The Leopard

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Then I may be in love with you again,’ Harry said, placing his hand next to hers on the table. ‘If not before.’

  She looked at their hands. Saw how much bigger his were. How much more delicately shaped hers were. How much paler and how gnarled his were, with thick blood vessels twisting and turning all over the back of his hand.

  ‘So you could be in love before the job is over after all, eh?’ She placed her hand on his.

  ‘I meant the job could be over before—’

  She withdrew her hand.

  Harry looked at her in surprise. ‘I just meant—’

  ‘Listen!’

  Harry held his breath and listened. But heard nothing.

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Sounded like a car,’ Kaja said, peering out. ‘What do you reckon?’

  ‘Unlikely, in my opinion,’ Harry said. ‘It’s more than ten kilometres to the nearest road open in winter. What about a helicopter? Or a snowmobile?’

  ‘Or what about my overactive imagination?’ Kaja sighed. ‘The sound’s gone. And, on reflection, perhaps it was never there. Sorry, but you can easily become a bit oversensitive when you’re afraid and—’

  ‘No,’ Harry said, getting up. ‘Suitably afraid. Suitably sensitive. Describe what you heard.’ Harry took his revolver from his shoulder holster and went to the second window.

  ‘Nothing, I keep telling you!’

  Harry opened the window a fraction. ‘Your hearing’s better than mine. Listen for both of us.’

  They sat listening to the silence. Minutes passed.

  ‘Harry . . .’

  ‘Shhh.’

  ‘Come and sit down again, Harry.’

  ‘He’s here,’ Harry said, half aloud as though talking to himself. ‘He’s here now.’

  ‘Harry, now it’s you who’s being oversensi—’

  There was a muffled boom. The sound was low, deep, sort of slow, no forward thrust, like distant thunder. But Harry knew that thunder seldom occurred with a clear sky at seven degrees below zero.

  He held his breath.

  And then he heard it. Another roar, different from the boom, but this too was a low frequency, like the sound waves from a bass speaker, sound waves that move air, that are felt in the stomach. Harry had heard this sound only once before, but he knew he would remember it for the rest of his life.

  ‘Avalanche!’ Harry yelled and ran towards Kolkka’s bedroom, which faced the mountainside. ‘Avalanche!’

  The bedroom door opened and there was Kolkka, wide awake. They could feel the ground shaking. It was a big avalanche. Whether the cabin had a cellar or not, Harry knew they would never have been able to make it there. For behind Kolkka fragments of glass from what had once been a window flew past, forced in by the air that avalanches push ahead of them.

  ‘Take my hand!’ Harry shouted above the roar and stretched out his hands, one to Kaja and one to Kolkka. He saw them race towards him as the air was sucked out of the cabin, as if the avalanche had breathed out first and then in. He felt Kolkka’s hand squeeze his hard and waited for Kaja’s. Then the wall of snow hit the cabin.

  58

  Snow

  IT WAS DEAFENINGLY QUIET AND PITCH BLACK. HARRY TRIED to move. Impossible. His body seemed to be cast in plaster, he couldn’t move one single limb. Indeed, he had actually done what his father had told him: held a hand in front of his face to make room for an air pocket. But he didn’t know if there was any air in it. Because Harry couldn’t breathe. And he knew the reason why. Constrictive pericarditis. What Olav Hole had explained happened when the chest and diaphragm were packed together so tight by snow that the lungs were unable to function. Which meant you had only the oxygen that was already in your blood, about a litre, and with normal consumption, at around 0.25 litres a minute, you would die within four minutes. Panic struck: he had to have air, had to breathe! Harry tensed his body, but the snow was like a boa constrictor that responded by tightening its grip. He knew he had to fight the panic, had to be able to think. And think now. The world outside had ceased to exist; time, gravity, temperature didn’t exist. Harry had no idea what was up or down or how long he had been in the snow. Another of his father’s wisdoms whirled through his brain. To find your bearings and determine which way you are lying, dribble saliva from your mouth and feel which way it runs down your face. He ran his tongue around his palate. Knew it was fear, the adrenalin that had dried out his mouth. He opened wide and used the fingers in front of his face to scrabble some snow into his mouth. Chewed, opened again and let the melted ice dribble out. He panicked instantly and jerked as his nostrils filled with water. Closed his mouth and snorted the water out again. Snorted out what was left of the air in his lungs. He was going to die soon.

