by Jo Nesbo
No answer. Harry sighed.
‘So he arranges to meet her again. He picks her up in a car. Which he has covered internally with plastic. They drive to an undisturbed spot, probably the Kadok factory. There he takes out a large knife with a yellow handle. He forces her to write a postcard he dictates and to address it to her flatmate in Drammen. Afterwards he kills her. Bjorn?’
Bjorn Holm coughed and changed down a gear. ‘The autopsy shows he punctured her carotid artery.’
‘He gets out of the car. Takes a picture of her sitting in the passenger seat with a knife in the neck. The photograph. Confirmation of revenge, of triumph. It’s the first photo that goes on his office wall in the Kadok factory.’
An oncoming car swerved out of its lane, but went back in and hooted its horn as it passed.
‘Perhaps it was easy to kill her. Perhaps not. Nevertheless, he knows she is the most critical victim. They hadn’t met very often, but he can’t know for sure how much she has told her friends about him. He only knows that if she is found dead and her death can be linked to him, a dumped lover will be the police’s main suspect. If she is found. If, on the other hand, she apparently disappears, for example during a trip to Africa, he is safe.
‘So Ole sinks her body in a place he knows well, where the water is deep and what’s more where people keep well away. The place with the jilted bride in the window. The ropery by Lake Lyseren. Then he travels to Leipzig and pays the prostitute, Juliana Verni, to take the postcard Adele wrote with her to Rwanda, to stay at a hotel under Adele’s name and send the card to Norway. Furthermore, she has to bring Ole something back from the Congo. A murder weapon. A Leopold’s apple. The special weapon is not plucked out of the air, of course, it has to have some connection with the Congo and prompt the police to become suspicious about the Congo traveller, Tony Leike. Ole pays Juliana on her return to Leipzig. And perhaps it is there, standing over the trembling Juliana, in tears as she opens her mouth to receive the apple, that he begins to experience the joy, the ecstasy of sadism, an almost sexual pleasure he has developed and nourished for years with his lonely daydreams of revenge. Afterwards he dumps her in the river, but the body surfaces and is found.’
Harry took a deep breath. The road had become narrower, and the forest had slunk in, was dense on both sides now.
‘In the course of the next weeks he kills Borgny Stem-Myhre and Charlotte Lolles. Unlike with Adele and Juliana he doesn’t try to hide their bodies, quite the contrary. Nevertheless, the police investigation does not lead them to Tony Leike, as Ole has hoped. So he has to continue killing, continue to leave a trail, to push them. He kills Marit Olsen, the MP, exhibits her in Frogner Lido. Now the police have to see the connection between the women, have to find the man with the Leopold’s apple. But it doesn’t happen. And he knows he will have to intervene, give a helping hand, take a risk. He watches Tony’s house in Holmenveien until he sees him leave. Then he breaks in through the cellar, goes up to the living room and calls the next victim, Elias Skog, from Tony’s phone on the desk. On the way out he steals a bike to make the break-in appear normal. Leaving fingerprints upstairs in the living room doesn’t bother Ole; everyone knows the police don’t investigate run-of-the-mill burglaries. Then he goes to Stavanger. At this point his sadism is in full bloom. He kills Elias by glueing him to the bathtub and leaving the tap running. Hey, petrol station! Anyone hungry?’
Bjorn Holm didn’t even slow down.
‘OK. Then something does happen. Ole receives a letter. It’s from a blackmailer. He writes that he knows Ole has killed and he wants money. Otherwise the police will be round. Ole’s first thought is that it must be someone who knows he was at Havass, so it must be one of the two survivors. Iska Peller. Or Tony Leike. He excludes Iska Peller right away. She’s Australian, went back and, anyway, is hardly likely to write in Norwegian. Tony Leike, what irony! They never met at the cabin, but Adele may of course have mentioned Ole’s name while they were flirting. Or Tony may have seen Ole’s name in the guest book. At any rate, Tony must have guessed the connection as the murders appeared in the newspapers. The blackmail attempt squares pretty well with what the financial press is writing about Tony being desperately in need of funds for his Congo project. Ole takes a decision. Even though he would have preferred Tony to live with the shame, he has to turn to the second option before things spiral out of control. Tony has to die. He tails Tony. Follows him onto the train which goes where Tony always goes – Ustaoset. Follows his snowmobile tracks which lead to a locked Tourist Association cabin situated among cliffs and crevices. And that’s where Ole finds him. And Tony recognises the ghost, the boy from the dance hall, the boy whose tongue he cut off. And realises what’s in store for him. Ole takes his revenge. He tortures Tony. Burns him. Maybe to make him reveal possible partners in the blackmail venture. Maybe for his own enjoyment.’
