The Leopard hh-8 Read online

  He saw the tears well up in her eyes again. Then she stepped aside, and he staggered in and slammed the door behind him. Remained in the hall in the soundless vacuum after the bang, in the good silence, the void, the wonderful nothingness.

  47

  Fear of the Dark

  Olav Hole blinked into the darkness.

  ‘Is that you, Harry?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me.’

  ‘It’s night, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it’s night.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m alive.’

  ‘Let me put on the light.’

  ‘No need. I’m going to tell you something.’

  ‘I recognise the tone. I’m not sure I want to hear.’

  ‘You’ll read about it in the papers tomorrow anyway.’

  ‘And you have a different version you want to tell me?’

  ‘No, I just want to be first.’

  ‘Have you been drinking, Harry?’

  ‘Do you want to hear?’

  ‘Your grandfather drank. I loved him. Drunk or sober. There are not many people who can say that about a drunken father. No, I don’t want to hear.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘And I can say that to you, too. I have loved you. Always. Drunk or sober. You weren’t even difficult. Although you were always argumentative. You were at war with most people, not least with yourself. But loving you, Harry, is the easiest thing I have done.’

  ‘Dad…’

  ‘There’s no time to talk about trivia, Harry. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this, Harry, I feel as if I have, but sometimes we think things so often that we simply believe they have been said aloud. I’ve always been proud of you, Harry. Have I told you that often enough?’

  ‘I…’

  ‘Yes?’ Olav Hole listened in the dark. ‘Are you crying, son? That’s fine. Do you know what made me proudest? I’ve never told you this, but when you were in your teens one of your teachers rang us. He said you’d been fighting in the playground again. With two of the boys from the class above, but this time it hadn’t turned out so well – they’d had to send you to hospital to have your lip sewn and a tooth taken out. I stopped your pocket money, remember? Anyway, Oystein told me about the fight later. You flew at them because they’d filled Tresko’s rucksack with water from the school fountain. If I remember correctly you didn’t even like Tresko much. Oystein said the reason you’d been hurt so badly was because you didn’t give in. You got up time after time and in the end you were bleeding so much that the big boys became alarmed and went on their way.’

  Olav Hole laughed quietly. ‘I didn’t think I could tell you at the time, it would only have been asking for more fights, but I was so proud I could have wept. You were brave, Harry. You were scared of the dark, but that didn’t stop you going there. And I was the world’s proudest dad. Did I ever say that, Harry? Harry? Are you there?’

  Free. The champagne bottle smashed against the wall, and the bubbles ran down the wallpaper like boiling cerebral matter, over the pictures, the newspaper cuttings, the printout off the Net showing Harry Hole accepting the blame. Free. Free of blame, free to send the world into hell again. I tread on the broken glass, tread it into the floor, hear it crunch. And I’m barefoot. I skid on my own blood. Laughing until I howl. Free. Free!

  48

  Hypothesis

  The head of Crime Squad, Sydney South, Neil McCormack, ran a hand through his thinning mop of hair while studying the bespectacled woman across the table in the interview room. She had come straight from the publishing house where she worked. Her suit was plain and creased, but there was nevertheless something about Iska Peller that made him presume it was expensive, it wasn’t just meant to impress simple souls like himself. But her address suggested that she was not particularly well off. Bristol was not the most fashionable area of Sydney. She seemed adult and sensible. Definitely not the type to dramatise, exaggerate, attract attention for attention’s sake. Besides, they were the ones who had called her in; she hadn’t come to Sydney Police of her own accord. He looked at his watch. McCormack had arranged to go sailing with his son this afternoon; they were due to meet in Watson Bay where the boat was moored. That’s why he hoped this wouldn’t take long. And everything had been fine until the last snippet of information.

  ‘Miss Peller,’ McCormack said, leaning back and folding his hands over his impressive pot belly, ‘why didn’t you tell anyone about this before?’

