by Jo Nesbo
‘I’m thinking about this, yes!’ Bellman smacked the newspaper down on the desk in front of him.
The headlines covered half the front page. PRINCE CHARMING ARRESTED LAST NIGHT. The press had got hold of the sobriquet Prince Charming the same day they had christened him in the Odin conference room. ARRESTED LAST NIGHT was not quite accurate, of course, it was more early evening, but Skai had not had time to send out the press report until midnight, after the TV stations’ last news programmes and before the newspapers’ deadlines. It had been brief and did not specify the time or circumstances, only that Prince Charming, after intense investigation by local police, had been arrested outside the old dance hall in Ytre Enebakk.
‘What’s this supposed to mean?’ Bellman repeated.
‘I presume it means the police have one of Norway’s most notorious killers under lock and key,’ Harry said, trying to release the high-backed chair.
‘The police?’ hissed Bellman. ‘The local police in –’ he had to consult the newspaper – ‘Ytre Enebakk?’
‘I don’t suppose it matters who clears up the case so long as it’s cleared up, does it?’ said Harry, groping for the lever beside the seat. ‘How do these things work?’
Bellman shut the door. ‘Listen here, Hole.’
‘No Harry any more?’
‘Shut your mouth and listen carefully. I know what’s gone on here. You’ve been talking to Hagen and were told you couldn’t hand over the arrest to him and Crime Squad, it was too risky. So, as you couldn’t go for a home win, you went for a draw. You bequeathed the honour and the points to a police bumpkin who couldn’t tell you one end of a murder investigation from the other.’
‘Me, boss?’ Harry said, giving him a blue-eyed, aggrieved look. ‘One of the bodies was found in his district, so it’s natural enough that he followed up on a local level. Then he picked up on this background story about Tony Leike. Cracking police work, if you ask me.’
The white patches on Bellman’s forehead seemed to be turning all the colours of the rainbow.
‘Do you know how this will be construed by the Ministry of Justice? They have put the investigation in my hands, I keep at it week after week, no result. Then along comes this bloody inbred and after a couple of days cuts us up on the inside lane.’
‘Mm.’ Harry yanked at the lever and the seat tipped back violently. ‘Doesn’t sound too good when you put it like that, boss.’
Bellman placed his palms on the desk, leaned forward and snarled, sending small, white spit balls in Harry’s direction. ‘I hope it doesn’t sound too good, Hole. This afternoon a lump of opium found in your house is going to the lab to be identified. Your goose is cooked, Hole!’
‘And afterwards, boss?’ Harry bobbed up and down as he wrestled with the lever.
Bellman frowned. ‘What the hell do you mean?’
‘What are you going to say to the press and the Ministry of Justice? When they see the date of the search warrant you used, issued in your name? And ask how it can be that the day after you find opium at a policeman’s house, you give the selfsame officer a prominent position in your own investigative unit? Some might claim that if Kripos is governed like that, it’s no wonder a country copper with one cell and a wife who cooks is better at finding killers.’
Bellman’s jaw dropped and he kept blinking.
‘There!’ Harry leaned against the seat back, now locked into position, with a contented smile on his face. And screwed up his eyes to meet the rush of air after the door was slammed.
The sun had slipped over the edge of the mountain as Krongli stopped the snowmobile, got off and went over to Roy Stille, who was standing beside a ski pole stuck deep in the snow.
‘Well?’
‘I think we’ve found it,’ Stille said. ‘This has to be the stick that Hole fellow marked the site with.’
The soon-to-be-retired policeman had never had any ambitions to rise up the career ladder, but the thick white hair, the intent gaze and the calm voice were such that when he spoke people concluded he was the superior officer and not Krongli.
‘Oh?’ Krongli said.
He accompanied Stille to the edge of the precipice. Stille pointed. And there, down in the scree, he saw the snowmobile. He adjusted the binoculars. Focused on the bare, burned arm sticking out. Mumbled half aloud: ‘Oh shit. At last. Or both.’
The breakfast customers had begun to leave Stopp Pressen when Bent Nordbø heard a cough, looked up from the New York Times, removed his glasses, squinted and mustered the closest he would ever get to a smile.
