rain or snow. He watched the lights coming on in all the homes on the side of the ridge around what had once been a volcano. In a way, it was a liberating thought that the volcano would open beneath them one day, swallow them up and remove all traces of what had once been a contented, well-organised and slightly sad town.

  Forty-eight hours. Why? It wouldn’t take them more than two hours to clear their so-called office.

  Harry closed his eyes and considered the case. Wrote a last mental report for his personal archive.

  Two women killed in the same way, drowning in their own blood, with ketanome in the bloodstream. One woman hanged from a diving tower, with a rope taken from an old ropery. One man drowned in his own bathtub. All the victims had probably been in the same cabin at the same time. They didn’t know yet who else had been there, what the motive behind the murders could be or what had gone on in the Havass cabin that day or night. There was just effect, no cause. Case closed.

  ‘Harry…’

  He hadn’t heard his father wake, and he turned.

  Olav Hole looked renewed, but perhaps that was because of the colour in his cheeks and the feverish glow in his eyes. Harry got up and moved his chair over to his father’s bedside.

  ‘Have you been here long?’

  ‘Ten minutes,’ Harry lied.

  ‘I’ve slept so well,’ Olav said. ‘And had such wonderful dreams.’

  ‘I can see. You look like you’re ready to get up and leave.’

  Harry plumped his pillow, and his father let him do it even though they both knew that it wasn’t necessary.

  ‘How’s the house?’

  ‘Fine,’ Harry said. ‘It will stand for ever.’

  ‘Good. There’s something I want to talk to you about, Harry.’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘You’re a grown man now. You’ll lose me in a natural way. That’s how it should be. Not how you lost your mother. You were on the verge of going insane.’

  ‘Was I?’ Harry said, straightening the pillowslip.

  ‘You demolished your room. You wanted to kill the doctors, those that had infected her, and even me. Because I had… well, because I hadn’t discovered it earlier, I suppose. You were so full of love.’

  ‘Of hatred, you mean?’

  ‘No, of love. It’s the same currency. Everything starts with love. Hatred is just the other side of the coin. I’ve always thought that your mother’s death is what drove you to drink. Or rather the love for your mother.’

  ‘Love is a killer,’ Harry mumbled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just something someone once said to me.’

  ‘I did everything your mother asked me to do. Apart from one thing. She asked me to help her when the time came.’

  It felt as if someone had injected ice-cold water into Harry’s chest.

  ‘But I couldn’t. And do you know what, Harry? It has given me nightmares. Not a day has passed when I haven’t thought about not being able to fulfil that wish for her, for the woman I loved above all else on this earth.’

  The thin wooden chair creaked as Harry jumped up. He walked over to the window. He heard his father draw breath a couple of times behind him, deep, trembling. Then it came.

  ‘I know that this is a heavy burden to impose on you, son. But I also know that you’re like me – it will haunt you if you don’t. So let me explain what you do…’

  ‘Dad,’ Harry said.

  ‘Can you see this hypodermic needle?’

  ‘Dad! Stop!’

  Everything went quiet behind him. Except for the rasp of his breathing. Outside, Harry saw the black-and-white film of a town with face-like clouds pressing their blurred, leaden-grey features against the rooftops.

  ‘I want to be buried in Andalsnes,’ his father said.

  Buried. The word sounded like an echo from Easters with Mum and Dad in Lesja when Olav Hole, with great earnestness, explained to Harry and Sis what they should do if they were buried in an avalanche and they had constrictive pericarditis, a hardened sac around the heart that prevented it from expanding. An armoured heart. Around them were flat fields and gently sloping ridges; it was a bit like when air hostesses on domestic flights over Inner Mongolia explain how to use life jackets. Absurd, but nevertheless: it gave them a feeling of security, the sense that they would all survive if they just did the right things. And now Dad was saying that wasn’t true, after all.

  Harry coughed. ‘Andalsnes… to be with Mum…?’

  Harry fell quiet.

  ‘And I want to lie alongside my fellow villagers.’

  ‘You don’t know them.’

  ‘Well, who do we know? At least they and I are from the same place. Perhaps ultimately that’s what it’s about. The tribe. We want to be with our tribe.’

  ‘Do we?’

  ‘Yes, we do. Whether we are aware of it or not, that’s what we want.’

  The nurse with the badge bearing the name Altman came in, flashed a quick smile at Harry and tapped his watch.

  Harry went downstairs and met two uniformed policemen on their way up. He nodded automatically; it was a convention. They stared at him in silence, as though he were a stranger.

  Usually Harry longed for solitude and all the benefits that came with it: peace, calm, freedom. But standing at the tram stop, suddenly he didn’t know where to go. Or what to do. He jus
t knew that being alone in the house in Oppsal would be unbearable right now.

