The Leopard: An Inspector Harry Hole Novel

by Jo Nesbo

  “The E-Six?”

  “Yep, we’re going east. To Lyseren. Know these parts, Sigurd?”

  “Well enough, but—”

  “This is where the story starts,” Harry said. “Many years ago, outside a dance hall. Tony Leike, the man who owned the finger I showed you photos of before, is standing at the edge of the woods, kissing Mia, County Officer Skai’s daughter. Ole, who’s in love with Mia, goes out to look for Mia and bumps into them. Devastated and angry, Ole throws himself on the interloper, the charmer Tony. But now another side of Tony reveals itself. Gone is the smiling, charming flirt everyone likes. To be replaced by a beast. And like all animals that feel threatened, he attacks, with a fury and brutality that numb Ole, Mia and subsequent onlookers. The blood mist has descended; he takes out a knife and cuts off half of Ole’s tongue before he is dragged away. And even though Ole is innocent in this matter, he is the one who is afflicted by shame. The shame of his unrequited love being exhibited in front of others, humiliation in rural Norway’s ritual mating duel and his stunted speech as eternal evidence of his defeat. So he flees. Flees. Are you with me so far?”

  Altman nodded.

  “Many years pass. Ole has established himself somewhere new, has a job where he is well liked and respected for his abilities. He has friends—not many, but enough; all that counts is that they don’t know his past. What’s missing in his life is a woman. He has met some, via dating websites, personal ads, on the odd occasion at a restaurant. But they soon evaporate. Not because of his tongue, but because he carries the defeat with him like a knapsack full of shit. Because of an ingrained self-denigrating way of speaking, an anticipation of rejection and a suspicion of women who behave as if they actually do want him. The usual stuff. The stench of defeat that everyone flees. Then one day something happens. He meets a woman who has done the rounds. She even lets him live out his sexual fantasies; they have sex in a disused factory. He invites her on a ski trip in the mountains, as a first sign he means business. Her name is Adele Vetlesen, and she joins him with some reluctance.”

  Bjørn Holm turned off by Grønmo, where the smoke from incinerated garbage rose into the air.

  “They have a great ski trip in the mountains. Maybe. Or maybe Adele is bored; she’s a restless soul. They go to a cabin in Håvass, where there are already five people; Marit Olsen, Elias Skog, Borgny Stem-Myhre, Charlotte Lolles and a sick Iska Peller, who is sleeping off her fever in a room alone. After dinner they light the fire and someone opens a bottle of red wine while others go to bed. Like Charlotte Lolles. And Ole, who is lying in a sleeping bag in the bedroom waiting for his Adele. But Adele would rather be up. Perhaps at last she has begun to notice the stench. Then something happens. One last person arrives late at night. The walls are thin and Ole hears a new man’s voice from the sitting room. He stiffens. It’s the voice from his worst nightmare, from his sweetest dreams of revenge. But it can’t be him; it can’t be. Ole listens. The voice talks to Marit Olsen. For a while. Then it talks to Adele. He hears her laughing. But gradually they lower their voices. He hears the others go to bed in adjoining rooms. But not Adele. And not this man with the familiar voice. Then he hears nothing. Until the sounds outside reach his ears. He creeps over to the window, looks out, sees them, sees her eager face, recognizes her moans of pleasure. And he knows the impossible is happening; history is repeating itself. For he recognizes the man standing behind Adele, who is taking her. It’s him. It’s Tony Leike.”

  Bjørn Holm turned up the heat. Harry pushed himself back in the seat.

  “When the others get up the following morning, Tony has left. Ole acts as if nothing has happened. Because he is stronger now; many years of hatred have hardened him. He knows the others have seen Adele and Tony; they have seen his humiliation, just like before. But he is calm. He knows what he is going to do. He might have been longing for it, this last nudge, the free fall. A couple of days later he has a plan ready. He returns to the Håvass cabin, maybe gets a lift there on a snowmobile, and tears out the page in the guest book detailing their names. For this time it won’t be he who flees the witnesses in shame; they are the ones who are going to suffer. And Adele. But the person who will suffer most is Tony. He will have to carry all the shame Ole has carried; his name will be dragged through the mud; his life will be destroyed; he will be smitten by the same unjust God who allows tongues of the lovelorn to be severed.”

