The Leopard

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘I remember that bit,’ Harry nodded and blew smoke into the winter night. ‘Made me think of the meteorologist who said that if only he had all the relevant variables he could forecast all future weather.’

  ‘And we could prevent murders before they took place.’

  ‘And predict that cigarette-cadging policewomen would sit on cold verandas with expensive philosophy books.’

  She laughed. ‘I didn’t buy the book myself, I found it on the shelf here.’ She pouted and sucked at the cigarette, and got smoke in her eyes. ‘I never buy books, I only borrow them. Or steal them.’

  ‘I don’t exactly see you as a thief.’

  ‘No one does, that’s why I’m never caught,’ she said, resting the cigarette on the ashtray.

  Harry coughed. ‘And why do you pilfer?’

  ‘I only steal from people I know and who can afford it. Not because I’m greedy, but because I’m a bit tight. When I was studying, I nicked loo rolls from the university toilet. By the way, have you thought of the title of the Fante book that was so good?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Text me when you remember it.’

  Harry chuckled. ‘Sorry, I don’t text.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Harry shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I don’t like the concept. Like Aborigines who don’t want their photo taken because they think they’ll lose a bit of their souls, maybe.’

  ‘I know!’ she said with enthusiasm. ‘You don’t want to leave traces. Tracks. Irrefutable evidence of who you are. You want to know that you are going to disappear, utterly and totally.’

  ‘You’ve hit the nail on the head,’ Harry said drily, and inhaled. ‘Do you want to go back in?’ He nodded towards her hands which she had put between her thighs and the chair.

  ‘No, it’s just my hands that are cold,’ she smiled. ‘Warm heart though. What about you?’

  Harry gazed across the garden fence, onto the road. At the car standing there. ‘What about me?’

  ‘Are you like me? Kind, light-fingered and tight-fisted?’

  ‘No, I’m evil, honest and tight-fisted. What about your husband?’

  It came out harder than Harry had intended, as though he wanted to put her in her place because she … because she what? Because she was sitting here and was beautiful and liked the same things as he did and lent him slippers belonging to a man she pretended didn’t exist.

  ‘What about him?’ she asked with a tiny smile.

  ‘Well, he’s got big feet,’ Harry heard himself say, feeling an urgent desire to bang his head on the table.

  She laughed out loud. The laughter trilled into the dark Fagerborg silence that lay over the houses, gardens and garages. The garages. Everyone had a garage. There was only one car parked in the street. Of course there could be a thousand reasons for it being there.

  ‘I don’t have a husband,’ she said.

  ‘So . . .’

  ‘So it’s a pair of my brother’s slippers you’re wearing on your feet.’

  ‘And the shoes on the steps … ?’

  ‘… are also my brother’s, and are there because I suspect that men’s size forty-six and a half shoes have a deterrent effect on evil men with sinister plans.’

  She sent Harry a meaningful look. He chose to believe the ambiguity was not intended.

  ‘So your brother lives here?’

  She shook her head. ‘He died. Ten years ago. It’s Daddy’s house. In the last years, when Even was studying at Blindern, he and Daddy lived here.’

  ‘And Daddy?’

  ‘He died soon after Even. And as I was already living here, I took over the house.’

  Kaja drew her legs up onto the chair and rested her head on her knees. Harry gazed at the slim neck, the hollow where her pinned-up hair was taut and a few loose strands fell back onto her skin.

  ‘Do you often think about them?’ Harry asked.

  She raised her head from her knees.

  ‘Mostly about Even,’ she said. ‘Daddy moved out when we were small, and Mummy lived in her own bubble, so Even became sort of both parents in one for me. He looked after me, encouraged me, brought me up, he was my role model. He could do no wrong in my eyes. When you’ve been as close to someone as Even and I were to each other, that closeness never wears off. Never.’

  Harry nodded.

  With a tentative cough, Kaja said: ‘How’s your father?’

  Harry studied the cigarette glow.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s odd?’ he said. ‘Hagen giving us forty-eight hours. We could have cleared the office in two with ease.’

