The Leopard: An Inspector Harry Hole Novel

by Jo Nesbo

  They stepped into a broad, flat-bottomed boat, Bjørn with greater caution than the others.

  “It’s green here,” Kaja said as the officer pushed off from the jetty with a pole.

  “Yes,” he said, peering down into the water and pulling the cord to start the engine. “The ropery is over there, on the deep side. There’s a path, but the terrain is so steep that it’s best to go by boat.” He flicked forward the handle on the side of the engine. A bird of indeterminate species took off from a tree inside the bare forest and shrieked a warning.

  “I hate the sea,” Bjørn said to Harry, who could just hear his colleague above the hacking sound of the two-stroke outboard motor. They slipped through the gray afternoon light in a channel between the six-foot-high rushes. Crept past a pile of twigs that Harry assumed must have been a beaver’s den and out through an avenue of mangrovelike trees.

  “This is a lake,” Harry said. “Not the sea.”

  “Same shit,” Bjørn said, shifting closer to the middle of his seat. “Give me inland, cow muck and rocky mountains.”

  The channel widened, and there it lay in front of them: Lake Lyseren. They chugged past islands and islets from which winter-abandoned cabins with black windows seemed to be staring at them through wary eyes.

  “Basic cabins,” the officer said. “Here you’re free from the stress down on the gold coast, where you have to compete with your neighbor for the biggest boat or the most attractive cabin renovation.” He spat into the water.

  “What’s the name of that TV comic from Ytre Enebakk?” Bjørn shouted over the drone of the motor. “Cracked glasses and moped.”

  The officer sent Holm a blank look and shook his head slowly.

  “The ropery,” he said.

  In front of the bow, right down by the lake, Harry saw an old wooden building, oblong in shape, standing alone at the foot of a steep slope, dense forest on both sides. Beside the building, steel rails ran down the mountainside and disappeared into the black water. The red paint was peeling off the walls, with gaping spaces for windows and doors. Harry squinted. In the fading light it looked as if there were a person in white standing at a window staring at them.

  “Jeez, the ultimate haunted house.” Bjørn laughed.

  “That’s what they say,” said County Officer Skai, cutting the engine.

  In the sudden silence they could hear the echo of Bjørn’s laughter from the other side and a lone sheep bell reaching them from far across the lake.

  Kaja took the rope, jumped onto the shore and, being of a nautical bent herself, tied a half-hitch around a rotten green pole protruding from among the water lilies.

  The others got out of the boat and onto the huge rocks serving as a wharf. Then they entered through the doorway and found themselves in a deserted, narrow rectangular room smelling of tar and urine. It hadn’t been so easy to discern from the outside because the extremities of the building merged into the dense forest, but while the room was barely seven feet across, it must have been more than two hundred feet from end to end.

  “They stood at opposite ends of the building and twined the rope,” Kaja explained before Harry could ask.

  In one corner lay three empty bottles and signs of attempts to light a fire. On the facing wall, a net hung in front of a couple of loose boards.

  “No one wanted to take over after Simonsen,” Skai said, looking around. “It’s been empty ever since.”

  “What are the rails at the side of the building for?” Harry asked.

  “Two things. To raise and lower the boat he used to collect timber. And to hold the sticks underwater while they soaked. He tied the sticks to the iron carriage, which must be up in the boathouse. Then he cranked the carriage down under the water and wound it back up after a few weeks, when the wood was ready. Practical fellow, Simonsen.”

  They all gave a start at a sudden noise from the forest outside.

  “Sheep,” the officer said. “Or deer.”

  They followed him up a narrow wooden staircase to the first floor. An enormously long table stood in the center of the room. The corners of the room were enshrouded in darkness. The wind blew in through the windows—with borders of jagged glass set in the frames—making a low whistling sound, and it caused the woman’s bridal veil to flap. She stood looking out over the lake. Beneath the head and torso was the skeleton: a black iron stand on wheels.

  “Simonsen used her as a scarecrow,” Skai said, nodding toward the shop dummy.

  “Pretty creepy,” Kaja said, taking up a position beside Skai and shivering inside her coat.

