The Leopard hh-8 Read online

  She let go of him.

  ‘Sleep well, Harry.’

  He nodded.

  She turned and walked away. He closed the door quietly behind him.

  He cleared away the cups, rinsed the kettle and had just put it away when the doorbell rang.

  He went to answer it.

  ‘I forgot something,’ she said.

  ‘What was that?’ he asked.

  She lifted her hand and stroked his brow. ‘What you look like.’

  He pulled her close. Her skin. The scent. He fell, a wonderful dizzying spiral downwards.

  ‘I want you,’ she whispered. ‘I want to make love to you.’

  ‘And I want you, too.’

  They let go. Looked at each other. A sudden formality seemed to come between them, and for a moment it appeared to him that she had regrets. That he also had regrets. It was too much, too quickly. There were too many other things, there was too much clinker, too much baggage, too many good reasons. Nonetheless she took his hand, timid almost, whispered ‘Come on’ and led him up the stairs.

  The bedroom was cold and smelt of parents. He switched on the light.

  The spacious double bed was made with two duvets and pillows.

  Harry helped her to change the bedlinen.

  ‘Which side is his?’ she asked.

  ‘This one,’ Harry pointed.

  ‘And he continued to sleep there after she was gone,’ she said, as if to herself. ‘Just in case.’

  They undressed without peeking. Crept under the duvets and met there.

  At first they lay close to each other, kissing, exploring, careful not to ruin anything before they knew how it would be. Listened to each other’s breathing and the odd isolated car rushing by. Then their kisses became greedier, their touching bolder, and he heard the excited hiss of her breath against his ear.

  ‘Are you frightened?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she groaned, grabbing hold of his erection, adjusting her hips and guiding him in, but he moved her hand and did it himself.

  There was barely a sound, only a gasp as he penetrated her. He closed his eyes, lay still, enjoying the sensations. Then he began to move slowly, carefully. Opened his eyes, met hers. She seemed on the verge of tears.

  ‘Kiss me,’ she whispered.

  Her tongue coiled around his, smooth underneath, rough on top. Faster and deeper, slower and deeper. She rolled him over without letting go of his tongue and sat astride him. She pressed against his stomach every time she came down on him. Then her tongue released his, and she leaned back and let out a moan. Twice, a deep animal noise that rose, and became high-pitched as she gasped for air and went quiet again. Her throat was thick with the scream that didn’t come. He raised his hand, placed his fingers against the quivering blue artery under the skin on her neck.

  And then she screamed, as if in pain, in anger, in liberation. Harry felt his scrotum tighten and came. It was perfect, so unbearably perfect that he threw his hand in the air and banged the wall behind him with his fist. And, as though she had been given a lethal injection, she collapsed on top of him.

  They lay like this, limbs strewn randomly, like the dead. Harry felt the blood rush in his ears and well-being surge through his body. That and something he could have sworn was happiness.

  He slept and was woken by her getting back into bed and snuggling up close to him. She was wearing one of Olav’s vests. She kissed him, mumbled something and was gone, her breathing light and serene. Harry stared at the ceiling. Letting his thoughts churn, knowing there was no point resisting.

  It had been so good. It hadn’t been so good since… since…

  The blind wasn’t pulled down and at half past five cones of light from passing cars began to travel across the ceiling as Oslo woke and dragged itself off to work. He looked at her again. And then he was gone, too.

  53

  Heel Hook

  When Harry woke it was nine o’clock, the room was bathed in daylight and there was no one lying beside him. There were four messages on his phone.

  The first was from Kaja, saying she was on her way home to get changed for work. And thanking him for… he couldn’t hear what, just a shriek of laughter before she rang off.

  The second was from Gunnar Hagen, who was wondering why Harry had not answered any of his calls and saying the press were on his back because of Tony Leike’s unjustified arrest.

  The third was from Gunther, who repeated the Dirty Harry witticism and said the Leipzig police had not found Juliana Verni’s passport and therefore could not confirm whether it had been stamped in Kigali or not.

