The Leopard hh-8 Read online

  He leaned on the pistol so that the recoil wouldn’t cause it to come free and fire at an angle. Then he fired. And fired. And fired. It felt as if their eardrums would explode in the hermetically sealed space. After four shots he stopped, put his lips around the pole and sucked.

  He sucked in… air.

  For a second he was so astonished that he almost fell back down. He sucked again, careful not to destroy the tunnel in the snow that the bullet would have made. The odd grain of snow fell and settled under his tongue. Air. It tasted like a mild, well-rounded whiskey with ice.

  60

  Pixies and Dwarfs

  Roger Gjendem ran acrossKarl Johans Gate where the shops were beginning to open. In Egertorget he peered up at the red Freia clock and saw that the hands were showing three minutes to ten. He increased his speed.

  He had been summoned as a matter of urgency by Bent Nordbo, their retired and, in all ways, legendary editor-in-chief, now board member and temple guardian.

  He bore right, up Akersgata where all the newspapers had bunched together in those days when the paper edition was the king of the journalistic heap. He turned left towards the law courts, right up Apotekergata and stepped, out of breath, into Stopp Pressen. It didn’t seem quite to have been able to make up its mind whether it was going to be a sports bar or a traditional English pub. Perhaps both, as their aim was for all types of journalist to feel at home here. On the walls hung press photographs showing what had engaged, shaken, gladdened and horrified the nation over the last twenty years. They were mostly of sporting events, celebrities and natural disasters. Plus a number of politicians who fell into the latter two categories.

  Since this establishment was within walking distance of the two remaining newspaper offices in Akersgata – Verdens Gang and Dagbladet – Stopp Pressen was almost considered an extended canteen for these two, but for the moment there were only two people visible inside. The barman behind the counter and a man sitting at the table furthest back, beneath a shelf of classic books published by Gyldendal and an old radio, which were obviously meant to give the place a certain cachet.

  The man beneath the shelf was Bent Nordbo. He had John Gielgud’s superior appearance, John Major’s panoramic glasses and Larry King’s braces. And he was reading a genuine newspaper’s newspaper. Roger had heard that Nordbo read only the New York Times, Financial Times, Guardian, China Daily, Suddeutsche Zeitung, El Pais and Le Monde, although he did read them every day. He might take it into his head to flick through Pravda and the Slovenian Dnevnik, but he insisted that ‘East European languages are so heavy on the eye’.

  Gjendem stopped in front of his table with a cough. Bent Nordbo finished reading the last lines of an article about the Mexican immigrants’ revitalisation of former condemned areas of the Bronx, glanced down at the page to make sure there was nothing else of interest. Then he removed his enormous glasses, snatched the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his tweed jacket and looked up at the nervous, and still breathless, man standing by his table.

  ‘Roger Gjendem, I presume.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Nordbo folded the newspaper. Gjendem had also been told that when the man opened it again you could take it that the conversation was over. Nordbo tilted his head and started the not inconsiderable task of cleaning his glasses.

  ‘You’ve worked on criminal cases for many years and you know many of the people at Kripos and Crime Squad, don’t you?’

  ‘Er… yes.’

  ‘Mikael Bellman. What do you know about him?’

  Harry scrunched up his eyes at the sun flooding into his room. He had just woken up and spent the first seconds shaking off dreams and reconstructing reality.

  They had heard his shots.

  And uncovered the ski pole at the first thrust of the spade.

  Afterwards they had told him that what had frightened them most was being shot at while they were digging down to the chimney.

  His head ached as if he had been off the booze for a week. Harry swung his legs out of bed and looked around the room he had been given at the Ustaoset mountain hotel.

  Kaja and Kolkka had been taken by helicopter to Oslo and Rikshospital. Harry had refused to join them. Only after he had lied and said he’d had loads of air the whole time and was absolutely fine did they let him stay.