  Sigurd Altman rolled down the window and a soft whistling sound filled the car.

  “The first thing Ole has to do is find himself a room, a headquarters where he can work undisturbed and without fear of being discovered. And what could be more natural than the disused factory where he experienced the happiest night of his life? There he starts gathering information about his victims and planning in detail. Of course, he has to kill Adele Vetlesen first, as she was the only person at Håvass to know his full identity. Names that may have been exchanged up there would have been forgotten soon enough, and no copy of the guest book page existed. Sure about the cigarette, boys?”

  No answer. Harry sighed.

  “So he arranges to meet her again. He picks her up in a car. The inside of which he has covered with plastic. They drive to an undisturbed spot, probably the Kadok factory. There he takes out a large knife with a yellow handle. He forces her to write a postcard he dictates and to address it to her flat mate in Drammen. Afterward he kills her. Bjørn?”

  Bjørn Holm coughed and shifted down a gear. “The autopsy shows he punctured her carotid artery.”

  “He gets out of the car. Takes a picture of her sitting in the passenger seat with a knife in the neck. The photograph: confirmation of revenge, of triumph. It’s the first photo that goes on his office wall in the Kadok factory.”

  An oncoming car swerved out of its lane, but went back in and hooted its horn as it passed.

  “Perhaps it was easy to kill her. Perhaps not. Nevertheless, he knows she is the most critical victim. They hadn’t met very often, but he can’t know for sure how much she has told her friends about him. He only knows that if she is found dead and her death can be linked to him, a dumped lover will be the police’s main suspect. If she is found. If, on the other hand, she apparently disappears, for example, during a trip to Africa, he is safe.

  “So Ole sinks her body in a place he knows well, where the water is deep and, what’s more, where people keep well away. The place with the jilted bride in the window. The ropery by Lake Lyseren. Then he travels to Leipzig and pays the prostitute, Juliana Verni, to take the postcard Adele wrote with her to Rwanda, to stay at a hotel under Adele’s name and send the card to Norway. Furthermore, she has to bring Ole something back from the Congo. A murder weapon. A Leopold’s apple. The special weapon is not plucked out of the air, of course; it has to have some connection with the Congo and prompt the police to become suspicious about the Congo traveler Tony Leike. Ole pays Juliana on her return to Leipzig. And perhaps it is there, standing over the trembling Juliana, in tears as she opens her mouth to receive the apple, that he begins to experience the joy, the ecstasy, of sadism, an almost sexual pleasure he has developed and nourished for years with his lonely daydreams of revenge. Afterward he dumps her in the river, but the body surfaces and is found.”

  Harry took a deep breath. The road had become narrower, and the forest had slunk in, was dense on both sides now.

  “In the course of the next weeks, he kills Borgny Stem-Myhre and Charlotte Lolles. Unlike with Adele and Juliana, he doesn’t try to hide their bodies—quite the contrary. Nevertheless, the police investigation does not lead them to Tony Leike, as Ole has hoped. So he has to continue killing, continue to leave a trail, to push them. He kills Marit Olsen, the MP, exhibits her in the Frogner pool. Now the police have to see the connection between the women, have to find the man with the Leopold’s apple. But it doesn’t happen. And he knows he will have to intervene, give a helping hand, take a risk. He watches Tony’s house on Holmenveien until he sees him leave. Then he
breaks in through the cellar, goes up to the living room and calls the next victim, Elias Skog, from Tony’s phone on the desk. On the way out he steals a bike to make the break-in appear normal. Leaving fingerprints upstairs in the living room doesn’t bother Ole; everyone knows the police don’t investigate run-of-the-mill burglaries. Then he goes to Stavanger. At this point his sadism is in full bloom. He kills Elias by gluing him to the bathtub and leaving the tap running. Hey, gas station! Anyone hungry?”

  Bjørn Holm didn’t even slow down.

