The Leopard: An Inspector Harry Hole Novel

by Jo Nesbo

  He definitely kept it brief.

  “Let’s assume he’s like me, Harry. After all, that assumption is vital if I am to be able to help you. Motive first. Hatred. A red-hot, burning hatred. This is the stuff of survival; it’s the magma inside that keeps him warm. And, just like magma, hatred is a precondition of life, so that everything doesn’t freeze to ice. At the same time the pressure from the internal heat will inevitably lead to an eruption, the destructive element released. And the longer it goes without an eruption, the more violent it will be. Now the eruption is in full flow, and it is violent. Which tells me you will have to search way back in time for the cause. Because it is not the actions committed out of hatred, but the cause of the hatred that will solve this riddle for you. The actions will make no sense without the cause. Hatred takes time to build up, but the cause is simple. Something happened. It’s all about this one thing that happened. Find out what it is and you’ve got him.”

  Of all the metaphors, what had made him use a volcano? Harry drove down the steep, winding road from Bærum Hospital.

  “Eight murders. He’s the king now, at the top. He’s built a universe in which everything appears to obey him. He’s the puppet master, and he’s playing with all of you. And especially with you, Harry. It’s hard to see why you should have been the one—perhaps it’s a matter of chance. Gradually, though, as he controls his puppets, he will look for more thrills. He will talk to the puppets, be close to them, enjoy his triumphs where he can enjoy them most, together with those over whom he triumphs. But he’s well disguised. He doesn’t stand out like a puppet master; he may even seem subservient, someone who is easily led, someone who is underestimated, someone you would never imagine could direct such a complex drama.”

  Harry was heading for downtown on the E18. There was a traffic jam. He shifted into the bus lane. He was a policeman, for Christ’s sake. And this was urgent, urgent, urgent. His mouth was dry; the dogs were in full cry.

  “He’s close to you, Harry, of that I’m pretty certain; he simply can’t let go. But he’s closed in on you from a blind spot. Stolen into your life in some way and inspired trust at a time when you had your attention focused elsewhere. Or when you were weak. He’s at home where he is. A neighbor, a friend, a colleague. Or someone who’s simply there, right behind another person who is clearer to you, a shadow you don’t even think about, other than as an appendix to this first person. Think about those who have crossed your field of vision. Because he has been there. You know his face already. He may not have exchanged many words with you, but if he’s like me, he hasn’t been able to restrain himself, Harry. He’s cozied up to you.”

  Harry parked outside the Savoy and went to the bar.

  “What can I get you?”

  Harry let his eyes wander along the bottles on the glass shelves behind the barman.

  Beefeater, Johnnie Walker, Bristol Cream, Absolut, Jim Beam.

  He was searching for a man with a burning hatred. Someone who didn’t let his emotions stray. Someone with an armored heart.

  His wandering eyes came to a halt. And jumped back. His mouth fell open. It was like a divine flash. And everything, everything was in that flash.

  The voice came from a distance.

  “Sir? Excuse me, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “Made a decision?”

  Harry nodded slowly.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I’ve made a decision.”

  71

  Bliss

  Gunnar Hagen was rolling a pencil between his forefingers and observing Harry, who for once was sitting—and not lying—in the chair in front of his desk.

  “Technically, for the time being, you are employed by Kripos and therefore part of Bellman’s team,” the Crime Squad boss said. “Ergo, an arrest by you would be a home win for Bellman.”

  “And if I—all this is still perfectly hypothetical—informed you and left the arrest to someone at Crime Squad, say, Kaja Solness or Magnus Skarre?”

  “I would be forced to refuse such a generous offer even from you, Harry. As I said, I am bound by agreements.”

  “Mm. Bellman’s still got a hold on you?”

  Hagen sighed. “If I were to try something like taking an arrest off Bellman in Norway’s biggest murder case, the Ministry of Justice would want to know everything right away. If I were to defy them and bring you back here to investigate this case, that would be regarded as disobeying orders. And it would hit the whole unit. Sorry, Harry, but I can’t.”

