by Jo Nesbo
‘Keep going,’ Harry said, on his knees under the sink, dismantling the plastic pipes. ‘It’s here somewhere.’
‘What is?’
‘I don’t know. Something or other.’
‘If we keep going, we’ll certainly need a bit of heating.’
‘Fire her up then.’
Bjorn Holm crouched down by the wood burner, opened the door and began to tear up and twist the newspaper from the wood basket.
‘What did you offer Skai to get him to join your little game? He risks all sorts if the truth comes out.’
‘He’s not risking anything,’ Harry said. ‘He hasn’t said an untrue word. Look at his statements. It’s the media that have jumped to the wrong conclusions. And there are no police instructions stipulating who can and who cannot arrest a suspect. I didn’t need to offer anything for his help. He said he disliked me less than he disliked Bellman, and that was justification enough.’
‘That was all?’
‘Hm. He told me about his daughter, Mia. Things haven’t gone so well for her. In such cases parents always look for a cause, something concrete they can point to. And Skai reckons it was the night outside the dance hall that marked Mia for life. Local gossip is that Mia and Ole had been going out and it wasn’t just innocent kissing in the woods when Ole found Mia and Tony. In Skai’s eyes Ole and Tony carry the blame for the daughter’s problems.’
Bjorn shook his head. ‘Victims, victims, wherever you turn.’
Harry had come over to Bjorn, holding out his hand. In the palm lay bits of what looked like wire cut from a fence. ‘This was under the drainpipe. Any idea what it is?’
Bjorn took the pieces of wire and studied them.
‘Hey,’ Harry burst out. ‘What’s that?’
‘What’s what?’
‘The newspaper. Look, that’s the press conference where we launched the Iska Peller ruse.’
Bjorn Holm looked at the photo of Bellman which had been uncovered when he had torn off the page in front. ‘Well, I’ll be…’
‘The newspaper’s only a few days old. Someone’s been here recently.’
‘Well, I’ll be.’
‘There might be prints on the front pa-’ Harry looked in the woodburner where the first pages were just going up in flames.
‘Sorry,’ said Bjorn. ‘But I can check the other pages.’
‘OK. Actually, I was wondering about the wood.’
‘Oh?’
‘There isn’t a tree for a three-mile radius. You check the papers and I’ll have a walk around.’
Mikael Bellman studied Sigurd Altman. He didn’t like his cold eyes. Didn’t like the bony body, the teeth pressing against the inside of his lips, the staccato movements or the clumsy lisp. But he didn’t need to like Sigurd Altman to see him as his redeemer and benefactor. For every word Altman said, Bellman was a step nearer his triumph.
‘I assume you’ve read Harry Hole’s report presenting the course of events,’ Altman said.
‘You mean Skai’s report?’ Bellman said. ‘Skai’s presentation?’
Altman let slip a wry smile. ‘As you prefer. The story Harry told was astonishingly accurate, anyway. The problem with it is that it contains only one concrete piece of evidence. My fingerprints at Leike’s. Well, let’s say I was there. I was paying him a visit. And we talked about the good old days.’
Bellman shrugged. ‘And you think a jury will fall for that?’
‘I like to think I can inspire trust. But…’ Altman’s lips stretched and revealed his gums, ‘… now I won’t ever have to face a jury, will I.’
Harry found the woodpile under a green tarpaulin beneath a rock jutting out from the mountainside. An axe stood bowed in a chopping block, beside it a knife. Harry looked around and kicked the snow. Not much of interest here. His boot brushed something. An empty white plastic bag. He bent down. On it was a contents label. Ten metres of gauze. What was that doing here?
Harry angled his head and examined the chopping block for a few moments. Looked at the black blade in the wood. At the knife. At the handle. Yellow, smooth. What was a knife doing on a chopping block? Could be several reasons, of course, yet…
He laid his right hand on the block in such a way that the remaining stump of his middle finger pointed upwards and the other fingers pressed down beside it.
Harry freed the knife cautiously with two fingers at the top of the handle. The blade was as sharp as a razor. With traces of the material he was always seeing in his profession. Then he ran like an elk on long legs through the deep snow.
