The Leopard: An Inspector Harry Hole Novel

by Jo Nesbo

  “Nothing, I’m afraid.”

  “Tony has a habit of disappearing, I understand from my daughter.”

  Harry thought he detected a certain reluctance to articulate the first name of his future son-in-law. The shipowner fell heavily into a rose-colored chair opposite Harry.

  “Have you … any personal theories, Herr Galtung?”

  “Theories?” Anders Galtung shook his head, making his jowls quiver. “I don’t know him well enough to form theories. Gone to the mountains, gone to Africa—what do I know?”

  “Mm. In fact, I came here to speak to your daughter—”

  “Lene’ll be right here,” Galtung interrupted. “I just wanted to inquire first.”

  “Inquire about what?”

  “About what I said, whether there was anything new. And … and whether the police are sure the man has a clear conscience.”

  Harry noticed that “Tony” had been exchanged for “the man” and knew his first instinct had not deceived him: The father-in-law was not enamored of his daughter’s choice.

  “Do you think he does, Galtung?”

  “Me? I would have thought I was showing trust. After all, I am in the process of investing a considerable sum in this Congo project of his. A very considerable sum.”

  “So a kid in rags knocks on the door and gets a princess plus half a kingdom, like in a fairy tale?”

  There was a sudden silence, as Galtung eyed Harry.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “And maybe your daughter is exerting some pressure on you to invest. The venture is pretty dependent on finance, isn’t it?”

  Galtung opened his arms. “I’m a shipowner. Risk is what I live off.”

  “And could die of.”

  “Two sides of the same coin. In risk markets one man’s loss is another man’s gain. So far the others have lost, and I hope this trend will continue.”

  “Other people losing?”

  “Shipowning is a family business, and if Leike is going to be family, we have to ensure …” He paused as the door opened. She was a tall, blond girl with her father’s coarse features and her mother’s turquoise eyes, but without her father’s bluff farmer-made-good air or her mother’s dignified superiority. She walked with a hunched bearing, as if to reduce her height, so as not to stand out, and she observed her shoes rather than Harry when she shook hands and introduced herself as Lene Gabrielle Galtung.

  She didn’t have a lot to say. And even less to ask. She seemed to cower under her father’s gaze every time she answered Harry’s questions, and Harry wondered whether his assumption that she had forced her father to invest might be wrong.

  Twenty minutes later Harry expressed his gratitude, stood up and, right on invisible cue, there she was again, the woman with the turquoise eyes.

  When she opened the front door for him, the cold surged in and Harry stopped to button up his coat. He looked at her.

  “Where do you believe Tony Leike is, Fru Galtung?”

  “I don’t believe anything,” she said.

  Perhaps she answered too quickly, perhaps there was a twitch at the corner of her eye, perhaps it was just Harry’s intense desire to find something, anything, but he was convinced she was telling the truth. The second thing she said did not allow any room for doubt.

  “And I am not Fru Galtung. She is upstairs.”

  Mikael Bellman adjusted the microphone in front of him and surveyed the audience. There was a hushed whisper, but all eyes were directed toward the podium, fearful of missing anything. In the packed room he recognized the journalist from Stavanger Aftenblad and Roger Gjendem from Aftenposten. He could hear Ninni, who was wearing a freshly ironed uniform, as usual. Someone counted down the seconds to the start, which was normal for live broadcasts of press conferences.

  “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. We have called this press conference to give you an update on what we are doing. Any questions …”

  Chuckles all around.

  “… will be answered at the end. I will pass the podium over now to the officer leading the investigation, POB Mikael Bellman.”

  Bellman cleared his throat. Full turnout. The TV channels had been given permission to place their microphones on the podium table.

  “Thank you. Let me start by being a party pooper. I can see from the attendance and your faces that we may have ratcheted up your expectations a little too high in calling you here. There will be no announcement of a final breakthrough in the investigation.” Bellman saw the disappointment on their faces and heard scattered groans. “We are here in order to fulfill the desire you expressed to be kept informed. I apologize if you had more important things planned for today.”

