The Leopard: An Inspector Harry Hole Novel

by Jo Nesbo

  She sent him a sideways glance as the shadows of the next tunnel passed over them. They crossed Majorstuen and went up Slemdalsveien, past Vinderen, and she saw him staring out of the window, at the tram stop, a naked expression of torment on his face. She felt an urge to place a hand over his, to say something, anything, that could remove that expression. She looked at his hand. It was holding the revolver, squeezing it, as though it were all he had. This could not go on; something was going to burst. Had already burst.

  They climbed higher and higher; the town lay beneath them. They crossed the tram lines and then the lights began to flash behind them and the barrier was lowered.

  They were on Holmenveien.

  “Who’s coming with me to the door, Milano?” Harry shouted to the passenger seat in the front.

  “Delta Three and Delta Four,” Milano shouted back, turning and pointing to a man with a large figure 3 chalked onto the chest and back of his combat suit.

  “OK,” Harry said. “And the rest?”

  “Two men on each side of the house. Procedure Dyke one-four-five.”

  Kaja knew this was code for the formation. It had been borrowed from American football, and the aim was to communicate quickly without anyone else understanding, in case they had managed to tune in to the radio frequencies that Delta used. They came to a halt a couple of houses down from Leike’s. Six of the men checked their MP5’s and jumped out. Kaja saw them move up through the neighbors’ large yards of brown, withered grass, bare apple trees and the tall hedges they had a proclivity for in west Oslo. Kaja checked her watch. Forty seconds had passed when Milano’s radio crackled. “Everyone in position.”

  The driver released the clutch, and they drove slowly toward the house. Tony Leike’s recently acquired home was yellow, a single-story building, impressively large, but the address was more resplendent than the architecture, which lay somewhere between functionalist and a wooden box, as far as Kaja could judge.

  They stopped outside two garage doors at the end of a gravel drive leading to the front door. Several years back, during a hostage crisis in Vestfold, where Delta had surrounded a house, the hostage takers had escaped by strolling down a path from the house into the garage, starting up the homeowner’s car and simply driving off, to the open-mouthed amazement of the heavily armed police bystanders.

  “Stay back and follow me,” Harry said to Kaja. “Next time it’s your turn.”

  They got out and Harry immediately made for the house, with the two other policemen one step behind and to the side, in a triangular formation. Kaja could hear from Harry’s voice that his pulse was accelerated. Now she could see it in his body language, too, from the tenseness of his neck, from the exaggeratedly supple way he was moving.

  They went up the steps. Harry rang the bell. The other two had positioned themselves at each side of the door, backs against the wall.

  Kaja counted. Harry had told her in the car that in the FBI manual it said you had to ring or knock, shout, “Police!” and “Please open up!” repeat and then wait ten seconds before you entered. The Norwegian police had no such precise instructions, but that didn’t mean there weren’t guidelines.

  On this afternoon on Holmenveien, however, none of them was in evidence.

  The door burst open. Kaja automatically recoiled a step when she saw the Rasta hat in the doorway, then saw Harry’s shoulders swivel and heard the sound of fist on flesh.

  42

  Beavis

  The reaction had been instinctive; Harry had simply not been able to prevent it.

  When Forensics Officer Bjørn Holm’s moonlike face had appeared in Tony Leike’s doorway and Harry had seen the other officers in full swing behind him, he realized in a flash what had happened and everything went black.

  He just felt the punch register along his arm into his shoulder and then the pain in his knuckles. Opening his eyes again, he saw Bjørn Holm on his knees in the hall with blood streaming from his nose into his mouth and dripping from his chin.

  The two Delta officers had leapt forward and pointed their weapons at Holm, but were obviously in a state of bewilderment. They had probably seen his familiar Rasta hat before and were aware the other men in white were crime scene officers.

  “Report back that the situation is under control,” Harry said to the man with the figure 3 on his chest. “And that the suspect has been arrested. By Mikael Bellman.”

  Harry slumped in the chair with his legs stretched out as far as Gunnar Hagen’s desk.

