The Leopard: An Inspector Harry Hole Novel Read online

The man had hidden himself behind a copy of Liberal.

  Harry picked up a Se og Hør gossip rag with a picture of Lene Galtung and her fiancé and left the waiting area.

  Olav Hole was lying with his eyes closed. Harry bent down and put his ear to Olav’s mouth. He was breathing so lightly it was barely audible, but Harry felt a current of air on his cheek.

  He sat for a while on the chair beside the bed, watching his father as his mind played back poorly edited childhood memories in arbitrary order and with no other central theme than that they were things he remembered clearly.

  Then he placed the chair by the door, which he opened a crack, and waited.

  It was half an hour before he saw the man come from the waiting area and walk down the corridor. Harry noticed that the squat, robust-looking man was unusually bowlegged; he seemed to be walking with a beach ball stuck between his knees. Before entering a door marked with the international sign for the men’s room, he plucked at his belt. As if something heavy were hanging from it.

  Harry got up and followed.

  Stopped outside the restroom and breathed in. It had been a long time. Then he pushed open the door and slipped in.

  The restroom was like the whole hospital: clean, nice, new and too big. Along the main wall there were six cubicle doors, none with an OCCUPIED sign above the lock. On the shorter wall four sinks, and on the other long wall four porcelain urinals at hip height. The man was standing at a urinal, with his back to Harry. On the wall above him ran a horizontal pipe. It looked solid. Solid enough. Harry took out his revolver and handcuffs. International etiquette in men’s rooms is not to look at each other. Eye contact, even unintentional, is cause for murder. Accordingly, the man didn’t turn to look at Harry. Not when Harry locked the outside door with infinite care, not when he walked over slowly and not when he placed the gun barrel against the roll of fat between the man’s neck and head and whispered what a colleague used to claim all police officers should be allowed to say at least once in their careers: “Freeze.”

  The man did exactly that. Harry could see the gooseflesh appear on the roll of fat as the man stiffened.

  “Hands up.”

  The man lifted a couple of short, powerful arms above his head. Harry leaned forward. And realized at that moment it had been a blunder. The man’s speed was breathtaking. Harry knew from the hours spent studying up on hand-to-hand combat techniques that knowing how to take a beating was as important as giving one. The art was to let your muscles relax, to appreciate that punishment cannot be avoided, only reduced. So, when the man spun around with his knee raised, Harry reacted as supplely as a dancer, following the movement. He moved his body in the same direction as the kick. The foot hit him above the hip. Harry lost balance, fell and slid along the tiled floor until he was out of range. He remained there, sighed and looked at the ceiling as he took out his pack of cigarettes. He poked one in his mouth.

  “Speed-cuffing,” Harry said. “Learned it the year I took an FBI course in Chicago. Cabrini-Green. The digs were the pits. For a white man, there was nothing to do in the evenings unless you wanted to go out and get yourself robbed. So I sat indoors practicing two things: loading and unloading my service pistol as fast as I could in the dark, and speed-cuffing on a table leg.”

  Harry levered himself up onto his elbows.

  The man still had his short arms stretched up above his head. His wrists were shackled to the handcuffs on either side of the pipe. He stared blankly at Harry.

  “Mr. Kluit send you?” Harry asked in English.

  The man held Harry’s gaze without blinking.

  “The triad? I’ve paid my debts—haven’t you heard?” Harry studied the man’s expressionless face. The features could have been Asian, but he didn’t have a Chinese face or complexion. Mongolian, maybe? “So what do you want from me?”

  No answer. Which was bad news, as the man had most probably not come to ask for anything, but to do something.

  Harry stood up and walked in a semicircle so that he could approach him from the side. He held the revolver to the man’s temple while slipping his left hand inside the man’s suit jacket. His hand ran over the cold steel of a weapon, then found a wallet and plucked it out.

  Harry stepped back three paces.

  “Let’s see … Mr. Jussi Kolkka.” Harry held an American Express card up to the light. “Finnish? I suppose you know some Norwegian, then?”

  No answer.

