by Jo Nesbo
‘I know nothing about that,’ Sigurd Altman said, crossing his arms. ‘I know only that I saw him stick a knife into Adele’s neck. And that the letters I sent caused the ostensible senders to be murdered straight afterwards.’
‘You’re aware that at least makes you an accessory to murder, aren’t you?’
Johan Krohn coughed. ‘And you’re aware, aren’t you, that you made a deal that will serve up the real killer on a silver platter, for you and Kripos? All your internal problems will be solved, Bellman. You’ll get all the credit, and you have a witness who will say in court that he saw Tony Leike kill Adele Vetlesen. What happened beyond that remains between you and me.’
‘And your client goes free?’
‘That’s the deal.’
‘What about if Leike kept the letters and they turn up at the trial?’ Bellman said. ‘Then we have a problem.’
‘That’s precisely why I have a feeling they won’t turn up,’ Krohn smiled. ‘Or, will they?’
‘What about the photographs you took of Adele and Tony?’
‘Went up in the blaze at Kadok,’ Altman said. ‘That bastard Hole.’
Mikael Bellman nodded slowly. Then he lifted his pen. S.T. Dupont. Lead and steel. It was heavy. Once he had set it to paper, though, it was as if the signature wrote itself.
‘Thanks,’ Harry said. ‘Over and out.’
He received a rasping sound by way of answer and then it was still, there was only the helicopter engine’s monotonous noise outside his headset. Harry bent the microphone and looked out.
Too late.
He had just finished talking over the radio to the tower at Gardemoen Airport. For security reasons they had access to most information, including passenger lists. And could confirm that Odd Utmo had travelled on his pre-booked ticket to Copenhagen two days ago.
The countryside moved slowly beneath them.
Harry visualised him standing there with the passport of the man he had tortured and killed. The man or the woman behind the counter routinely reading to see if the passport matched the name on the list and thinking – if they looked at the photo at all – that was one hell of a brace. Looked up and registered the same dental work on the probably artifically browned teeth in front of him, a brace which Tony Leike must have had to bend and cut to fit on top of his own porcelain highrises.
They flew into a rainstorm that exploded on the plexiglas bubble, ran to the sides in quivering streaks of water and disappeared. Seconds later it was as if they had never been there.
The finger.
Tony Leike had cut off his finger and sent it to Harry as a final red herring, to demonstrate that Tony Leike had to be considered dead. He could be forgotten, written off, put aside. Was it chance that Leike had chosen the same finger as Harry’s missing digit, that he had made himself like him?
But what about the alibi, his water-tight alibi?
Harry had entertained the thought before, but had rejected it because cold-blooded murderers are rarities, deviants, perverted souls in the true sense of the word. But could there have been someone else? Could the answer be as simple as Tony Leike working together with a sidekick?
‘Fuck!’ said Harry, loud enough for the sound-sensitive microphone to transmit the last part of the syllable to the other three headsets in the helicopter. He caught Jens Rath’s sidelong glance. Maybe Rath had been right after all. Maybe Tony Leike was indeed sitting with a shot of the hard stuff, some exotic wildcat of a woman on his arm and grinning because he had come up with a solution.
79
Missed Calls
At a quarter past two the helicopter landed at Fornebu, the disused aerodrome twelve minutes’ drive from the city centre. When Harry and Bjorn went through the door of the Kripos building and Harry asked the receptionist why neither Bellman nor any of the senior detectives were answering their phones, he was told they were all in a meeting.
‘Why the hell weren’t we called?’ mumbled Harry as he strode down the corridor with Bjorn jogging after him.
He pushed open the door without knocking. Seven heads turned towards them. The eighth, Mikael Bellman’s, didn’t need to turn as he was sitting at the end of the long table facing the door, and he was the one on whom all the others had been focused.