  The water had told him he was upside down, the jerk had told him it was possible to move after all. He tried another jerk, tautened his whole body in a spasm, felt the snow give a little. A little. Enough to escape from the stranglehold of constrictive pericarditis? He breathed in. Got some air. Not enough. The brain must already have been suffering from a lack of oxygen, nevertheless he clearly recalled his father’s words from the Easters up in Lesja. In an avalanche where you can hardly breathe you don’t die from a lack of air but from too much CO2 in your blood. His other hand had met something, something hard, something that felt like wire mesh. Olav Hole: ‘In snow you’re like a shark, you’ll die if you don’t move. Even though the snow is loose enough for some air to come in, the heat of your breath and body soon forms a layer of ice around you, which means air won’t come in and the poisonous carbon dioxide in your breath can’t get out. You are simply making your own ice coffin. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, Dad, but take it easy, will you? This is Lesja, not the Himalayas.’

  Mum’s laughter from the kitchen.

  Harry knew the cabin was filled with snow. And that above him was a roof. And above that probably more snow again. There was no way out. Time was ticking. It would end here.

  He had prayed that he wouldn’t wake up again. That next time he slipped into unconsciousness would be the last. He was hanging upside down. His head was throbbing as if it would explode. It must have been all the blood filling it.

  It was the sound of the snowmobile that had woken him.

  He tried not to move. He had done at first, jerked, tensed his body, tried to free himself. But he had given up his attempts fairly quickly. Not because of the meat hooks in his calves – he had lost feeling in his legs long ago. It was the sound. The sound of tearing flesh and sinews, and muscles that snapped and burst when he jerked and twisted, making the chains attached to the storehouse roof sing.

  He stared into the glazed eyes of a stag hanging by its rear legs and looking as if it was in mid-dive, antlers first. He had shot it while poaching. With the same rifle that he had used to kill her.

  He heard the plaintive creak of footsteps in the snow. The door opened, the moonlight plunged inside. Then he was there again. The ghost. And the strange thing was that it was only now, looking at him from upside down, that he was sure.

  ‘It really is you,’ he whispered. It was so strange speaking without any front teeth. ‘It really is you. Isn’t it?’

  The man walked behind him, untied his hands.

  ‘C-can you forgive me, my boy?’

  ‘Are you ready to travel?’

  ‘You killed them all, didn’t you.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Harry dug with his right hand. Towards his left hand, the one which was squeezed up against some wire mesh he couldn’t identify. Part of his brain told him he was trapped, that it was a hopeless race against time, seconds, that for every breath he took he was one step nearer death. That all he was doing was prolonging his suffering, postponing the inevitable. The other voice said he would rather die in desperation than in apathy.

  He had managed to dig his way through to the other hand and put the right hand over the wire mesh. Pressed both hands agains
t it and tried to push, but the mesh wouldn’t budge. He sensed that his breathing was already heavier, the snow was becoming smoother and his grave coated with ice. Dizziness came and went, just for a second, but he knew it was the first warning that he was inhaling poisoned air. Soon the drowsiness would come, and the brain would shut down, room by room, like a hotel approaching the low season. And that was when Harry felt it, something he had never experienced before, not even during his worst nights at Chungking Mansion: an overwhelming loneliness. It wasn’t the certainty that he would die that suddenly drained him of all will to live, but that he would die here, without anyone, without those he loved, without his father, Sis, Oleg, Rakel . . .

  The drowsiness came. Harry stopped digging. Even though he knew this spelt death. A seductive, alluring death taking him into its arms. Why protest, why fight, why choose pain when he could succumb? Why choose anything other than what he had always done? Harry closed his eyes.

  Wait.

  The mesh.