  “It’s very simple, boss. Bellman found out we were about to arrest Tony Leike. For Christ’s sake, they’ve got the public prosecutor’s office right across the street, in the same building as Krimteknisk. All he had to do was amble over and pick up a blue chit from one of the lawyers there. He was probably done in two minutes, while I waited for two fucking hours!”

  “You don’t need to shout,” Hagen said.

  “You don’t need to, but I do!” Harry shouted, banging the armrest. “Shit, shit, shit!”

  “You should be happy Holm’s not going to report you. Why did you hit him, anyway? Is he the leak?”

  “Anything else you wanted, boss?”

  Hagen looked at his inspector. Then he shook his head. “Take a couple of days off, Harry.”

  Truls Berntsen had been called a lot of things in his childhood. Most of the nicknames were forgotten now. But he had been given a name soon after he finished school in the early nineties that had stuck: Beavis. The cartoon idiot on MTV. Blond hair, underbite and grunted laugh. OK, maybe he did laugh like that. Had ever since primary school, especially when someone was given a beating. Especially when he himself was given a beating. He had read in a comic that the guy who made Beavis and Butt-Head was named Judge; he couldn’t recall the first name. But at any rate, this Judge guy said he imagined that Beavis’s father was a drunkard who beat his son. Truls Berntsen remembered he had just thrown the comic on the floor and left the shop, laughing this grunt laughter.

  He had two uncles who were in the police force, and he had managed to satisfy the entrance requirements by the skin of his ass and with two letters of recommendation. And scraped through the exam with at least one helping hand from the guy at the next desk. It was the least he could do; they had been pals since they were small. Sort of pals. To be honest, Mikael Bellman had been his boss since they were twelve years old, when they met on a large building site that was being dynamited in Manglerud. Bellman had caught him trying to set fire to a dead rat. And had shown him how much more fun it was to stuff a stick of dynamite down the rat’s throat. Truls had even been allowed to light it. And since that day he had followed Mikael Bellman wherever he went—when he was given permission. Mikael knew how to navigate the things Truls did not: school, gym class. And how to talk so that no one would give you any shit. He even had girls; one of them was older and had tits Mikael was allowed to stroke as much as he liked. There was only one thing Truls was better at: taking a beating. Mikael always backed down when any of the bigger boys found it hard to accept that the show-off had outdone them in the art of bad-mouthing and went for him with clenched fists. Then Mikael shoved Truls in front of him. For Truls could take a beating. He had plenty of training from home. They could knock him around until blood was drawn, but he still stood there with his grunted laugh, which just made them even angrier. But he couldn’t stop himself; he simply had to laugh. He knew that afterward he would receive a pat on the shoulder from Mikael, and if it was a Sunday, Mikael might say that Julle and TV were having another race, and they would go stand on the bridge below the Ryen intersection, smell the sun-baked pavement and listen to the Kawasaki 1000cc engines revving up as the cheerleaders screamed and shouted. And then Julle’s and TV’s bikes would tear down Sunday’s traffic-free highways and pass beneath them and on to the tunnel and Bryn, and they might—if Mikael was in a good mood and Truls’s mother was working a shift at Aker University Hospital—go and eat Sunday lunch with Fru Bellman.

  Once
Mikael had rung the bell at Truls’s house and his father had shouted that Jesus had come to collect his disciple.

  They had never argued. That is, Truls had not retaliated if Mikael was in a stinking mood and took it out on him. Not even at the party when Mikael had called him Beavis and everyone had laughed, and Truls had instinctively known that the name would stick. He had retaliated only once. The time Mikael had called his father one of the drunks from the Kadok factory. Then Truls had gone for Mikael with a raised fist. Mikael had curled up with an arm over his head, told him to take it easy, laughed and said he was just joking, he was sorry. But afterward it was Truls who had been sorry and apologized.

  One day Mikael and Truls had gone into one of the gas stations where they knew Julle and TV stole fuel. Julle and TV would fill the Kawasaki tanks from the self-service pumps while their girls sat on the back with their denim jackets casually tied around their waists, covering the license plates. Then the boys would jump on their bikes and ride off full-throttle.