‘Stan and Ollie,’ Bellman chortled, and Harry gathered from the chuckling that they had been a subject of conversation in their absence. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Well, while you were sitting here and playing Snow White and the seven dwarfs we’ve been to Tony Leike’s cabin,’ Harry said, throwing himself down on a free chair at the opposite end of the table. ‘And we have some news. It isn’t Altman. We’ve arrested the wrong man. It was Tony Leike.’
Harry didn’t know what reaction he had expected, but at any rate it hadn’t been this: none at all.
The POB leaned back in his chair with a friendly quizzical smile.
‘We’ve arrested the wrong man? To my recollection, Skai was the officer who took it upon himself to arrest Sigurd Altman. And, regarding news value, this is pretty scant. As for Tony Leike, perhaps we should be saying “Welcome back”.’
Harry’s gaze jumped from?rdal to the Pelican and back to Bellman as his brain churned. And drew the only possible conclusion.
‘Altman,’ Harry said. ‘Altman said it was Leike. He knew all the time.’
‘He not only knew,’ Bellman said. ‘Just as Leike triggered the avalanche in Havass, Altman set this whole murder case in motion, without even realising. Skai arrested an innocent man, Harry.’
‘Innocent?’ Harry shook his head. ‘I saw the pictures in the Kadok factory, Bellman. Altman is involved here, I just don’t know how as yet.’
‘But we do,’ Bellman said. ‘So if you wouldn’t mind leaving this to us…’ Harry heard the word ‘adults’ forming in Bellman’s mouth, but it came out as: ‘… enlightened ones, you can join in when you’re up to speed, Harry. Alright? Bjorn, too? So let’s move on. I was saying that we cannot exclude the possibility that Leike had a partner, someone who committed at least two of the murders, the two for which Leike has an alibi. We know that when both Borgny and Charlotte died Leike was at business meetings with several witnesses present.’
‘A clever bastard,’ said?rdal. ‘Leike knew, of course, that the police would find a link between all the murders. So if he found himself a cast-iron alibi for one or two of them, he would automatically be cleared of the others.’
‘Yes,’ said Bellman. ‘But who is the accomplice?’
Harry heard suggestions, comments and queries fluttering past him in the room.
‘Tony Leike’s motive for killing Adele Vetlesen was hardly the demand for four hundred thousand,’ the Pelican said. ‘But rather the fear that if it came out that he had got some woman pregnant, Lene Galtung would end the relationship and he could kiss goodbye to the Galtung millions for the Congo project. So the question we should be asking ourselves is who had identical interests.’
‘The other investors in the Congo,’ said the smooth-faced detective. ‘What about his financial friends at the office block?’
‘It’s make or break for Tony Leike with the Congo project,’ Bellman said. ‘But none of the other finance squirts would have killed two people to secure their ten per cent share in a project. Those boys are used to winning and losing money. Besides, Leike had to collaborate with someone he could trust at both a personal and a professional level. Bear in mind that the murder weapon was the same for Borgny and Charlotte. What did you call it, Harry?’
‘A Leopold’s apple,’ Harry intoned, still befuddled.
‘Louder, please.’
‘A Leopold’s apple.’
‘Thank you. From Africa. Same place Leike had been a mercenary. It is therefore fair to assume that Leike used one of his former comrades, and I think we should start there.’
‘If he used a mercenary for murders number two and three, why not for all of them?’ the Pelican asked. ‘Then he would have had
an alibi right the way through.’
‘He would have got a per capita discount, too,’ the Nansen moustache said. ‘The mercenary can’t get any more than life imprisonment anyway.’
‘There may be angles of which we are unaware,’ Bellman said. ‘Banal reasons like not having enough time or Leike not having the money. Or the most usual reason in crime cases: it just happened like that.’
Nods of agreement round the table; even the Pelican seemed content with the answer.
‘Any other questions? No? Then I would like to use this opportunity to thank Harry Hole who has been with us thus far. As we no longer have any use for his expertise, he will return to Crime Squad with immediate effect. It was stimulating to experience another view of how to work on murders, Harry. You might not have solved this case but who knows. There may be some interesting Crime Squad cases waiting for you down there in Gronland, if not murders. So thank you again. I have a press conference now, folks.’
