The Leopard: An Inspector Harry Hole Novel

by Jo Nesbo

  The only person in the room was his boss, Beate Lønn, an unusually pale, petite and quiet-mannered woman. Had one not known any better, one might have thought a person like this would have problems leading a group of experienced, professional, self-aware, always quirky and seldom conflict-shy forensics officers. Had one known better, one would have realized she was the only person who could deal with them. Not primarily because they respected the fact that she stood erect and proud despite losing two policemen to the eternity shift, first her father and later the father of her child. But because, in their group, she was the best, and radiated such unimpeachability, integrity and gravity that when Beate Lønn whispered an order with downcast gaze and flushed cheeks, it was carried out on the spot. So Bjørn Holm had come as soon as he was informed.

  She was sitting in a chair drawn up close to the TV monitor.

  “They’re recording live from the press conference,” she said without turning. “Take a seat.”

  Holm immediately recognized the people on the screen. How strange it was, it struck him, to be watching signals that had traveled thousands of miles out into space and back, just to show him what was happening right now on the opposite side of the street.

  Beate Lønn turned up the volume.

  “You have understood correctly,” said Mikael Bellman, leaning toward the microphone on the table in front of him. “For the present we have neither leads nor suspects. And to repeat myself once again: We have not ruled out the possibility of suicide.”

  “But you said—” began a voice from the body of journalists present.

  Bellman cut her off. “I said we regard the death as suspicious. I am sure you’re familiar with the terminology. If not, you should …” He left the end of the sentence hanging in the air and pointed to a person behind the camera.

  “Stavanger Aftenblad,” came the slow bleat of the Rogaland dialect. “Do the police see a connection between this death and the two in—”

  “No! If you’d been following, you would have heard me say that we do not rule out a connection.”

  “I caught that,” continued the slow, imperturbable dialect. “But those of us here are more interested in what you think rather than what you don’t rule out.”

  Bjørn Holm could see Bellman giving the man the evil eye as impatience strained at the corners of his mouth. A uniformed woman officer at Bellman’s side placed her hand over the microphone, leaned in to him and whispered something. The POB’s face darkened.

  “Mikael Bellman is getting a crash course in how to deal with the media,” said Bjørn Holm. “Lesson one, stroke the ones with hair, especially the provincial newspapers.”

  “He’s new to the job,” Beate Lønn said. “He’ll learn.”

  “Think so?”

  “Yes. Bellman’s the type to learn.”

  “Humility’s hard to learn, I’ve heard.”

  “Genuine humility, that’s true. But to grovel when it suits you is basic to modern communication. That’s what Ninni’s telling him. And Bellman’s smart enough to appreciate that.”

  On-screen, Bellman coughed, forced an almost boyish smile and leaned in to the microphone. “I apologize if I sounded a bit brusque, but it’s been a long day for all of us, and I hope you understand that we are simply impatient to get back to the investigation of this tragic case. We have to finish here, but if any of you have any further questions, please direct them to Ninni, and I promise I will try to return to you later this evening. Before the deadline. Is that OK?”

  “What did I say?” Beate laughed triumphantly.

  “A star is born,” Bjørn said.

  The picture dissolved and Beate Lønn turned. “Harry called. He wants me to hand you over.”

  “Me?” said Bjørn Holm. “To do what?”

  “You know very well what. I heard you were with Gunnar Hagen at the airport when Harry arrived.”

  “Whoops.” Holm smiled, revealing both top and bottom sets of teeth.

  “I assume Hagen wanted to use you in Operation Persuasion since he knew you were one of the few people Harry liked working with.”

  “We never got that far, and Harry turned down the job.”

  “But now it seems he has changed his mind.”

  “Really? What made him do that?”

  “He didn’t say. He just said he thought it was right to go through me.”

  “Sure. You’re the boss here.”

  “You can take nothing for granted where Harry is concerned. I know him pretty well, as you’re aware.”