Bjorn looked up from the computer as Harry burst in. ‘Just more Tony Leike,’ he sighed.
‘There’s blood on the blade,’ Harry said, out of breath. ‘Check the handle for prints.’
Bjorn held the knife with care. Sprinkled black powder on the smooth, varnished yellow wood and blew gently.
‘There’s only one set of prints here; however, they are tasty,’ he said. ‘Maybe there are epithel cells here, too.’
‘Yess!’ Harry said.
‘What’s the deal?’
‘Whoever left the fingerprint cut off Leike’s finger.’
‘Oh? What makes you-’
‘There’s blood on the chopping block. And he had gauze ready to bandage the wound. And I have an inkling I’ve seen that knife before. On a grainy photo of Adele Vetlesen.’
Bjorn Holm whistled softly, pressed the transparency against the handle so that the powder stuck. Then he put the transparency on the scanner.
‘Sigurd Altman, you might have got a good lawyer to explain away the prints on Leike’s desk,’ Harry whispered while Bjorn pressed the search button and they both followed the blue line that moved in fits and starts towards the right of the bar. ‘But not the print on this knife.’
Ready…
Found 1 match.
Bjorn Holm pressed ‘show’.
Harry stared at the name that came up.
‘Still think the print belongs to the person who cut off Tony’s finger?’ Bjorn Holm asked.
78
The Deal
‘After I saw Adele and Tony banging away like dogs by the toilet, everything came back to me. Everything I had succeeded in burying. Everything the psychologist said I had put behind me. It was like an animal that had been chained up, but it had been fed, it had grown and was stronger than ever. And now it was free. Harry was quite right. I planned to avenge myself on Tony by humiliating him just as he had done to me.’
Sigurd Altman looked down at his hands and smiled.
‘However, from thereon Harry was wrong. I didn’t plan Adele’s murder. I just wanted to humiliate Tony in public. Particularly in front of those he hoped would become his in-laws, the milch cow Galtung who was to finance that Congo adventure of his. Why would someone like Tony bother to marry a field mouse like Lene Galtung otherwise?’
‘True enough,’ smiled Mikael Bellman, to show he was on his side.
‘So I wrote a letter to Tony pretending to be Adele. I wrote that he had made me pregnant and I wanted the child. However, as a future single mother I would have to provide for it, and therefore I wanted silence money. Four hundred thousand first time round. He was to show up at midnight in the car park behind Lefdal electrical appliances in Sandvika with the money two days later. Then I sent Adele a letter, pretending to be Tony, and asked if we could meet at the same time and place for a date. I knew the setting would be to Adele’s taste, and I assumed they hadn’t exchanged names and phone numbers, if you know what I mean. The deception wouldn’t be discovered until it was too late, until I had what I wanted. At eleven I was in position, sitting in my car with a camera ready. The plan was to take photos of the rendezvous however it ended up, a row or bonking, and to send the whole lot to Anders Galtung with the revelatory story. That was all.’
Sigurd looked at Bellman and repeated: ‘That was all.’
Bellman nodded, and Sigurd Altman continued. ‘Tony arrived early. He parked, got out and d
id a recce. Then he disappeared into the shadows under the trees by the river. I hid behind the steering wheel. Adele came. I rolled down the window to catch what happened. She stood there waiting, looking around, checking her watch. I saw Tony right behind her, so close it was unbelievable she couldn’t hear him. I saw him pull out a large Sami knife and close his arm around her neck. She wriggled and kicked as he carried her to his car. When the door fell open I saw that he had plastic over the seats. I didn’t hear what Tony said to her, but I picked up my camera and zoomed in. Saw him pressing a pen into her hand, obviously dictating what she was to write on a postcard.’
‘The postcard from Kigali,’ Bellman said. ‘He had planned everything in advance. She was going to disappear.’
‘I took pictures, not thinking about anything else. Until I saw him suddenly raise his hand and drive the knife into her neck. I couldn’t believe my own eyes. Blood spurted out spraying the windscreen.’
The two men were unaware that Krohn was gasping for air.