Harry looked at Bellman. He could not help but admire him. The way you admire a cockroach you flush down the toilet, that comes creeping back. Again and again. And in the end it inherits the world.
***
At Olav’s bedside in Rikshospital, seconds, minutes and hours passed in a slow, undulating swell of monotony. A nurse came and went, Sis came and went. Flowers moved imperceptibly closer.
Harry had seen how many relatives could not bear to wait for the last breath of their loved ones, how in the end they prayed, begged for death to come and liberate them. Them, meaning themselves. But for Harry it was the opposite. He had never felt closer to his father than now, here, in this wordless room where all was breathing and the next heartbeat. For seeing Olav Hole there was like seeing himself, in the peace-filled existence between life and nothingness.
The detectives at Kripos had seen and understood a lot. But not the evident link. Which made the entirety so much clearer. The link between the Leike farm and Ustaoset. Between the rumours and the ghost of a missing boy from the Utmo farm and a man who called the wasteland ‘his terrain’. Between Tony Leike and the boy in the photograph with his ugly father and beautiful mother.
Now and then Harry glanced at his mobile phone and saw a missed call. Hagen. Oystein. Kaja. Kaja again. He would have to answer her calls soon. He rang her.
‘Can I come to yours tonight?’ she asked.
80
The Rhythm
The rain beat down on the boards of the Jetty. Harry walked up behind the man standing at the edge, facing the other way.
‘Morning, Skai.’
‘Morning, Hole,’ the officer said without turning. The tip of the fishing rod was bent towards the line that disappeared in the reeds on the opposite bank.
‘Caught something?’
‘Nope,’ Skai said. ‘Snarled up on the bloody reeds.’
‘Sorry to hear that. Read the papers today?’
‘They don’t arrive before late morning in the sticks.’
Harry knew that was not true, but nodded anyway.
‘But I suppose they’ve written that I’m a village idiot,’ Skai said. ‘They had to get townsfolk in from Kripos to sort out the muddle.’
‘As I said: I’m sorry.’
Skai shrugged. ‘I’ve got no complaints. You gave it to me straight, I knew what I was doing. And it was a bit of fun, too. Not much happens out here, you know.’
‘Mm. They don’t write much about you, they’re mostly interested in Tony Leike being the killer, after all. Bellman is much-quoted.’
‘He is that.’
‘Soon they’ll work out who Tony’s father is as well.’
Skai turned and looked at Harry.
‘I should have thought of it before, and especially after we talked about the changing of names.’
‘Now I don’t follow you, Hole.’
‘You were even the person who told me, Skai. Tony lived with his grandfather at the Leike farm. Mother’s father. Tony had taken his mother’s name.’
‘Nothing unusual in that.’
‘Maybe not. But in this case there was a good reason for it. Tony was hiding at his grandfather’s. His mother sent him there.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘A colleague,’ Harry said, and for a second he seemed to have the night’s scent of her in his nostrils again. ‘She told me something the Ustaoset officer had told her. About the Utmo family. About a father and a son who hated each other so intensely that it threatened to culminate in murder.’
‘Murder?’
‘I’ve checked Odd Utmo’s record. He was, like his son, known for his rages. As a young man he went to prison for eight years for committing a murder out of jealousy. After that, he moved into the wastelands. He married Karen Leike, and they had a son. The son reached his teens and was already good-looking, tall and a charmer. Two men and a woman in almost total isolation. A man who had a conviction for killing in a jealous rage. It looks like Karen tried to prevent a tragedy unfolding by sending her son away in secret and leaving one of his shoes in an area where there had just been a big avalanche.’
‘News to me, Hole.’
Harry nodded slowly. ‘I’m afraid she managed only to postpone the tragedy. Her body has just been found at the bottom of a precipice with a bullet through the head. A few metres away her husband and murderer was crushed beneath a snowmobile. He’d been tortured, had most of the skin on his back and arms burned off and his teeth ripped out. Guess who did it?’