  Harry mused, staring into middle distance. “OK, boss.” He jumped up from the chair and strode to the door.

  “Wait!”

  Harry waited.

  “Why are you asking me about this now, Harry? Has something happened that I ought to know about?”

  Harry shook his head. “Just testing a few hypotheses, boss. That’s our job, isn’t it?”

  Harry spent the hours until three o’clock making phone calls. The last one was to Bjørn Holm, who agreed to drive without a second thought.

  “I haven’t told you where or why,” Harry said.

  “No need,” said Bjørn and continued, stressing every word. “I-trust-you.”

  There was a pause.

  “Guess I deserved that,” Harry said.

  “Yes,” said Bjørn.

  “I have a feeling I apologized, but did I?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t? OK. Mm … mm … mm. Christ, this is hard. Mm … mm …”

  “Sounds like you’ve got a slow starter there, buddy boy,” Bjørn said, but Harry could hear he was smiling.

  “Sorry,” Harry said. “I hope I have some fingerprints for you to check before we leave. If they don’t match, you won’t have to drive, if you get my drift.”

  “Why so secretive?”

  “Because you trust me.”

  It was half past three when Harry knocked on the door of the small office at Rikshospital.

  Sigurd Altman opened.

  “Hi. Could you take a look at these?”

  He passed the nurse a small pile of photographs.

  “They’re sticky,” Altman said.

  “They’ve come straight from the darkroom.”

  “Hm. A severed finger. What’s that about?”

  “I suspect the owner has been given a hefty dose of ketanome. I was wondering if you, as an anesthesia expert, can say whether we will be able to find any traces of the drug in the finger.”

  “Yes, no doubt—it circulates through the whole body with the blood.”

  Altman flicked through the photographs. “The finger looks pretty drained of blood, but in theory one drop is enough.”

  “Then the next question is whether you can assist us with an arrest tonight?”

  “Me? Haven’t you got pathologists who—”

  “You know more than they do about this. And I need someone I can trust.”

  Altman shrugged, looked at his watch and passed the photographs back. “I’m off duty in two hours, so …”

  “Great. We’ll pick you up. You’re going to be part of Norwegian crime history, Altman.”

  The nurse gave a wan smile.

  …

  Mikael Bellman called as Harry was on his way to Krimteknisk.

  “Where’ve you been, Harry? Missed you at the morning meeting.”

  “Around and about.”

  “Around what?”

  “Our wonderful city,” Harry said, dropping an envelope on the bench in front of Kim Erik Lokker and pointing to his own fingertips to show him he wanted the contents checked for prints.

  “I get nervous when you’re not even on the radar for a whole day, Harry.”

  “Don’t you trust me, Mi-ka-el? Afraid I’ll end up on the drink?”

  The other end went quiet.

  “You report to me, and I would like to be kept informed, that’s all.”

  “Reporting in to say there’s nothing to report, boss.”

  Harry hung up and went in to see Bj
ørn. Beate was already waiting in his office.

  “What did you want to tell us?” she asked.

  “A real cops-and-robbers story,” Harry said, taking a seat.

  He was halfway through his narrative when Lokker stuck his head in the door.

  “I’ve found these,” he said, holding up a fingerprint transparency.

  “Thanks,” said Bjørn, sitting by the computer and taking the transparency. He put it on his scanner, brought up the file of the prints they had found on Holmenveien and started the matching program.

  Harry was aware it would take only a couple of seconds, but he closed his eyes, felt his heart throbbing even though he knew—he knew. The Snowman knew. And had told Harry the little he had needed, formulated the words, made the sound wave that would trigger the avalanche.

  This was how it had to be.

  It should take only a couple of seconds.

  His heart was thumping.

  Bjørn Holm cleared his throat. But said nothing.

  “Bjørn,” Harry said, still with his eyes pinched shut.

  “Yes, Harry.”