  It had to be the fireguard. The fire. The chimney. Rock. If anything had withstood the avalanche, if there was one place where the mass of snow had not penetrated, it would have to be the chimney.

  Harry pushed against the wire again. It wouldn’t budge a millimetre. His fingers clawed the mesh. Powerless, resigned.

  It was predestined. This was how it would end. His CO2-infected brain sensed a logic to it, but was unsure quite what it was. He accepted it though. He let the sweet, warm sleep envelop him. The sedation. The freedom.

  His fingers slid along the wire. Found something hard, solid. Tips of skis. Dad’s skis. He offered no resistance to the thought. It was less lonely like this, with his hand on Dad’s skis. Together, in step, they would enter the kingdom of death. Take the last steep slope.

  Mikael Bellman stared at what lay before them. Or to be more precise what no longer lay before them. Because it wasn’t there any more. The cabin was gone. From the snow cave it had looked like a little drawing on a large white sheet of paper. That was before the boom and the faraway crash that had woken him. By the time he had finally pulled out his binoculars it was quiet again, there was just a distant, delayed echo reverberating from the Hallingskarvet mountain range. He had stared himself blind through the binoculars, scanned the mountainside beyond. It was as if someone had erased everything from the paper. No drawing, just peaceful and innocently white. It was incomprehensible. A whole cabin buried? They had snapped on their skis and taken eight minutes to arrive at the avalanche scene. Or eight minutes and eighteen seconds. He had noted the time. He was a police officer.

  ‘Christ, the avalanche area is a square kilometre,’ he heard a voice shout behind him and watched the frail yellow beams from their torches sweep across the snow.

  The walkie-talkie crackled. ‘Rescue Ops says the helicopter will be here in thirty minutes. Over.’

  Too long, Bellman thought. What was it he had read: after half an hour the chance of surviving under snow was one in three? And when the helicopter got here, what the hell were they supposed to do? Stick their sonar probes in the snow to detect the remains of a cabin? ‘Thanks, over and out.’

  Ærdal came alongside. ‘Spot of luck! There are two sniffer dogs in Ål. They’re bringing them up to Ustaoset now. The County Officer in Ustaoset, Krongli, isn’t at home – at least he’s not answering the phone – but there was a man at the hotel with a snowmobile, and he can bring them here.’ He was flapping his arms to keep warm. Bellman looked at the snow beneath them. Kaja was down there somewhere. ‘How often did they say there were avalanches here?’

  ‘Every ten years,’ Ærdal said.

  Bellman rocked on his heels. Milano was directing the others, who were trudging around prodding the snow with skis and poles.

  ‘Sniffer dogs?’ he said.

  ‘Forty minutes.’

  Bellman nodded. Knowing the dogs would make no difference one way or the other. By the time they arrived almost an hour would have passed since the avalanche.

  The chances of survival would be less than ten per cent even before they started work. After an hour and a half they would be, to all intents and purposes, zero.

  The journey had begun. He was driving a snowmobile. Both light and dark seemed to be coming towards him, as if the diamond-strewn sky was opening itself and welcoming him. He knew that behind him in the snow stood the man, the ghost, aiming at his burned, charred and blistered back through the sights of a gun. But no bullet could reach him now, he was free, he was going where he intended, taking the path he had always been following. To the place where she had gone, along the same route. He was no longer tied up, and if he had been able to move his arms or legs he would have just stood up on the seat, twisted the accelerator and rushed forward even faster. He was cheering as he took off towards the starry sky.

  59

  The Burial

  HARRY SANK THROUGH LAYERS OF DREAMS, MEMORIES AND half-chewed thoughts. Everything was fine. Apart from one voice intoning the same sentence, again and again. Dad’s voice.

  ‘… and in the end you were bleeding so much that the big boys became alarmed and went on their way.’

  He tried to hold it at arm’s length, to listen to one of the other voices. But even that one belonged to Olav Hole.

  ‘You were scared of the dark, but that didn’t stop you going there.’