  ‘I suppose. Now you say so.’

  ‘Maybe he thought we could spend our final two days doing something useful.’

  Kaja looked at him.

  ‘Not investigating the present murder case, of course. We’ll have to leave that to Kripos. But the Missing Persons Unit needs help, I hear.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Adele Vetlesen is a young woman who, to my knowedge, is not connected with any murder case.’

  ‘You think we should … ?’

  ‘I think we should meet for work at seven tomorrow morning,’ Harry said. ‘And see if we can do something useful.’

  Kaja Solness sucked on the cigarette again. Harry stubbed his out.

  ‘Time to go,’ he said. ‘Your teeth are chattering.’

  On his way out he tried to see if there was anyone in the parked car, but it was impossible without going closer. And he chose not to go any closer.

  In Oppsal the house was waiting for him. Big, empty and full of echoes.

  He went to bed in the boy’s room and closed his eyes.

  And dreamed the dream he so often had. He is standing by a marina in Sydney, a chain is hauled up, a poisonous jellyfish rises to the surface, it is not a jellyfish but red hair floating around a white face. Then came the second dream. The new one. It had first appeared in Hong Kong, just before Christmas. He is on his back staring up at a nail protruding from the wall, a face is impaled on it, a face, a sensitive-looking face with a neatly trimmed moustache. In the dream Harry has something in his mouth, something that feels as if it would blow his head to pieces. What was it, what was it? It was a promise. Harry twitched. Three times. Then he fell asleep.

  28

  Drammen

  ‘SO IT WAS YOU WHO REPORTED ADELE VETLESEN MISSING,’ Kaja confirmed.

  ‘Yes,’ said the young man sitting in front of her at People & Coffee. ‘We lived together. She didn’t come home. I felt I had to do something.’

  ‘Of course,’ Kaja said with a glance at Harry. It was half past eight. It had taken them thirty minutes to drive from Oslo to Drammen after the trio’s morning meeting which had ended in Harry discharging Bjørn Holm. Holm hadn’t said much, had expelled a deep sigh, washed his coffee cup and then driven back to Krimteknisk in Bryn to resume his work there.

  ‘Have you heard anything from Adele?’ the man asked, looking from Kaja to Harry.

  ‘No,’ Harry said. ‘Have you?’

  The man shook his head and peered over his shoulder, at the counter, to make sure there weren’t any customers waiting. They perched on high bar stools in front of the window facing one of Drammen’s many squares, that is, an open area that was used as a car park. People & Coffee sold coffee and cakes at airport prices and tried to give the impression they belonged to an American chain, and indeed perhaps they did. The man Adele Vetlesen lived with, Geir Bruun, appeared to be around thirty, was unusually white with a shiny, perspiring crown and constantly wandering blue eyes. He worked at the place as a ‘barista’, a title that had attracted awe-inspiring respect in the nineties when coffee bars had first invaded Oslo. And it also involved making coffee, an art form which – the way Harry saw it – was primarily about avoiding obvious pitfalls. As a policeman, Harry used people’s intonation, diction, vocabulary and grammatical solecisms to place them. Geir Bruun neither dressed, nor combed his hair, nor behaved like a homosexual, but as s
oon as he opened his mouth, it was impossible to think of anything else. There was something about the rounding of the vowels, the tiny redundant lexical embellishments, the lisping that almost seemed feigned. Harry knew that the guy could be a die-hard hetero, but he had already decided that Katrine had jumped to a premature conclusion when she described Adele Vetlesen and Geir Bruun as living togther. They were just two people who had shared a city-centre flat in Drammen for economic reasons.

  ‘Yes, I have,’ Geir Bruun said in answer to Harry’s question. ‘I remember she went to some kind of mountain cabin in the autumn.’ He uttered this as though it were a concept he found fairly alien. ‘But that wasn’t where she disappeared.’

  ‘We know that,’ Kaja said. ‘Did she go there with anyone, and if so, do you know who?’