  Mikael gave the owner of the gas station the full names and addresses of Julle and TV, but of just one of the girls, TV’s girlfriend. The owner had looked skeptical, wondering whether he hadn’t seen Truls’s face before on a CCTV camera; at any rate he resembled the lad who had stolen a jerrican of gasoline not long before the empty workmen’s shed at Manglerud had gone up in flames. Mikael had said he didn’t want any reward for the information; he just wanted the guilty parties held responsible for their actions. He assumed the owner was aware of his social duty. The owner had nodded, somewhat surprised. Mikael had that effect on people. As they left, Mikael said he was going to apply to police college after school and Beavis should consider doing the same—there were even policemen in his family.

  Later, Mikael had gotten together with Ulla, and Truls and he hadn’t seen so much of each other. But after school and police college they had been employed by the same police station in Stovner, a real east Oslo suburb, with gang crimes, burglaries and even the odd murder. After a year Mikael had married Ulla and been promoted. Truls, or Beavis, as he had been called from day three, roughly, reported to him, and the future had looked good for Truls and radiant for Mikael. Until some knucklehead, a civilian temp in the payroll office, had accused Bellman of smashing his jaw after the Christmas party. He had no proof, and Truls knew for certain that Mikael had not done it. But in all the hubbub Mikael had applied for a move anyway, been accepted at Europol and moved to the head office in The Hague, where he soon became a star, too.

  When Mikael returned to Norway and Kripos, the second thing he did was to ring Truls and ask: “Beavis, are you ready to blow up rats again?”

  The first was to employ Jussi.

  Jussi Kolkka was a an expert in half a dozen martial arts whose names you forget before they have been fully articulated. He had worked at Europol for four years, and before that he had been a policeman in Helsinki. Jussi Kolkka had been forced to resign from Europol because he had crossed the line during an investigation into a series of rapes targeting teenage girls in southern Europe. Kolkka had, it was said, beaten up a sex offender so badly that even his lawyer had had trouble recognizing him. But he had no trouble threatening Europol with a lawsuit. Truls had tried to get Jussi to tell him the gory details, but he had just stared into the distance without speaking. Fair enough—Truls wasn’t the talkative type, either. And he had noticed that the less you spoke, the greater the chance people underestimated you. Which was not always a bad thing. Nevertheless, tonight they had reason to celebrate. Mikael, he, Jussi and Kripos had won. And in Mikael’s absence they would have to call the shots themselves.

  “Shut up!” shouted Truls, pointing to the TV attached to the wall above the bar at Kafé Justisen. And heard his own nervous, grunting laugh when his colleagues actually did what he said. There was silence around the tables and the bar. Everyone was staring at the newsreader, who looked straight into the camera and announced what they had been waiting for.

  “Today Kripos arrested a man suspected of killing six people, including Marit Olsen.”

  Cheers broke out and mugs of beer were swung, silencing the newsreader until a deep voice with a Finnish-Swedish accent boomed, “Shut up!”

  The Kripos officers obeyed again and focused their attention on Mikael Bellman, who was standing outside their building in Bryn with a furry microphone thrust into his face.

  “This person is a suspect, will be interviewed by Kripos and thereafter appear in court for a preliminary hearing,” Mikael Bellman said.

  “Does that mean you believe the police have solved this case?”

  “Finding the perpetrator and getting him convicted are two different things,” Bellman said with a tiny smile at the corners of his mouth. “However, our investigation at Kripos has uncovered so much circumstantial evidence and so many coincidences that we considered it appropriate to make an immediate arrest, as there was a risk of further crimes and of tampering with evidence.”

  “The man you have arrested is in his thirties. Can you tell us any more about him?”

  “He has a previous conviction for violence; that is all I can say.”

  “On the Internet there are rumors circulating about the man’s identity. Suggesting he’s a well-known investor who, among other things, is engaged to the daughter of a famous shipowner. Can you confirm these rumors, Bellman?”