  The fourth was from Mikael Bellman, who simply told Harry to be at Kripos for two. He assumed Solness had passed on his instructions.

  Harry got up. He felt good. Better than good. Fantastic maybe. He listened to his body. OK, fantastic was an exaggeration.

  Harry went downstairs, took out a packet of crispbreads and made the important phone call first.

  ‘You’re talking to Sos Hole.’ It was Sos, or Sis, as Harry called her. Her voice sounded so formal he had to smile.

  ‘And you’re talking to Harry Hole,’ he said.

  ‘Harry!’ She screamed his name two more times.

  ‘Hi, Sis.’

  ‘Dad said you were home! Why haven’t you rung before?’

  ‘I wasn’t ready, Sis. Now I am. Are you?’

  ‘I’m always ready, Harry. You know that.’

  ‘Yes, I do. Lunch in town before visiting Dad some time soon? My treat.’

  ‘Yes! You sound happy, Harry. Is it Rakel? Have you been speaking to her? I spoke to her yesterday. What was that sound? Harry?’

  ‘Just the crispbreads falling out of the packet onto the floor. What did she want?’

  ‘To ask about Dad. She’d heard he’s ill.’

  ‘Was that all?’

  ‘Yes. No. She said Oleg was fine.’

  Harry swallowed. ‘Good. Let’s talk soon then.’

  ‘Don’t forget. I’m so happy you’re home, Harry! I have so much to tell you!’

  Harry put the phone on the worktop and was bending down to pick up the crispbreads when the phone hummed again. Sis was like that, remembering things she should have said after they had rung off. He straightened up.

  ‘What is it?’

  Sonorous clearing of throat. Then a voice introduced itself as Abel. The name was familiar, and Harry instantly ransacked his memory. There were the files of old murder cases, neatly organised with data that never seemed to be deleted: names, faces, house numbers, dates, sound of a voice, colour and year of a car. But he could suddenly forget the name of neighbours who had lived in his block for three years or when Oleg’s birthday was. They called that the detective memory.

  Harry listened without interrupting.

  ‘I see,’ he said at length. ‘Thank you for ringing.’

  He hung up and tapped in a new number.

  ‘Kripos,’ answered a weary receptionist. ‘You are trying to get through to Mikael Bellman.’

  ‘Yes. Hole from Crime Squad. Where’s Bellman?’

  The receptionist informed him of the POB’s whereabouts.

  ‘Logical,’ Harry said.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ she yawned.

  ‘That’s what he’s doing, isn’t it?’

  Harry slipped the phone into his pocket. Stared out of the kitchen window. Crispbread crunched under his feet as he walked.

  ‘Skoyen Climbing Club’ it said on the glass door facing the car park. Harry pushed the door and entered. On his way in, he had to wait for a class of excited schoolchildren on their way out. He flipped off his boots by a shoe rack at the bottom of the stairs. In the large hall, there were half a dozen people climbing up the ten-metre-high walls, although they looked more like the artificial papier mache mountainsides of Tarzan films Harry and Oystein had seen at Symra cinema when they were kids. Except that these were peppered with multicoloured holds and pegs with loops and carabiner hooks. A discreet
smell of soap and sweaty feet emanated from the blue mats on the floor that Harry walked across. He stopped beside a bow-legged, squat man staring intently up at the overhang above them. A rope went from his climbing harness to a man who at that moment was swinging like a pendulum from one arm eight metres above them. At the end of one arc he swung up a foot, threaded the heel under a pink, pear-shaped hold, put the other foot on a piece of the structure and clipped the climbing rope into the top anchor in one elegant sweeping movement.

  ‘Gotcha!’ he shouted, leaned back on the rope and placed his legs against the wall.

  ‘Great heel hook,’ Harry said. ‘Your boss is a bit of a poseur, isn’t he?’

  Jussi Kolkka neither answered nor graced Harry with a glance, just pulled the lever on the rope brake.

  ‘Your receptionist told me you’d be here,’ Harry said to the man being lowered towards them.