  He cast a sideways glance at her, then gave a crooked smile. “The kids around here were terrified of her. The adults said that at full moon she walked around the district chasing the man who had jilted her on her wedding day. And you could hear the rusty wheels as she approached. I grew up right behind here, in Haga, you see.”

  “Did you?” asked Kaja, and Harry smothered a grin.

  “Yes,” said Skai. “By the way, this was the only woman known to be in Simonsen’s life. He was a bit of a recluse. But he could certainly make rope.”

  Behind them Bjørn Holm took down a coil of rope hanging from a nail.

  “Did I say you could touch anything?” the officer said without turning.

  Bjørn hurriedly put back the rope.

  “OK, boss,” Harry said, sending Skai a closed smile. “Can we touch anything?”

  The officer examined Harry. “You still haven’t told me what kind of case this is.”

  “It’s confidential,” Harry said. “Sorry. Fraud Squad. You know.”

  “That right? If you’re the Harry Hole I think you are, you used to work on murders.”

  “Well,” Harry said, “now it’s insider trading, tax evasion and fraud. One moves upward in life.”

  Officer Skai pinched an eye shut. A bird shrieked.

  “Of course, you’re right, Skai,” Kaja said with a sigh. “But I’m the person who has to deal with the red tape for the search warrant from the prosecutor. As you know, we’re understaffed and it would save me a lot of time if we could just …” She smiled with her tiny, pointed teeth and gestured toward the coil of rope.

  Skai looked at her. Rocked to and fro on his rubber heels a couple of times. Then he nodded.

  “I’ll wait in the boat,” he said.

  Bjørn set to work immediately. He placed the coil on the long table, opened the little knapsack he had with him, switched on a flashlight attached to a cord with a fishhook on the end and secured it between two boards in the ceiling. He took out his laptop and a portable microscope shaped like a hammer, plugged the microscope into the USB port on the laptop, checked it was transmitting pictures to the screen and clicked on an image he had transferred to the laptop before they’d departed.

  Harry stood beside the bride and gazed down at the lake. In the boat he could see the glow of a cigarette. He eyed the rails that went down into the water. The deep end. Harry had never liked swimming in freshwater, especially after the time he and Øystein had skipped school, gone to Lake Hauktjern in Østmarka and jumped off the Devil’s Tip, which people said was forty feet high. And Harry—seconds before he hit the water—had seen a snake gliding through the depths beneath him. Then he was enveloped by the freezing cold bottle-green water, and in his panic he swallowed half the lake and was sure he would never see daylight or breathe air again.

  Harry smelled the fragrance that told him Kaja was standing behind him.

  “Bingo,” he heard Bjørn Holm whisper.

  Harry turned. “Same type of rope?”

  “No doubt about it,” Bjørn said, holding the microscope against the rope end and pressing a key for high-resolution images. “Linden and elm. Same thickness and length of fiber. But the bingo is reserved for the recently sliced rope end.”

  “What?”

  Bjørn Holm pointed to the screen. “The photo on the left is the one I brought with me. It shows the rope from the Frogner pool, magnified tw
enty-five times. And on this rope I have a perfect …”

  Harry closed his eyes so as to relish to the full the word he knew was coming.

  “… match.”

  He kept his eyes closed. The rope Marit Olsen was hanged with not only had been made here, but had been cut from the rope they had before them. And it was a recent cut. Not so long ago, he had been standing where they were standing. Harry sniffed the air.

  An all-embracing darkness had fallen. Harry could hardly make out anything white in the window as they left.

  Kaja sat in the front of the boat with him. She had to lean close so that he could hear her over the drone of the motor.

  “The person who collected the rope must have known his way around this area. And there can’t be many links in the chain between that person and the killer …”

  “I don’t think there are any links at all,” Harry said. “The cut was recent. And there are not many reasons for rope to change hands.”

  “Local knowledge—lives nearby or has a cabin here,” Kaja mused aloud. “Or he grew up here.”

  “But why come all the way to a disused ropery to get a few yards of rope?” Harry asked. “How much does a long rope cost in a shop? A couple of hundred kroner?”