  “Is this one of those dramatic pauses you want me to savor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it over now, you asshole?”

  “Yes. And we have a match.”

  Harry opened his eyes. Sunlight. Flooding into the room, filling it so that they could veritably swim out on it. Bliss. Fucking bliss.

  The three of them stood up at the same time. Staring at one another with open mouths that formed mute roars of delight. Then they embraced one another in a clumsy group hug, with Bjørn on the outside and little Beate squashed flat. They continued with muffled shouts and cautious high-fives, and Bjørn Holm concluded with what Harry considered above and beyond any normal demands of a Hank Williams fan, a flawless moonwalk.

  72

  Boy

  The two men stood on a little grassy knoll—except that there was no grass—between the Manglerud church and the highway.

  “We used to call it an earth hookah or an earth bong,” said the man in the leather biker jacket, tossing long, thin strands of hair to the side. “In the summer we lay here smoking all the stuff we had. Fifty yards from the Manglerud Police Station.” He smirked. “There was me, Ulla, TV, his woman, plus a few others. Those were the days.”

  The man’s eyes glazed over as Roger Gjendem took notes.

  It had not been easy to find Julle, but in the end Roger had tracked him down to a bikers’ club in Alnabru, where it turned out he ate, slept and lived his life as a free man; he moved no farther afield than the supermarket, to buy snuff and bread. Gjendem had seen it before, how prison made people dependent on familiar surroundings, routine, security. Though, strangely enough, Julle had agreed quite willingly to talk about the past. The operative word had been Bellman.

  “Ulla was my woman and it was so fucking good because everyone around Manglerud was in love with Ulla.” Julle nodded as if agreeing with himself. “But no one was so insanely jealous as him.”

  “Mikael Bellman?”

  Julle shook his head. “The other one. The shadow. Beavis.”

  “What happened?”

  Julle opened his palms. Roger had noticed the scabs. A jailbird migrating between dope in prison and dope outside. “Mikael Bellman snitched on me over some gasoline I stole; I already had a suspended sentence for hash, and so had to do time. I heard rumors that Bellman and Ulla had been seen together. Anyhow, when I got out and went to pick her up, the Beavis guy was waiting for me. Almost killed me. Said Ulla belonged to him. And Mikael. Not to me, at any rate. And if I ever showed my face near …” Julle ran his forefinger across his lean neck with its gray stubble. “Pretty insane. And fucking scary. No one in the fucking gang believed me when I told them the Beavis guy had been so close to doing me in. The slavering idiot just trotted after Bellman.”

  “You mentioned something about quantities of heroin,” Roger said. When he interviewed people in drug cases he always made sure he used precise terminology that could not be misunderstood, since the slang expressions changed quickly and meant different things in different places. For example, smack might mean cocaine in Hovseter, heroin in Hellerud and anything that got you high in Abildsø.

  “Me, Ulla, TV and his woman were on a bike tour in Europe the summer I went to the slammer. We took a pound of boy with us from Copenhagen. Bikers like me and TV were checked at every single border crossing, but we sent the girls over separately. Jesus, they looked good, wearing summer dresses, with blue eyes and half a pound up their cunts. We sold most to a dealer down in Tveita.”

  “You’re very open,” Roger said while taking notes, putting brackets around “cunts” for later rewording and adding “boy” to a long list of synonyms for heroin.

  “Time’s lapsed, so they can’t arrest anyone for it now. The point is that the dealer in Tveita was arrested. And was offered a reduced sentence if he snitched on the suppliers. Which, of course, he did, the scumbag.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Ha! The guy told me a few years later, when we were doing time together in Ullersmo. He’d given the names and addresses of all fucking four of us, including Ulla. All that was missing was our national identity numbers. We were so fucking lucky that the case was shelved.”

  Roger took feverish notes.

  “And guess who had the case at the Stovner cop shop? Guess who questioned the guy? Who, in all probability, recommended the case should be dropped, thrown out, shelved? Who saved Ulla’s skin?”