  “You’ve been a policeman, haven’t you? When I saw you in arrivals at Gardermoen, I thought you were an undercover narcotics cop. How did you know I was catching that particular flight, Jussi? It’s all right if I call you Jussi, isn’t it? It feels sort of natural to address a guy with his schlong hanging out by his first name.”

  There was a brief throaty noise before a gobbet of spit came whirling through the air, rotating on its axis, and landed on Harry’s chest.

  Harry looked down at his T-shirt. The black snuff spit had drawn a diagonal line through the second o and it now read SNOW PATRøL.

  “So you do understand Norwegian,” Harry said. “Who do you work for then, Jussi? And what do you want?”

  Not a muscle stirred in Jussi’s face. Someone shook the door handle outside, swore and went away.

  Harry sighed. Then he raised his revolver until it was level with the Finn’s forehead and cocked it.

  “You might suppose, Jussi, that I’m a normal, sane person. Well, this is how sane I am. My father is lying helpless in his sickbed in there. You’ve found out, and that presents me with a problem. There’s only one way to solve it. Fortunately, you’re armed so I can tell the police it was self-defense.”

  Harry pressed the hammer back still farther. And felt the familiar nausea.

  “Kripos.”

  Harry stopped the hammer. “Repeat.”

  “I’m in Kripos,” he hissed in Swedish, with the Finnish accent witty speech makers at Norwegian wedding receptions are so fond of.

  Harry stared at the man. He didn’t have a second’s doubt that he was telling the truth. Yet it was totally incomprehensible.

  “In my wallet,” the Finn snarled, not letting the fury in his voice reach his eyes.

  Harry opened the wallet again and checked inside. Removed a laminated ID card. There wasn’t much information, but it was adequate. The man in front of Harry was employed by Kriminalpolitisentralen, Kripos for short, the central crime unit in Oslo that assisted in—and usually led—the investigations into murder cases affecting the whole of the country.

  “What the hell does Kripos want with me?”

  “Ask Bellman.”

  “Who’s Bellman?”

  The Finn uttered a brief sound; it was difficult to determine whether it was a cough or laughter. “POB Bellman, you stupid fuck. My chief. Let me go now, handsome.”

  “Fuck,” Harry said, inspecting the card again. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He dropped the wallet on the floor and made for the door.

  “Hey! Hey!”

  The Finn’s shouts faded as the door slid shut behind Harry, and he walked down the corridor to the exit. The nurse who had been with his father was coming from the opposite direction and nodded with a smile when they were close enough. Harry tossed the tiny key for the handcuffs up in the air.

  “There’s a flasher in the boys’ room, Altman.”

  By instinct, the nurse caught the key with both hands. Harry could feel the open-mouthed stare on his back until he was out the door.

  9

  The Dive

  It was a quarter to eleven at night. Forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, and Marit Olsen remembered that the weather forecaster had said it would be even milder tomorrow. In Frogner Park there wasn’t a soul to be seen. Something about the pools made her think of laid-up ships, of abandoned fishing villages with the wind whispering through house walls, and fairgrounds out of season. Fragmented memories of her childhood. Like the drowned fishermen who haunted Tronholmen, who emerged from the sea at night, with seaweed i
n their hair and fish in their mouths and nostrils. Ghosts without breath, but who were wont to scream cold, hoarse seagull cries. The dead with their swollen limbs, which snagged on branches and were wrenched off with a ripping sound—not that this halted their advance toward the isolated house in Tronholmen. Tronholmen, where Grandma and Grandpa lived. Where she herself lay trembling in the children’s room. Marit Olsen breathed out. Kept breathing out.

  Down there the wind was still, but up here at the top of the thirty-two-foot-high diving platform you could feel the air moving. Marit felt her pulse throbbing in her temples, in her throat, in her groin, blood streaming through every limb, fresh and life-giving. Living was wonderful. Being alive. She had hardly been out of breath after scaling all the steps of the tower, had just felt her heart, that loyal muscle, racing wildly. She stared down at the empty pool beneath her, to which the moonlight lent an almost unnatural bluish sheen. Farther away, at the end of the pool, she could see the large clock. The hand had stopped at ten past five. Time stood still. She could hear the city, see car lights on Kirkeveien. So close. And yet too far. Too far away for anyone to hear her.

