The Leopard: An Inspector Harry Hole Novel

by Jo Nesbo

  Harry studied the display. There was still the missed call from the vaguely familiar number of someone who had left those sounds on his voice mail. The last three digits—where the hell had he seen them?

  And then it kicked in. The detective memory. The number was in the “Former Suspects” file, and was embossed on a business card.

  Along with TONY C. LEIKE, ENTREPRENEUR. Harry slowly raised his gaze and looked at Bellman.

  “Leike’s alive.”

  “What?”

  “At least his phone is. He tried to call me while we were in Håvass.”

  Bellman returned Harry’s gaze without blinking. Snowflakes settled on his long eyelashes and the white stains seemed to be glowing. His voice was low, almost a whisper. “Visibility’s good, don’t you think, Harry? And there’s no snow in the air.”

  “Exceptional visibility,” Harry said. “Not a fucking flake to be seen.”

  He quickly jumped back on.

  They stuttered through the snowscape, three hundred feet at a time. Located the snowmobile’s probable route, swept the tracks with a broom, took bearings, surged forward. The gouge in the left runner, probably caused by an accident, meant they could be sure they were following the right tracks. In a few places, in tiny hollows or on wind-blown hillcrests, the trail was clear and they could make fast progress. But not too fast. Harry had already shouted warnings about precipices twice and they had had some very close shaves. It was getting close to four now. Bellman flicked the headlights on and off, depending on how much snow was drifting in their faces. Harry studied the map. He had no clear idea of where they were, just that they were straying farther and farther from Ustaoset. And that daylight was dwindling. A third of Harry was slowly beginning to worry about the trip back. Which just meant that the two-thirds majority couldn’t care less.

  At half past four they lost the trail.

  The drifting snow was so thick now they could hardly see.

  “This is madness,” Harry shouted above the roar of the motor. “Why don’t we wait until tomorrow?”

  Bellman turned to him and answered with a smile.

  At five they picked up the trail again.

  They stopped and dismounted.

  “Leads that way,” Bellman said, trudging back to the snowmobile. “Come on!”

  “Wait,” Harry said.

  “Why? Come on—it’ll soon be dark.”

  “When you shouted just now, didn’t you hear the echo?”

  “Now that you mention it.” Bellman stopped. “Rock face?”

  “There are no rock faces on the map,” Harry said, turning in the direction the tracks indicated.

  “Ravine!” he yelled. And received an answer. A very swift answer. He turned back to Bellman.

  “I think the snowmobile making these tracks is in serious trouble.”

  “What do I know about Bellman?” Roger Gjendem repeated to gain some time. “He’s reputed to be very competent and extremely professional.” What was Nordbø, the legendary editor, really after? “He does all the right things,” Gjendem went on. “Learns quickly, can handle us press types now. Sort of a whiz kid. Er, that is if you know—”

  “I am somewhat conversant with the term, yes,” said Bent Nordbø with an acidic smile, his right thumb and forefinger furiously rubbing the handkerchief on his glasses. “However, basically, I am more interested in if there any rumors doing the rounds.”

  “Rumors?” Gjendem said, failing to notice a relapse into his old habit of leaving his mouth open after speaking.

  “I am truly hopeful you understand the concept, Gjendem. Since that is what you and your employer live off. Well?”

  Gjendem hesitated. “There are all sorts of rumors.”

  Nordbø rolled his eyes. “Speculation. Fabrication. Direct lies. I’m not bothered with the niceties here, Gjendem. Turn the sack of gossip inside out, reveal the malevolence.”

  “N-negative things, then?”

  Nordbø released a ponderous sigh. “Gjendem, do you often hear rumors about people’s sobriety, financial generosity, fidelity to partners and nonpsychopathic leadership styles? Could that be because the function of rumors is to please the rest of us by putting us in a better light?” Nordbø was finished with one lens and engaged in cleaning the second.

  “It’s a very, very idle rumor,” Gjendem said and added with alacrity, “and I know for certain of others with the selfsame reputation who categorically are not.”