  ‘Regular slot every week,’ Bellman said. ‘One of the perks of being a policeman is being able to train during working hours. How are you, Harry? Muscles look defined at any rate. Lots of muscle per kilo, I reckon. Ideal for climbing, you know.’

  ‘For limited ambitions,’ Harry said.

  Bellman landed with legs shoulder-width apart and pulled down some rope so that he could slacken the figure-of-eight knot.

  ‘I didn’t understand that.’

  ‘I can’t see the point of climbing so high. I clamber around a few crags now and then.’

  ‘Clambering,’ Bellman snorted, loosening the harness and stepping out of it. ‘You know, it hurts more to fall from two metres without a rope than it does from thirty metres with one?’

  ‘Yes,’ Harry said, a smile tugging at his mouth. ‘I know.’

  Bellman sat down on one of the wooden benches, pulled off the balletshoe-like climbing slippers and rubbed his feet while Kolkka brought down the rope and started to gather it in a coil. ‘You got my message?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So what’s the hurry? I’m seeing you at two.’

  ‘That was what I wanted to clarify with you, Bellman.’

  ‘Clarify?’

  ‘Before we meet the others. Agreeing on the conditions for me to join the team.’

  ‘The team?’ Bellman laughed. ‘What are you talking about, Harry?’

  ‘Do you want me to spell it out for you? You don’t need me to ring Australia and persuade a woman to come here to act as a decoy, you can do that yourself without any bother. What you’re asking for is help.’

  ‘Harry! Really now…’

  ‘You look knackered, Bellman. You’ve started to feel it, haven’t you. You’ve felt the pressure escalate since Marit Olsen.’ Harry sat down on the bench beside him. Even then, he was almost ten centimetres taller. ‘Feeding frenzy in the press every sodding day. Impossible to walk past a newspaper stand or switch on the TV without being reminded of the Case. The Case you haven’t solved. The Case your bosses are nagging you about all the time. The Case that requires a press conference a day where the vultures scream questions into each other’s beaks. And now the man you yourself released has vanished into the blue beyond. The vultures swarm in, some of them cackling in Swedish, Danish and even English. I’ve been where you are now, Bellman. Soon they’ll be talking fucking French. For this is the Case you have to solve, Bellman. And the Case has gone stale.’

  Bellman didn’t answer, but his jaw muscles were grinding. Kolkka had packed the rope in the sack and came towards them, but Bellman waved him away. The Finn turned and waddled towards the exit like an obedient terrier.

  ‘What do you want, Harry?’

  ‘I’m offering you the chance to get this sorted out one on one, instead of at a meeting.’

  ‘You want me to ask you for help?’

  Harry saw Bellman’s complexion redden.

  ‘What sort of bargaining position do you imagine you’re in, Harry?’

  ‘Well, I imagine it’s better than it has been for a while.’

  ‘You’re mistaken there.’

  ‘Kaja Solness doesn’t want to work for you. Bjorn Holm you’ve already promoted, and if you send him back to being a crime scene officer he’ll be only too pleased. The only person you can hurt now is me, Bellman.’

  ‘Have you forgotten I can lock you up so that you can’t visit your father before he dies?’

  Harry shook his head. ‘There’s no one to visit any more, Bellman.’

  Mikael Bellman arched an eyebrow in surprise.

  ‘They rang from the hospital this morning,’ Harry said. ‘My father went into a coma last night. Dr Abel says he won’t come out of it. Whatever was left unsaid between my father and me will remain unsaid.’

  54

  Tulip

  Bellman looked at Harry in silence. that is, the brown deer-like eyes were directed towards Harry, but his gaze was inverted. Harry knew that a committee meeting was in progress there, a meeting with a lot of dissenting opinions, it seemed. Bellman slowly loosened the strings of the chalk bag hanging around his waist, as if to gain time. Time to think. Then he angrily stuffed the chalk bag in his rucksack.