  “I’d like you to say, Julle.”

  “Very happy to. It was the cunt thief himself. Mikael Bellman.”

  “One last question,” Roger said, knowing he had arrived at a critical point. Could the story be proved? Could the source be checked? “Do you have the name of the dealer? I mean, he’s not risking anything and his name won’t be mentioned anyway.”

  “Would I snitch on him, you mean?” Julle laughed out loud. “You bet your ass I will.”

  He spelled the name, and Roger turned a page and wrote it in capital letters while noticing that his jaw was broadening. Into a smile. He controlled himself and put on a straight face. But he knew the taste was going to be there for a long time: the sweet taste of a scoop.

  “Thank you for your help,” Roger said.

  “Thank you,” said Julle. “Just make sure you crush that Bellman—then we’re even.”

  “Er, by the way, out of curiosity, why do you think the dealer told you he had informed on you?”

  “Because he was frightened.”

  “Frightened? Why?”

  “Because he knew too much. He wanted others to know the story in case the cop carried out his threat.”

  “Bellman threatened the informer?”

  “Not Bellman. His shadow. He said if the guy so much as mentioned Ulla’s name again he would put something in him that would shut him up. Forever.”

  73

  Arrest

  Bjørn Holm’s Volvo Amazon turned in to Rikshospital, opposite the tram stop. Sigurd Altman stood waiting with his hands in his duffel-coat pockets. Harry beckoned to him from the backseat. Sigurd and Bjørn said hello, and they drove on to Ringveien, where they continued eastward toward the Sinsen intersection.

  Harry leaned forward between the seats.

  “It was like one of the chemistry experiments we did at school. In fact, you have all the ingredients you need to get a reaction, but you don’t have the catalyst, the external component, the spark that’s necessary to trigger it. I had the information—all I needed was something to help me assemble it in the correct fashion. My catalyst was a sick man, a murderer known as the Snowman. And a bottle on a bar shelf. All right if I have a smoke?”

  Silence.

  “I see. Well …”

  They drove through the tunnel at Bryn, up toward the Ryen intersection and Manglerud.

  Truls Berntsen stood on the old undeveloped site, looking up the slope toward Bellman’s house.<
br />
  How peculiar it was that he who had so often eaten dinner, played and slept there when they were growing up had not been there a single time since Mikael and Ulla took over the house.

  The reason was obvious: He had not been invited.

  He sometimes stood where he was now, in the afternoon dusk, looking up at the house to catch a glimpse of her. Her, the unattainable one no one could have. No one except him, the prince, Mikael. Now and then he wondered whether Mikael knew. Knew and that was why they didn’t invite him. Or was she the one who knew? And made it clear to Mikael, without saying as much, that this Beavis he had grown up with was not someone they needed to associate with privately. At least not now that his career had finally taken off, and it was more important to move in the right circles, meet the right people, send out the right signals. It wasn’t tactically astute to surround yourself with ghosts from a past that contained things best forgotten.

  Oh, he knew that. He just didn’t know why she couldn’t understand it: that he would never hurt her. The opposite. Had he not protected her and Mikael all these years? Yes, he had. He kept watch, was there for them, cleaned up. Ministered to their happiness. Such was his love.

  The windows up there this evening were lit. Were they having a party? Were they eating and laughing, drinking wines the Manglerud liquor stores had never stocked, and speaking in the new way? Was she smiling and were her eyes sparkling, eyes that were so beautiful it hurt when they looked at you? Would she see more in him if he acquired money, became rich? Was that a possibility? Something so simple?

  He stood for a while at the bottom of the explosion-riddled building site. Then he lumbered home.

  Bjørn Holm’s Amazon tilted majestically around the Ryen roundabout.

  A sign showed the exit for Manglerud.

  “Where are we going?” Sigurd Altman asked, leaning against the door.

  “We’re going where the Snowman said we should go,” Harry said. “Way back in time.”

  They passed the exit.

  “Here,” Harry said, and Bjørn bore right.