‘Gunnar.’
‘Bent.’
The greeting, saying each other’s name, was something they had from the lodge and always reminded Gunnar Hagen of ants meeting and exchanging smells. The Crime Squad boss sat down, but did not remove his coat. ‘You said on the phone you’d found something.’
‘One of my journalists has dug this up.’ Nordbø pushed a brown envelope across the table. ‘Looks like Mikael Bellman protected his wife in a drugs case. It’s old, so from a legal point of view they’re untouchable, but in the press …’
‘… they’re always touchable,’ Hagen said, taking the envelope.
‘I believe you may safely regard Mikael Bellman as neutralised.’
‘At least a balance of terror can be achieved. He has things on me, too. Besides, I may not even need this – he’s just been humiliated by an officer from Ytre Enebakk.’
‘I read that. And the Ministry of Justice has read it too, isn’t that so?’
‘Up there, they read papers and keep their ears to the ground. But thank you, anyway.’
‘My pleasure, we help each other.’
‘Who knows, I may need this one day.’ Gunnar Hagen put the envelope inside his coat.
He didn’t receive a response as Bent Nordbø had already resumed his reading of an article about a young black American senator by the name of Barack Obama who, the writer maintained in all seriousness, could one day become the President of the United States.
When Krongli was down, he called up to the others that he had arrived, and he untied the rope.
The snowmobile was an Arctic Cat and lay with its runners in the air. He dragged himself the three metres to the wreck and instinctively became conscious of where he was placing his feet and hands. As if he were at a crime scene. He crouched down. An arm was protruding from under the snowmobile. He touched the vehicle. It was swaying on two rocks. He took a deep breath and tipped the snowmobile on its side.
The dead body lay on its back. Krongli’s first thought was that presumably it was a man. The head and face had been crushed between the vehicle and the rocks, and the result looked like the remains of a crab party. He didn’t need to feel the smashed body to know it was like jelly, like a piece of tender meat with the bones removed or that the torso had been squashed flat, hips and knees pulverised. Krongli would hardly have been able to identify the body, had it not been for the red flannel shirt. And the single rotten, brown-stained tooth left in the lower jaw.
76
Redefinition
‘WHAT DID YOU SAY?’ HARRY EXCLAIMED, PRESSING THE phone harder to his ear as if the mistake were there.
‘I said the body under the snowmobile is not Tony Leike,’ Krongli said.
‘Who then?’
‘Odd Utmo. A local recluse and local guide. He always wears the same red flannel shirt. And it’s his snowmobile. But it was the teeth that decided it. One single rotten stump of a tooth. God knows what happened to the rest of his teeth and the orthodontic brace.’
Utmo. Orthodontic brace. Harry remembered Kaja telling him about the guide who had driven her to Håvass.
‘His fingers though,’ Harry said. ‘Aren’t they distorted?’
‘Sure. Utmo had terrible problems with arthritis, poor fella. It was Bellman who asked me to inform you directly. Wasn’t quite what you hoped for, eh, Hole?’
Harry pushed the chair from the desk. ‘At least not quite what I was expecting. Could
it have been an accident, Krongli?’
But he knew the answer before it came. There had been moonlight the whole evening and night; even without headlamps the ravine would have been impossible to miss. Especially for a local guide. Especially when he was driving so slowly that he landed only three metres from a perpendicular drop of over seventy metres.
‘Forget it, Krongli. Tell me about the burns.’
The other end went silent for a bit before the answer came.
‘Arms and back. The skin on the arms was cracked and you can see the red flesh beneath. Parts of the back are charred. And a motif has been scorched in between the shoulder blades …’
Harry closed his eyes. Saw the pattern on the wood burner in the cabin. The smoking fragments of flesh.
‘… looks like a stag. Anything else, Hole? We have to start moving—’
‘No, that’s it, Krongli. Thanks.’