Altman rolled the window back up, hard.
‘Cold,’ he said.
‘While this is going on, he hears on the news that Iska Peller is in the cabin at Havass. Ole senses that the final solution may be at hand, but smells a trap. He remembers the snowdrift above the cabin that locals said was dangerous. He reaches a decision. Perhaps he takes Tony with him as a guide, heads for the Havass cabin, starts the avalanche with dynamite. Then he drives the snowmobile back, unloads Tony – dead or alive – off the precipice and sends the snowmobile after him. If, contrary to expectation, the body should ever be found, it will look like an accident. A man who has burned himself and is on his way to find help perhaps.’
The countryside opened up. They passed a lake with the moon reflected in it.
‘Ole triumphs, he’s won. He’s tricked everyone, pulled the wool over their eyes. And he’s started to enjoy the game, the feeling of being in power, of having everyone follow his directions. So the master, who has bound eight individual fates into one big drama, decides to leave us with a parting gesture. To leave me with a parting gesture.’
A cluster of houses, a petrol station and a shopping centre. They took the left exit off a roundabout.
‘Ole cuts off the middle finger of Tony’s right hand. And he has Leike’s phone. It’s the one he used when he called me from the centre of Ustaoset. My number is ex-directory, but Tony Leike has my number on his mobile phone. Ole doesn’t leave a message. Perhaps it was just playful whimsy.’
‘Or to confuse us,’ Bjorn Holm said.
‘Or to show us his superiority,’ Harry said. ‘Like when he quite literally gives us the finger by leaving Tony’s middle finger outside my door, inside Police HQ, right under our very noses. Because he can do that. He’s Prince Charming, he’s recovered from the shame, he’s retaliated, avenged himself on all those who mocked him and on their understudies. The witnesses. The whore. And the lech. Then something unforeseen happens. The headquarters at Kadok are found. In fact, the police still don’t have any evidence to lead them straight to Ole, but they’re beginning to get dangerously close. So Ole goes to his boss and says that finally he’ll take his holiday and accumulated time in lieu. He’ll be away for a good while. His plane goes the day after tomorrow by the way.’
‘Twenty-one fifteen to Bangkok via Stockholm,’ Bjorn Holm said.
‘OK, lots of the details in this story are assumptions, but we’re getting close. Here we are.’
Bjorn turned off the road and onto the gravel in front of the large, red timber building. Stopped and switched off the ignition.
There was no light in any of the windows, but advertisements hung on the ground-floor walls, showing that a corner of the building had once been a grocery shop. At the other end of the square, fifty metres in front of them and beneath a street light, stood a green Jeep Cherokee.
It was still. Sound-still, time-still, wind-still. From the top of the window on the driver’s side of the Cherokee cigarette smoke rose into the light.
‘This is the place where it all began,’ Harry said. ‘The dance hall.’
‘Who’s
that?’ Altman asked, nodding towards the Cherokee.
‘Don’t you recognise him?’ Harry took out a packet of cigarettes, placed one between his lips, unlit, and stared hungrily at the tobacco smoke. ‘You might be deceived by the street lamp, of course. Most of the older street lamps cast a yellow light, making a blue car seem green.’
‘I’ve seen the film,’ Altman said. ‘In the Valley of Elah.’
‘Mm. Good film. Almost Altman class.’
‘Almost.’
‘Sigurd Altman class.’
Sigurd didn’t answer.