  “Perhaps he happened to be in the vicinity and knew the rope was there.”

  “OK, but in the vicinity would mean he must have been staying in one of the nearby cabins. For everyone else it’s a fair-size boat trip. Are you making …?”

  “Yes, I’m making a list of the closest neighbors. By the way, I tracked down the volcano expert you asked for. A nerd up at the Geological Institute. Felix Røst. He seems to do a bit of volcano-spotting. Traveling all over the world to look at volcanoes and eruptions and that sort of thing.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “Just his sister, who lives with him. She asked me to email or text. He doesn’t communicate in any other way, she said. Anyway, he was out playing chess. I sent him the stones and the information.”

  They advanced at a snail’s pace through the shallow channel to the pontoon. Bjørn held up the flashlight like a lantern to light their way through the hazy mist drifting across the water. The officer cut the motor.

  “Look!” whispered Kaja, leaning even closer to Harry. He could smell her scent as he followed her index finger. From the rushes behind the jetty emerged a large, lone white swan, cutting through the veil of mist into the flashlight’s beam.

  “Isn’t it just … beautiful,” she whispered, entranced, then laughed and fleetingly squeezed his hand.

  Skai accompanied them to the treatment plant. Then they got into the Volvo Amazon and were about to set off when Bjørn feverishly wound down the window and shouted to the officer: “Fritjof!”

  Skai stopped and turned slowly. The light from a street lamp fell onto his heavy, expressionless face.

  “The funny guy on TV,” Bjørn shouted. “Fritjof from Ytre Enebakk.”

  “Fritjof?” Skai said and spat. “Never heard of him.”

  Twenty-five minutes later, as the Amazon turned onto the highway by the incinerator in Grønmo, Harry made a decision.

  “We must leak this information to Kripos,” he said.

  “What?” Bjørn and Kaja said in unison.

  “I’ll talk to Beate, then she’ll pass the message on so that it looks like her people at Krimteknisk have discovered the business with the rope and not us.”

  “Why?” Kaja asked.

  “If the killer lives in the Lyseren area, there’ll have to be a door-to-door search. We don’t have the means or the manpower for that.”

  Bjørn Holm smacked the steering wheel.

  “I know,” Harry said. “But the most important thing is that he’s caught, not who catches him.”

  They drove on in silence, with the false ring of the words hanging in the air.

  20

  Øystein

  No electricity. Harry stood in the dark hall flipping the light switch on and off. Did the same in the sitting room.

  Then he sat down in the wing chair, staring into the black void.

  After he had sat there for a while, his cell rang.

  “Hole.”

  “Felix Røst.”

  “Mm?” Harry said. The voice sounded as if it belonged to a slender, petite woman.

  “Frida Larsen, his sister. He asked me to call and say that the stones you found are mafic, basalt lava. All right?”

  “Just a minute. What does that mean? Mafic?”

  “It’s hot lava, over eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, low viscosity, which thins it and allows it to spread over a wide distance on eruption.”

  “Could it have come from Oslo?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? Oslo is built on lava.”

  “Old lava. This lava is recent.”

  “How recent?”

  He heard her put her hand over the phone and speak. But he couldn’t hear any other voices. She must have received an answer, though, because soon afterward she was back.

  “He says anything from five to fifty years. But if you were thinking of establishing which volcano it comes from, you’ve got quite a job on your hands. There are more than fifteen hundred active volcanoes in the world. And those are just the ones we know about. If there are any other queries, Felix can be contacted by email. Your assistant has the address.”

  “But …”

  She had already hung up.

  He considered calling back, but changed his mind and punched in another number.

  “Oslo Taxi.”

  “Hi, Øystein, this is Harry H.”

  “You’re kidding. Harry H. is dead.”

  “Not quite.”

  “OK, then I must be dead.”

  “Feel like driving me from Sofies Gate to my childhood home?”

  “No, but I’ll do it anyway. Just have to do this trip.” Øystein’s laugh morphed into a cough. “Harry H.! Damn … Call you when I’m there.”