  Holm nodded. He was aware. Knew Jack Halvorsen, Beate’s partner and the soon-to-be father of their child, had been killed while working for Harry. One freezing cold winter’s day, in broad daylight, in Grünerløkka, stabbed in the chest. Holm had arrived right afterward. Hot blood soaking down into the blue ice. A policeman’s death. No one had blamed Harry. Apart from Harry, that is.

  He scratched his sideburns. “So what did you say?”

  Beate took a deep breath and watched the journalists and photographers hurrying out of the Kripos building. “The same as I’m going to tell you now. The Ministry of Justice has let it be known that Kripos has priority, and accordingly there is no chance that I can pass on forensics officers to anyone other than Bellman for this case.”

  “But?”

  Beate Lønn drummed a Bic pen on the table, hard. “But there are other cases besides this double murder.”

  “Triple murder,” Holm said, and after a sharp look from Beate, he added, “believe me.”

  “I don’t know exactly what Inspector Hole is investigating, but it is definitely not any of these murder cases. He and I are totally agreed on that,” Beate said. “And you are thereby transferred to that case or those cases—of which I know nothing. For two weeks. Copy of first report on whatever you do to be on my desk five working days from now. Understood?”

  Inwardly, Kaja Solness was beaming like a sun and felt an almost irresistible desire to do a couple of spins in her swivel chair.

  “If Hagen says OK, of course I’ll join you,” she said, trying to contain herself, but she could hear the exultation in her voice.

  “Hagen says OK,” said the man leaning against the door frame with his arm over his head, forming a diagonal in her doorway. “So it’s just Holm, you and me. And the case we’re working on is confidential. We start tomorrow. Meet at seven in my office.”

  “Er … seven?”

  “Sieben. Seven. Oh-seven-hundred hours.”

  “I see. Which office?”

  The man grinned and explained.

  She looked at him in disbelief. “We’ve got an office in the prison?” The diagonal in the doorway relaxed. “Meet up, all systems go. Questions?”

  Kaja had several, but Harry had already left.

  The dream has begun to appear in the daytime, too, now. A long way off I can still hear the band playing “Love Hurts.” I notice a few boys standing around us, but they don’t move in. Good. As for me, I’m looking at her. See what you’ve done, I try to say. Look at him now. Do you still want him? My God, how I hate her, how I want to tear the knife out of my mouth and stick it in her, stab holes in her, see it gush out: blood, guts, the lie, the stupidity, her idiotic self-righteousness. Someone should show her how ugly she is on the inside.

  I saw the press conference on TV. Incompetent oafs! No clues. No suspects! The golden first forty-eight hours, the sands are running out, hurry, hurry. What do you want me to do? Write it on the wall in blood?

  It’s you who are allowing this killing to go on.

  The letter is finished.

  Hurry.

  15

  Strobe Lights

  Stine eyed the boy who had just spoken to her. He had a beard, blond hair and a woolen hat. Indoors. And this was no indoor hat, but a thick hat to keep your ears warm. A snowboarder? Anyway, when she took a closer look, this was no boy, but a man. Over thirty. At any rate, there were white wrinkles in the brown skin.

  “So?”
she shouted over the music booming out through the stereo system at Krabbe. The recently opened restaurant had proclaimed it was the new hangout for Stavanger’s young avant-garde musicians, filmmakers and writers, of whom there were quite a few in this otherwise business-oriented, dollar-counting oil town. It would turn out that the in-crowd had not yet decided whether Krabbe deserved their favor or not. As indeed Stine had not yet decided whether this boy-man deserved hers.

  “It’s just I think you should let me tell you about it,” he said with a confident smile, looking at her with a pair of eyes that seemed much too pale blue to her. But perhaps that was the lighting in here? Strobe lights? Was that cool? Time would tell. He turned the beer glass in his hand and leaned back against the bar so that she had to lean forward if she wanted to hear what he was saying, but she didn’t fall for that one. He was wearing a thick down jacket, yet there was not a drop of sweat to be seen on his face under that ridiculous hat. Or was that cool?