  ‘No idea. We didn’t talk about that sort of thing – it was enough to share a bathroom, if you know what I mean. She had her private life, I had mine. But I doubt she would have gone into the wilds on her own, if I may put it like that.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Adele did very little on her own. I don’t see her in a cabin without a guy. But impossible to say who. She was – if I may be frank – a bit promiscuous. She had no female friends, though she compensated with male friends. Whom she kept apart. Adele didn’t live a double life so much as a quadruple life. Or thereabouts.’

  ‘So she was dishonest?’

  ‘Not necessarily. I remember she gave me advice on honest ways to finish with someone. She said that once while she was being shagged from behind she took a photo over her shoulder with her mobile, wrote the name of the guy, sent the photo and deleted the addressee. All in one swift operation.’ Geir Bruun’s face was expressionless.

  ‘Impressive,’ Harry said. ‘We know she paid for two people in the mountains. Could you give us the name of a male friend, so we could start our enquiries there?’

  ‘’Fraid I can’t,’ Geir Bruun said, ‘but when I reported her missing, you lot checked who she’d been talking to on the phone over the last few weeks.’

  ‘Which officers precisely?’

  ‘I don’t remember any names. Local police.’

  ‘Fine, we have a meeting at the police station now,’ Harry said, looking at his watch and getting up.

  ‘Why’, asked Kaja, who hadn’t moved, ‘did the police stop investigating the case? I don’t even recall reading about it in the newspapers.’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ the man said, signalling to two women with a pram that he would attend to them immediately. ‘She sent a postcard.’

  ‘Postcard?’ Harry said.

  ‘Yes. From Rwanda. Down in Africa.’

  ‘What did she write?’

  ‘It was very brief. She’d met her dream guy, and I would have to pay the rent on my own until she was back in March. The bitch.’

  It was walking distance to the police station. An inspector with a squat pumpkin head and a name Harry forgot as soon as he heard it received them in a smoke-infested office, served them coffee in plastic cups that burned their fingers, and cast long looks at Kaja every time he considered himself unobserved.

  He began by delivering a lecture about there being somewhere between five hundred and a thousand missing Norwegians at any one time. Sooner or later they would all turn up. If the police were to investigate every missing person case whenever there was suspicion of a criminal act or an accident, they wouldn’t have time for anything else. Harry stifled a yawn.

  In Adele Vetlesen’s case they had even received a sign of life; they had it somewhere. The inspector got up and stuck his pumpkin head into a drawer of hanging files and reappeared with a postcard, which he laid before them. There was a photo of a conical mountain with a cloud around the peak, but no text to explain what the mountain was called or where in the world it was. The handwriting was scratchy, dreadful. Harry could just decipher the signature. Adele. There was a stamp bearing the name Rwanda and the envelope was postmarked Kigali, which Harry seemed to recall was the capital.

  ‘Her mother confirmed it was her daughter’s handwriting,’ the inspector said and explained that at the mother’s insistence they had checked and found Adele Vetlesen’s name on the passenger list of a Brussels Airlines flight to Kigali via Entebbe in Uganda on the 25th of November. Furthermore, they had carried out a hotel search through Interpol, and a hotel in Kigali – the inspector read out his notes: the Gorilla Hotel! – had indeed had an Adele Vetlesen down as a guest the same night she arrived by plane. The only reason Adele Vetlesen was still on the missing persons list was that they didn’t know precisely where she was now, and that a postcard from abroad did not technically change her status as missing.

  ‘Besides, we’re not exactly talking about the civilised part of the world here,’ the inspector said, throwing up his arms. ‘Huti, Tutsu, or whatever they’re called. Machetes. Two million dead. Get me?’

  Harry saw Kaja close her eyes as the inspector with the schoolmaster’s voice and a string of interpolated dependent clauses explained how little life was worth in Africa, where human trafficking was hardly an unknown phenomenon, and how in theory Adele could have been abducted and forced to write a postcard, since blacks would pay a year’s salary to sink their teeth into a blonde Norwegian girl, wouldn’t they.

  Harry examined the postcard and tried to block out the pumpkin man’s voice. A conical mountain with a cloud around the peak. He glanced up when the inspector with the forgettable name cleared his throat.

