The Leopard

by Jo Nesbo

  His father lay on his side, the skin on his face sagging; he looked older than he had on his back. He gazed at Harry with heavy, blank eyes.

  Harry stood up so abruptly that the chair legs scraped loudly on the floor.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Olav asked.

  ‘Out for a smoke,’ Harry said. ‘I won’t be long.’

  Harry sat on a low brick wall with a view of the car park and lit up a Camel. On the other side of the motorway he could see Blindern and the university buildings where his father had studied. There were those who asserted that sons always became, to some degree or other, disguised variants of their fathers, that the experience of breaking out was never more than an illusion; you returned; the gravity of blood was not only stronger than your willpower, it was your willpower. To Harry it had always seemed he was evidence of the contrary. So why had seeing his father’s naked, ravaged face on the pillow been like looking into a mirror? Listening to him speak like hearing himself? Hearing him think, the words … like a dentist’s drill that found Harry’s nerves with unerring accuracy. Because he was a copy. Shit! Harry’s searching gaze had found a white Corolla in the car park.

  Always white, that’s the most anonymous colour. The colour of the Corolla outside Schrøder’s, the one with the face behind the wheel, the same face that had been staring at him with its narrow, slanting eyes less than twenty-four hours before.

  Harry tossed away his cigarette and hurried inside. Slackened his pace when he entered the corridor leading to his father’s room. He turned where the corridor widened to an open waiting area and pretended to search through a pile of magazines on the table while scanning the people sitting there from the corner of his eye.

  The man had hidden himself behind a copy of Liberal.

  Harry picked up a Se og Hør gossip rag with a picture of Lene Galtung and her fiancé and left.

  Olav Hole was lying with his eyes closed. Harry bent down and put his ear to Olav’s mouth. He was breathing so lightly it was barely audible, but Harry felt a current of air on his cheek.

  He sat for a while on the chair beside the bed watching his father as his mind played back poorly edited childhood memories in arbitrary order and with no other central theme than that they were things he remembered clearly.

  Then he placed the chair by the door, which he opened a crack, and waited.

  It was half an hour before he saw the man come from the waiting area and walk down the corridor. Harry noticed that the squat, robustlooking man was unusually bow-legged; he seemed to be walking with a beach ball stuck between his knees. Before entering a door marked with the international sign for the men’s toilet, he plucked at his belt. As if something heavy was hanging from it.

  Harry got up and followed.

  Stopped outside the toilet and breathed in. It had been a long time. Then he pushed open the door and slipped in.

  The toilet was like the whole hospital: clean, nice, new and too big. Along the main wall there were six cubicle doors, none with a red square above the lock. On the shorter wall four basins, and on the other long wall four porcelain urinals at hip height. The man was standing at a urinal, with his back to Harry. On the wall above him ran a horizontal pipe. It looked solid. Solid enough. Harry took out his revolver and handcuffs. International etiquette in men’s toilets is not to look at each other. Eye contact, even unintentional, is cause for murder. Accordingly, the man didn’t turn to look at Harry. Not when Harry locked the outside door with infinite care, not when he walked over slowly and not when he placed the gun barrel against the roll of fat between the man’s neck and head and whispered what a colleague used to claim all police officers should be allowed to say at least once in their careers: ‘Freeze.’

  The man did exactly that. Harry could see the gooseflesh appear on the roll of fat as the man stiffened.

  ‘Hands up.’

  The man lifted a couple of short, powerful arms above his head. Harry leaned forward. And realised at that moment it had been a blunder. The man’s speed was breathtaking. Harry knew from the hours spent swotting up on hand-to-hand combat techniques that knowing how to take a beating was as important as giving one. The art was to let your muscles relax, to appreciate that punishment cannot be avoided, only reduced. So, when the man spun round, with his knee raised, as supple as a dancer, Harry reacted by following the movement. He moved his body in the same direction as the kick. The foot hit him above the hip. Harry lost balance, fell and slid along the tiled floor until he was out of range. He remained there, sighed and looked at the ceiling as he took out his pack of cigarettes. He poked one in his mouth.