  “There are very few people who’ve biked through the delta district of Burma and returned sufficiently alive to tell the tale,” he said.

  Sufficiently alive. A talker, then. She liked that up to a point. He looked like someone. Some American action hero from an old film or a TV show from the eighties.

  “I promised myself that if I got back to Stavanger I would go out, buy myself a beer and accost the most attractive girl I could see and say what I am saying now.” He thrust out his arms and wore a big white smile. “I think you’re the girl by the pagoda.”

  “What?”

  “Rudyard Kipling, missy. You’re the girl waiting for the English soldier by the old Moulmein pagoda. So what do you say? Will you join me and walk barefoot on the marble in Shwedagon? Eat cobra meat in Bago? Sleep till the Muslims’ call to prayers in Rangoon and wake to the Buddhists’ in Mandalay?”

  He breathed in. She bent forward. “So I’m the most attractive girl in here, am I?”

  He looked around. “No, but you’ve got the biggest boobs. You’re good-looking, but the competition is too fierce for you to be the best-looking one. Shall we go?”

  She laughed and shook her head. Didn’t know whether he was fun or just crazy.

  “I’m with some girls. You can try that trick on someone else.”

  “Elias.”

  “What?”

  “You were wondering what my name was. In case we meet again. And my name’s Elias. Skog. You’ll forget that, but you’ll remember Elias. And we’ll meet again. Before you imagine, actually.”

  She slanted her head. “Oh, yes?”

  Then he drained his glass, put it on the bar, smiled at her and left.

  “Who was he?”

  It was Mathilde.

  “Don’t know,” Stine said. “He was nice. But weird. Talked like he came from eastern Norway.”

  “Weird?”

  “There was something odd about his eyes. And teeth. Are there strobe lights in here?”

  “Strobe lights?”

  Stine laughed. “No, it’s that toothpaste-colored solarium light. Makes your face look like a zombie’s.”

  Mathilde shook her head. “You need a drink. Come on.”

  Stine turned toward the exit as she followed. She thought she had seen a face against a pane, but no one was there.

  16

  Speed King

  It was nine o’clock at night, and Harry was walking through downtown Oslo. He had spent the morning lugging chairs and tables into the new office. In the afternoon he had gone up to Rikshospital, but his father was undergoing some tests. So he had doubled back, copied reports, made a few calls, booked a ticket to Bergen, popped down to the shops and bought a SIM card the size of a cigarette end.

  Harry strode out. He had always enjoyed moving from east to west in this compact town, seeing the gradual but obvious changes in people, fashion, ethnicity, architecture, shops, cafés and bars. He stopped into a McDonald’s, had a hamburger, stuffed three straws in his coat pocket and continued his journey.

  Half an hour after standing in the ghettolike Pakistani Grønland, he found himself in the neat, slightly sterile and very white West End land. Kaja Solness’s address was on Lyder Sagens Gate and turned out to be one of those large old timber houses that attracted a long line of Oslo-ites on the rare occasions one of them was for sale. Not to buy—very few could afford that—but to see, dream about and receive confirmation that Fagerborg really was what it purported to be: a neighborhood where the rich were not too rich, the money was not too new and no one had a swimming pool, electric garage doors or any other vulgar modern invention. For the Fagerborger, quite literally the “fine burghers,” did as they always had done here. In the summer they sat under apple trees in their large shaded gardens on the garden furniture that was as old, impractically large and stained black as the houses from which it had been carried. And when it was transported back and the days became shorter, candles were lit behind the leaded windows. On Lyder Sagens Gate there was a Yuletide atmosphere from October through March.

  The front gate gave a screech so loud that Harry hoped it made any need for a dog superfluous. The gravel crunched beneath his boots. He had been as happy as a child to be reunited with his boots when he found them in the closet, but now they were drenched right through.

  He went up the porch steps and pressed the bell. There was no nameplate beside it.