‘He waited a while, leaving the knife in her neck, as though he wanted to drain her of blood first. Then he lifted her up, carried her to the rear of his car and dumped her in the boot. As he was about to get back in the car, he stopped and seemed to sniff the air. He was standing under the light of a street lamp, and that was when I saw it: the same widened eyes, the same grin on his lips that he’d had when he pinned me down outside the dance hall and forced the knife in my mouth. Long after Tony had driven off with Adele, I was still in my car, numb with horror, unable to move. I knew I couldn’t send a letter telling all to Anders Galtung now. Or to anyone else. Because I had just become an accessory to murder.’
Sigurd took a tiny, restrained sip of water from the glass in front of him and glanced at Johan Krohn, who nodded in return.
Bellman cleared his throat. ‘Technically speaking, you were not an accessory to murder. The worst charge would have been blackmail or deception. You could have stopped there. It would have been very unpleasant for you, but you could have gone to the police. You even had photographs proving your story.’
‘Nevertheless, I would have been charged and found guilty. They would have maintained that I, better than anyone else, knew Tony reacted with violence when put under pressure and that I had started the whole business, it was premeditated.’
‘Hadn’t you considered that this might happen?’ Bellman asked, ignoring the admonitory glare from Krohn.
Sigurd Altman smiled. ‘Isn’t it odd how often our own deliberations are the hardest to interpret? Or remember? I honestly don’t recall what I anticipated would happen.’
Because you don’t want to, Bellman thought, nodding and mmm-ing as if in gratitude to Altman for giving him new insights into the human soul.
‘I deliberated for several days,’ Altman said. ‘Then I went back to the Havass cabin and tore out the page in the guest book with all the names and addresses. Then I wrote another letter to Tony. In which I said that I knew what he had done, and I knew why. I had seen him screw Adele at the cabin in Havass. And I wanted money. Signed it Borgny Stem-Myhre. Five days later I read in the papers that she had been killed in a cellar. It should have stopped there. The police should have investigated the case and found Tony. That’s what they should have done. Arrested him.’
Sigurd Altman had raised his voice and Bellman could have sworn he saw tears welling up in the eyes behind the round glasses.
‘But you didn’t even have a lead, you were completely befogged. So I had to keep feeding him with more victims, threatening him with new names from the Havass list. I cut out pictures of the victims from the papers and hung them on the wall of the cutting room in the Kadok factory with copies of letters I had sent in the victims’ names. As soon as Tony killed one person, another letter arrived insisting they had sent the previous ones and now they knew he had two, three and four lives on his conscience. And that the price for their silence had risen accordingly.’ Altman leaned forward; his voice sounded anguished. ‘I did it to give you a chance to catch him. A killer makes mistakes, doesn’t he. The more murders there are, the greater the chance he will be arrested.’
‘And the better he becomes at what he’s doing,’ Bellman said. ‘Remember that Tony Leike was no novice at violence. You aren’t a mercenary in Africa for as long as he was without having blood on your hands. As you yourself have.’
‘Blood on my hands?’ Altman shrieked, in a sudden burst of anger. ‘I broke into Tony’s house and rang Elias Skog so you would find the trail at Telenor. It’s you who have blood on your hands! Whores like Adele and Mia, murderers like Tony. If not-’
‘Stop now, Sigurd.’ Johan Krohn had got to his feet. ‘Let’s have a break, shall we?’
Altman closed his eyes, raised his hands and shook his head. ‘I’m OK, I’m OK. Let’s get this over and done with.’
Johan Krohn eyed his client, glanced at Bellman and sat down.
Altman took a deep, tremulous breath. Then he continued. ‘After the third murder or so, Tony knew, of course, that the next letter was not necessarily from the person it purported to be from. Nonetheless, he went on killing them, in increasingly violent ways. It was as if he wanted to frighten me, make me pull back, to show that he could kill everyone and everything and in the end would kill me, too.’
‘Or he wanted to get rid of potential witnesses who had seen him and Adele,’ Bellman said. ‘He knew there had been seven other people at Havass, he just didn’t have the means to establish who they were.’
