The Leopard: An Inspector Harry Hole Novel

by Jo Nesbo

  A cigarette was flicked out of the Cherokee window, leaving a trail of sparks.

  “So there was just the question of the timeline left,” Harry said. “We checked the duty roster at Rikshospital. That seems to give you an alibi for two of the murders. You were working when Marit Olsen and Borgny Stem-Myhre were killed. But both murders were committed in Oslo, and no one at the hospital can remember with certainty having seen you at the times in question. And since you travel between departments no one would have missed you if they hadn’t seen you for a couple of hours. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you’ll tell me you spend most of your free time alone. And indoors.”

  Sigurd Altman shrugged. “Probably.”

  “So there we are,” Harry said with a clap of his hands.

  “Just a minute,” Altman said. “The story you’ve told is pure fiction. You don’t have a scrap of evidence.”

  “Oh, I forgot to say: You remember the photos I showed you earlier today? The ones I asked you to flick through and you said were sticky?”

  “What about them?”

  “You get great fingerprints from them. Yours matched the ones we found on the desk at Leike’s place.”

  Sigurd Altman’s expression changed slowly as the realization sank in. “You only showed them to me … so that I would hold them?” Altman stared at Harry for a few seconds, as if turned to stone. Then he put his face in his hands. And a sound emerged from behind his fingers. Laughter.

  “You considered almost every angle,” Harry said. “Why didn’t you think it prudent to find yourself a respectable alibi?”

  “It didn’t occur to me that I needed one.” Altman took his hands away. “You would have seen through everything anyway, Harry, wouldn’t you?”

  The eyes behind the glasses were moist, but not devastated. Resigned. Harry had experienced this before. The relief at being caught. Being able to unburden yourself at last.

  “Probably,” Harry said. “I mean, officially, I didn’t see through any of this. The man sitting in the vehicle over there did. He’s the one who will arrest you.”

  Sigurd removed his glasses and dried his tears of laughter. “So you were lying when you said you needed me to tell you about ketanome?”

  “Yes, but I wasn’t lying when I said your name would go down in Norwegian crime history.”

  Harry nodded to Bjørn, who flashed his lights.

  A man jumped out of the Cherokee in front of them.

  “An old acquaintance of yours,” Harry said. “At least his daughter was.”

  The man ambled over, slightly bow-legged, hitched up his trousers by the belt. Like an old policeman.

  “One last thing I was wondering,” Harry said. “The Snowman said you would steal up on me, unnoticed, while I was vulnerable, maybe. How did that come about?”

  Sigurd put his glasses back on. “All patients admitted have to give the name of their next of kin. Your father must have given your name, because in the cafeteria one of the nurses mentioned that the father of the man who had caught the Snowman, Harry Hole himself, was on her ward. I took it for granted that someone with your reputation would be given the case. At that time I was actually working on other wards, but I asked the ward manager if I could use your father for an anesthesia paper I was writing, said he fit my test group exactly. I thought that if I could get to know you via your father then I would find out how the case was going.”

  “You could be close, you mean. Feel the pulse of the case and have your superiority confirmed.”

  “When you finally made an appearance, I had to take care not to ask you direct questions about the investigation.” Sigurd Altman took a deep breath. “I didn’t want to arouse suspicion. I had to be patient, wait until I had built up trust.”

  “And you succeeded.”

  Sigurd nodded slowly. “Thank you—I like to believe I inspire trust. By the way, I called my office at the Kadok factory the ‘clipping room.’ When you broke in I lost my mind. It was my home. I was so furious I was on the verge of disconnecting your father from the respirator, Harry. But I didn’t. I would like you to know that.”

  Harry didn’t respond.

  “One more thing.” Sigurd said. “How did you find out about the locked Tourist Association cabin?”