‘So,’ Harry said. ‘Are you happy? Was it the masterpiece you had envisaged, Sigurd? Or can I call you Ole Sigurd?’
74
Bristol Cream
‘I prefer Sigurd.’
‘Pity it’s not as easy to change first names as surnames,’ Harry said, leaning forward between the seats again. ‘When you told me you’d changed the usual -sen surname, I didn’t think that the S in Ole S. Hansen might stand for Sigurd. But did it help, Sigurd? Did the new name make you into someone different from the person who lost everything in the gravel on this very spot?’
Sigurd shrugged. ‘We flee as far as we can. I suppose the new name took me part of the way.’
‘Mm. I’ve checked out a number of things today. When you moved to Oslo you started nursing studies. Why not medicine? After all, you had top grades from school.’
‘I wanted to avoid having to speak in public,’ Sigurd said with an ironic smile. ‘I assumed as a nurse I would be exempt.’
‘I rang a speech therapist today, and he told me it depends which muscles are damaged. In theory, even with half a tongue you can train yourself to speak almost perfectly again.’
‘The “s”s are tricky without the tip of a tongue. Was that what gave me away?’
Harry rolled down the window and lit his cigarette. Inhaled so hard the paper crackled and rustled.
‘That was one of the things. But we went off on the wrong track for a while. The speech therapist told me that people have a tendency to associate lisping with male homosexuality. In English it’s called a “gay lisp” and does not constitute lisping in a speech-therapy sense, it’s just a different way of articulating the letter “s”. Gay men can switch lisping on and off, they use it as a sort of code. And the code works. The speech therapist told me an American university had done some linguistic research to see whether it was possible to deduce sexual tendencies in people by listening only to recorded speech. The results were fairly accurate; however, it transpired that the perception of a gay lisp was so strong that it overrode other language signals that were characteristic of heteros. When the receptionist at Hotel Bristol said that the man asking after Iska Peller spoke in an effeminate way he was a victim of stereotypical thinking. It was only when he acted out how the person had spoken that I realised he had allowed himself to be duped by the lisp.’
‘There must have been a bit more than that.’
‘Yes indeed. Bristol. It’s a suburb in Sydney, Australia. I can see you’ve twigged the connection now.’
‘Hang on,’ Bjorn said. ‘I haven’t.’
Harry blew smoke out of the window. ‘The Snowman told me. The killer wanted to be close. He had crossed my field of vision, he had cosied up to me. So when a bottle of Bristol Cream crossed my field of vision, I clicked at long last. I remembered seeing the same name, and telling someone something. Someone who had cosied up to me. And then I realised that what I had said had been misunderstood. I gave Iska Peller’s place of residence as Bristol. By which the person inferred I meant Hotel Bristol in Oslo. I said that to you, Sigurd. At the hospital right after the avalanche.’
‘You have a good memory.’
‘For some things. When suspicion first fell on you, other things became quite obvious. Like you saying that you have to work in anaesthestics to get hold of ketanome in Norway. Like a friend of mine saying that we often desire those things we see every day, which would suggest that whoever has sexual fantasies about women dressed in a nurse’s outfit may work at a hospital. Like the the computer at the Kadok factory being called Nashville, the name of a film directed by. ..’
‘Robert Altman in 1975,’ Sigurd said. ‘A much underrated masterpiece.’
‘And the chair at the headquarters being, it goes without saying, a director’s chair. For the master director, Sigurd Altman.’
Sigurd didn’t react.
‘But still I didn’t know what your motive was,’ Harry continued. ‘The Snowman told me that the killer was driven by hatred. And the hatred was engendered by one single event, one that lay back in the mists of time. Perhaps I already had a hunch. The tongue. The lisping. I got a friend from Bergen to do a bit of digging on Sigurd Altman. It took her about thirty seconds to discover your change of name on the national register and to connect it with the old name mentioned in Tony Leike’s conviction for assault.’
A cigarette was flicked out of the Cherokee window leaving a trail of sparks.