  Harry put his head under the tap in the bathroom and drank. ‘Water’s never that bad and is sometimes quite nice.’ Who used to say that? Rakel when she wanted Oleg to drink up at the table. He switched on his mobile phone, which had been off since he left for Havass. There was coverage here in Ustaoset, the display said. It also showed there was a message waiting. Harry played it, but there was only a second of coughing and laughing before the connection was broken. Harry checked the caller’s number. A mobile number, could be anyone’s. There was something vaguely familiar about it, but it definitely wasn’t from Rikshospital. Whoever it was would probably ring again if it was important.

  In the breakfast room Mikael Bellman sat in solitary majesty with a cup of coffee in front of him. Papers folded and read. Harry didn’t need to look at them to know it was more of the same. More about the Case, more about the police’s helplessness, more pressure. But today’s edition would hardly have been quick enough off the mark to include the death of Jussi Kolkka.

  ‘Kaja’s fine,’ Bellman said.

  ‘Mm. Where are the others?’

  ‘They caught the morning train to Oslo.’

  ‘But you didn’t?’

  ‘Thought I would wait for you. What do you think?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the avalanche. Just something that can happen?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘No? Did you hear the boom before it came?’

  ‘Might have been the snowdrift on top falling and hitting the side of the mountain. Which in turn triggered the avalanche.’

  ‘Do you think it sounded like that?’

  ‘I don’t know what it’s supposed to sound like. Noises do definitely trigger avalanches though.’

  Bellman shook his head. ‘Even experienced mountain folk believe that myth about sound waves triggering them. I climbed the Alps with an avalanche expert and he told me that people there still believe that the avalanches during the Second World War were caused by cannonfire. The truth is that for a shell to start an avalanche there has to be a direct hit.’

  ‘Mm. So?’

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ Bellman held up a bit of shiny metal between his thumb and first finger.

  ‘No,’ Harry said, signalling to the waiter clearing away the breakfast buffet that he wanted a cup of coffee.

  Bellman hummed the verse of Wergeland’s ‘Pixies and Dwarfs’ about building in the mountains and blowing the rock to pieces.

  ‘Pass.’

  ‘You disappoint me, Harry. Well, OK, I may have a head start on you. I grew up in Manglerud in the seventies in an expanding satellite town. They dug plots around us on all sides. The soundtrack of my childhood was dynamite charges going off. After the builders had left I went around finding bits of red plastic cable and tiny fragments of paper off the dynamite sticks. Kaja told me that they have a special way of fishing up here. Sticks of dynamite are more common than moonshine. Don’t say the thought didn’t cross your mind.’

  ‘OK,’ Harry said. ‘That’s a bit of a blasting cap. When and where did you find it?’

  ‘After you were transported out last night. A couple of the guys and I had a little recce around where the avalanche started.’

  ‘Any tracks?’ Harry took the coffee from the waiter and thanked him.

  ‘No. It’s so exposed up there that the wind had swept away any ski tracks there might have been. But Kaja said she thought she had heard a snowmobile.’

  ‘Barely. And there was quite a time between her hearing it and the avalanche. He might have parked the snowmobile well before he got there so that we wouldn’t hear it.’

  ‘I had the same idea.’r />
  ‘And what now?’ Harry took a tentative sip.

  ‘Look for snowmobile tracks.’

  ‘The local officer…’

  ‘No one knows where he is. But I’ve got us a snowmobile, map, climbing rope, ice axe, provisions. So don’t get too comfortable with that coffee, there’s snow forecast for this afternoon.’

  To reach the top of the avalanche zone, the Danish hotel manager had explained that they would have to drive in a wide arc west of the Havass cabin, but not too far north-west, where they would come into the area known as Kjeften. It had been given this name, ‘jaws’, on account of the fang-shaped rocks scattered about. Sudden crevices and precipices were carved into the plateau, making it an extremely dangerous place to roam in poor weather if you weren’t familiar with the surroundings.

  It was around twelve o’clock when Harry and Bellman looked down the mountainside, where they could make out the excavation of the chimney at the bottom of the valley.