  Harry shrugged. “By chance. A colleague and I had to stay the night. It seemed as if someone had just been there. And something was stuck to the wood stove. Bits of flesh, I guessed. It was a while before I connected it with the arm sticking out from under the snowmobile. It looked like an overdone sausage. The county officer went to the cabin, poked at the flesh and sent the pieces for DNA testing. We’ll have the results in a few days. Tony kept personal possessions there. I found a family photo in a drawer, for instance. Tony as a boy. You didn’t clean up after yourself properly, Sigurd.”

  The policeman had stopped by the driver’s window, and Bjørn rolled it down. He stooped, looked past Bjørn and at Sigurd Altman.

  “Hi, Ole,” Skai said. “I am hereby arresting you for the murder of a whole load of people whose names I should have studied up on, but we’ll take things one step at a time. Before I come around and open the door, I would like you to place both hands on the dashboard so that I can see them. I’m going to handcuff you, and you will have to accompany me to a nice, freshly spruced-up cell. The wife has made meatballs with mashed rutabaga. Seem to remember you like that. That sound all right, Ole?”

  75

  Perspiration

  “What the fuck’s this supposed to mean?”

  It was seven o’clock, the Kripos building was stirring into life and in the doorway to Harry’s office stood a fuming Mikael Bellman with a briefcase in one hand and a copy of Aftenposten in the other.

  “If you’re thinking about Aftenposten—”

  “I’m thinking about this, yes!” Bellman smacked the newspaper down on the desk in front of him.

  The headlines covered half the front page: PRINCE CHARMING ARRESTED LAST NIGHT. The press had gotten hold of the sobriquet Prince Charming the same day they had christened him in the Odin conference room. “Arrested last night” was not quite accurate, of course; it was more early evening, but Skai had not had time to send out the press release until midnight, after the TV stations’ last news programs and before the newspapers’ deadlines. It had been brief and did not specify the time or circumstances, only that Prince Charming, after intense investigation by local police, had been arrested outside the old dance hall in Ytre Enebakk.

  “What’s this supposed to mean?” Bellman repeated.

  “I presume it means the police have one of Norway’s most notorious killers under lock and key,” Harry said, trying to release the high-backed chair.

  “The police?” hissed Bellman. “The local police in”—he had to consult the newspaper—“Ytre Enebakk?”

  “I don’t suppose it matters who clears up the case so long as it’s cleared up, does it?” said Harry, groping for the lever beside the seat. “How do these things work?”

  Bellman shut the door. “Listen here, Hole.”

  “No ‘Harry’ anymore?”

  “Shut your mouth and listen carefully. I know what’s gone on here. You’ve been talking to Hagen and were told you couldn’t hand over the arrest to him and Crime Squad; it was too risky. So, since you couldn’t go for a home win, you went for a draw. You bequeathed the honor and the points to a police bumpkin who couldn’t tell you one end of a murder investigation from the other.”

  “Me, boss?” Harry said, giving him a blue-eyed, aggrieved look. “One of the bodies was found in his district, so it’s natural enough that he followed up on a local level. Then he picked up on this background story about Tony Leike. Damn fine police work, if you ask me.”

  The white patches on Bellman’s forehead seemed to be turning all the colors of the rainbow.

  “Do you know how this will be construed by the Ministry of Justice? They have put the investigation in my hands; I keep at it week after week,
no result. Then along comes this fucking inbred and after a couple of days cuts us off on the inside lane.”

  “Mm.” Harry yanked at the lever and the seat tipped back violently. “Doesn’t sound too good when you put it like that, boss.”

  Bellman placed his palms on the desk, leaned forward and snarled, sending small white spit balls in Harry’s direction. “I hope it doesn’t sound too good, Hole. This afternoon a lump of opium found in your house is going to the lab to be identified. Your goose is cooked, Hole!”

  “And afterward, boss?” Harry bobbed up and down as he wrestled with the lever.

  Bellman frowned. “What the hell do you mean?”

  “What are you going to say to the press and the Ministry of Justice? When they see the date of the search warrant you used, issued in your name? And ask how it can be that the day after you find opium at a policeman’s house, you give the selfsame officer a prominent position in your own investigative unit? Some might claim that if Kripos is governed like that, it’s no wonder a country cop with one cell and a wife who cooks is better at finding killers.”