  “As an ex-editor I would recommend you delete either ‘for certain’ or ‘categorically’; it’s a tautology,” Nordbø said. “Categorically are not what?”

  “Erm. Jealous.”

  “Aren’t we all jealous?”

  “Violently jealous.”

  “Has he beaten up his wife?”

  “No, I don’t think he’s laid a hand on her. Or had reason to. However, those who have given her a second look …”

  61

  The Drop

  Harry and Bellman lay on their stomachs at the edge where the snowmobile tracks stopped. They stared down. Steep black rock faces sliced inward to the ground and disappeared in the thickening swirl of snow.

  “Can you see anything?” Bellman asked.

  “Snow,” Harry answered, passing him the binoculars.

  “The snowmobile’s there.” Bellman got up and walked back to their vehicle. “We’re climbing down.”

  “We?”

  “You.”

  “Me? Thought you were the mountaineer here, Bellman.”

  “Correct,” said Bellman, who had already started strapping on the harness. “That’s why it’s logical for me to operate the ropes and rope brake. The rope’s two hundred feet long. I’ll lower it as far as it can go. All right?”

  Six minutes later Harry stood on the edge with his back to the chasm, binoculars around his neck and a cigarette smoking from his mouth.

  “Nervous?” Bellman smiled.

  “Nope,” Harry said. “Scared shitless.”

  Bellman checked that the rope ran through the brake without a hitch, around the narrow tree trunk behind them and to Harry’s harness.

  Harry closed his eyes, breathed in and concentrated on leaning backward, overriding the body’s evolution-conditioned protest, formed from millions of years of experience, that the species cannot survive if it steps off a cliff.

  The brain won over the body by the smallest possible margin.

  For the first ten feet or so, he could support his legs against the rock face, but as it jutted in, he was left hanging in the air. The rope was released in fits and starts, but its elasticity softened the tightening of the harness against his back and thighs. Then the rope came more evenly, and after a while he had lost sight of the top and was alone, hovering between the white snowflakes and the black cliff faces.

  He leaned to the side and peered down. And there, sixty feet below, he glimpsed sharp black rocks protruding from the snow. Steep scree. And in the midst of all the black and white, something yellow.

  “I can see the snowmobile!” Harry shouted, and the echo ricocheted between the rock walls. It was upside down, with the skis in the air. Since he and the rope were unaffected by the wind, he could judge that the vehicle lay about ten feet farther along. More than two hundred feet down. Therefore, the snowmobile must have been traveling at an unusually slow speed before it went over.

  The rope went taut.

  “More!” Harry shouted.

  The resonant answer from above sounded as if it had come from a pulpit. “There is no more rope.”

  Harry stared down at the snowmobile. Something was sticking out from under it to the left. A bare arm. Black, bloated, like a sausage that had been on the grill for too long. A white hand against a black rock. He tried to focus, to force his eyes to see better. Open palm, the right hand. Fingers. Distorted, crooked. Harry’s brain rewound. What had Tony Leike said about his illness? Not contagious, just hereditary. Arthritis.

  Harry glanced at his watch. Detect
ive’s reflex. The dead man was found at 5:54. Darkness covered the walls down in the scree.

  “Up!” Harry shouted.

  Nothing happened.

  “Bellman?”

  No answer.

  A gust of wind twirled Harry around on the rope. Black rocks. Sixty feet. And all of a sudden, without warning, he felt his heart pound and he automatically grabbed the rope with both hands to make sure it was still there. Kaja. Bellman knew.

  Harry breathed in deeply three times, before shouting again.

  “It’s getting dark, the wind’s picking up and I’m freezing my balls off, Bellman. Time to find shelter.”

  Still no answer. Harry closed his eyes. Was he frightened? Frightened that an apparently rational colleague would kill him on a whim because circumstances happened to be propitious? ’Course he was fucking frightened. For this was no whim. It wasn’t chance that he stayed behind to go into the frozen wastes with Harry. Or was it? He took a deep breath. Bellman could easily arrange for this to look like an accident. Climb down afterward and remove the harness and rope, say that Harry had lost his footing in the snow. His throat had gone dry. This was not happening. He hadn’t dug his way out of a fucking avalanche just to be dropped down a ravine twelve hours later. By a policeman. This didn’t fucking happen, this …

  The pressure from the harness was gone. He was falling. Free fall. Fast.