  Bellman gave a wry smile, heard a few journalists laugh and knew that he had already been forgiven.

  Mikael Bellman gave them the gist of where the investigation stood. That is, he repeated their success stories, such as the rope being traced to a building by Lake Lyseren, finding another victim, Adele Vetlesen, and identifying the murder weapon used in two of the murders: a so-called Leopold’s apple. Old news. He saw one of the journalists stifle a yawn. Mikael Bellman looked down at the papers in front of him. At the script. Because that was what it was, a script for a bit of theater, each and every word written down, weighed carefully, gone over. Not too much, not too little; the bait should smell, but it shouldn’t stink.

  “Finally, something about the witnesses,” he began, and the press corps sat up in their chairs. “As you know, we have asked anyone who was at the Håvass cabin on the same night as the murder victims to come forward. And one person by the name of Iska Peller has come forward. She is arriving by plane from Sydney tonight, and she will proceed to the cabin with one of our detectives tomorrow. We will try to reconstruct the crime scene as faithfully as possible.”

  Normally, they would never have mentioned the name of the witness, but it was important here that the man they were addressing—the murderer—understand that they had indeed found someone from the guest book. Bellman had not laid special emphasis on the word “one” when he mentioned the detective, but that was the message. There would be just two people, the witness and an ordinary detective. In a cabin. Far from civilization.

  “We hope, of course, that Miss Peller will be able to give us a description of the other guests present that night.”

  They had had a long discussion about the wording. They wanted to sow the seed that the witness could bring down the murderer. At the same time Harry thought it important that they not arouse too much suspicion with the witness being accompanied by only one detective, and that the pithy introduction “Finally, something about the witnesses” and the downplayed “We hope, of course” signal that the police did not consider this an important witness who would therefore require high-level protection. They hoped the killer would be of a different opinion.

  “What do you think she may have seen? And can you spell the witness’s name?”

  This was the Rogaland journalist. Ninni leaned forward to remind them that questions would be at the end, but Mikael shook his head.

  “We’ll have to see what she remembers when she gets to the cabin,” Bellman said, stretching toward the microphone labelled NRK. The state channel. Nationwide. “She will be going up there with one of our most experienced detectives and will be there for twenty-four hours.”

  He looked at Harry Hole standing at the back, saw him give a slow nod. He had driven the point home. Twenty-four hours. The bait was prepared and the trap set. Bellman let his gaze wander farther. It found the Pelican. She had been the only one to protest, to consider it scandalous that they were deliberately setting out to mislead the press. He had asked the group to take five and had talked to her privately. Afterward she had concurred with the majority view. Ninni opened the floor for questions. The assembly came to life, but Mikael Bellman relaxed and made ready to give vague answers, glib formulations and the ever-useful “I’m afraid we can’t go into that at this phase of the investigation.”<
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  His legs were freezing, so frozen that they were completely numb. How could that be? When the rest of his body was burning? He had screamed so loud he had no voice left; his throat was dry, dried out, riven asunder, an open wound with blood singed to red dust. There was a smell of burned hair and flesh. The stove had seared through his flannel shirt into his back, and as he screamed and screamed they fused. He melted as if he were a tin soldier. Feeling that the pain and the heat had begun to eat into his consciousness and that he was finally slipping into oblivion, he awoke with a start. The man had poured a bucket of cold water over him. The sudden relief had caused him to cry again. Then he heard the hiss of boiling water between his back and the stove and the pain returned with renewed vigor.

  “More water?”

  He looked up. The man stood over him with another bucket. The mist before his eyes cleared, and for a couple of seconds he saw him with total clarity. The light from the flames through the holes in the stove flickered on his face, making the beads of sweat on his forehead glisten.

  “It’s very simple. All I need to know is who. Is it someone in the police? Is it one of those who were at Håvass that night?”