  She hunched her shoulders. ‘Why should I? No one asked, and I can’t see it has any relevance to Charlotte’s murder. I’m telling you now because you’ve asked me in such detail. I thought what happened in the cabin was what you were interested in, not the kind of… incident that took place afterwards. And that was what it was. A tiny incident, soon over, soon forgotten. You find idiots like him everywhere. As an individual you can’t take on the task of reporting every single creep.’

  McCormack growled. Of course she was right. And he didn’t feel like following up the matter, either. There was always so much more trouble, unpleasantness and, not least, work when the person in question had a professional handle that either started or finished with the word police. He gazed out of the window. The sun was glittering on the sea by Port Jackson and on the Manly side where smoke was still rising despite it being a week since the season’s last bush fire had been extinguished. The smoke was drifting south. A fine, warm northerly. Perfect for sailing. McCormack had liked Hole. Or Holy as he called the Norwegian. He had done a brilliant job when he’d helped them with the clown murder. But the lofty, fair-haired Norwegian had sounded weary on the phone. McCormack genuinely hoped that Holy wasn’t going to keel over again.

  ‘Let’s take it from the start, shall we, Miss Peller?’

  Mikael Bellman entered the Odin conference room and heard the conversations stop at once. He strode over to the speaker’s chair, put down his notes, connected his laptop to the USB port and stood in the middle of the floor with his legs anchored. The investigation unit numbered thirty-six officers, three times what was normal for murder cases. They had been working for so long without results that he had had to boost morale a couple of times, but generally speaking they had stuck to it like heroes. That was why Bellman had allowed not only himself but his staff to enjoy what had seemed like their great triumph: the arrest of Tony Leike.

  ‘You will have read the papers today,’ he opened, surveying the assembly.

  He had saved their hides. The front pages of two of the three biggest newspapers bore the same photograph: Tony Leike getting into a car outside Police HQ. The third had a picture of Harry Hole, an archive photo from a talk show where he had been discussing the Snowman.

  ‘As you can see, Inspector Hole has assumed responsibility. Which is only right and proper.’

  His words bounced back to him off the walls, and he met the silent officers’ morning-weary gazes. Or was it a different kind of tiredness? In which case, it would have to be opposed. Because things were coming to a head now. The Kripos boss had dropped by to say that the Ministry of Justice had rung and was asking questions. The sands of time were running out.

  ‘We don’t have a prime suspect any more,’ he said. ‘But the good news is we have fresh leads. And they all take us from the Havass cabin to Ustaoset.’

  He went to the laptop, tapped a key and the first page of a PowerPoint presentation he had prepared came to life.

  Half an hour later he had been through all the facts they possessed, with names, times and assumed routes.

  ‘The question’, he said, switching off the computer, ‘is what kind of murders we are dealing with here. I think we can exclude the typical serial killer. The victims have not been chosen at random inside a demographic group; they are tied to a specific place and a specific time. Accordingly, there is reason to believe that we are also talking about a specific motive which may even be perceived as rational. If so, that makes the task considerably easier for us: find the motive and w
e have the killer.’

  Bellman saw several detectives nod.

  ‘The problem is that there are no witnesses to tell us anything. The only one we know to be alive, Iska Peller, was ill in bed, alone. The others are either dead or have not come forward. We know, for example, that Adele Vetlesen was with a man she had met recently, but no one in her circle of acquaintances seems to know anything about him, so we have to assume it was a short-lived relationship. We’re looking at the men she contacted by phone or on the Net, but it will take time to work our way through them. And in the absence of witnesses we will have to find our own starting point. We need hypotheses for the motive. What is the motive for killing at least four people?’

  ‘Jealousy or hearing voices,’ someone from the back replied.

  ‘All our experience tells us that.’

  ‘Agreed. Who might hear voices commanding them to kill?’

  ‘Anyone with a psychiatric record,’ came a sing-song response from Finnmark.