  He dialled Oystein’s number.

  Oystein was on a long trip to Fagernes, but suggested a beer at Lompa at around midnight to celebrate the relatively satisfactory completion of another day in Oystein Eikeland’s life. Harry reminded Oystein that Harry was an alcoholic, and received the response that even an alcoholic had to go on a bender once in a while, didn’t he.

  Harry wished Oystein a safe journey and rang off. Glanced at his watch. And the question arose again. Forty-eight hours. Why?

  A tram stopped in front of him and the doors banged open. Harry peered into the invitingly warm, lit carriage. Then he turned and began to walk down towards town.

  27

  Kind, Light-Fingered and Tight-Fisted

  ‘I was in the vicinity,’ Harry said. ‘But I suppose you’re on your way out.’

  ‘Not at all,’ smiled Kaja, who was standing in the doorway with a thick puffa jacket on. ‘I was sitting on the veranda. Come in. Take the slippers over there.’

  Harry removed his shoes and followed her through the living room. They each sat down on an enormous wooden chair on the covered veranda. It was quiet and deserted in Lyder Sagens gate, only one parked car. But on the first floor of the house over the road Harry could see the outline of a man in an illuminated window.

  ‘That’s Greger,’ Kaja said. ‘He’s eighty now. He’s sat like that and followed everything that’s happened on the street since the war, I think. I like to believe he looks after me.’

  ‘Yes, we need that,’ Harry said, taking out a pack of cigarettes. ‘To believe someone is looking after us.’

  ‘Have you got a Greger as well?’

  ‘No,’ Harry said.

  ‘Can I have one?’

  ‘A cigarette?’

  She laughed. ‘I smoke occasionally. It makes me… calmer, I think.’

  ‘Mm. Thought about what you’re going to do? After these forty-eight hours, I mean.’

  She shook her head. ‘Back to Crime Squad. Feet on the table. Wait for a murder that is trivial enough for Kripos not to whisk it away from under our noses.’

  Harry tapped out two cigarettes, put them between his lips, lit both and passed her one.

  ‘Now, Voyager,’ she said. ‘Hen… Hen… What was the name of the man who did that?’

  ‘Henreid,’ Harry said. ‘Paul Henreid.’

  ‘And the woman whose cigarette he lit?’

  ‘Bette Davis.’

  ‘Killer film. Would you like to borrow a thicker jacket?’

  ‘No, thanks. Why are you sitting on the veranda by the way? It’s not exactly a tropical night.’

  She held up a book. ‘My brain is sharper in cold air.’

  Harry read the front cover. ‘Materialistic Monism. Hm. Long-forgotten fragments from philosophy studies spring to mind.’

  ‘Right. Materialism holds that everything is matter and energy. Everything that happens is a part of a larger calculation, a chain reaction, consequences of something that has already happened.’

  ‘And free will is illusory?’

  ‘Yep. Our actions are determined by our brain’s chemical composition, which is determined by who chose to have children with whom, who in turn are determined by their brain chemistry. And so on. Everything can be taken back to the big bang, for example, and even further back. Including the fact that this book came to be written, and what you’re thinking right now.’

  ‘I remember that bit,’ Harry nodded and blew smoke into the winter night. ‘Made me think of the meteorologist who said that if only he had all the relevant variables he could forecast all future weather.’

  ‘And we could prevent murders before they took place.’

  ‘And predict that cigarette-cadging policewomen would sit on cold verandas with expensive philosophy books.’

  She laughed. ‘I didn’t buy the book myself, I found it on the shelf here.’ She pouted and sucked at the cigarette, and got smoke in her eyes. ‘I never buy books, I only borrow them. Or steal them.’

  ‘I don’t exactly see you as a thief.’

  ‘No one does, that’s why I’m never caught,’ she said, resting the cigarette on the ashtray.

  Harry coughed. ‘And why do you pilfer?’

  ‘I only steal from people I know and who can afford it. Not because I’m greedy, but because I’m a bit tight. When I was studying, I nicked loo rolls from the university toilet. By the way, have you thought of the title of the Fante book that was so good?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Text me when you remember it.’

  Harry chuckled. ‘Sorry, I don’t text.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Harry shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I don’t like the concept. Like Aborigines who don’t want their photo taken because they think they’ll lose a bit of their souls, maybe.’

  ‘I know!’ she said with enthusiasm. ‘You don’t want to leave traces. Tracks. Irrefutable evidence of who you are. You want to know that you are going to disappear, utterly and totally.’

