The Leopard hh-8 Read online

  She groaned and twisted, but he was strong.

  ‘Kaja!’

  The voice came from the bedroom where the door stood open. A firm, imperious man’s voice that, under different circumstances, Krongli might have recognised. As he had heard it only an hour earlier at Justisen.

  ‘What’s going on, Kaja?’

  Krongli had already let go and was staring at her, with eyes wide and jaw agape.

  ‘Nothing,’ Kaja said, not letting Krongli out of her sight. ‘Just a drunken bumpkin from Ustaoset who’s on his way home.’

  Krongli backed towards the front entrance without a word. Slipped out and slammed the door. Kaja went over, locked it and rested her forehead against the cold wood. She felt like crying. Not out of fear or shock. But despair. Everything around her was collapsing. Everything she had thought was clean and right had finally begun to appear in its real light. It had been happening for some time, but she hadn’t wanted to see. Because what Even had said was true: no one is as they seem, and most of life, apart from honest betrayal, is lies and deceit. And the day we discover we are no different is the day we no longer want to live.

  ‘Are you coming, Kaja?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Kaja pushed off from the door through which she would so much have liked to flee. Went into the bedroom. The moonlight fell between the curtains and onto the bed, onto the bottle of champagne he had brought with him to celebrate, onto his naked, athletic torso, onto the face she had once thought the most handsome on this earth. The white patches on his face shimmered like luminous paint. As if he were aglow inside.

  44

  The Anchor

  Kaja stood in the doorway looking at him.Mikael Bellman. To outsiders: a competent, ambitious POB, a happily married father of three and soon-to-be head of the new Kripos leviathan that would lead all murder investigations in Norway. To her, Kaja Solness: a man she had fallen in love with from the moment they’d met, who had seduced her with all the arts at his disposal, plus a few others. She had been easy game, but that wasn’t his fault, it was hers. By and large. What was it Harry had said? ‘He’s married and says he’ll leave his wife and kids for you, but never does?’

  He had hit the nail on the head. Of course. That’s how banal we are. We believe because we want to believe. In gods, because that dulls the fear of death. In love, because it enhances the notion of life. In what married men say, because that is what married men say.

  She knew what Mikael would say. And then he said it.

  ‘I have to be off. She’ll start wondering.’

  ‘I know,’ Kaja sighed and, as usual, did not ask the questions that always popped up when he said that: Why not stop her wondering? Why not do what you’ve said for so long? And now a new question emerged: Why am I no longer sure I want him to do this?

  Harry clung to the banisters on his way up to the Haematology Department at Rikshospital. He was soaked in sweat, frozen, and his teeth were chattering like a two-stroke engine. And he was drunk. Drunk on Jim Beam, drunk and full of devilry, full of himself, full of shit. He staggered along the corridor; he could already make out the door to his father’s room at the end.

  A nurse’s head poked out from a duty room, looked at him and was gone again. Harry had fifty metres to go to the door when the nurse, plus a skinhead male nurse, skidded into the corridor and cut him off.

  ‘We don’t keep medicines on this ward,’ the skinhead said.

  ‘What you are saying is not only a gross lie,’ Harry said, trying to control his balance and the chattering of his teeth, ‘but a gross insult. I’m not a junkie, but a son here to visit his father. So please, move out of my way.’

  ‘I apologise,’ said the female nurse who seemed quite reassured by Harry’s immaculate pronunciation. ‘But you smell like a brewery, and we cannot allow-’

  ‘A brewery is beer,’ Harry said. ‘Jim Beam is bourbon. Which would require you to say I smell like a distillery, froken. It’s…’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ the male nurse said, grabbing Harry by the elbow. And let it go just as quickly when his own hand was twisted round. The nurse groaned and grimaced with pain before Harry released him. Harry rose to his full height and eyeballed him.

  ‘Ring the police, Gerd,’ the nurse said softly without letting Harry out of his sight.

  ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll deal with this,’ said a voice with a suggestion of a lisp. It was Sigurd Altman. He was walking with a file under his arm and a friendly smile on his face. ‘Have you got time to come with me to where we keep drugs, Harry?’