  “Which night?” he sobbed.

  “You know which night. They’re almost all dead now. Come on.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have anything to do with this—you have to believe me. Water. Please. Plea—”

  “—se? Please as in … please?”

  The smell. The smell of his body burning. The words he stuttered were no more than a hoarse whisper. “It w-was … just m-me.”

  Gentle laughter. “Smart. You’re trying to make it sound like you would do anything to avoid the pain. So that I believe you when you can’t cough up the name of your collaborator. But I know you can stand more. You’re made of tougher stock.”

  “Charlotte—”

  The man swung the poker. He didn’t even feel the blow. Everything went black for one wonderfully long second. Then he was back in hell.

  “She’s dead!” the man yelled. “Come up with something better.”

  “I meant the other one,” he said, trying to get his brain to work. He remembered now; he had a good memory—why was it failing him? Was he really in such bad shape? “She’s Australian—”

  “You’re lying!”

  He felt his eyes wander again. Another shower of water. A moment of clarity.

  The voice. “Who? How?”

  “Kill me! Mercy! I … you know I’m not protecting anyone. Lord Jesus, why should I?”

  “I know nothing of the sort.”

  “So why not kill me? I killed her. Do you hear me? Do it. Revenge is thine.”

  The man put down the bucket, flopped into a chair, leaned forward with his elbows on the armrests and chin resting on his fists, and answered slowly, as though he hadn’t heard what had been said, but was thinking about something else. “You know, I’ve dreamed about this for so many years. And now, now we’re here … I had been hoping it would taste sweeter.”

  The man struck him with the poker one more time. Tilted his head and studied him. With a sour expression, probingly, he stabbed the poker into his ribs.

  “Perhaps I lack imagination. Perhaps this justice lacks the appropriate spice?”

  Something made the man turn. To the radio. It was on low. The man went over to it, turned up the volume. News. Voices in a large room. Something about the cabin in Håvass. A witness. Reconstruction. He froze; his legs were no longer there. He closed his eyes and again prayed to his god. Not to be liberated from the pain, as he had been doing until now. He prayed for forgiveness, for all his sins to be cleansed by the blood of Jesus, for someone else to bear all that he had done. He had taken a life. Yes, he had. He prayed that he would be bathed in the blood of forgiveness. And then be allowed to die.

  56

  Decoy

  A hell of lights. Even with sunglasses Harry’s eyes smarted. The sun was shining on the snow, which was shining back at the sun; it was like looking into an ocean of diamonds, of frantically glittering lights. Harry retreated from the window, although he was aware that, seen from the outside, the panes were black, impenetrable mirrors. He checked his watch. They had arrived at Håvass the previous night. Jussi Kolkka had installed himself in the cabin with Harry and Kaja and the others had dug themselves into the snow in two groups of four at opposite ends of the valley, separated by about twenty miles.

  There were three reasons for choosing to lay the bait at Håvass. First of all, because their being there made sense. Second, the killer would, they hoped, think he knew the area well enough to feel comfortable about an attack. Third, because it was a perfect trap. The dip where the cabin lay allowed entry from only the northeast and the south. In the east the mountain was too steep and in the west there were so many precipices and crevices that you had to know the terrain very well to make any progress at all.

  Harry grabbed the binoculars and tried to spot the others, but all he could see was white. And lights. He had spoken to Mikael Bellman, who was south of him, and Milano, who was in the north. Usually they would have used their cell phones, but up here in the uninhabited mountains the only network that had coverage was Telenor. The former state-owned telephone monopoly had had the capital to build base stations on every wind-blown crag, but since several of the policemen, including Harry, subscribed to other companies, they were using walkie-talkies. So that they could get hold of him in case anything happened at Rikshospital, Harry had left a message on his voice mail before he left, saying that he would have no network coverage, and had given Milano’s Telenor number.