  ‘Speed-cuffing,’ Harry said. ‘Learned it the year I did an FBI course in Chicago. Cabrini Green, digs were the pits. For a white man, there was nothing to do in the evenings unless you wanted to go out and get yourself robbed. So I sat indoors practising two things. Loading and unloading my service pistol as fast as I could in the dark. And speed-cuffing on a table leg.’

  Harry levered himself up onto his elbows.

  The man was still standing with his short arms stretched up above his head. His wrists were shackled to the handcuffs on either side of the pipe. He stared blankly at Harry.

  ‘Mr Kluit send you?’ Harry asked, in English.

  The man held Harry’s gaze without blinking.

  ‘The Triad? I’ve paid my debts, haven’t you heard?’ Harry studied the man’s expressionless face. The features could have been Asian, but he didn’t have a Chinese face or complexion. Mongolian maybe? ‘So what do you want from me?’

  No answer. Which was bad news, as the man had most probably not come to ask for anything, but to do something.

  Harry stood up and walked in a semicircle so that he could approach him from the side. He held the revolver to the man’s temple while slipping his left hand inside the man’s suit jacket. His hand ran over the cold steel of a weapon, then found a wallet and plucked it out.

  Harry stepped back three paces.

  ‘Let’s see … Mr Jussi Kolkka.’ Harry held an American Express card up to the light. ‘Finnish? I suppose you know some Norwegian then?’

  No answer.

  ‘You’ve been a policeman, haven’t you. When I saw you in arrivals at Gardemoen, I thought you were an undercover narco cop. How did you know I was catching that particular flight, Jussi? It’s alright if I call you Jussi, isn’t it? It feels sort of natural to address a guy with his schlong hanging out by his first name.’

  There was a brief throaty noise before a gobbet of spit came whirling through the air, rotating on its axis, and landed on Harry’s chest.

  Harry looked down at his T-shirt. The black snus-spit had drawn a diagonal line through the second ‘o’ and it now read ‘Snow Patrøl’.

  ‘So you do understand Norwegian,’ Harry said. ‘Who do you work for then, Jussi? And what do you want?’

  Not a muscle stirred in Jussi’s face. Someone shook the door handle outside, swore and went away.

  Harry sighed. Then he raised his revolver until it was level with the Finn’s forehead and cocked it.

  ‘You might suppose, Jussi, that I’m a normal, sane person. Well, this is how sane I am. My father is lying helpless in his sickbed in there. You’ve found out, and that presents me with a problem. There’s only one way to solve it. Fortunately, you’re armed so I can tell the police it was self-defence.’

  Harry pressed the hammer back still further. And felt the familiar nausea.

  ‘Kripos.’

  Harry stopped the hammer. ‘Repeat.’

  ‘I’m in Kripos,’ he hissed in Swedish, with the Finnish accent of which witty speech-makers at Norwegian wedding receptions are so fond.

  Harry stared at the man. He didn’t have a second’s doubt that he was telling the truth. Yet it was totally incomprehensible.

  ‘In my wallet,’ the Finn snarled, not letting the fury in his voice reach his eyes.

  Harry opened the wallet and checked inside. Removed a laminated ID card. There
wasn’t much information, but it was adequate. The man in front of Harry was employed by Krimpolitisentralen, Kripos for short, the central crime unit in Oslo that assisted in – and usually led – the investigations into murder cases affecting the whole of the country.

  ‘What the hell does Kripos want with me?’

  ‘Ask Bellman.’

  ‘Who’s Bellman?’

  The Finn uttered a brief sound; it was difficult to determine whether it was a cough or laughter. ‘POB Bellman, you poor sod. My chief. Let me go now, handsome.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Harry said, inspecting the card again. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ He dropped the wallet on the floor and made for the door.

  ‘Hey! Hey!’

  The Finn’s shouts faded as the door slid to behind Harry and he walked down the corridor to the exit. The nurse who had been with his father was coming from the opposite direction and nodded with a smile when they were close enough. Harry tossed the tiny key for the handcuffs up in the air.

