The Leopard

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Murder?’

  ‘I’ve checked Odd Utmo’s record. He was, like his son, known for his rages. As a young man he went to prison for eight years for committing a murder out of jealousy. After that, he moved into the wastelands. He married Karen Leike, and they had a son. The son reached his teens and was already good-looking, tall and a charmer. Two men and a woman in almost total isolation. A man who had a conviction for killing in a jealous rage. It looks like Karen tried to prevent a tragedy unfolding by sending her son away in secret and leaving one of his shoes in an area where there had just been a big avalanche.’

  ‘News to me, Hole.’

  Harry nodded slowly. ‘I’m afraid she managed only to postpone the tragedy. Her body has just been found at the bottom of a precipice with a bullet through the head. A few metres away her husband and murderer was crushed beneath a snowmobile. He’d been tortured, had most of the skin on his back and arms burned off and his teeth ripped out. Guess who did it?’

  ‘Oh, my God . . .’

  Harry put a cigarette between his lips.

  ‘How did you trace the link?’ Skai asked.

  ‘The similarity, the genes.’ He lit the cigarette. ‘Father and son. You can try to run, but it will always be there, like a curse. I think Odd Utmo realised the Håvass murders meant he would be hunted, too, and that it was the ghost of his own deceased son who was after him. So he fled from the farm up to this Tourist Association cabin safely hidden between precipices. He took a family photo with him, the family he had himself destroyed. Imagine, a frightened, maybe remorseful killer alone with his thoughts.’

  ‘He had already been given his punishment.’

  ‘I found the photo. Tony was lucky, he took after his mother in looks. It was hard to see anything of the adult Tony in the photograph of the boy. But he already had the big white teeth. While his father hid his. That’s where they were different.’

  ‘I thought you said it was the similarity that gave them away?’

  Harry nodded. ‘They had the same disease.’

  ‘They were killers.’

  Harry shook his head. ‘Disease, as in physical ailment, Skai. I meant they both had arthritis. The family relationship was confirmed this morning. The DNA analysis of the flesh on the wood burner and Tony Leike’s hair prove they are father and son.’

  Skai nodded.

  ‘Well,’ Harry said. ‘I came by to thank you for your help and to bemoan the outcome. Bjørn Holm sends his regards to your wife and says she makes the best meatballs and mashed swede he’s ever tasted.’

  Flicker of a smile from Skai. ‘Most people think that. Even Tony liked them.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Skai shrugged and pulled a knife from the sheath on his belt.

  ‘I told you Mia was stuck on the boy, didn’t I? It was soon after he had knifed Ole. She brought him home for lunch one day when she knew I wouldn’t be there. The wife said nothing when they showed up, though there was a humdinger when I got to hear about it, of course. But you know what girls are like at that age and in love. I tried to explain that Tony was violent, fool that I was. I should have known the worse I made her boyfriend out to be, the more determined she would become to hang on to him. Then it’s two together against the rest of the world, kind of. Well, you’ve seen it yourself with women who start writing letters to convicted murderers.’

  Harry nodded.

  ‘Mia would have left home, followed him to the end of the world, there was no moderation in anything,’ Skai said, cutting the fishing line and reeling in.

  Harry followed the retreat of the slack line. ‘Mm. End of the world.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I see.’

  Skai stopped winding and looked at Harry. ‘No,’ he said with conviction.

  ‘No what?’

  ‘No to what you’re thinking.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘That Mia and Tony met again later. He broke up with her; since then they have never met. Her life has continued without him. She has nothing to do with this case, got it? You have my word. She is putting her life together again, so please don’t . . .’

  Harry nodded and took the cigarette, which had been extinguished by the rain, from his mouth.

  ‘I’m not on the case any more,’ he said. ‘But your word would have been good enough, anyway.’

  As Harry drove from the car park he looked in the mirror and watched Skai packing up his fishing gear.

  Rikshospital. He was in the rhythm now. Time was not chopped up by events; it flowed in an even stream. He had thought of asking for a mattress. That would be a bit like Chungking Mansion.