  Harry swayed back and forth twice. Focused on the small, thin man with the round glasses. Then he nodded.

  ‘This way,’ said Altman, who had already continued walking.

  Altman’s office was, strictly speaking, a storeroom. There were no windows, there was no noticeable ventilation, but there was a desk and computer, a camp bed, which he explained was for night shifts, so that he could sleep or be roused whenever needed. And a lockable cabinet Harry assumed contained a range of chemical uppers and downers.

  ‘Altman,’ Harry said, sitting on the edge of the bed, smacking his lips loudly as though they were coated with glue. ‘Unusual name. Only know one person called that.’

  ‘Robert,’ said Sigurd, sitting on the only chair in the room. ‘I didn’t like who I was in the little village where I grew up. As soon as I got away I applied to change my surname from a much too common -sen. I justified my application by saying, as was the truth, that Robert Altman was my favourite director. And the case officer must have had a hangover that day because it was passed. We can all do with being reborn once in a while.’

  ‘The Player,’ Harry said.

  ‘Gosford Park,’ Altman said.

  ‘Short Cuts.’

  ‘Ah, a masterpiece.’

  ‘Good, but overrated. Too many themes. The direction and editing make the plot unnecessarily complicated.’

  ‘Life is complicated. People are complicated. Watch it again, Harry.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘How’s it going? Any progress on the Marit Olsen case?’

  ‘Progress,’ Harry said. ‘The guy who did it was arrested today.’

  ‘Jeez, well, I can understand you celebrating.’ Altman pressed his chin to his chest and peered over his glasses. ‘I have to confess I’m hoping I can tell my grandchildren that it was my information about ketanome that cracked the case.’

  ‘By all means, but it was a phone call to one of the victims that gave him away.’

  ‘Poor things.’

  ‘Poor who?’

  ‘Poor all of them, I assume. So why the haste to see your father right now, tonight?’

  Harry put his hand in front of his mouth and produced a noiseless belch.

  ‘There is a reason,’Altman said. ‘However drunk you are, there’s always a reason. On the other hand, that reason is none of my business, so perhaps I should keep my mou-’

  ‘Have you ever been asked to carry out euthanasia?’

  Altman shrugged. ‘A few times, yes. As an anaesthetic nurse, I’m an obvious choice. Why?’

  ‘My father asked me.’

  Altman nodded slowly. ‘It’s a heavy burden to place on someone. Is that why you came here now? To get it over with?’

  Harry’s gaze had already wandered around the room to see if there was anything alcoholic to drink. Now it did another round. ‘I came to ask for forgiveness. For not being able to do it for him.’

  ‘You hardly need forgiveness for that. Taking a life is not something you can demand of anyone, let alone of your own son.’

  Harry rested his head in his hands. It felt hard and heavy, like a bowling ball.

  ‘I’ve done it once before,’ he said.

  Altman’s voice sounded more surprised than actually shocked. ‘Carried out euthanasia?’

  ‘No,’ Harry said. ‘Refused to carry it out. To my worst enemy. He has an incurable, fatal and very painful disease. He is slowly being suffocat
ed by his own shrinking skin.’

  ‘Scleroderma,’ Altman said.

  ‘When I arrested him, he tried to make me shoot him. We were alone at the top of a tower, just him and me. He had killed an unknown number of people and hurt me and people I love. Permanent damage. My gun was pointing at him. Just us. Self-defence. I didn’t risk a thing by shooting him.’

  ‘But you preferred him to suffer,’ Altman said. ‘Death was too easy for him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And now you feel you’re doing the same with your father, you’re making him suffer rather than allowing him release.’

  Harry rubbed his neck. ‘It’s not because I hold with the principles of the sanctity of life or any of that bullshit. It’s weakness, pure and simple. It’s cowardice. Christ, you haven’t got anything to drink here, have you, Altman?’

  Sigurd Altman shook his head. Harry wasn’t sure if it was in answer to his last question or the other things he had said. Perhaps both.