Harry rang off. Sat for a while deliberating. Not Tony Leike. Of course that changed the details, but not the bigger picture. Utmo was probably a victim of Altman’s avenging crusade, someone who had found himself in the way of something or other. They had Tony Leike’s finger, but where was the rest of his body? A thought struck Harry. If he was dead. In theory, Tony could be locked up somewhere. A place only Sigurd Altman knew.
Harry tapped in Skai’s number.
‘He refuses to say a single word to anyone,’ Skai said, masticating something or other. ‘Apart from his solicitor.’
‘Who is?’
‘Johan Krohn. Do you know him? Looks like a boy and—’
‘I know Johan Krohn very well.’
Harry rang Krohn’s office, was transferred and Krohn sounded half welcoming and half dismissive, the way a professional defence counsel should when a prosecuting authority calls. He listened to Harry. Then he answered.
‘I’m afraid not. Unless you have concrete evidence that can establish beyond doubt that my client is keeping someone locked up or otherwise exposing someone to danger by not revealing their whereabouts, I cannot allow you to speak to Altman at this juncture, Hole. These are serious allegations you’re making against him, and I don’t need to tell you that it is my job to protect his interests as far as I am able.’
‘Agreed,’ Harry said. ‘You didn’t need to tell me.’
They rang off.
Harry looked out of the window onto the city centre. The chair was good, no doubt about that. But his eyes found the familiar glass building in Grønland.
Then he dialled another number.
Katrine Bratt was as happy as a lark, and twittered like one, too.
‘I’m going to be discharged in a couple of days,’ she said.
‘I thought you were there of your own free will.’
‘Yes I am, but I have to be formally discharged. I’m looking forward to it. They’ve offered me a desk job at the station when my sick leave runs out.’
‘Good.’
‘Anything special you want?’
Harry explained.
‘So you’ll have to find Tony Leike without Altman’s help?’
‘Yup.’
‘Any ideas where I can start?’
‘Just one. Right after Tony went missing we checked he hadn’t stayed anywhere around Ustaoset. Thing is, I’ve checked recent years a bit more closely, and he’s almost never registered at accommodation anywhere in Ustaoset, a couple of Tourist Association cabins, that’s all. And that’s weird because he’s been up there a lot.’
‘Perhaps he was freeloading at the cabins, not registering or paying.’
‘He’s not the type,’ Harry said. ‘I wonder if Tony has a cabin or suchlike up there no one knows anything about.’
‘OK. Anything else?’
‘No. Yes – see what you can find out about Odd Utmo’s activities over the last few days.’
‘Are you still single, Harry?’
‘What sort of a bloody question’s that?’
‘You sound less single.’
‘Do I?’
‘You do. But it suits you.’
‘Does it?’
‘Since you ask, no.’
Aslak Krongli straightened his stiff back and looked up the scree.
It was one of the men in the search party who had called, and he was shouting again now, obviously excited. ‘Over here!’
Aslak uttered a low curse. The crime scene officers had finished, and the snowmobile and Odd Utmo had been hoisted to the top. It was complicated and time-consuming work as the only possible access to the scree was by rope, and even that was hard enough.
In the lunch break one man had told them something a maid at the hotel had whispered into his ear in confidence: there were bloodstains on the sheets in the room occupied by Rasmus Olsen, the husband of the dead woman MP, when he checked out. At first, she had thought it was menstrual blood, but then she had heard that Rasmus Olsen had been on his own and his wife had been at the Håvass cabin.
Krongli had answered that he must have had a local girl in his room or met his wife the morning she arrived in Ustaoset and they had made up in bed. The man had mumbled it was not certain it was menstrual blood.
‘Over here!’
What a lot of hassle. Aslak Krongli wanted to go home. Dinner, coffee, sleep. Put this whole shitty case behind him. The money he had owed in Oslo was paid, and he would never go there again. Never go back down into the quagmire. It was a promise he would keep this time.
They had used a dog to be sure they found all the bits of Utmo in the snow, and it was the dog that had leapt up the scree and stood barking a hundred metres further along. A hundred steep metres. Aslak assessed the climb.
‘Is it important?’ he shouted and set off a symphony of echoes.
He received an answer, and ten minutes later he was staring at what the dog had dug up from the snow. It was wedged in between the rocks so tightly that it must have been impossible to spot from the top.