  “I don’t think I have to confirm or deny anything except that we at Kripos are fairly confident that we will soon have this case solved.”

  The reporter turned to the camera for a wrap-up, but was drowned out by the round of applause at Justisen.

  Truls ordered another beer as one of the detectives got up onto a chair and proclaimed that Crime Squad could suck his dick, at least the tip, if they said “Pretty please.” Laughter resounded around the packed, sweaty, fetid room.

  At that moment the door opened and in the mirror Truls saw a figure fill the entrance.

  He felt a strange excitement at the sight, a tremulous certainty that something was going to happen, that someone would be hurt.

  It was Harry Hole.

  Tall, broad-shouldered, lean-faced, with deep-set bloodshot eyes, he just stood there. And although no one shouted for the crowd to shut up, the silence spread from the front to the back of Justisen, until a last shh was heard to quiet two garrulous forensics officers. When the silence was complete, Hole spoke.

  “So you’re celebrating the job you succeeded in stealing from us, are you?”

  The words were low, almost a whisper, and yet every syllable reverberated around the room.

  “You’re celebrating having a boss who’s prepared to step over dead bodies—those that have piled up outside and those that will soon be carried from the sixth floor at Police HQ—just so that he can be the Sun King of fucking Bryn. Well, here’s a hundred-krone note.”

  Truls could see Hole waving a bill.

  “You don’t have to steal this. Here, buy yourselves beer, forgiveness, a dildo for Bellman’s threesome …” He crumpled up the bill and tossed it onto the floor. From the corner of his eye he could see Jussi was already moving. “Or another snitch.”

  Hole lurched to the side to gain balance, and it was then that Truls realized that the guy—despite enunciating with the diction of a priest—was as stewed as a prune.

  The next moment Hole performed a half-pirouette as Jussi Kolkka’s right hook hit him on the chin, and then a deep, almost gallant bow, as the Finn’s left buried itself in his solar plexus. Truls guessed that in a few seconds Hole—when he had gotten some air back in his lungs—was going to vomit. In here. And Jussi was obviously thinking the same—that he would be better outside. It was a wonder to see how the tubby, almost log-shaped Finn lifted his foot high with the suppleness of a ballerina, placed it against Harry’s shoulder and gently pushed so that the crumpled detective rocked backward and through the door from which he’d come.

  The drunkest and youngest of them howled with laughter, but Truls grunt
ed. A couple of the older ones yelled, and one screamed that Kolkka should damn well behave himself. But no one did anything. Truls knew why. Everyone here remembered the story. Harry had dragged the uniform through the dirt, shat in the nest, taken the life of one of their best men.

  Jussi marched solemnly toward the bar, as if he had carried out the garbage. Truls whinnied and grunted. He would never understand Finns or Samis or Eskimos or whatever the hell they were.

  From farther back in the room a man had stood up and made his way to the door. Truls hadn’t seen him at Kripos before, but he had the circumspect eye of a policeman under all that dark, curly hair.

  “Tell me if you need any help with him, Sheriff,” someone shouted from his table.

  Three minutes later, when Celine Dion had been turned back up and the conversation had resumed its previous levels, Truls ventured forth, put his foot on the hundred-krone note and took it to the bar.

  Harry had his breath back. And he vomited. Once, twice. Then he collapsed again. The pavement was so cold it stung his ribs through his shirt and so heavy he seemed to be supporting it and not vice versa. Bloodred spots and wriggling black worms danced in front of his eyes. “Hole?”

  Harry heard the voice, but knew that if he showed he was conscious it would be open season for a kicking. So he kept his eyes closed.

  “Hole?” The voice had come closer and he felt a hand on his shoulder.

  Harry also knew that the alcohol would have reduced his speed, accuracy and ability to judge distances, but he did it anyway. He opened his eyes, twisted over and aimed for the larynx. Then he collapsed again.

  He had missed by a foot and a half.

  “I’ll get you a taxi,” the voice said.

  “Fuck off, you fucking bastard,” Harry groaned.

  “I’m not Kripos,” the voice said. “My name’s Krongli. The county officer from Ustaoset.”