  ‘You can’t just disregard your own feelings like that, Harry. You, like everyone else, are trying to leapfrog the fact that we are governed by notions of what’s right and wrong. Your intellect may not have all the arguments for these notions, but nonetheless they are rooted deep, deep inside you. Right and wrong. Perhaps it’s things you were told by your parents when you were a child, a fairy tale with a moral your grandmother read, or something unfair you experienced at school and you spent time thinking through. The sum of all these half-forgotten things.’ Altman leaned forward. ‘Anchored deep within is in fact a pretty apposite expression. Because it tells you that you may not be able to see the anchor in the depths, but you damn well can’t move from the spot, that’s what you float around and that’s where your home is. Try and accept that, Harry. Accept the anchor.’

  Harry stared down at his folded hands. ‘The pain he has…’

  ‘Physical pain is not the worst thing a human has to deal with,’ Altman said. ‘Believe me, I see it every day. Not death, either. Nor even fear of death.’

  ‘What is the worst then?’

  ‘Humiliation. To be deprived of honour and dignity. To be disrobed, to be cast out by the flock. That’s the worst punishment, it’s akin to burying a person alive. And the only consolation is that the person will perish fairly quickly.’

  ‘Mm.’ Harry kept eye contact with Altman. ‘You don’t have anything in that cupboard to lighten the atmosphere, do you?’

  45

  Questioning

  Mikael Bellman had been dreaming about free fall again. Climbing solo in El Chorro, the fingerhold that isn’t, the mountain wall racing past your eyes, the ground accelerating towards you. The alarm clock ringing at the last moment. He wiped the egg yolk from his mouth and looked up at Ulla standing right behind him and filling his cup with coffee from the cafetiere. She had learned to recognise the precise moment when he was ready to eat, and it was then and not a second before that he wanted his coffee, boiling hot, poured into the blue cup. And that was only one of the reasons he appreciated her. Another was that she kept herself in such good shape that she still attracted admiring glances at the parties they were invited to more and more often. Ulla had, after all, been Manglerud’s undisputed beauty queen when they got together, he had been eighteen, she nineteen. A third reason was that Ulla, without making any great fuss about it, had set aside her dreams of further education so that he could prioritise his job. But the three most important reasons sat around the table arguing about who should have the plastic figure in the cornflakes box and who should sit in front today when she drove them to school. Two girls, one boy. Three perfect reasons to appreciate the woman and her genes’ compatibility with his.

  ‘Will you be late again tonight?’ she asked, furtively stroking his hair. He knew she loved his hair.

  ‘It might be a long session,’ he said. ‘We’re starting with the suspect today.’ He knew that over the course of the day the papers would publish what they already knew: that the arrestee was Tony Leike. But he had made it a principle never to reveal confidentialities even at home. That also enabled him to explain overtime regularly with ‘I can’t talk about that, darling’.

  ‘Why didn’t you question him yesterday?’ she asked while buttering the children’s bread for their packed lunches.

  ‘We had to gather more facts. And finish searching his house.’

  ‘Did you find anything?’

  ‘Afraid I can’t be that specific, darling,’ he said and gave her the regretful confidentiality look so as not to reveal the fact that she had actually put her finger on a sensitive point. Bjorn Holm and the crime scene officers hadn’t found anything during the search that could have linked Leike to any of the murders. Fortunately, for the moment, however, that was of minor importance.

  ‘Softening him up in a cell overnight won’t hurt,’ Bellman said. ‘It’ll just make him more receptive when we start. And the first part of the questioning is always the crunch.’

  ‘Is it?’ she asked, and he could tell she was trying to sound interested.

  ‘I have to be off.’ He got up and kissed her on the cheek. Yes, he certainly did appreciate her. The thought of forgoing her and the children, the framework and infrastructure that had enabled him to rise through the ranks, through the classes, was of course absurd. To follow the impulses of his heart, to throw up everything for love or whatever it was, was utopian, a dream he could think and talk about, with Kaja as a listener. But if you were going to dream, Mikael Bellman preferred dreams that were grander than that.