  Bellman claimed they hadn’t been cold during the night, that the combination of sleeping bags, heat-reflecting ground pads and paraffin stoves was so efficient that they’d had to take off clothing. And that now-melted water was dripping from the ceiling of the snow caves they had scraped out from the side of the mountain.

  The press conference had been so well covered on TV and radio and in the newspapers that you would have had to be absolutely indifferent to the case not to know that Iska Peller and a police officer had gone to Håvass. Every now and then Kolkka and Kaja went out and pointed to the cabin, the way they had come and the outhouse, Kaja in her role as Iska, Kolkka as the lone detective helping her to reconstruct the events of the fateful night. Harry hid in the sitting room, where he kept his skis and ski poles, so that only the other two had their skis embedded in the snow outside, where they could be seen.

  Harry followed a gust of wind blowing a furrow across the bare wastes, swirling up the light, fresh snow that had fallen in the hollow overnight. The snow was driven toward mountain peaks, precipices, slopes, irregularities in the terrain, where it formed frozen waves and great drifts, similar to the one that protruded like a hat brim from the top of the mountain behind the cabin.

  Harry knew, of course, that there was no guarantee that the man they were hunting would even show up. For some reason or other Iska Peller might not have been on the hit list; he might not consider this opportunity appropriate; he might have other plans for Iska. Or he might have smelled a rat. And there might be more banal reasons. Ill, on a trip …

  Nonetheless. If Harry had counted up all the times his intuition had misled him, the number would have told him to give up intuition as a method and guide. But he didn’t count them. Instead, he counted all the times intuition had told him something he didn’t know he already knew. And now it was telling him the killer was on his way to Håvass.

  Harry glanced at his watch again. The killer had twenty hours. In the huge fireplace the spruce crackled and spat behind the fine-mesh screen. Kaja had gone to take a nap in one of the bedrooms while Kolkka sat by the coffee table oiling a disassembled Weilert P11. Harry recognized the German weapon by the fact that it had no gun sights. The Weilert pistol was made especially for close combat, when you had to remove it from a holster, belt or pocket quickly and with minimal risk of it snagging. In such situations sights were superflu
ous, anyway; you pointed it at the target and shot—you didn’t take aim. The spare pistol, a SIG Sauer, lay next to it, assembled and loaded. Harry felt the shoulder holster of his Smith & Wesson .38 chafe against his ribs.

  They had landed by helicopter during the night by Lake Neddalvann, a mile or so away, and had covered the rest of the way on skis. Under different circumstances Harry might have taken in the beauty of a snow-clad expanse bathed in moonlight, of the northern lights playing on the sky, or Kaja’s almost euphoric expression as they glided through the white silence as if in a fairy tale, the lack of sound so complete that he had the feeling the scraping noises of their skis would carry for miles across the mountain plateau. But there was too much at stake, too little he could afford to lose, for him to have his eyes on anything except the job, the hunt.

  It was Harry who had cast Kolkka in the role of “one detective.” Not because Harry had forgotten Kafé Justisen, but if things didn’t go according to plan, they could use the Finn’s close-combat skills. Ideally, the killer would make a move during the day and be seen by one of the two groups hidden in the snow. But if he came by night, without being noticed before he reached the cabin, the three of them would have to tackle the situation on their own.

  Kaja and Kolkka took a bedroom each; Harry slept in the sitting room. The morning had passed without unnecessary chitchat; even Kaja had been quiet. Concentrated.

  From the reflection in the window Harry watched Kolkka assemble the gun, aim at the back of Harry’s head and pretend to fire a shot. Twenty hours left. Harry hoped the killer would waste no time.

  While Bjørn Holm was taking the light blue hospital clothes from Adele’s closet, he felt Geir Bruun’s eyes on his back from the doorway.

  “Why don’t you just take everything?” Bruun said. “Then I won’t have to bother throwing it out. Where’s your colleague Harry, by the way?”

  “He’s gone skiing in the mountains,” Holm said patiently, putting the garments individually in the plastic bags he had brought along.