  In front of the door was a pair of pretty ladies’ shoes and a pair of men’s shoes. Size twelve, Harry estimated. Kaja’s husband was big, they seemed to suggest. For, naturally, she had a husband; he didn’t know why he had thought any differently. Because he had, hadn’t he? It was of no consequence. The door opened.

  “Harry?” She was wearing an open and much too large woolen jacket, faded jeans and felt slippers that were so old Harry could swear they had liver spots. No makeup. Just a surprised smile. Nevertheless she seemed to have been expecting him. Expected that he would like to see her this way. Of course, he had already seen it in her eyes in Hong Kong, the fascination so many women have for any man with a reputation, good or bad. Though he had not made a comprehensive analysis of every single thought that had led him to this door. Just as well he had saved himself the effort. Size twelve shoes. Or twelve and a half.

  “I got your address from Hagen,” Harry said. “You live within walking distance of my flat so I thought I would drop by instead of calling.”

  She smirked. “You don’t have a cell?”

  “Wrong.” Harry produced a red phone from his pocket. “I was given this by Hagen, but I’ve already forgotten the PIN. Am I disturbing you?”

  “No, no.” She opened the door wide and Harry stepped in.

  It was pathetic, but his heart had been beating a bit faster while he waited for her. Fifteen years ago that would have annoyed him, but he had resigned himself and accepted the banal fact that a woman’s beauty would always have this modicum of power over him.

  “I’m making coffee. Would you like some?”

  They had moved into the living room. The walls were covered with pictures and the shelves had so many books he doubted she could have read them all herself. The room had a distinctly masculine character. Large, angular furniture, a globe, a hookah, vinyl records on more shelves, maps and photographs of high, snow-covered mountains on the walls. Harry concluded that he was a great deal older than she was. A TV was on, but without the volume.

  “Marit Olsen is the main item on all the news broadcasts,” Kaja said, lifting the remote and switching off the TV. “Two of the opposition leaders stood up and demanded quick results. They said the government had been systematically dismantling the police force. Kripos won’t get much peace for the next few days.”

  “Yes please to the coffee,” Harry said, and Kaja scurried into the kitchen.

  He sat on the sofa. A John Fante book lay facedown on the coffee table, beside a pair of ladies’ reading glasses. Next to it were photos of the Frogner pool. Not of the crime scene itself, but of the people who had gath
ered outside the tape to rubberneck. Harry gave a grunt of satisfaction. Not only because she had taken work home, but because crime scene officers continued to take these photos. It had been Harry who insisted they always photograph the crowd. It was something he had learned at the FBI course about serial killings; the killer returning to the scene of a crime was no myth. The King brothers in San Antonio and the Kmart man had been arrested precisely because they couldn’t restrain themselves from returning to admire their handiwork, to see all the commotion they had caused, to feel how invulnerable they were. The photographers at Krimteknisk called it Hole’s Sixth Commandment. And, yes, there were nine other commandments. Harry riffled through the photos.

  “You don’t take milk, do you?” Kaja shouted from the kitchen.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you? At Heathrow—”

  “I mean yes, as in yes, you’re right, I don’t take milk.”

  “Aha. You’ve gone over to the Cantonese system.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve stopped using double negatives. Cantonese is more logical. You like logical.”

  “Is that right? About Cantonese?”

  “I don’t know.” She laughed from the kitchen. “I’m just trying to sound clever.”

  Harry could see that the photographer had been discreet; he’d shot from hip height, no flash. The spectators’ attention was directed toward the diving tower. Dull eyes, half-open mouths, as if they were bored of waiting for a glimpse of something dreadful, something for their albums, something with which they could scare the neighbors out of their wits. A man holding a cell phone up in the air; he was definitely taking photos. Harry took the magnifying glass from the pile of reports and scrutinized their faces one by one. He didn’t know what he was looking for. His brain was empty; it was the best way, so as not to miss whatever might be there.

  “Can you see anything?” She had taken up a position behind his chair and bent down to see. He caught a mild fragrance of lavender soap, the same he had smelled on the plane when she had fallen asleep on his shoulder.