  “OK. Then something does happen. Ole receives a letter. It’s from a blackmailer. He writes that he knows Ole has killed and he wants money. Otherwise the police will be around. Ole’s first thought is that it must be someone who knows he was at Håvass, so it must be one of the two survivors: Iska Peller or Tony Leike. He excludes Iska Peller right away. She’s Australian, went back and, anyway, is hardly likely to write in Norwegian. Tony Leike—what irony! They never met at the cabin, but Adele may of course have mentioned Ole’s name while they were flirting. Or Tony may have seen Ole’s name in the guest book. At any rate, Tony must have guessed the connection, since the murders appeared in the newspapers. The blackmail attempt squares pretty well with what the financial press is writing about Tony being desperately in need of funds for his Congo project. Ole makes a decision. Even though he would have preferred that Tony live with the shame, he has to turn to the second option before things spiral out of control. Tony has to die. He tails Tony. Follows him onto the train, which goes where Tony always goes—Ustaoset. Follows his snowmobile tracks, which lead to a locked Tourist Association cabin situated among cliffs and crevices. And that’s where Ole finds him. And Tony recognizes the ghost, the boy from the dance hall, the boy whose tongue he cut off. And realizes what’s in store for him. Ole takes his revenge. He tortures Tony. Burns him. Maybe to make him reveal possible partners in the blackmail venture. Maybe for his own enjoyment.”

  Altman rolled the window back up, hard.

  “Cold,” he said.

  “While this is going on, he hears on the news that Iska Peller is in the cabin at Håvass. Ole senses that the final solution may be at hand, but smells a trap. He remembers the snowdrift above the cabin that locals said was dangerous. He makes a decision. Perhaps he takes Tony with him as a guide, heads for the Håvass cabin, starts the avalanche with dynamite. Then he drives the snowmobile back, unloads Tony—dead or alive—off the precipice and sends the snowmobile after him. If somehow the body is ever found, it will look like an accident. A man who has burned himself and is on his way to find help, perhaps.”

  The countryside opened up. They passed a lake with the moon reflected in it.

  “Ole triumphs; he’s won. He’s tricked everyone, pulled the wool over their eyes. And he’s started to enjoy the game, the feeling of being in power, of having everyone follow his directions. So the master, who has bound eight individual fates into one big drama, decides to leave us with a parting gesture. To leave me with a parting gesture.”

  A cluster of houses, a gas station and a shopping center. They took the left exit off a roundabout.

  “Ole cuts off the middle finger of Tony’s right hand. And he has Leike’s phone. It’s the one he used when he called me from the center of Ustaoset. My number is unlisted, but Tony Leike has it on his cell phone. Ole doesn’t leave a message. Perhaps it is just playful whimsy.”

  “Or to confuse us,” Bjørn Holm said.

  “Or to show us his superiority,” Harry said. “Like when he quite literally gives us the finger by leaving Tony’s middle finger outside my door, inside Police HQ, right under our very noses. Because he can do that. He’s Prince Charming, he’s recovered from the shame, he’s retaliated, avenged himself on all those who mocked him and on their understudies. The witnesses. The whore. And the lech. Then something unforeseen happens. The hideaway at Kadok is found. In fact, the police still don’t have any evidence to lead them straight to Ole, but they’re beginning to get dangerously close. So Ole goes to his boss and says that finally he’ll take his vacation and accumulated personal time. He’ll be away for a good while. His plane leaves the day after tomorrow, by the way.”

  “Nine-fifteen to Bangkok, via Stockholm,” Bjørn Holm said.

  “OK—lots of the details in this story are assumptions, but we’re getting close. Here we are.”

  Bjørn turned off the road and onto the gravel in front of the large red-timber building. Stopped and switched off the ignition.

  There was no light in any of the windows, but advertisements hung on the ground-floor walls, showing that a corner of the building had once been a grocery store. At the other end of the square, fifty yards in front of them and beneath a streetlight, stood a green Jeep Cherokee.

  It was still. Sound-still, time-still, wind-still. From the top of the window on the driver’s side of the Cherokee, cigarette smoke rose into the light.

  “This is the place where it all began,” Harry said. “The dance hall.”

  “Who’s that?” Altman asked, nodding toward the Cherokee.

  “Don’t you recognize him?” Harry took out a packet of cigarettes, placed one between his lips, unlit, and stared hungrily at the tobacco smoke. “You might be deceived by the street lamp, of course. Most of the older street lamps cast a yellow light, making a blue car seem green.”