  ‘There’s a flasher in the boys’ room, Altman.’

  Out of instinct, the nurse caught the key with both hands. Harry could feel the open-mouthed stare on his back until he was out of the door.

  9

  The Dive

  IT WAS A QUARTER TO ELEVEN AT NIGHT. NINE DEGREES centigrade, and Marit Olsen remembered that the weather forecaster had said it would be even milder tomorrow. In Frogner Park there wasn’t a soul to be seen. Something about the lido made her think of laid-up ships, of abandoned fishing villages with the wind whispering through house walls, and fairgrounds out of season. Fragmented memories of her childhood. Like the drowned fishermen who haunted Tronholmen, who emerged from the sea at night, with seaweed in their hair and fish in their mouths and nostrils. Ghosts without breath, but who were wont to scream cold, hoarse seagull cries. The dead with their swollen limbs, which snagged on branches and were wrenched off with a ripping sound, not that this halted their advance towards the isolated house in Tronholmen. Tronholmen where Grandma and Grandpa lived. Where she herself lay trembling in the children’s room. Marit Olsen breathed out. Kept breathing out.

  Down there the wind was still, but up here at the top of the ten-metre-high diving platform you could feel the air moving. Marit felt her pulse throbbing in her temples, in her throat, in her groin, blood streaming through every limb, fresh and life-giving. Living was wonderful. Being alive. She had hardly been out of breath after scaling all the steps of the tower, had just felt her heart, that loyal muscle, racing wildly. She stared down at the empty diving pool beneath her, to which the moonlight lent an almost unnatural bluish sheen. Further away, at the end of the pool, she could see the large clock. The hand had stopped at ten past five. Time stood still. She could hear the city, see car lights in Kirkeveien. So close. And yet too far. Too far away for anyone to hear her.

  She was breathing. And was dead nonetheless. She had a rope as thick as a hawser around her neck and could hear the gulls screaming, ghosts she would soon be joining. But she was not thinking about death. She was thinking about life, how much she would have liked to live. All the small things, and the big things, she would like to have done. She would have travelled to countries she hadn’t seen, watched her nephews and nieces grow, seen the world come to its senses.

  It had been a knife; the blade had glistened in the light from the street lamp, and it had been held to her throat. Fear is said to release energy. Not in her case, it had stolen all her energy, deprived her of the power to act. The thought of steel cutting into her flesh had turned her into a quivering bundle of helplessness. So when she had been told to climb over the fence, she had not been able to and had fallen to the ground and lain there like a beanbag, tears streaming down her cheeks. Because she knew what was going to happen. She would do everything she could not to be cut and knew she would not be able to prevent it. Because she wanted so much to live. A few more years, a few more minutes, it was the same crazy, blind rationality that drove everyone.

  She had started to explain that she couldn’t climb over; she had forgotten that he had told her to keep her mouth shut. The knife had writhed like a snake, sliced her mouth, twisted round, crunched against her teeth and then been pulled out. The blood had gushed at once. The voice had whispered something behind the mask and nudged her forward along the fence. To a place in the bushes where she was pushed through a gap in the fence.

  Marit Olsen swallowed the blood that continued to fill her mouth and looked down at the spectator stands beneath her; they, too, were bathed in the blue moonlight. They were so empty, it was a courtroom without spectators or jury, just a judge. An execution without a mob, just the executioner. A final public appearance which no one had considered worth attending. It struck Marit that she lacked as much appeal in death as in life. And now she couldn’t speak, either.

  ‘Jump.’

  She saw how beautiful the park was, even now in winter. She wished the clock at the end of the pool were working so that she could see the seconds of life she was stealing.

  ‘Jump,’ the voice repeated. He must have removed his mask, for his voice had changed, she recognised it now. She turned her head and stared in shock. Then she felt a foot on her back. She screamed. She no longer had ground beneath her feet; for one astonishing moment she was weightless. But the ground was pulling her down, her body accelerated and she registered that the bluish-white porcelain of the pool was racing towards her, to smash her into pieces.