  ‘And anyone without one,’ said someone else.

  ‘Good. Who might be jealous?’

  ‘Partner or spouse of someone there.’

  ‘And who might that be?’

  ‘But we’ve checked the victims’ partners’ alibis and potential motives,’ another said. ‘That’s the first thing we do. And either they didn’t have partners or we eliminated them from our inquiries.’

  Mikael Bellman knew all too well they were just putting their foot on the accelerator while the wheels spun round in the same rut they had been in for a while, but the important point now was that they were ready to do exactly that: to put their foot down. For he was in no doubt that the Havass cabin was a plank that could be levered under the wheel to get them out of the rut.

  ‘We didn’t eliminate all the partners and spouses,’ Bellman said, rocking on his heels. ‘We just didn’t think every one was a suspect. Who didn’t have an alibi for the time his wife was killed?’

  ‘Rasmus Olsen!’

  ‘Correct. And when I went to Stortinget and spoke to Rasmus Olsen he admitted that there had been what he called a little “jealous patch” some months ago. A woman Rasmus had been flirting with. And Marit Olsen went to the Havass cabin for a couple of days to think things over. The days may match. Perhaps she did more than think. Perhaps she got her own back. And here’s a thought. On the night in question, when the victims were at the Havass cabin, Rasmus Olsen was not in Oslo; he was booked into a hotel in Ustaoset. What was Rasmus doing in the area if his wife was in Havass? And did he spend the night in the hotel or did he go for a longish skiing trip?’

  The eyes in front of him were no longer heavy-lidded or tired, quite the opposite, he was igniting a spark in them. He waited for an answer. Such a large investigative group was not normally the most efficient way to organise this kind of improvised brainstorming, but they had worked on the case for so long that everyone in the room had had their slants, their sure-fire hunches and fanciful hypotheses rejected and their egos flattened.

  A young detective took a punt. ‘He may have arrived at the cabin in the evening unannounced and caught her in the act. The guy saw and sneaked off again. Then planned the whole thing at his leisure.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Bellman said, going over to the speaker’s chair and holding up a note. ‘Argument one in favour of such a theory: I’ve just been given this by Telenor. It shows that Rasmus Olsen spoke to his wife on the phone some time that morning. So let’s assume he knew which cabin she was going to. Argument two in favour of this hypothesis is the weather report, which shows there was a moon and clear visibility all evening and night, so he could easily have skied there, as Tony Leike did. Argument one against the hypothesis: why kill anyone apart from his wife and her alleged partner?’

  ‘Maybe she had more than one,’ shouted one of the female detectives, a short, buxom number Bellman reckoned was sufficiently lesbian for him to have toyed with the idea of inviting her to Kaja’s one night. No more than a passing thought of course. ‘Perhaps there was a whole fucking orgy going on up there.’

  Laughter all round. Good, that lightened the atmosphere.

  ‘He may not have seen who she was having sex with, didn’t even know if it was a woman or a man, just that someone was under the covers with her,’ another voice said. ‘And so he hedged his bets.’

  More laughter.

  ‘Come on, we can’t waste time on this rubbish,’ said Eskildsen, a veteran, though no one knew exactly how long he had been a detective. The room fell silent. ‘Any of you young ’uns remember the case they solved at Crime Squad a few years back when everyone thought there was a serial killer on the loose?’ Eskildsen continued. ‘When they got the killer it turned out he only had a motive for murdering number three. But because he knew he would come under suspicion if she was the only victim, he killed the others to camouflage it as an insane rampage.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ shouted a young officer. ‘Did the Crime Squad actually manage to solve a case? Must have been a fluke.’

  The young man looked around with a grin and his face slowly coloured as no response was forthcoming. Everyone with any investigative experience at all remembered the case. It was on the syllabus of all police colleges throughout Scandinavia. It was a legend. As indeed was the man who cracked it.

  ***

  ‘Harry Hole.’