  “I’ve seen the film,” Altman said. “In the Valley of Elah.”

  “Mm. Good film. Almost Altman class.”

  “Almost.”

  “Sigurd Altman class.”

  Sigurd didn’t answer.

  “So,” Harry said. “Are you happy? Was it the masterpiece you had envisaged, Sigurd? Or can I call you Ole Sigurd?”

  74

  Bristol Cream

  “I prefer Sigurd.”

  “Pity it’s not as easy to change first names as surnames,” Harry said, leaning forward between the seats again. “When you told me you’d changed the usual -sen surname, I didn’t think that the S in Ole S. Hansen might stand for Sigurd. But did it help, Sigurd? Did the new name make you into someone different from the person who lost everything in the gravel on this very spot?”

  Sigurd shrugged. “We flee as far as we can. I suppose the new name took me part of the way.”

  “Mm. I’ve checked out a number of things today. When you moved to Oslo you started nursing studies. Why not medicine? After all, you had top grades from school.”

  “I wanted to avoid having to speak in public,” Sigurd said with an ironic smile. “I assumed as a nurse I would be exempt.”

  “I called a speech therapist today, and he told me it depends which muscles are damaged. In theory, even with half a tongue you can train yourself to speak almost perfectly again.”

  “The s’s are tricky without the tip of a tongue. Was that what gave me away?”

  Harry rolled down the window and lit his cigarette. Inhaled so hard the paper crackled and rustled.

  “That was one of the things. But we went off on the wrong track for a while. The speech therapist told me that people have a tendency to associate lisping with male homosexuality. In English it’s called a ‘gay lisp’ and does not constitute lisping in a speech-therapy sense; it’s just a different way of articulating the letter s. Gay men can switch lisping on and off; they use it as a sort of code. And the code works. The speech therapist told me an American university had done some linguistic research to see whether it was possible to deduce sexual tendencies in people by listening only to recorded speech. The results were fairly accurate; however, it transpired that the perception of a gay lisp was so strong that it overrode other language signals that were characteristic of straight men. When the receptionist at Hotel Bristol said that the man asking after Iska Peller spoke in an effeminate way, he was a victim of stereotypical thinking. It was only when he acted out how the person had spoken that I realized he had allowed himself to be duped by the lisp.”

  “There must have been a little more than that.”


  “Yes, indeed. Bristol. It’s a suburb in Sydney, Australia. I can see you’ve figured out the connection now.”

  “Hang on,” Bjørn said. “I haven’t.”

  Harry blew smoke out of the window. “The Snowman told me. The killer wanted to be close. He had crossed my field of vision, he had cozied up to me. So when a bottle of Bristol Cream crossed my field of vision, it clicked at long last. I remembered seeing the same name, and telling someone something. Someone who had cozied up to me. And then I realized that what I had said had been misunderstood. I gave Iska Peller’s place of residence as Bristol. By which the person inferred I meant Hotel Bristol, in Oslo. I said that to you, Sigurd. At the hospital, right after the avalanche.”

  “You have a good memory.”

  “For some things. When suspicion first fell on you, other things became quite obvious. Like you saying that one has to work in anesthesia to get hold of ketanome in Norway. Like a friend of mine saying that we often desire those things we see every day, which would suggest that whoever has sexual fantasies about women dressed in a nurse’s outfit may work at a hospital. Like the screen name on the computer at the Kadok factory being Nashville, the name of a film directed by—”

  “Robert Altman in 1975,” Sigurd said. “A much-underrated masterpiece.”

  “And the chair at the hideaway at Kadok being, it goes without saying, a director’s chair. For the master director, Sigurd Altman.”

  Sigurd didn’t react.

  “But still I didn’t know what your motive was,” Harry continued. “The Snowman told me that the killer was driven by hatred. And the hatred was engendered by one single event, one that lay back in the mists of time. Perhaps I already had a hunch. The tongue. The lisping. I got a friend from Bergen to do a little digging on Sigurd Altman. It took her about thirty seconds to discover your change of name on the national register and to connect it with the old name mentioned in Tony Leike’s conviction for assault.”