  Three metres above the bottom of the pool the rope tightened around Marit Olsen’s neck and throat. The rope was an old-fashioned type, made of linden and elm, and had no elasticity. Marit Olsen’s stout body was not checked to any appreciable degree; it detached itself from the head and hit the base of the pool with a dull thud. The head and the neck were left in the rope. There wasn’t much blood. Then the head tipped forward, slipped out of the noose, fell onto Marit Olsen’s blue tracksuit top and rolled across the tiles with a rumble.

  Then the lido was still again.

  PART TWO

  10

  Reminders

  AT THREE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING HARRY ABANDONED his attempts to sleep and got up. He turned on the tap in the kitchen and put a glass underneath, held it there until the water overflowed and trickled down his wrist, cold. His jaw ached. His attention was held by two photographs pinned up over the kitchen worktop.

  One, with a couple of disfiguring creases, showed Rakel in a light blue summer dress. But it wasn’t summer, the leaves behind her were autumnal. Her dark brown hair cascaded down onto her bare shoulders. Her eyes seemed to be searching for something behind the lens, perhaps the photographer. Had he taken the photo himself ? Strange that he couldn’t remember.

  The other was of Oleg. Taken with Harry’s mobile phone camera at Valle Hovin skating rink during a training session last winter. At that time, a delicate young boy, but if he had continued his training he would have soon filled out that red skinsuit of his. What was he doing now? Where was he? Had Rakel managed to create a home for them wherever they were, a home that felt safer than the one they had in Oslo? Were there new people in her life? When Oleg became tired, or lost concentration, did he still refer to Harry as ‘Dad’?

  Harry turned off the tap. He was conscious of the cupboard door against his knees. Jim Beam was whispering his name from inside.

  Harry pulled on a pair of trousers and a T-shirt, went into the sitting room and put on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. It was the original, the one where they didn’t compensate for the reel tape in the studio running a tiny bit slow, so the whole record was an almost imperceptible displacement of reality.

  He listened for a while before increasing the volume to drown the whispering from the kitchen. Closed his eyes.

  Kripos. Bellman.

  He had never heard the name. He could, of course, have rung Hagen and enquired, but he couldn’t be bothered. Because he had a feeling he knew what this might be about. Best to let sleeping dogs lie.

  Harry had come to t
he last track, ‘Flamenco Sketches’, then he gave up. He got to his feet and left the sitting room for the kitchen. In the hall he turned left, emerged wearing Doc Martens boots and went out.

  He found it under a split plastic bag. Something akin to dried pea soup coated the front of the file.

  Back in his sitting room he sat down in the green wing chair and began to read with a shiver.

  The first woman was Borgny Stem-Myhre, thirty-three years old, originally from Levanger, in the north. Single, no children, resident of Sagene in Oslo. Worked as a hairstylist, had a large circle of acquaintances, particularly among hairdressers, photographers and people in the fashion press. She frequented several of Oslo’s restaurants, and not just the coolest. Besides that, she was keen on the outdoors and liked walking or skiing from mountain cabin to mountain cabin.

  ‘You can take the woman out of Levanger, but you can’t take Levanger out of the woman,’ was the general summary of interviews with her colleagues. Harry assumed the remark came from colleagues who had succeeded in erasing their own small-town upbringings.

  ‘We all liked her. In this line of business she was one of the few who was genuine.’

  ‘It’s incomprehensible. We can’t understand how anyone could take her life.’

  ‘She was too nice. And sooner or later all the men she fell for exploited her. She became a toy for them. She aimed too high, that was basically the problem.’

  Harry studied a photograph of her. One in the file of when she was still alive. Blonde, maybe not natural. Run-of-the-mill looker, no obvious beauty, but she was smartly dressed in a military jacket and a Rastafarian hat. Smartly dressed and too nice – did they go together?

  She had been to Mono restaurant for the monthly launch and preview of the fashion magazine Sheness. That had been between seven and eight, and Borgny had told a colleague slash friend that she would be at home preparing for a photo shoot the day after, at which the photographer had wanted a ‘jungle meets punk meets eighties look’.