  She was breathing. And was dead, nonetheless. She had a rope as thick as a hawser around her neck and could hear the gulls screaming, ghosts she would soon be joining. But she was not thinking about death. She was thinking about life, how much she would have liked to live. All the small things, and the big things, she would like to have done. She would have traveled to countries she hadn’t seen, watched her nephews and nieces grow, seen the world come to its senses.

  It had been a knife; the blade had glistened in the light from the street lamp, and it had been held to her throat. Fear is said to release energy. Not in her case—it had stolen all her energy, deprived her of the power to act. The thought of steel cutting into her flesh had turned her into a quivering bundle of helplessness. So when she had been told to climb over the fence, she had not been able to, and had fallen to the ground and lain there like a beanbag, tears streaming down her cheeks. Because she knew what was going to happen. She would do everything she could not to be cut and knew she would not be able to prevent it. Because she wanted so much to live. A few more years, a few more minutes—it was the same crazy, blind rationality that drove everyone.

  She had started to explain that she couldn’t climb over; she had forgotten that he had told her to keep her mouth shut. The knife had writhed like a snake, sliced her mouth, twisted around, crunched against her teeth and then been pulled out. The blood had gushed at once. The voice had whispered something behind the mask and nudged her forward along the fence. To a place in the bushes where she was pushed through a gap in it.

  Marit Olsen swallowed the blood that continued to fill her mouth and looked down at the spectator stands beneath her; they, too, were bathed in the blue moonlight. They were so empty; it was a courtroom without spectators or jury, just a judge. An execution without a mob, just the executioner. A final public appearance that no one had considered worth attending. It struck Marit that she lacked as much appeal in death as in life. And now she couldn’t speak, either.

  “Jump.”

  She saw how beautiful the park was, even now in winter. She wished the clock at the end of the pool were working so that she could see the seconds of life she was stealing.

  “Jump,” the voice repeated. He must have removed his mask, for his voice had changed; she recognized it now. She turned her head and stared in shock. Then she felt a foot on her back. She screamed. She no longer had ground beneath her feet; for one astonishing moment she was weightless. But the ground was pulling her down, her body accelerated and she registered that the bluish-white porcelain of the pool was racing toward her, to smash her into pieces.

  Nine feet above the bottom of the pool the rope tightened around Marit Olsen’s neck and throat. It was an old-fashioned type, made of linden and elm, and had no elasticity. Marit Olsen’s stout body was not checked to any appreciable degree; it detached itself from the head and hit the base of the pool with a dull thud. The head and the neck were left on the rope. There wasn’t much blood. Then the head tipped forward, slipped out of the noose, fell onto Marit Olsen’s blue tracksuit top and rolled across the tiles with a rumble.

  Then the pool was still again.

  10

  Reminders

  At three o’clock in the morning Harry abandoned his attempts to sleep and got up. He turned on the tap in the kitchen and put a glass underneath, held it there until the water overflowed and trickled down his wrist, cold. His jaw ached. His attention was held by two photographs pinned up over the kitchen counter.

  One, with a couple of disfiguring creases, showed Rakel in a light-blue summer dress. But it wasn’t summer; the leaves behind her were autumnal. Her dark-brown hair cascaded down onto her bare shoulders. Her eyes seemed to be searching for something behind the lens, perhaps the photographer. Had he taken the photo himself? Strange that he couldn’t remember.

  The other was of Oleg. Taken with Harry’s cell-phone camera at Valle Hovin skating rink during a training session last winter. At that time, a delicate young boy, but if he had continued his training he would have soon filled out that red skinsuit of his. What was he doing now? Where was he? Had Rakel managed to create a home for them wherever they were, a home that felt safer than the one they had in Oslo? Were there new people in her life? When Oleg became tired, or lost concentration, did he still refer to Harry as “Dad”?

  Harry turned off the tap. He was conscious of the cupboard door against his knees. Jim Beam was whispering his name from inside.