  He inspected his front teeth in the hall mirror and checked his silk tie was straight. The press were bound to be out in force.

  How long would he be able to keep Kaja? He thought he had detected some doubts in her last night. And a lack of enthusiasm in their lovemaking. But he also knew that as long as he was heading for the top, as he had been doing so far, he would be able to control her. It wasn’t that Kaja was a gold-digger with clear objectives of what he, as overall boss, could do for her own career. It wasn’t about intellect; it was pure biology. Women could be as modern as they liked, but when it came to submitting to the alpha male they were still at primate level. However, if she was beginning to entertain doubts because she thought that he would never renounce his wife for her sake, perhaps it was time to give her some encouragement. After all, he needed her to feed him with inside info about Crime Squad for a while yet, until all the loose ends were tied, until this battle was over. And the war won.

  He went over to the window while buttoning up his coat. The house they had taken over from his parents was in Manglerud, not the best area of town, if you asked the West Enders. But those who had grown up here had a tendency to stay; it was a quarter with soul. And it was his quarter. With a view over the rest of Oslo. Which would also soon be his.

  ‘They’re coming now,’ the uniformed officer said. He stood in the doorway of one of the new interview rooms at Kripos.

  ‘OK,’ Mikael Bellman said.

  Some interrogators liked to have the interviewee led to the room first, to keep him or her waiting, to make it clear who was in charge. So that they could enjoy the great entrance and go in hard straight away while they had them at their most defensive and vulnerable. Bellman preferred to be seated and ready when the suspect was ushered in. To mark his territory, to announce who owned the room. He was still able to keep the suspect waiting while he skimmed through his papers, able to feel the nervousness mounting in the room and then – when the time was ripe – raise his eyes and shoot. But these were the fine details of interview techniques. Which, naturally, he was happy to discuss with other competent chief interrogators. Again, he checked that the red recording light was switched on. Fiddling with technical equipment after the suspect had arrived could spoil the preliminary establishing of status.

  Through the window he saw Beavis and Kolkka enter the adjacent office. Between them walked Tony Leike, whom they had brought from the custody block at Police HQ.

&
nbsp; Bellman took a deep breath. Yes, his pulse was a bit higher now. A mixture of aggression and nerves. Tony Leike had declined the opportunity to have a solicitor present. In essence, of course, that was an advantage for Kripos, it gave them greater latitude. But at the same time it was a signal that Leike considered he had little to fear. Poor sucker. He can’t have known that Bellman had proof that Leike had rung Elias Skog immediately before he was murdered. Someone whose name Leike had claimed he didn’t even know.

  Bellman looked down at the papers and heard Leike entering the room. Beavis closed the door behind him as he had been instructed.

  ‘Take a seat,’ Bellman said without looking up.

  He heard Leike do what he was told.

  Bellman stopped at an arbitrary piece of paper and stroked his lower lip with a forefinger while slowly counting to himself, from one upwards. The silence quivered in the small enclosed room. One, two, three. He and his colleagues had been sent on a course in the new interrogation methods they were being instructed to use – so-called investigative viewing – the point of which, according to these ungrounded academic types, was openness, dialogue and trust. Four, five, six. Bellman had listened quietly – after all, the model had been chosen at the highest level – but what sort of characters did these people actually think Kripos interviewed? Sensitive but obliging souls who tell you everything you want to know in exchange for a shoulder to cry on? They insisted the methods the police had used hitherto, the traditional nine-step American FBI model, was inhuman, manipulative, and it made innocent people confess to crimes they hadn’t committed and was therefore counterproductive. Seven, eight, nine. OK, so say it put the odd suggestible chicken in the coop, but what was that compared with the grinning scum who strolled away, killing themselves with laughter at ‘openness, dialogue and trust’?

  Ten.

  Bellman pressed his fingertips together and raised his eyes.

  ‘We know you rang Elias Skog from Oslo, and that two days later you were in Stavanger. And that you killed him. These are the facts we have, but what I am wondering is why. Or didn’t you have a motive, Leike?’