The Leopard hh-8 Page 51

  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 Credit 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 Credit 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 tryi
ng 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?’

  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?’

  ‘We have a lead.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I read in Se og Hor that Lene Galtung asked to have her hair dyed brick red. I don’t even know if that’s a colour we use in Norway, that’s probably why I remembered it.’

  ‘Remembered what?’

  ‘That it was the hair colour given in the passport belonging to Juliana Verni from Leipzig. At the time I asked Gunther to check if there was a stamp from Kigali in her passport. But the police didn’t find it, the passport was gone, and I’m convinced Tony Leike took it.’

  ‘The passport? And?’

  ‘Now Lene Galtung has got it.’

  Hagen put some pak choi in his shopping basket while slowly shaking his head. ‘You’re basing a trip to the Congo on something you read in a gossip rag?’

  ‘I’m basing it on what I – or I should say Katrine Bratt – found out about what Juliana Verni has been doing recently.’

  Hagen started to make a move towards the man at the cash desk on a podium by the right-hand wall. ‘Verni’s dead, Harry.’

  ‘Do dead people catch flights? Turns out Juliana Verni – or let’s say a woman with curly brick-red hair – has bought a plane ticket from Zurich to the end of the world.’

  ‘The end of the world?’

  ‘Goma, the Congo. Early tomorrow.’

  ‘Then they will arrest her when they discover she has a passport belonging to a person who has been dead for more than two months.’

  ‘I checked with ICAO. They say it can take up to a year before the passport number of a deceased person is crossed off the books. Which means someone may have travelled to the Congo on Odd Utmo’s passport, too. However, we have no cooperation agreement with the Congo. And it’s hardly an insurmountable problem buying your way out of prison.’

  Hagen let the cashier tot up his goods while he massaged his temples in an attempt to pre-empt the inevitable headache. ‘So go and find her in Zurich. Send the Swiss police to the airport.’

  ‘We’ve got her under surveillance. Lene Galtung will lead us to Tony Leike, boss.’

  ‘She’ll lead us to perdition, Harry.’ Hagen paid, took his items and marched out of the shop into rainy, wind-blown Gronlandsleiret where people rushed past with upturned collars and downcast faces.

  ‘You don’t understand. Bratt managed to find out that two days ago Lene Galtung emptied her account in Zurich. Two million euros. Not a staggering sum and definitely not enough to finance a whole mining project. But enough to bridge a critical phase.’

  ‘Idle speculation.’

  ‘What the hell else is she going to do with two million euros in cash? Come on, boss, this is the only chance we’ll get.’ Harry stepped up the pace to stay level with Hagen. ‘In the Congo you don’t find people who don’t want to be found. The fucking country is as big as Western Europe and consists largely of forest no white man has ever seen. Go for it now. Leike will haunt your dreams, boss.’

  ‘I don’t have nightmares like you do, Harry.’

  ‘Have you told the next of kin how well you sleep at night, boss?’

  Gunnar Hagen came to an abrupt halt.

  ‘Sorry, boss,’ Harry said. ‘That was below the belt.’

  ‘It was. And actually I don’t know why you’re hassling me for my permission. You’ve never considered it important before.’

  ‘Thought it would be nice for you to have the feeling you’re the man in charge, boss.’

  Hagen fired a warning shot across Harry’s
bows. Harry shrugged. ‘Let me do this, boss. Afterwards you can give me the boot for refusing to obey orders. I’ll take all the flak, it’s OK by me.’

  ‘Is it OK?’

  ‘I’m going to resign after this anyway.’

  Hagen eyed Harry. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Go.’ Then he set off again.

  Harry caught up with him. ‘Fine?’

  ‘Yes. Actually it was fine from the very beginning.’

  ‘Oh? Why didn’t you say so before then?’

  ‘Thought it would be nice to have the feeling I was the man in charge.’

  PART NINE

  83

  The End of the World

  She dreamed she was standing before a closed door and heard a cold, lone bird’s cry from the forest, and it sounded so peculiar because the sun was shining and it was hot. She opened the door…

  She woke up with her head on Harry’s shoulder and dried saliva in the corners of her mouth. The captain’s voice announced they were about to land in Goma.

  She looked out of the window. A grey stripe in the east presaged the arrival of a new day. It was twelve hours since they had left Oslo. In a few hours the Zurich flight with Juliana Verni on the passenger list would land.

  ‘I’m wondering why Hagen thought it was alright to shadow Lene like this,’ Harry said.

  ‘He probably valued your cogent arguments,’ Kaja yawned.

  ‘Mm. He seemed a bit too relaxed. I reckon he’s got something up his sleeve. There’s some guarantee he’s got they won’t bollock him for this.’

  ‘He might have something on someone in the Ministry of Justice,’ Kaja said.

  ‘Mm. Or on Bellman. Perhaps he knows you and Bellman were having a relationship?’

  ‘Doubt it,’ Kaja said, peering into the dark. ‘There are hardly any lights here.’

  ‘Looks like a power cut,’ Harry said. ‘The airport must have its own generator.’

  ‘Light over there,’ she said, pointing to a red shimmer north of the town. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Nyiragongo,’ Harry said. ‘It’s the lava lighting up the sky.’