  Clouds had already moved in from the west. Harry squinted to the north-west. Shadows and contours were erased without the sun.

  ‘It must have come from there,’ Harry said. ‘Otherwise we would have heard it whatever.’

  ‘Kjeften,’ Bellman said.

  Two hours later, after crossing the snowscape from south to north in crab-like manner without finding any snowmobile tracks, they had a break. Sat next to each other on the seat, drinking from the Thermos Bellman had brought with them. A light covering of snow fell.

  ‘I once found an unused stick of dynamite on the estate in Manglerud,’ Bellman said. ‘I was fifteen years old. In Manglerud there were three things kids could do. Sport, Bible or dope. I wasn’t interested in any of them. And certainly not in sitting on the post office window ledge waiting for life to take me from hash and heroin, via glue-sniffing, to the grave. As happened to four boys in my class.’

  Harry noticed how the old Manglerud patois had crept back into his Norwegian.

  ‘I hated all that,’ Bellman said. ‘So my first step towards policing was to take the stick of dynamite behind Manglerud church where the dopeheads had their earth bong.’

  ‘Earth bong?’

  ‘They had dug a pit in which they placed, upside down, a decapitated beer bottle with a grille inside, where the hash smoked and stank. They had laid plastic tubes under the ground, running from the pit to various points half a metre away. Then they lay on the grass around the bong each sucking on their tube. I don’t know why.. .’

  ‘To cool the smoke,’ Harry chortled. ‘You get more of a buzz from less dope. Not bad coming from dopeheads, that one. I’ve obviously underestimated Manglerud.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I pulled out one of the tubes and replaced it with dynamite.’

  ‘You blew up the earth bong?’

  Bellman nodded, and Harry laughed.

  ‘Soil hailed down for thirty seconds,’ Bellman smiled.

  Silence. The wind rushed, low and rasping.

  ‘Actually, I wanted to say thank you,’ Bellman said, looking down at his cup. ‘For getting Kaja out in the nick of time.’

  Harry shrugged. Kaja. Bellman knew that Harry knew about the two of them. How? And did that mean Bellman knew about Kaja and himself, as well?

  ‘I had nothing else to do down there,’ Harry said.

  ‘Yes, you did. I looked at Jussi’s body before the helicopter took him away.’

  Harry didn’t answer, just squinted through the thickening snowflakes that had begun to fall.

  ‘The body had a wound at the side of the neck. And there were more on both palms. From the pointed end of a ski pole perhaps. You found him first, didn’t you.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Harry said.

  ‘The neck wound had fresh blood. His heart must have been beating when he received that wound, Harry. Beating pretty strongly, too. It should have been possible to dig out a living man in time. But you prioritised Kaja, didn’t you.’

  ‘Well,’ Harry said, ‘I think Kolkka was right.’ He emptied the rest of his coffee in the snow. ‘You have to choose sides,’ he quoted in Swedish.

  They found the snowmobile tracks at three o’clock, a kilometre from the avalanche, between two large fang-shaped rocks, a refuge from the wind.

  ‘Looks like he paused here,’ Harry said, pointing along the edge of the track left by the tread of the rubber belt. ‘The vehicle has had time to sink in the snow.’ He ran his finger along the middle of the left ski runner while Bellman swept away the light, dry, drifting snow.

  ‘Yep,’ he said, pointing. ‘He turned here and then drove on northwest.’

  ‘We’re approaching the cliffs and the snow’s getting thicker,’ Harry said, looking up at the sky and taking out his phone. ‘We’ll have to ring the hotel and ask them to send a guide on a snowmobile. Shit!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No coverage. We’ll have to make our own way back to the hotel.’

  Harry studied the display. There was still the missed call from the vaguely familiar number of someone who had left those sounds on his voicemail. The last three digits, where the hell had he seen them? And then it kicked in. The detective memory. The number was in the ‘Former Suspects’ file, and was embossed on a business card.