  81

  The Cones of Light

  THREE DAYS PASSED. HE WAS ALIVE. EVERYONE WAS ALIVE.

  No one knew where Tony Leike was, the trail of the fake Odd Utmo ended in Copenhagen. A photograph of Lene Galtung with a shawl over her head and large sunglasses in the best Greta Garbo style was splashed across one newspaper. The headline was: NO COMMENT. And now no one had seen her for two days after she had gone into hiding, apparently at her father’s house in London. The photograph of Tony in work clothes in front of the helicopter had been in several newspapers. It was captioned PRINCE CHARMING’S VANISHING ACT in one. He had been dubbed Prince Charming now, people had taken to it, and anyway, it suited Leike better than Altman. Strangely enough, no one in the press had managed to link Tony Leike with the Utmo farm yet. The mother and later Tony had obviously covered their tracks well.

  Mikael Bellman had daily press conferences. In a TV talk show he demonstrated his pedagogic skills and flashed his winsome smile explaining how the case had been cracked. His version of the story, that went without saying. And made it seem like an oversight that the killer had not been arrested; the important thing first off was that Tony ‘Prince Charming’ Leike had been unmasked, rendered ineffective, sidelined.

  The dark descended a few minutes later every evening. Everyone was waiting for spring or frost, one of the two, but neither came.

  The cones of light swept across the ceiling.

  Harry lay on his side, staring at the smoke from his cigarette curling up towards the ceiling in intricate and ever-unpredictable patterns.

  ‘You’re so quiet,’ Kaja said, snuggling up to his back.

  ‘I’ll be here until the funeral,’ he said. ‘Then I’m off.’

  He took another drag. She didn’t answer. Then, to his surprise, he felt something warm and wet on his shoulder blade. He put the cigarette on the edge of the ashtray and turned to her. ‘Are you crying?’

  ‘Trying not to,’ she laughed with a sniffle. ‘I don’t know what’s got into me.’

  ‘Do you want a cigarette?’

  She shook her head and dried the tears. ‘Mikael rang today, wanting to meet.’

  ‘Mm.’

  She laid her head against his chest. ‘Don’t you want to know what I answered?’

  ‘Only if you want to tell me.’

  ‘I said no. Then he said I would regret that. He said you would drag me down. That it wasn’t the first time you had done that to someone.’

  ‘Well, he’s right.’

  She lifted her head. ‘But that doesn’t matter, don’t you understand? I want to be wherever you are.’ Tears began to roll again. ‘And if it’s down, I want to be there, too.’

  ‘But there’ll be nothing,’ Harry said. ‘Not even me. I’ll have gone. You saw me in Chungking. It would be like right after the avalanche. The same cabin, but alone and abandoned.’

  ‘But you found me and got me out. I can do the same for you.’

  ‘What about if I don’t want to get out? You haven’t got any more dying fathers to entice me with.’

  ‘But you love me, Harry. I know you love me. That’s a good enough reason, isn’t it? I’m a good enough reason.’

  Harry caressed her hair, her cheeks, caught her tears with his fingers, carried them to his mouth and kissed them.

  ‘Yes,’ he said with a sad smile.
‘You are reason enough.’

  She took his hand, kissed it where he had kissed it.

  ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t say it. Don’t say that’s why you’re going. So that you don’t drag me down. I’ll follow you to the end of the world, you see?’

  He pulled her into him. And at once felt something slacken, like a muscle that had been held in quivering tension for a long time without his realising. He let go, gave up, let himself fall. And the pain that had been there melted away, became something warm following the bloodstream around his body, softening it, giving it peace. The feeling of free fall was so liberating that he felt his throat thicken. And knew part of him had wanted it, this, also up there in the snowy mist above the scree.

  ‘To the end of the world,’ she whispered, already breathing faster.

  The cones of light swept across the ceiling, again and again.

  82

  Red

  HARRY WAS SITTING BY HIS FATHER’S BEDSIDE. IT WAS STILL dark when a nurse came in with a cup of coffee, asked him whether he had had any breakfast and dropped a glossy mag in his lap.