  Harry pulled on a pair of trousers and a T-shirt, went into the sitting room and put on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. It was the original, the one where they didn’t compensate for the reel tape in the studio running a tiny bit slow, so the whole record was an almost imperceptible displacement of reality.

  He listened for a while before increasing the volume to drown the whispering from the kitchen. Closed his eyes.

  Kripos. Bellman.

  He had never heard the name. He could, of course, have called Hagen and inquired, but he couldn’t be bothered. Because he had a feeling he knew what this might be about. Best to let sleeping dogs lie.

  Harry had come to the last track, “Flamenco Sketches,” then he gave up. He got to his feet and left the sitting room for the kitchen. In the hall he turned left, emerged wearing Doc Martens boots and went out.

  He found it under a split plastic bag. Something akin to dried pea soup coated the front of the file.

  Back in his sitting room he sat down in the green wing chair and began to read with a shiver.

  The first woman was Borgny Stem-Myhre, thirty-three years old, originally from Levanger, in the north. Single, no children, resident of Sagene in Oslo. Worked as a hairstylist, had a large circle of acquaintances, particularly among hairdressers, photographers and people in the fashion press. She frequented several of Oslo’s restaurants, and not just the coolest. Besides that, she liked the outdoors and liked hiking or skiing from mountain cabin to mountain cabin.

  “You can take the woman out of Levanger, but you can’t take Levanger out of the woman,” was the general summary of interviews with her colleagues. Harry assumed the remark came from colleagues who had succeeded in erasing their own small-town upbringings.

  “We all liked her. In this line of business she was one of the few who was genuine.”

  “It’s incomprehensible. We can’t understand how anyone could take her life.”

  “She was too nice. And sooner or later all the men she fell for exploited her. She became a toy for them. She aimed too high—that was basically the problem.”

  Harry studied a photograph of her. One in the file from when she was still alive. Blond, maybe not natural. Run-of-the-mill looks, no obvious beauty, but she was smartly dressed in a military jacket and a Rastafarian hat. Smartly dressed and too nice—did they go together?

  She had been to Mono restaurant for the monthly launch
and preview of the fashion magazine Sheness. That had been between seven and eight, and Borgny had told a colleague/friend that she would be at home preparing for a photo shoot the day after, at which the photographer had wanted a “jungle meets punk meets eighties look.”

  They assumed she would go to the nearest taxi stand, but none of the taxi drivers in the vicinity at the time in question (computerized lists from Norgestaxi and Oslo Taxi attached) had recognized the photograph of Borgny Stem-Myhre or had driven to Sagene. In short, no one had seen her after she left Mono. Until two Polish bricklayers had shown up for work, noticed that the padlock on the iron bomb-shelter door had been snapped, and gone in. Borgny had been lying in the middle of the floor, in a contorted position, with all of her clothes on.

  Harry examined the photo. The same military jacket. The face looked as if it had been made up with white foundation. The flash cast sharp shadows against the cellar wall. Photo shoot. Smart.

  The pathologist had determined that Borgny Stem-Myhre died somewhere between ten and eleven o’clock at night. In her blood were traces of the drug ketanome, a strong anesthetic that worked fast even when injected intramuscularly. But the direct cause of death was drowning, triggered by blood from wounds in the mouth. And this was where the most disturbing elements came in. The pathologist found twenty-four stab wounds in the mouth, symmetrically distributed and at the same depth, two and a half inches—those that did not pierce the face, that is. But the police were at a loss as to what kind of weapon or instrument had been used. They had simply never seen anything like it. There were absolutely no forensic clues: no fingerprints, no DNA, not even shoe or boot prints, as the concrete floor had been cleaned the day before in preparation for heating cables and floor covering. In the report filed by Kim Erik Lokker, a forensics officer who must have been appointed after Harry’s time, there was a photograph of two gray-black pebbles found on the floor that did not originate from the gravel around the crime scene. Lokker pointed out that small stones often got stuck in boots with a heavy-duty tread, and came loose when worn on firmer ground, such as this concrete floor. Furthermore, these stones were so unusual that if they turned up later in the investigation, for example in a gravel path, they might well find a match. There was one addition to the report after it had been signed and dated: Small traces of iron and coltan had been found on two molars.