  Along with ‘Tony C. Leike, Entrepreneur’. Harry slowly raised his gaze and looked at Bellman.

  ‘Leike’s alive.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘At least his phone is. He tried to ring me while we were in Havass.’

  Bellman returned Harry’s gaze without blinking. Snowflakes settled on his long eyelashes and the white stains seemed to be glowing. His voice was low, almost a whisper. ‘Visibility’s good, don’t you think, Harry? And there’s no snow in the air.’

  ‘Exceptional visibility,’ Harry said. ‘Not a bloody flake to be seen.’

  He quickly jumped back on.

  They stuttered through the snowscape, a hundred metres at a time. Located the snowmobile’s probable route, swept the tracks with a broom, took bearings, surged forward. The gouge in the left runner, probably caused by an accident, meant they could be sure they were following the right scooter tracks. In a few places, in tiny hollows or on wind-blown hillcrests, the trail was clear and they could make fast progress. But not too fast. Harry had already shouted warnings about precipices twice and they had had some very close shaves. It was getting on for four now. Bellman flicked the headlights on and off, depending on how much snow was drifting in their faces. Harry studied the map. He had no clear idea of where they were, just that they were straying further and further from Ustaoset. And that daylight was dwindling. A third of Harry was slowly beginning to worry about the trip back. Which just meant that the two-third majority couldn’t care less.

  At half past four they lost the trail.

  The drifting snow was so thick now they could hardly see.

  ‘This is madness,’ Harry shouted above the roar of the motor. ‘Why don’t we wait until tomorrow?’

  Bellman turned to him and answered with a smile.

  At five they picked up the trail again.

  They stopped and dismounted.

  ‘Leads that way,’ Bellman said, trudging back to the snowmobile. ‘Come on!’

  ‘Wait,’ Harry said.

  ‘Why? Come on, it’ll soon be dark.’

  ‘When you shouted just now, didn’t you hear the echo?’

  ‘Now you mention it.’ Bellman stopped. ‘Rock face?’

  ‘There are no rock faces on the map,’ Harry said, turning in the direction the tracks indicated.

  ‘Ravine!’ he yelled. And received an answer. A very swift answer. He turned back to Bellman.

  ‘I think the snowmobile making these tracks is in serious trouble.’

  ‘What do I know about Bellman?’ Roger Gjendem repeated to gain some time. ‘He’s reputed to be very competent and extremely professional.’ What was Nordbo, the legendary editor, really after? ‘He does all the right things,’ Gjendem went on. ‘Learns quickly, c
an handle us press types now. Sort of a whizz-kid. Er, that is if you know…’

  ‘I am somewhat conversant with the term, yes,’ said Bent Nordbo with an acidic smile, his right thumb and forefinger furiously rubbing the handkerchief on his glasses. ‘However, basically, I am more interested in if there any rumours doing the rounds.’

  ‘Rumours?’ Gjendem said, failing to notice a relapse into his old habit of leaving his mouth open after speaking.

  ‘I am truly hopeful you understand the concept, Gjendem. Since that is what you and your employer live off. Well?’

  Gjendem hesitated. ‘There are all sorts of rumours.’

  Nordbo rolled his eyes. ‘Speculation. Fabrication. Direct lies. I’m not bothered with the niceties here, Gjendem. Turn the sack of gossip inside out, reveal the malevolence.’

  ‘N-negative things then?’

  Nordbo released a pondorous sigh. ‘Gjendem, my dear man, do you often hear rumours about people’s sobriety, financial generosity, fidelity to partners and non-psychopathic leadership styles? Could that be because the function of rumours is to please the rest of us by putting us in a better light?’ Nordbo was finished with one lens and engaged on the cleansing operation of the second.

  ‘It’s a very, very idle rumour,’ Gjendem said and added with alacrity: ‘And I know for certain of others with the selfsame reputation who categorically are not.’

  ‘As an ex-editor I would recommend you delete either for certain or categorically, it’s a tautology,’ Nordbo said. ‘Categorically are not what?’