  ‘You have to think about something else, you know,’ she said, angling her head and giving the impression she was about to stroke his cheek.

  Harry dutifully flicked through the magazine while she tended to his father. But he couldn’t distract himself in the celebrity press, either. Photographs of Lene Galtung leaving premieres, gala lunches in her new Porsche. MISSING TONY was the headline, and the assertion was underpinned by comments not from Lene herself, but from celebrity friends. There were pictures outside the gates of a house in London, but no one had seen Lene there, either. At least no one had recognised her. There was a grainy photograph taken from a distance of a red-haired woman in front of Crédit Suisse in Zurich, which the magazine claimed was Lene Galtung, because they were able to quote Lene’s hairstylist who Harry assumed had been paid a sizeable sum to say: ‘She asked me to curl her hair and dye it brick red.’ Tony was referred to as a ‘suspect’ in what was portrayed as an average society scandal rather than one of the country’s worst ever murder cases.

  Harry got up, went into the corridor and rang Katrine Bratt. It still wasn’t even seven o’clock, but she was up. She was leaving today. Beginning at Bergen Police Station over the weekend.

  He hoped she would take it easy at the start. Although it was difficult to imagine Katrine Bratt taking anything easy.

  ‘Last job,’ he said.

  ‘And after that?’ she asked.

  ‘Then I’m off.’

  ‘No one will miss you.’

  ‘… more than I will.’

  ‘There was a full stop at the end, dear.’

  ‘It’s about Crédit Suisse in Zurich. I’d like to know if Lene Galtung has an account there. She’s supposed to have been given a whopping preinheritance. Swiss banks are tricky. Probably take a bit of time.’

  ‘Fine, I’m getting the hang of this now.’

  ‘Good. And there’s a woman whose movements I want you to check.’

  ‘Lene Galtung?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No? What’s the name of the beast?’

  Harry spelt it for her.

  At a quarter past eight Harry pulled up outside the fairy-tale homestead in Voksenkollen. There were a couple of cars parked, and through the raindrops Harry could make out the tired faces and the long telephoto lenses of paparazzi. They seemed to have been camping there the whole night. Harry rang the bell by the gate and went in.

  The woman with the turquoise eyes was standing by the door, waiting.

  ‘Lene’s not here,’ she said.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Somewhere they won’t find her,’ she said, motioning to the cars outside the gate. ‘And you lot promised me you would leave her alone after the last interview. Three hours it lasted.’

  ‘I know,’ Harry lied. ‘But it was you I wanted to talk to.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘May I come in?’

  He followed her into the kitchen. She gestured to a chair, turned her back on him and filled a cup from a coffee machine on the worktop.

  ‘What’s the story?’

  ‘Which story?’

  ‘The one about you being Lene’s mother.’

  The coffee cup hit the floor and smashed into a thousand pieces. She clutched the worktop, and he could see her back heaving. Harry hesitated for a moment, but then took a deep breath and said what he’d made up his mind to say.

  ‘We’ve done a DNA test.’

  She whirled around, furious. ‘How? You haven’t . . .’ She came to an abrupt halt.

  Harry’s gaze met her turquoise eyes. She had fallen for the bluff. He was aware of a vague sense of discomfort. Which could have been caused by shame. It melted away, nonetheless.

  ‘Get out!’ she hissed.

  ‘Out to them?’ Harry asked, nodding towards the paparazzi. ‘I’m finishing my police career, going to travel. I could do with a bit of capital. If a hairstylist can be paid twenty thousand kroner for saying which hair colour Lene requested, how much do you think I’d get for telling them who her real mother is?’

  The woman took a step forward, raising a hand in anger, but then her tears flowed, the burning light in her eyes extinguished and she sank into a kitchen chair, impotent. Harry cursed himself, knowing he had been unnecessarily brutal. But time was not on his side for any finely attuned stratagems.

  ‘I apologise,’ he said. ‘But I’m trying to save your daughter. And to do that I require assistance. Do you understand?’