  Harry hung up, went into the bedroom, packed a bag in the light from the street lamp outside the window and chose a couple of CDs from the sitting room in the light from his cell. Carton of smokes, handcuffs, service pistol.

  He sat in the wing chair, making use of the dark to repeat the revolver exercise. Started the stopwatch on his wrist, flicked out the cylinder of his Smith & Wesson, emptied and loaded. Four cartridges out, four in, without a speed-loader, just nimble fingers. Flicked the cylinder back in so that the first cartridge was first in line. Stop. Nine sixty-six. Almost three seconds over the record. He opened the cylinder. He had messed up. The first chamber ready to fire was one of the two empty ones. He was dead. He repeated the exercise. Nine fifty. And dead again. When Øystein called, after twenty minutes, he was down to eight seconds and had died six times.

  “Coming,” Harry said.

  He walked into the kitchen. Looked at the cupboard under the sink. Hesitated. Then he took down the photos of Rakel and Oleg and put them in his inside pocket.

  “Hong Kong?” sniffed Øystein Eikeland. He turned his bloated alcoholic face, with its huge hooter and sad, drooping mustache, to Harry in the seat next to him. “What the hell d’you do there?”

  “You know me,” Harry said as Øystein stopped on red outside the Radisson SAS Hotel.

  “I fucking do not,” Øystein said, sprinkling tobacco into his rolling paper. “How would I?”

  “Well, we grew up together. Do you remember?”

  “So? You were already a fucking enigma then, Harry.”

  The rear door was torn open and a man wearing a coat got in. “Airport express, main station. Quick.”

  “Taxi’s taken,” Øystein said without turning.

  “Nonsense—the sign on the roof’s lit.”

  “Hong Kong sounds groovy. Why d’you come home, actually?”

  “I beg your pardon,” said the man in the backseat.

  Øystein poked the cigarette between his lips and lit up. “Tresko called to invite me
to a get-together tonight.”

  “Tresko doesn’t have any friends,” Harry said.

  “He doesn’t, does he. So I asked him, ‘Who are your friends?’ ‘You,’ he said, and asked me, ‘And yours, Øystein?’ ‘You,’ I answered. ‘So it’s just the two of us.’ We’d forgotten all about you, Harry. That’s what happens when you go to …” He funneled his lips and, in a staccato voice, said, “Hong Kong!”

  “Hey!” came a shout from the backseat. “If you’re done, perhaps we might …”

  The light changed to green, and Øystein accelerated away.

  “Are you coming, then? It’s at Tresko’s place.”

  “Stinks of toe-fart there, Øystein.”

  “He’s got a full fridge.”

  “Sorry—I’m not in a party mood.”

  “Party mood?” Øystein snorted, smacking the wheel with his hand. “You don’t know what a party mood is, Harry. You always backed off parties. Do you remember? We’d bought some beers, intending to go to some fancy address in Nordstrand with loads of women. And you suggested you, me and Tresko go to the bunkers instead and drink on our own.”

  “Hey, this isn’t the way to the airport express!” came a whine from the backseat.

  Øystein braked for red again, tossed his wispy shoulder-length hair to the side and addressed the backseat. “And that was where we ended up. Got drunk and that fella started singing ‘No Surrender’ until Tresko chucked empty bottles at him.”

  “Honest to God!” the man cried, tapping his forefinger on the glass of a TAG Heuer watch. “I have to catch the last plane to Stockholm.”

  “The bunkers are great,” Harry said. “Best view in Oslo.”

  “Yep,” Øystein said. “If the Allies had attacked there, the Germans would’ve shot them to bits.”

  “Right.” Harry grinned.

  “You know, we had a standing agreement, him and me and Tresko,” Øystein said, but the suit was now desperately scanning the rain for vacant taxis. “If the fucking Allies come, we’ll fucking shoot the meat off their carcasses. Like this.” Øystein pointed an imaginary machine gun at the suit and fired a salvo. The suit stared in horror at the crazy taxi driver, whose chattering noises were causing small foam-white drops of spit to land on his dark, freshly ironed suit trousers. With a little gasp he managed to open the car door and stumble out into the rain.