  “The rumor is that Bellman is supposed to have manhandled a colleague,” Gjendem said. “Just because the guy had danced a couple of times too many with her at the police Christmas party. The guy wanted to report a broken jaw and a cracked skull, but had no evidence—the attacker had been wearing a face mask. But everyone knew it was Bellman. Trouble was brewing so he applied for a move to Europol to get away.”

  “Do you believe there is anything to these rumors, Gjendem?”

  Roger shrugged. “It certainly looks as if Bellman has a certain … um, predilection for that kind of transgression. We’ve looked into Jussi Kolkka’s background following the avalanche at Håvass. He beat up a rapist under interrogation. And Truls Berntsen, Bellman’s sidekick, is not exactly a mama’s boy, either.”

  “Good. I want you to cover this duel between Kripos and Crime Squad. I want you to set off a few bombshells. Preferably about a psychopathic management style. That’s all. Then let’s see how the minister of justice reacts.”

  Without any gestures or parting salutations, Bent Nordbø put on his newly polished spectacles, unfolded the newspaper and started to read again.

  Harry didn’t have time to think. Not one thought. Nor did he see his life passing before him, faces of people he should have said he loved, or feel impelled to walk toward any light. Possibly because you don’t get that far when you fall fifteen feet. The harness tightened against his groin and back, but the elasticity in the rope allowed him a gentle slackening of speed.

  Then he felt himself being hoisted up again. The wind was blowing snow in his face.

  “What the fuck happened?” Harry asked when, fifteen minutes later, he was standing on the edge of the ravine and swaying in the wind as he untied the rope from the harness.

  “Scared, were you?” Bellman smiled.

  Instead of putting the rope down, Harry wound it around his right hand. Checked that he had enough slack in the rope to have a swing. A short uppercut to the chin. The rope meant he would be able to use his hand again tomorrow, not like when he hit Bjørn Holm and suffered two days of painful knuckles.

  He took a step toward Bellman. Saw the POB’s surprised expression when he noticed the rope around Harry’s fist, saw him retreat, stagger and fall backward in the snow.

  “Don’t! I … I just had to tie a knot at the end of the rope so that it wouldn’t slide through the brake …”

  Harry continued toward him, and Bellman—who was cowering in the snow—automatically raised his arm in front of his face.

  “Harry! There … there was a gust of wind and I slipped …”

  Harry stopped, eyed Bellman in surprise. Then he continued past the trembling POB and lumbered through the snow.

  The icy wind blew through outer clothing, underclothes, skin, flesh, muscles and into the bones. Harry grabbed a ski pole strapped to the snowmobile, cast around for some other material he could tie to the top, but found nothing, and sacrificing anything he was wearing was out of the question. Then he speared the pole into the snow to mark the site. God knows how long it would take them to find it again. He pressed the ignition button. Found the lights, turned them on. And Harry knew at once. Saw it in the snow blowing horizontally into the cones of light and forming an impenetrable white wall: They would never get out of this labyrinth and back to Ustaoset.

  62

  Transit

  Kim Erik Lokker was the youngest forensics officer at Krimteknisk. Accordingly, he was often given jobs of a less forensic nature. Such as driving to Drammen. Bjørn Holm had mentioned that Bruun was a homosexual of the flirtier kind, but that Lokker only had to hand over the clothes and then leave.

  When the female GPS voice in the car declared, “You have arrived at your destination,” he found himself outside an old apartment building. He parked and wandered through open doors up to the door on the second floor marked with the names GEIR BRUUN/ADELE VETLESEN on a sheet of paper stuck down with two pieces of tape.

  Lokker pressed the doorbell once, twice, and at last heard the sounds of someone stomping through the hall.