  Bellman’s jaw dropped and he kept blinking.

  “There!” Harry leaned against the seat back, now locked into position, with a contented smile on his face. And screwed up his eyes to meet the rush of air after the door was slammed.

  The sun had slipped over the edge of the mountain as Krongli stopped the snowmobile, got off and went over to Roy Stille, who was standing beside a ski pole stuck deep in the snow.

  “Well?”

  “I think we’ve found it,” Stille said. “This has to be the stick that Hole fellow marked the site with.”

  The soon-to-be-retired policeman had never had any ambitions to rise up the career ladder, but the thick white hair, the intent gaze and the calm voice were such that when he spoke, people concluded he was the superior officer, and not Krongli.

  “Oh?” Krongli said.

  He accompanied Stille to the edge of the precipice. Stille pointed. And there, down in the scree, he saw the snowmobile. He adjusted the binoculars. Focused on the bare, burned arm sticking out. Mumbled half aloud: “Oh, shit. At last. Or both.”

  The breakfast customers had begun to leave Stopp Pressen when Bent Nordbø heard a cough, looked up from The New York Times, removed his glasses, squinted and mustered the closest he would ever get to a smile.

  “Gunnar.”

  “Bent.”

  The greeting, saying each other’s name, was something they had from the lodge and always reminded Gunnar Hagen of ants meeting and exchanging smells. The Crime Squad boss sat down, but did not remove his coat. “You said on the phone you’d found something.”

  “One of my journalists has dug this up.” Nordbø pushed a brown envelope across the table. “Looks like Mikael Bellman protected his wife in a drug case. It’s old, so from a legal point of view they’re untouchable, but in the press …”

  “They’re always touchable,” Hagen said, taking the envelope.

  “I believe you may safely regard Mikael Bellman as neutralized.”

  “At least a balance of terror can be achieved. He has things on me, too. Besides, I may not even need this—he’s just been humiliated by an officer from Ytre Enebakk.”

  “I read that. And the Ministry of Justice has read it, too—isn’t that so?”

  “Up there, they read papers and keep their ears to the ground. But thank you, anyway.”

  “My pleasure—we help each other.”

  “Who knows—I may need this one day.” Gunnar Hagen put the envelope inside his coat.

  He didn’t receive a response, as Bent Nordbø had already resumed his reading of an article about a young black American senator by the name of Barack Obama, who, the writer maintained in all seriousness, could one day become the president of the United States.

  When Krongli was down, he called up to the others that he had arrived, and he untied the rope.

  The snowmobile was an Arctic Cat and lay with its runners in the air. He dragged himself the ten feet to the wreck and instinctively became conscious of where he was placing his feet and hands. As if he were at a crime scene. He crouched down. An arm was protruding from under the snowmobile. He touched the vehicle. It was swaying on two rocks. He took a deep breath and tipped the snowmobile on its side.

  The dead body lay on its back. Krongli’s first thought was that it was likely a man. The head and face had been crushed between the vehicle and the rocks, and the result looked like the remains of a crab party. He didn’t need to feel the smashed body to know it was like jelly, like a piece of tender meat with the bones removed, or that the torso had been squashed flat, hips and knees pulverized. Krongli would hardly have been able to identify the body, had it not been for the red flannel shirt. And the single, rotten, brown-stained tooth left in the lower jaw.

  76

  Redefinition

  “What did you say?” Harry exclaimed, pressing the phone harder to his ear as if the mistake were there.

  “I said the body under the snowmobile is not Tony Leike,” Krongli said.

  “Who, then?”

  “Odd Utmo. A local recluse and guide. He always wears the same red flannel shirt. And it’s his snowmobile. But it was the teeth that decided it. One single rotten stump of a tooth. God knows what happened to the rest of his teeth and the braces.”

  Utmo. Braces. Harry remembered Kaja telling him about the guide who had driven her to Håvass.