  ‘If – and only if – I asked you for help without having anything to pressurise you with,’ he said, ‘why on earth would you do it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Bellman stopped packing and looked up. ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Well, it definitely wouldn’t be out of love for you, Bellman.’ Harry breathed in. Fidgeted with a pack of cigarettes. ‘Let’s say that even those who believe themselves to be homeless occasionally discover that they have a home. A place where you could imagine being buried one day. And do you know where I want to be buried, Bellman? In the park in front of Police HQ. Not because I love the police or have been a fan of what is known as esprit de corps. Quite the opposite – I spit on the police officer’s craven loyalty to the force, that incestuous camaraderie that exists only because people think they may need a favour one rainy day. A colleague who can exact vengeance, make a testimony or, if necessary, turn a blind eye for you, I hate all that.’

  Harry faced Bellman.

  ‘But the police is all I have. It’s my tribe. And my job is to clear up murders. Whether it is for Kripos or Crime Squad. Can you grasp something like that, Bellman?’

  Mikael Bellman squeezed his lower lip between thumb and first finger.

  Harry motioned to the wall. ‘What grade was the climb, Bellman? Seven plus?’

  ‘Eight minimum. On sight.’

  ‘That’s tough. And I guess you think this is even tougher. But that’s how it has to be.’

  Bellman cleared his throat. ‘Fine. Fine, Harry.’ He pulled the strings of his rucksack tight again. ‘Will you help us?’

  Harry put his cigarettes back in his pocket and lowered his head. ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’ll have to check with your boss to see if it’s alright first.’

  ‘Save yourself the effort,’ Harry said, getting up. ‘I’ve already informed him I’m working with you lot from now on. See you at two.’

  Iska Peller peered out of the window of the two-storey brick building, at the row of identical houses on the other side of the street. It could have been any street in any town in England, but it was the tiny district of Bristol in Sydney, Australia. A cool southerly had picked up. The afternoon heat would release its grip as soon as the sun went down.

  She heard a dog bark and the heavy traffic on the motorway two blocks away.

  The man and woman in the car opposite had just been relieved; now there were two men. They drank slowly from their paper cups with lids. In their own good time, because there is no reason in the world to hurry when you have an eight-hour shift ahead of you and nothing at all is going to happen. Ratchet down a gear, slow the metabolism, do what the Aborigines do: go into that torpid, dormant state which is their diapause and where they can be for hours on end, days on end if need be. She tried to visualise how these slow coffee drinkers could be of any help if anything really happened.

>   ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, trying to repress the tremble in her voice caused by suppressed fury. ‘I would have liked to help you find who killed Charlotte, but what you’re suggesting is utterly out of the question.’ Then her anger gained the upper hand after all. ‘I can’t believe you’re even asking! I’m enough of a decoy here. Ten wild horses couldn’t drag me back to Norway. You’re the police, you get paid to catch that monster, why can’t you be the bait?’

  She hung up and threw down the phone. It hit the cushion on the armchair and one of her cats jumped up and darted into the kitchen. She hid her face in her hands and let the tears flow again. Dear Charlotte. Her dear, dear, beloved Charlotte.

  She had never been afraid of the dark before, now she thought of nothing else; soon the sun would go down, night would come, it was relentless, returning again and again.

  The phone played the opening bars of an Antony and the Johnsons song, and the display lit up on the cushion. She walked over and eyed it. Felt the hairs on her neck rising. The caller’s number started with 47. From Norway again.

  She put the phone to her ear.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Me again.’

  She sighed with relief. Just the policeman.

  ‘I was wondering, if you don’t want to come here in person, whether we might at least have the use of your name?’

  Kaja studied the man held in the red-haired woman’s embrace, her head bowed over his bared neck.

  ‘What can you see?’ Mikael asked. His voice echoed around the walls of the museum.

  ‘She’s kissing him,’ Kaja said, stepping back from the painting. ‘Or comforting him.’

  ‘She’s biting him and sucking his blood,’ Mikael said.

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘It’s one of the reasons Munch called this The Vampire. Everything ready?’

  ‘Yes, I’m taking the train to Ustaoset soon.’

  ‘Why did you want to meet here now?’