‘Jesus,’ Aslak said. ‘Who could that be?’
‘Not that Tony Leike anyway,’ said the dog handler. ‘Here in the cold scree it would be a long time before the skeleton was picked that clean. Several years.’
‘Eighteen years.’ It was Roy Stille. The officer had followed them and was panting.
‘She’s been here eighteen years,’ Roy said, crouching down.
‘She?’ Aslak queried.
The officer pointed to the hips on the skeleton. ‘Women have a larger pelvis. We never did find her when she went missing. That’s Karen Utmo.’
Krongli heard something he had never heard before in Roy Stille’s voice. A quiver. The quiver of a man emotionally upset. Grief-stricken. But his granite face was as smooth as always, closed.
‘Well, I never, so it was true then,’ said the dog handler. ‘She topped herself out of anguish for her boy.’
‘Hardly,’ Krongli said. The other two looked at him. He had stuck his little finger in a delicate round aperture in the forehead of the skull.
‘Is that a bullet hole?’ the dog handler asked.
‘Yep,’ said Stille, feeling the back of the skull. ‘And there’s no exit wound, so I reckon we’ll find the bullet in the skull.’
‘And should we bet that the bullet will match Utmo’s rifle?’ said Krongli.
‘Well, I never,’ the dog handler repeated. ‘Do you mean he shot his wife? How is that possible? To kill a person you’ve loved? Because you think she and your son … it’s like entering hell.’
‘Eighteen years,’ Stille said, getting up with a groan. ‘Seven years left before the murder was deemed too old. That must be what they call irony. You wait and wait, afraid of being found out. The years pass and then, when you’re approaching freedom – bang! – you’re killed yourself and end up in the same scree.’
Krongli closed his eyes and thought, yes, it is possible to kill a person you have loved. Easily possible. But, no, you’re never free. Never. He would never come here again.
Johan Krohn enjoyed the lim
elight. You don’t become the country’s most popular defence counsel without enjoying it. And when he had agreed to defend Sigurd Altman, Prince Charming, without a second’s hesitation, he knew there was going to be more limelight than he had hitherto experienced in his remarkable career. He had already reached his goal of beating his father as the youngest lawyer ever entitled to attend the Supreme Court. As a defence counsel in his twenties he was already being proclaimed the new star, the wonder boy. But that might have gone to his head a bit; he had not been used to so much attention at school. Then he had been the irritating top pupil who always waved his hand too eagerly in the classroom, who always tried a bit too hard socially and yet was always the last to know where the Saturday-night party was – if he knew about it at all. But now young female assistants and clerks might giggle and blush when he complimented them or suggested a dinner after work. And invitations rained down, to give talks, participate in debates on radio or TV and even to the odd premiere his wife valued so highly. Such events may have occupied too much of his attention over recent years. At any rate, he had detected a downward trend in the number of legal triumphs, big media cases and new clients. Not so many that it had begun to affect his reputation, but enough for him to be aware that he needed the Sigurd Altman case. Needed something high profile to put him back where he belonged: at the top.
That was why Johan Krohan sat listening quietly to the lean man with the round glasses. Listening while Sigurd Altman told a story that was not only the least likely story Krohn had ever heard but also a story he believed. Johan Krohn could already see himself in the courtroom, the sparkling rhetorician, the agitator, the manipulator, who nonetheless never lost sight of legal justice, a delight for both layman and judge. He was therefore disappointed at first when Sigurd Altman revealed the plans he had made. However, after reminding himself of his father’s repeated admonition that the lawyer was there for the client, and not vice versa, he accepted the brief. For Johan Krohn was not really a bad person.
And when Krohn left Oslo District Prison where Sigurd Altman had been transferred during the day, he saw new potential in the assignment, which in its way, despite everything, was extraordinary. The first thing he did when he got back to his office was contact Mikael Bellman. They had met only once before, at a murder trial of course, but Johan Krohn had immediately known where he was with Bellman. A hawk recognises a hawk. So he appreciated how Bellman was feeling after the day’s headlines about the County Officer’s arrest.