Altman laughed. ‘Imagine! I swear he went up to the cabin to look at the guest book. Only to find the stub of a torn-out sheet. Tony Pony!’
‘What about your motive for continuing?’
‘What do you mean?’ Altman asked, on the alert now.
‘You could have given the police an anonymous tip-off much earlier in the case. Perhaps you wanted to get rid of all the witnesses as well?’
Altman tilted his head, so that his ear almost touched his shoulder.
‘As I said, it’s difficult to keep tabs on all the reasons for doing what you do. Your subconscious is controlled by your survival instinct and is therefore often more rational than conscious thought. Perhaps my subconscious realised it would also be safer for me if Tony eliminated all the witnesses. Then no one would be able to say I was there, or suddenly recognise me one day in the street. But we will never get an answer to that, will we.’
The wood burner crackled and spat.
‘But why on earth would Tony Leike chop off his own finger?’ Bjorn Holm asked.
He had settled down on the sofa while Harry went through the firstaid kit he had found at the back of a kitchen drawer. It contained several rolls of bandages. And an astringent ointment that made blood coagulate faster. The date on the tube showed it was only two months old.
‘Altman forced him,’ Harry said, revolving a tiny unlabelled brown bottle. ‘Leike had to be humiliated.’
‘You don’t sound as if you believe that yourself.’
‘I damn well do believe it,’ Harry said, unscrewing the lid and sniffing the contents.
‘Oh? There’s not a single fingerprint here that isn’t Leike’s, not a hair that isn’t Leike’s raven-black hair, not a shoe print that isn’t size forty-five, Leike’s. Sigurd Altman is ash blond and takes size forty-two, Harry.’
‘He made a good job of clearing up afterwards. Remind me to have this analysed.’ Harry slipped the brown bottle into his jacket pocket.
‘A good job of clearing up? In what probably isn’t even a crime scene? The same man who didn’t care about leaving big fat fingerprints on Leike’s desk in Holmenveien? Who you said yourself didn’t clear up very well at the cabin where he killed Utmo? I don’t think so, Harry. And you don’t, either.’
‘Fuck!’ Harry shouted. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ He rested his forehead on his hands and stared at the table.
Bjorn Holm held one of the small bits of wire from under the drainpipe in the air and scraped off
the gold coating with his fingernail. ‘By the way, I think I know what this is.’
‘Oh?’ Harry said, without lifting his head.
‘Iron, chrome, nickel and titanium.’
‘What?’
‘I had a dental brace when I was a kid. The wires had to be bent and clipped on.’
Harry suddenly looked up and stared at the map of Africa. He studied the countries that slotted into each other like jigsaw pieces. Except Madagascar, which was separate, like a bit that didn’t fit.
‘At the dentist’s-’
‘Shh!’ Harry said, holding up a hand. Now he had it. Something had just clicked into place. All that could be heard was the wood burner and the gusting wind that was closer outside now. Two jigsaw pieces that had been far apart, each on their own side of the puzzle. A maternal grandfather by Lake Lyseren. Father of his mother. And the photograph in the drawer at the cabin. The family photograph. The picture didn’t belong to Tony Leike, but to Odd Utmo. Arthritis. What was it that Tony had told him? Not contagious, but hereditary. The boy with the large, bared teeth. And the man with the hard, pinched mouth, as if he were hiding a dark secret. Hiding his rotten teeth and a brace.
The stone. The dark stone he had found on the bathroom floor in the cabin. He put his hand in his pocket. It was still there. He tossed it over to Bjorn.
‘Tell me,’ he said with a gulp. ‘I came across this. Think it could be a tooth?’
Bjorn held it up to the light. Scraped it with his nail. ‘Could be.’
‘Let’s get back,’ Harry said, feeling the hairs on his neck prickle. ‘Now. It wasn’t bloody Altman who killed them.’
‘Oh?’
‘It was Tony Leike.’
‘You must have read in the papers that Tony Leike was released after being arrested,’ Bellman said. ‘He had a wonderful little thing called an alibi. He could prove he was somewhere else when Borgny and Charlotte died.’