  The door swung open. The man was wearing no more than a towel around his waist. He was unusually pale, and his smooth crown was wet and shiny with sweat.

  “Geir Bruun? H-hope I’m not interrupting,” said Kim Erik Lokker, holding the plastic bag with outstretched arm.

  “Not at all—I’m only screwing,” he said in the affected voice Bjørn Holm had imitated. “What is this?”

  “The clothes we borrowed. We have to keep the ski pants until further notice, I’m afraid.”

  “Really?”

  Lokker heard the door behind Geir Bruun open. And an extremely feminine voice chirp: “What is it, darling?” “Just someone delivering something.”

  A figure nestled up behind Geir Bruun. She hadn’t even bothered with a towel, and Lokker was able to establish that the tiny creature was 100 percent woman.

  “Hello there,” she twittered over Geir Bruun’s shoulder. “If there’s nothing else, I’d like him back.” She raised a small, graceful foot and kicked. The glass in the door was shaking and rattling long after the door had slammed shut.

  Harry had stopped the snowmobile and was staring into the drifting snow.

  Something had been there.

  Bellman had put his arms around Harry’s waist and his head behind his back to shelter from the wind.

  Harry waited. Stared.

  There it was again.

  A cabin. Notched logs. And a storehouse.

  Then it was gone again, erased by the snow, as though it had never existed. But Harry had the direction.

  So why didn’t he just immediately accelerate and head toward it, save their skins? Why did he hesitate? He didn’t know. But there was something about the cabin, something he had sensed in the few seconds it became visible. Something about the black windows, the feeling that he was looking at a building that was infinitely abandoned and yet inhabited. Something that was not right. And which made him press the accelerator gently so as not to be heard above the wind.

  63

  The Storehouse

  Harry put a log in the wood stove.

  Bellman sat by the table, his teeth chattering. The white stains had taken on a bluish sheen. They had hammered on the door and shouted in the howling wind for a while before smashing a window to an empty bedroom. A bedroom with an unmade bed and a smell that caused Harry to wonder whether someone had slept there very recently. He almost placed a hand on the bed to see if it was still warm. And even though the sitting room would have felt warm anyway—they were so cold—Harry put a hand inside the woo
d stove to feel if there might be any warm embers under the black ash. But there were not.

  Bellman moved closer to the stove. “Did you see anything apart from the snowmobile down in the ravine?”

  They were the first words he had uttered since running after Harry, begging not to be left behind and throwing himself on the back of the snowmobile.

  “An arm,” Harry said.

  “Whose arm?”

  “How should I know?”

  Harry stood up and went to the bathroom. Checked the toiletries. The few there were. Soap and a razor. No toothbrush. One person, one man. Who either didn’t brush his teeth or had gone away on a trip. The floor was damp, even along the baseboards, as if someone had hosed it down. Something caught his attention. He crouched down. Half hidden by the baseboard there was something dark. A pebble? Harry picked it up, studied it. It wasn’t lava, anyway. He put it in his pocket.

  In the kitchen drawers he found coffee and bread. He pressed the bread. Relatively fresh. In the fridge there were two jars of jam, some butter and two beers. Harry was so hungry he imagined he could smell roast pork. He rummaged through the cupboards. Nothing. Shit, did the guy live off bread and jam? He found a packet of crackers on a pile of plates. Same type of plates they had at the Håvass cabin. Same furniture, too. Could this be a Tourist Association cabin? Harry stopped. He wasn’t just imagining it; he could smell roast—correction: burned—pork.

  He went back into the sitting room.

  “Can you smell it?”

  “What?”

  “The smell,” Harry said, squatting down by the wood stove. Beside the stove door, on an embossed stag, there were three unidentifiable black bits burned to the cast iron, and they were smoking.

  “Did you find any food?” Bellman asked.

  “Depends what you mean by food,” Harry said pensively.

  “There’s a storehouse on the other side of the yard. Maybe …”

  “Instead of ‘maybe,’ why don’t you go and check.”

  Bellman nodded, got up and went out.