  “His fingers, though,” Harry said. “Aren’t they distorted?”

  “Sure. Utmo had terrible problems with arthritis, poor fella. It was Bellman who asked me to inform you directly. Wasn’t quite what you hoped for, eh, Hole?”

  Harry pushed the chair from the desk. “At least not quite what I was expecting. Could it have been an accident, Krongli?”

  But he knew the answer before it came. There had been moonlight the whole evening and night; even without headlamps the ravine would have been impossible to miss. Especially for a local guide. Especially when he was driving so slowly that he landed only ten feet from a perpendicular drop of more than two hundred feet.

  “Forget it, Krongli. Tell me about the burns.”

  The other end went silent for a bit before the answer came.

  “Arms and back. The skin on the arms was cracked and you can see the red flesh beneath. Parts of the back are charred. And a brand has been scorched in between the shoulder blades …”

  Harry closed his eyes. Saw the pattern on the wood-burning stove in the cabin. The smoking fragments of flesh.

  “Looks like a stag. Anything else, Hole? We have to start moving—”

  “No, that’s it, Krongli. Thanks.”

  Harry hung up. Sat for a while deliberating. Not Tony Leike. Of course that changed the details, but not the bigger picture. Utmo was probably a victim of Altman’s avenging crusade, someone who had found himself in the way of something or other. They had Tony Leike’s finger, but where was the rest of his body? A thought struck Harry. If he was dead. In theory, Tony could be locked up somewhere. A place only Sigurd Altman knew about.

  Harry tapped in Skai’s number.

  “He refuses to say a single word to anyone,” Skai said, masticating something or other. “Apart from his lawyer.”

  “Who is?”

  “Johan Krohn. Do you know him? Looks like a boy and—”

  “I know Johan Krohn very well.”

  Harry called Krohn’s office. Krohn sounded half welcoming and half dismissive, the way a professional defense lawyer should when a prosecuting authority calls. He listened to Harry. Then he answered.

  “I’m afraid not. Unless you have concrete evidence that can establish beyond doubt that my client is keeping someone locked up or otherwise exposing someone to danger by not revealing their whereabouts, I cannot allow you to speak to Altman at this juncture, Hole. These are serious allegations you’re making against him, and I don’t need to tell you that it is my job to protect his interests as f
ar as I am able.”

  “Agreed,” Harry said. “You didn’t need to tell me.”

  They hung up.

  Harry looked out of the window at the downtown area. The chair was good—no doubt about that. But his eyes found the familiar glass building in Grønland.

  Then he dialed another number.

  Katrine Bratt was as happy as a lark, and twittered like one, too.

  “I’m going to be discharged in a couple of days,” she said.

  “I thought you were there of your own free will.”

  “Yes I am, but I have to be formally discharged. I’m looking forward to it. They’ve offered me a desk job at the station when my sick leave runs out.”

  “Good.”

  “Anything special you want?”

  Harry explained.

  “So you’ll have to find Tony Leike without Altman’s help?”

  “Yup.”

  “Any ideas where I can start?”

  “Just one. Right after Tony disappeared we checked that he hadn’t stayed anywhere around Ustaoset. Thing is, I’ve checked recent years a little more closely, and he’s almost never registered at accommodations anywhere in Ustaoset—once or twice a Tourist Association cabin, that’s all. And that’s weird because he’s been up there a lot.”

  “Perhaps the other times he was freeloading at the cabins, not registering or paying.”

  “He’s not the type,” Harry said. “I wonder if Tony has a cabin or something up there no one knows anything about.”

  “OK. Anything else?”

  “No. Yes—see what you can find out about Odd Utmo’s activities over the last few days.”

  “Are you still single, Harry?”

  “What sort of a fucking question’s that?”

  “You sound less single.”

  “Do I?”

  “You do. But it suits you.”

  “Does it?”

  “Since you ask, no.”

  Aslak Krongli straightened his stiff back and looked up the scree.

  It was one of the men in the search party who had called, and he was shouting again now, obviously excited. “Over here!”