‘Oh, my God…’
Harry put a cigarette between his lips.
‘How did you trace the link?’ Skai asked.
‘The similarity, the genes.’ He lit the cigarette. ‘Father and son. You can try to run, but it will always be there, like a curse. I think Odd Utmo realised the Havass murders meant he would be hunted, too, and that it was the ghost of his own deceased son who was after him. So he fled from the farm up to this Tourist Association cabin safely hidden between precipices. He took a family photo with him, the family he had himself destroyed. Imagine, a frightened, maybe remorseful killer alone with his thoughts.’
‘He had already been given his punishment.’
‘I found the photo. Tony was lucky, he took after his mother in looks. It was hard to see anything of the adult Tony in the photograph of the boy. But he already had the big white teeth. While his father hid his. That’s where they were different.’
‘I thought you said it was the similarity that gave them away?’
Harry nodded. ‘They had the same disease.’
‘They were killers.’
Harry shook his head. ‘Disease, as in physical ailment, Skai. I meant they both had arthritis. The family relationship was confirmed this morning. The DNA analysis of the flesh on the wood burner and Tony Leike’s hair prove they are father and son.’
Skai nodded.
‘Well,’ Harry said. ‘I came by to thank you for your help and to bemoan the outcome. Bjorn Holm sends his regards to your wife and says she makes the best meatballs and mashed swede he’s ever tasted.’
Flicker of a smile from Skai. ‘Most people think that. Even Tony liked them.’
‘Oh?’
Skai shrugged and pulled a knife from the sheath on his belt.
‘I told you Mia was stuck on the boy, didn’t I? It was soon after he had knifed Ole. She brought him home for lunch one day when she knew I wouldn’t be there. The wife said nothing when they showed up, though there was a humdinger when I got to hear about it, of course. But you know what girls are like at that age and in love. I tried to explain that Tony was violent, fool that I was. I should have known the worse I made her boyfriend out to be, the more determined she would become to hang on to him. Then it’s two together against the rest of the world, kind of. Well, you’ve seen it yourself with women who start writing letters to convicted murderers.’
Harry nodded.
‘Mia would have left home, followed him to the end of the world, there was no moderation in any
thing,’ Skai said, cutting the fishing line and reeling in.
Harry followed the retreat of the slack line. ‘Mm. End of the world.’
‘Yep.’
‘I see.’
Skai stopped winding and looked at Harry. ‘No,’ he said with conviction.
‘No what?’
‘No to what you’re thinking.’
‘Which is?’
‘That Mia and Tony met again later. He broke up with her; since then they have never met. Her life has continued without him. She has nothing to do with this case, got it? You have my word. She is putting her life together again, so please don’t…’
Harry nodded and took the cigarette, which had been extinguished by the rain, from his mouth.
‘I’m not on the case any more,’ he said. ‘But your word would have been good enough, anyway.’
As Harry drove from the car park he looked in the mirror and watched Skai packing up his fishing gear.
Rikshospital. He was in the rhythm now. Time was not chopped up by events; it flowed in an even stream. He had thought of asking for a mattress. That would be a bit like Chungking Mansion.
81
The Cones of Light
Three days passed. He was alive. Everyone was alive.
No one knew where Tony Leike was, the trail of the fake Odd Utmo ended in Copenhagen. A photograph of Lene Galtung with a shawl over her head and large sunglasses in the best Greta Garbo style was splashed across one newspaper. The headline was: NO COMMENT. And now no one had seen her for two days after she had gone into hiding, apparently at her father’s house in London. The photograph of Tony in work clothes in front of the helicopter had been in several newspapers. It was captioned PRINCE CHARMING’S VANISHING ACT in one. He had been dubbed Prince Charming now, people had taken to it, and anyway, it suited Leike better than Altman. Strangely enough, no one in the press had managed to link Tony Leike with the Utmo farm yet. The mother and later Tony had obviously covered their tracks well.