  ‘You’ve hit the nail on the head,’ Harry said drily, and inhaled. ‘Do you want to go back in?’ He nodded towards her hands which she had put between her thighs and the chair.

  ‘No, it’s just my hands that are cold,’ she smiled. ‘Warm heart though. What about you?’

  Harry gazed across the garden fence, onto the road. At the car standing there. ‘What about me?’

  ‘Are you like me? Kind, light-fingered and tight-fisted?’

  ‘No, I’m evil, honest and tight-fisted. What about your husband?’

  It came out harder than Harry had intended, as though he wanted to put her in her place because she… because she what? Because she was sitting here and was beautiful and liked the same things as he did and lent him slippers belonging to a man she pretended didn’t exist.

  ‘What about him?’ she asked with a tiny smile.

  ‘Well, he’s got big feet,’ Harry heard himself say, feeling an urgent desire to bang his head on the table.

  She laughed out loud. The laughter trilled into the dark Fagerborg silence that lay over the houses, gardens and garages. The garages. Everyone had a garage. There was only one car parked in the street. Of course there could be a thousand reasons for it being there.

  ‘I don’t have a husband,’ she said.

  ‘So…’

  ‘So it’s a pair of my brother’s slippers you’re wearing on your feet.’

  ‘And the shoes on the steps…?’

  ‘… are also my brother’s, and are there because I suspect that men’s size forty-six and a half shoes have a deterrent effect on evil men with sinister plans.’

  She sent Harry a meaningful look. He chose to believe the ambiguity was not intended.

  ‘So your brother lives here?’

  She shook her head. ‘He died. Ten years ago. It’s Daddy’s house. In the last years, when Even was studying at Blindern, he and Daddy lived here.’

  ‘And Daddy?’

  ‘He died soon after Even. And as I was already living here, I took over the house.’

  Kaja drew her legs up onto the chair and rested her head on her knees. Harry gazed at the slim neck, the hollow where her pinned-up hair was taut and a few loose strands fell back onto her skin.

  ‘Do you often think about them?’ Harry asked.

  She raised her head from her knees.

  ‘Mostly about Even,’ she said. ‘Daddy moved out when we were small, and Mummy lived in her own bubble, so Even became sort of both parents in one for me. He looked after me, encouraged me, brought me up, he was my role model. He could do no wrong in my eyes. When you’ve been as close to someone as Even and I were to each other, that closeness never wears off. Never.’

  Harry nodded.

  With a tentative cough, Kaja said: ‘How’s your father?’

  Harry studied the cigarette glow.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s odd?’ he said. ‘Hagen giving us forty-e
ight hours. We could have cleared the office in two with ease.’

  ‘I suppose. Now you say so.’

  ‘Maybe he thought we could spend our final two days doing something useful.’

  Kaja looked at him.

  ‘Not investigating the present murder case, of course. We’ll have to leave that to Kripos. But the Missing Persons Unit needs help, I hear.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Adele Vetlesen is a young woman who, to my knowedge, is not connected with any murder case.’

  ‘You think we should…?’

  ‘I think we should meet for work at seven tomorrow morning,’ Harry said. ‘And see if we can do something useful.’

  Kaja Solness sucked on the cigarette again. Harry stubbed his out.

  ‘Time to go,’ he said. ‘Your teeth are chattering.’

  On his way out he tried to see if there was anyone in the parked car, but it was impossible without going closer. And he chose not to go any closer.

  In Oppsal the house was waiting for him. Big, empty and full of echoes.

  He went to bed in the boy’s room and closed his eyes.

  And dreamed the dream he so often had. He is standing by a marina in Sydney, a chain is hauled up, a poisonous jellyfish rises to the surface, it is not a jellyfish but red hair floating around a white face. Then came the second dream. The new one. It had first appeared in Hong Kong, just before Christmas. He is on his back staring up at a nail protruding from the wall, a face is impaled on it, a face, a sensitive-looking face with a neatly trimmed moustache. In the dream Harry has something in his mouth, something that feels as if it would blow his head to pieces. What was it, what was it? It was a promise. Harry twitched. Three times. Then he fell asleep.

  28

  Drammen

  ‘So it was you who reported Adele Vetlesen missing,’ Kaja confirmed.

  ‘Yes,’ said the young man sitting in front of her at People amp; Coffee. ‘We lived together. She didn’t come home. I felt I had to do something.’

  ‘Of course,’ Kaja said with a glance at Harry. It was half past eight. It had taken them thirty minutes to drive from Oslo to Drammen after the trio’s morning meeting which had ended in Harry discharging Bjorn Holm. Holm hadn’t said much, had expelled a deep sigh, washed his coffee cup and then driven back to Krimteknisk in Bryn to resume his work there.