‘So there was just the question of the timeline left,’ Harry said. ‘We checked the duty roster at Rikshospital. That seems to give you an alibi for two of the murders. You were working when Marit Olsen and Borgny Stem-Myhre were killed. But both murders were committed in Oslo, and no one at the hospital can remember with certainty having seen you at the times in question. And since you travel between departments no one would have missed you if they hadn’t seen you for a couple of hours. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you’ll tell me you spend most of your free time alone. And indoors.’
Sigurd Altman shrugged. ‘Probably.’
‘So there we are,’ Harry said with a clap of his hands.
‘Just a minute,’ Altman said. ‘The story you’ve told is pure fiction. You don’t have a scrap of evidence.’
‘Oh, I forgot to say. You remember the snaps I showed you earlier today? The ones I asked you to flick through and you said were sticky?’
‘What about them?’
‘You get great fingerprints from them. Yours matched the ones we found on the desk at Leike’s place.’
Sigurd Altman’s expression changed slowly as the realisation sank in. ‘You only showed them to me… so that I would hold them?’ Altman stared at Harry for a few seconds, as if turned to stone. Then he put his face in his hands. And a sound emerged from behind his fingers. Laughter.
‘You considered almost every angle,’ Harry said. ‘Why didn’t you think it prudent to find yourself a respectable alibi?’
‘It didn’t occur to me that I needed one.’ Altman took his hand away. ‘You would have seen through everything anyway, Harry, wouldn’t you.’
The eyes behind the glasses were moist, but not devastated. Resigned. Harry had experienced this before. The relief at being caught. Being able to unburden yourself at last.
‘Probably,’ Harry said. ‘I mean, officially, I didn’t see through any of this. The man sitting in the vehicle over there did. He’s the one who will arrest you.’
Sigurd removed his glasses and dried his tears of laughter. ‘So you were lying when you said you needed me to tell you about ketanome?’
‘Yes, but I wasn’t lying when I said your name would go down in Norwegian crime history.’
Harry nodded to Bjorn, who flashed his lights.
A man jumped out of the Cherokee in front of them.
‘An old acquaintance of yours,’ Harry said. ‘At least his daughter was.’
The man ambled over, slightly bow-legged, hitched up his trousers by the belt. Like an old policeman.
‘One last thing I was wondering,’ Harry said. ‘The Snowman said you would steal up on me, unnoticed, while I was vulnerable maybe. How did that come about?’
Sigurd put his glasses back on. ‘All patients admitted have to give the name of their next of kin. Your father must have given your name because in the canteen one of the nurses mentioned that the father of the man who had caught the Snowman, Harry Hole himself, was on her ward.
I took it for granted that someone with your reputation would be given the case. At that time I was actually working on other wards, but I asked the ward manager if I could use your father in an anaesthesia paper I was writing, said he fitted my test group exactly. I thought that if I could get to know you via your father then I would find out of how the case was going.’
‘You could be close, you mean. Feel the pulse of the case and have your superiority confirmed.’
‘When you finally made an appearance, I had to take care not to ask you direct questions about the investigation.’ Sigurd Altman took a deep breath. ‘I didn’t want to arouse suspicion. I had to be patient, wait until I had built up trust.’
‘And you succeeded.’
Sigurd nodded slowly. ‘Thank you, I like to believe I inspire trust. By the way, I called my office at the Kadok factory the cutting room. When you broke in I lost my mind. It was my home. I was so furious I was on the point of disconnecting your father from the respirator, Harry. But I didn’t. I would like you to know that.’
Harry didn’t respond.
‘One more thing.’ Sigurd said. ‘How did you find out about the locked Tourist Association cabin?’
Harry shrugged. ‘By chance. A colleague and I had to stay the night. It seemed as if someone had just been there. And something was stuck to the wood burner. Bits of flesh, I guessed. It was a while before I connected it with the arm sticking out from under the snowmobile. It looked like an overdone sausage. The County Officer went to the cabin, poked at the flesh and sent the bits for DNA testing. We’ll have the results in a few days. Tony kept personal possessions there. I found a family photo in a drawer, for instance. Tony as a lad. You didn’t clear up after yourself properly, Sigurd.’