  ‘Yes, now and then you can understand them, can’t you?’ he said with a conspiratorial smile directed at Harry.

  Harry got up and said work was waiting in Oslo. Would Drammen be so kind as to scan the postcard and email it on for them?

  ‘To a handwriting expert?’ the inspector asked, clearly displeased, and studied the address Kaja had noted down for him.

  ‘Volcano expert,’ Harry said. ‘I’d like you to send him the picture and ask if he can identify the mountain.’

  ‘Identify the mountain?’

  ‘He’s a specialist. He travels around examining them.’

  The inspector shrugged, but nodded. Then he accompanied them to the main door. Harry asked if they had checked whether there had been any calls on Adele’s mobile phone since she left.

  ‘We know our job, Hole,’ the inspector said. ‘No outgoing calls. But you can imagine the mobile network in a country like Rwanda . . .’

  ‘Actually I can’t,’ Harry said. ‘But then I’ve never been there.’

  ‘A postcard!’ Kaja groaned when they were standing on the square by the unmarked police car they had requisitioned from Police HQ. ‘Plane ticket and hotel record in Rwanda! Why couldn’t your computer freak in Bergen have found that, so we wouldn’t have had to waste half a day in fucking Drammen?’

  ‘Thought that would put you in a great mood,’ Harry said, unlocking the door. ‘Got yourself a new friend, and perhaps Adele isn’t dead after all.’

  ‘Are you in a great mood?’ Kaja asked.

  Harry looked at the car keys. ‘Feel like driving?’

  ‘Yes!’

  Strangely enough, none of the speed boxes flashed, and they were back in Oslo in twenty minutes flat.

  They agreed they would take the light things, the office equipment and the desk drawers, to Police HQ first, and wait with the heavy things until the day after. They put them on the same trolley Harry had used when they were fitting out their office.

  ‘Have you been given an office yet?’ Kaja asked when they were halfway down the culvert. Her voice cast long echoes.

  Harry shook his head. ‘We’ll put the things in yours.’

  ‘Have you applied for an office?’ she asked, and stopped.

  Harry kept going.

  ‘Harry!’

  He stopped.

  ‘You asked about my father,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t mean to . . .’

  ‘No, of course not. But he hasn’t got much time left. OK? After that I’ll be of
f again. I just wanted to . . .’

  ‘Wanted to what?’

  ‘Have you heard of the Dead Policemen’s Society?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘People who worked at Crime Squad. People I cared about. I don’t know if I owe them something, but that’s the tribe.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not much, but it’s all I have, Kaja. They’re the only ones I have any reason to feel loyalty towards.’

  ‘A police unit?’

  Harry started walking. ‘I know, and it’ll probably pass. The world will go on. It’s just restructuring, isn’t it? The stories are in the walls, and now the walls are coming down. You and yours will have to make new stories, Kaja.’

  ‘Are you drunk?’

  Harry laughed. ‘I’m just beaten. Finished. And it’s fine. Absolutely fine.’

  His phone rang. It was Bjørn.

  ‘I left my Hank biography on my desk,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve got it here,’ Harry said.

  ‘What a sound. Are you in a church?’

  ‘The culvert.’

  ‘Jeez, you’ve got coverage there?’

  ‘Seems we’ve got a better phone network than Rwanda. I’ll leave the book in reception.’

  ‘That’s the second time I’ve heard Rwanda and mobile phones mentioned in the same breath today. Tell them I’ll pick it up tomorrow, OK?’

  ‘What did you hear about Rwanda?’

  ‘It was something Beate said. About coltan – you know the bits of metal we found on the teeth of the two with the stab wounds in their mouths.’

  ‘The Terminator.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Nothing. What’s that got to do with Rwanda?’

  ‘Coltan’s used in mobile phones. It’s a rare metal and the Democratic Republic of the Congo has almost the entire world supply. Snag is that the deposits are in the war zone where no one keeps an eye on it, so smart operators are pinching it in all the chaos and shipping it over to Rwanda.’

  ‘Mm.’