  He placed a hand upon hers, but she pulled it away.

  ‘He’s a killer,’ Harry said. ‘But she couldn’t care less, could she. She’ll do it anyway.’

  ‘Do what?’ the woman sniffled.

  ‘Follow him to the end of the world.’

  She didn’t answer, just shook her head weeping silent tears.

  Harry waited. Stood up, poured himself a cup of coffee, tore a sheet off the kitchen roll, put it on the table in front of her, sat down and waited. Took a sip. Waited.

  ‘I said she shouldn’t do what I did,’ she sniffled. ‘She shouldn’t love a man because he … because he made her feel beautiful. More beautiful than she is. You think it’s a blessing when it happens, but it’s a curse.’

  Harry waited.

  ‘When you’ve seen yourself become beautiful in his eyes once it’s like … like being bewitched. And so you are. Again and again, because you think you’ll be allowed to see it one more time.’

  Harry waited.

  ‘I spent my early years in a caravan. We travelled around, I wasn’t able to go to school. When I was eight the child welfare people came for me. At sixteen I began to clean at the shipping company owned by Galtung. Anders was engaged when he got me pregnant. He wasn’t the one with the money, she was. He had gambled in the stock market, but the prices for tankers fell and he had no choice. He sent me packing. But she found out. And it was she who decided I would keep the child, that I would be retained as a house cleaner, that my little girl would be raised as the daughter of the house. She couldn’t have any children herself, so they took Lene from me. They asked what kind of upbringing I could offer her. Me, a single mother, uneducated, no family around me, did I really wish to deprive my daughter of the chance of a good life? I was so young and afraid, I thought they were right, this was for the best.’

  ‘No one knew about it?’

  She took the kitchen paper and wiped her nose. ‘It’s strange how easy it is to deceive people when they want to be deceived. And if they are not deceived, they don’t let it show. That didn’t matter much to me. I had only been a womb to produce an heir for the Galtungs, so what?’

  ‘Was that it?’

  She shrugged. ‘No. After all, I had Lene. Nursed her, fed her, changed her nappies, slept by her. Taught her to speak, brought her up. But we all knew it was short-term. One day I would have to let go.’

  ‘Did you?’

&nbs
p; She gave a bitter laugh. ‘Can a mother ever let go? A daughter can let go. Lene despises me for what I’ve done. For what I am. But look at her. Now she’s doing the same.’

  ‘Following the wrong man to the end of the world?’

  She shrugged again.

  ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘No. Only that she’s left to be with him.’

  Harry took another swig of coffee. ‘I know where the end of the world is,’ he said.

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘I can go and try to bring her back for you.’

  ‘She doesn’t want to be brought back.’

  ‘I can try. With your help.’ Harry pulled out a piece of paper and placed it in front of her. ‘What do you say?’

  She read. Then she looked up. The make-up had run from her turquoise eyes down her hollow cheeks.

  ‘Swear to me that you’ll bring my girl back safe and sound, Hole. Swear. Do that and I’ll agree.’

  Harry studied her.

  ‘I swear,’ he said.

  Outside again, with a cigarette lit, he thought about what she had said. Can a mother ever let go? About Odd Utmo who had taken a photograph of his son with him. But a daughter can let go. Can she? He blew out the cigarette smoke. Could he let go?

  Gunnar Hagen was standing beside the vegetable counter of his favourite Pakistani grocer’s shop. He ogled his inspector with utter disbelief. ‘You want to go back to the Congo? To find Lene Galtung? And that has nothing to do with the murder investigation?’

  ‘Same as last time,’ Harry said, lifting a vegetable he didn’t recognise. ‘We’re after a missing person.’

  ‘Lene Galtung has not been reported missing by anyone except the gutter press, as far as I know.’

  ‘She has now.’ Harry took a sheet from his coat pocket and showed Hagen the signature. ‘By her biological mother.’

  ‘I see. And how am I going to explain to the Ministry of Justice that we should launch this search in the Congo?’