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  Harry opened his eyes to the dark. Wriggled and twisted in the icy snow’s iron grip. Tried to kick. Started digging in front of the wire. Made himself a bit more room. His fingers found the edge of the fireguard. He wasn’t going to die. Olav Hole would have to go on ahead; he would have to be that much of a bloody father! His hands were paddling like shovels now that they had some room to move. He got both hands on the inside of the fireguard and pulled it towards him. There! It shifted. He pulled again. And felt it. Air. Stinking of ash, heavy. But air nonetheless. For as long as it lasted. He pushed the snow away. Stuffed his hands in; his fingers found something that felt like polystyrene. He realised it was half-burned logs. The fireguard had stood up to the avalanche, the fireplace was free of snow. He continued to dig.

  A few minutes – or perhaps it was seconds – later and he lay curled up in the large fireplace gulping in air and coughing ash.

  And he realised that so far he had been thinking about only one thing: himself.

  He moved his arm around the corner of the fireplace, to where Dad’s skis had been. Rummaged in the snow until he found what he was searching for. One of the ski poles. He grabbed the basket on the end and pulled. The smooth, light, rigid metal pole slipped through the snow. He brought the pole into the fireplace, placed it between his legs, jammed his boots together and ripped off the basket. Now he had a spear measuring a little more than a metre and a half.

  Kaja and Kolkka couldn’t be far away from where he had been lying. He conjured up an imaginary grid system, the way they did at crime scenes to examine for clues, and started poking. He worked quickly, poking as hard as he could; it was a calculated risk. The worst-case scenario was he connected with an eye or stabbed a throat, but the bestcase scenario was only that they were still breathing. He poked to the left of where he reckoned he must have been lying and felt the point meet some resistance. He retracted the pole, prodded with care and felt it bounce off again. As he tried to retract it again he felt the pole jam. He released his grip and saw the pole pulled from him. Someone was holding the point and pulling it to and fro to show signs of life! Harry pulled the pole again, harder this time, but the other person was holding on with amazing strength. Harry needed the pole – it would be in the way when he started digging – so he put his hand in the wrist strap and even then had to use all his might to release the pole.

  Harry lay wondering why he hadn’t already put down the pole and started digging. Then he knew why. Hesitated for another second. Then he began to poke the snow again, this time to the right of where he had been. At the fourth prod he made contact. The same spring
y sensation. Stomach? He held the pole with his fingertips to see if he could detect any rising or falling, breathing, but there was no movement.

  The decision ought to have been easy. The shortest way was to the first opening where there had been signs of life. To save whatever could be saved. Harry was already on his knees and digging like a madman. Towards the second.

  His fingers were numb when they reached the body, and he had to use the back of his hand to feel if there was a woollen jumper. The jumper. The white one. He grabbed a shoulder, pushed more snow to the side, freed an arm and pulled the lifeless body through the passage in the snow. Her hair fell across his face; it still had Kaja’s aroma. He managed to haul her head and half her upper body onto the hearth and felt for a pulse in her neck, but his fingertips were like cement. He placed his face against hers, but couldn’t feel any breath. He opened her mouth, made sure her tongue wasn’t in the way, inhaled and breathed into her mouth. Came up for fresh air, suppressed his cough reflex as he inhaled particles of ash and breathed into her mouth again. A third time. He counted: four, five, six, seven. His head was beginning to whirl; he imagined he was back by the fire in the cabin in Lesja, the little boy trying to blow the dying embers into life and his dad laughing as the boy staggered off, dizzy and close to fainting. But he had to go on, he knew the chances of resuscitating her were diminishing by the second.

  Leaning over her to blow for the twelfth time, he felt it: a warm current against his face. He held his breath, waited, hardly daring to believe it could be true. The warm current faded. But then it was back. She was breathing! At that moment her body went into a convulsion and she began to cough. Then he heard her voice, faint.

  ‘Is that you, Harry?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where … I can’t see.’

  ‘It’s alright. We’re in the fireplace.’

  Pause.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Digging for Jussi.’

  When Harry got Kolkka’s head into the fireplace, he had no idea how much time had passed. Only that, as far as Jussi was concerned, there was none left. He lit a match and glimpsed the Finn’s large, staring eyes before the flame went out.