  ‘G’day, Holy, mate. Neil McCormack here. How are you? And where are you?’

  McCormack thought he heard Harry answer ‘in a coma’, but assumed he must have been saying the name of some Norwegian town.

  ‘I talked to Iska Peller. She didn’t have a lot to say about the night at the cabin. However, the following evening…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She and her friend Charlotte were picked up from the cabin by a cop from the outback and taken to his place. Turned out that while Miss Peller was trying to sleep off her flu, the policeman and her friend were having a glass of grog in the sitting room and he tried to seduce Charlotte. Got pretty physical, so physical that she shouted for help, Miss Peller woke up, and rushed into the room where the policeman had already pulled her friend’s ski pants down to her knees. He stopped, and Miss Peller and her friend decided to go to the station and stay at a hotel somewhere I’m afraid I can’t…’

  ‘Geilo.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You say “tried to seduce”, Neil, but you mean rape, I suppose?’

  ‘No, I had to do the rounds with Miss Peller before we landed on a precise formulation. She said her friend’s description was that the policeman had pulled down her trousers against her will, but he hadn’t touched her intimate parts.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘We can perhaps assume it was his intention, but we don’t know. The point is that nothing punishable by law had happened yet. Miss Peller accepted that. After all, they hadn’t bothered to report the matter, they just skedaddled. The cop had even found a village wacko to run all three of them to the station and he had helped them board the train. According to Miss Peller, the man seemed relatively unfazed by the whole business; he was more interested in getting the girlfriend’s phone number than apologising. As if it were just perfectly normal bloke-meets-sheila stuff.’

  ‘Mm. Anything else?’

  ‘No, Harry. Except that we’ve given her police protection as you suggested. Twenty-four-hour service, tucker and necessities brought to the door. She can just enjoy the sun. If the sun shines in Bristol, that is.’

  ‘Thanks, Neil. If anything-’

  ‘-should crop up, I’ll ring. And vice versa.’

  ‘Of course. Take care.’

  Says you, McCormack thought, ringing off and peering out at the blue afternoon sky. The days were a bit longer now in the summer, he could still get in an hour and a half’s sailing before it was dark.

  Harry got out of bed and went for a shower. Stood motionless, letting the boiling hot water run down his body for twenty minutes. Then he came out, dried his sensitive, red-flecked
skin and dressed. Saw from his mobile phone that he had received eighteen calls while he had been asleep. So they had managed to get hold of his number. He recognised the first numbers as those of Norway’s three biggest newspapers and the two most important TV channels since they all had switchboard numbers beginning with the same prefixes. The remainder were more arbitrary and probably belonged to comment-hungry journalists. But his gaze paused at one of the numbers, although he couldn’t say why. Because there were some bytes up in his brain that had fun memorising numbers perhaps. Or because the dialling code told him it was Stavanger. He flicked back through his call log and found the number from two days earlier. Colbjornsen.

  Harry rang back and squeezed the phone between cheek and shoulder as he tied his boots and noted that it was time he bought some new ones. The iron plate in the sole, so that you could tread on nails without worrying, was hanging off.

  ‘Bloody hell, Harry. They really hung you out to dry in the papers today. They butchered you. What does your boss say?’

  Colbjornsen sounded ill from overindulgence. Or just ill.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Harry said. ‘I haven’t spoken to him.’

  ‘Crime Squad comes out OK. It’s you personally carrying the entire can. Did your boss make you take one for the team?’

  ‘No.’

  The question came after a long silence. ‘It wasn’t… it wasn’t Bellman, was it?’

  ‘What do you want, Colbjornsen?’

  ‘Shit, Harry. I’ve been running a somewhat illegal solo investigation, just like you. So first of all I have to know whether we’re still on the same team or not.’

  ‘I haven’t got a team, Colbjornsen.’

  ‘Great, I can hear you’re still on our team. The losers.’

  ‘I’m on my way out.’