The Leopard

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘That’s about the size of it,’ said Harry, who was in the process of brewing some more coffee.

  ‘And you think that Verni must have done that in collusion with someone,’ Hagen said. ‘And this second person killed her to cover the traces.’

  ‘Yes,’ Harry said.

  ‘So it’s just a question of finding the link between her and this second person. That shouldn’t be too difficult. They must have been very close if they committed this kind of crime together.’

  ‘Well in that case I’d have thought it would be pretty difficult.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because,’ Harry said, smacking down the lid of the machine and flicking the switch, ‘Juliana Verni had a record. Drugs. Prostitution. Vagrancy. In short, she was the type it would have been easy to hire for a job like this, if the money was right. And everything so far suggests that the person behind it won’t have left any clues for us, that he has considered most angles. Katrine discovered that Verni travelled from Leipzig to Oslo. From there she continued to Kigali using Adele’s name. Nevertheless, Katrine did not find so much as a phone conversation between Verni’s mobile and Norway. This person has been scrupulous.’

  Hagen shook his head dejectedly. ‘So close . . .’

  Harry sat on the desk. ‘There is another dilemma we have to resolve. The overnight guests at Håvass cabin that night.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘We cannot exclude the possibility that the page torn out of the guest book is a hit list. They have to be warned.’

  ‘How? We don’t know who they are.’

  ‘Through the media. Even if it means we would be letting the killer know we’ve picked up his trail.’

  Hagen slowly shook his head. ‘Hit list. And you’ve only reached this conclusion now?’

  ‘I know, boss.’ Harry met Hagen’s eyes. ‘If I’d gone to the media with a warning as soon as we stumbled on the Håvass cabin, it might have saved Elias Skog’s life.’

  The room went quiet.

  ‘We can’t go to the media,’ Hagen said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘If someone responds to the media alert, perhaps we can find out who else was in the cabin and what really happened,’ Kaja said.

  ‘We can’t go to the media,’ Hagen said, getting to his feet. ‘We’ve been investigating a missing persons case and uncovered links with a murder case, which is in the Kripos hands. We have to pass the information on and let them take it further. I’ll ring Bellman.’

  ‘Wait!’ Harry said. ‘Should he take all the credit for what we’ve done?’

  ‘I’m not sure there will be any credit to share, will there?’ Hagen said, heading for the door. ‘And you can start moving out now.’

  ‘Isn’t that a trifle hasty?’ Kaja said.

  The other two looked at her.

  ‘I mean, we’ve still got a missing person here. Shouldn’t we try to locate her before we tidy up?’

  ‘And how were you going to go about that?’ Hagen asked.

  ‘As Harry said before. A search.’

  ‘You don’t even know where you should bloody search.’

  ‘Harry knows.’

  They looked at the man who had just grabbed the jug from the coffee machine with one hand and was holding his cup under the mud-brown stream with the other.

  ‘Do you?’ Hagen said at length.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Harry said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘You’ll get into hot water,’ Harry said.

  ‘Shut up, and out with it,’ Hagen said, without noticing the contradiction. Because he was thinking, here I am, doing it again. What was it about this tall, fair-haired policeman who always managed to drag others along when he took headlong plunges?

  Olav Hole looked up at Harry and the woman beside him.

  She had curtsied when she introduced herself, and Harry had noticed that his father had liked that; he was always complaining that women had stopped curtsying.

  ‘So you’re Harry’s colleague,’ Olav said. ‘Does he behave himself ?’

  ‘We’re off to organise an operation,’ Harry said. ‘Just dropped by to see how you were.’

  His father smiled wanly, shrugged and beckoned Harry to come closer. Harry leaned forward, listened. And flinched.

  ‘You’ll be alright,’ Harry said in a sudden hoarse voice and stood up. ‘I’ll be back this evening, OK?’

  In the corridor Harry stopped Altman and motioned for Kaja to go on ahead.

  ‘Listen, I was wondering if you could do me a big favour,’ he said when Kaja was out of range. ‘My father’s just told me that he’s in pain. He would never admit that to you because he’s afraid you’ll give him more painkillers, and, well, he has a pathological fear of becoming dependent on … drugs. There’s a bit of family history here, you see.’

  ‘Thee,’ the nurse lisped and there was a moment of confusion until Harry realised that Altman had repeated ‘see’. ‘The problem is that I’m being shifted between wards at the moment.’

  ‘I’m asking this as a personal favour.’

  Altman screwed up one eye behind his glasses, staring thoughtfully at a point between himself and Harry. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Kaja drove while Harry was on the phone to the chief of operations at Briskeby Fire Station.

  ‘Your father seems like a nice man,’ Kaja said as Harry rang off.

  Harry took that in. ‘Mum made him good,’ he said. ‘When she was alive he was good. She brought out the best in him.’

  ‘Sounds like something you’ve been through yourself,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Someone made you good.’

  Harry looked out of the window. Nodded.

  ‘Rakel?’

  ‘Rakel and Oleg,’ Harry said.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .’

  ‘It’s alright.’

  ‘It’s just that when I came to Crime Squad everyone was talking about the Snowman case. About him trying to kill them. And you. But it was already over before the case began, wasn’t it?’

  ‘In a way,’ Harry said.

  ‘Have you had any contact with them?’

  Harry shook his head. ‘We had to try to put it behind us. Help Oleg to forget. When they’re that young they still can.’

  ‘Not always,’ Kaja said with a sardonic smile.

  Harry glanced at her. ‘And who made you good?’

  ‘Even,’ she answered without any hesitation.

  ‘No great romantic passions?’

  She shook her head. ‘No XLs. Just a few smalls. And one medium.’

  ‘Got your cap set at someone?’

  She chuckled. ‘Cap set at someone?’

  Harry smiled. ‘My vocabulary is somewhat old-fashioned in that area.’

  She hesitated. ‘I suppose I’m a bit hung up on a guy.’

  ‘And the prospects are?’

  ‘Poor.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ Harry said, winding down the window and lighting a cigarette. ‘He’s married and says he’ll leave his wife and kids for you, but never does?’

  She laughed. ‘Let me guess. You’re the type who thinks he’s so damned good at reading other people’s minds because he only remembers the times he got it right?’

  ‘He said you’ve just got to give him some time?’

  ‘Wrong again,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t say anything.’

  Harry nodded. He was about to ask more questions when it struck him: he didn’t want to know.

  35

  The Dive

  THE MIST DRIFTED ACROSS THE SHINY, BLACK SURFACE OF Lake Lyseren. Along the banks the trees stood with bowed shoulders like sombre, silent witnesses. The tranquillity was broken by shouted commands, radio communication and splashes as divers toppled backwards off rubber dinghies. They had started on the shore closest to the ropery. The heads of the search-and-recovery teams had sent their divers out in a fan formation,
and now they were standing on land, crossing off the squares on the defined search grid they had covered, and signalling with a pull on the lifelines when they wanted the divers to stop or come back. The professional divers, such as Jarle Andreassen, also had wires in the lines which went up to full-face masks, allowing them to stay in verbal contact.

  It was only six months since Jarle had taken his rescue course, and his pulse was still up during these dives. And a high pulse meant higher oxygen consumption. The more experienced men at Briskeby Fire Station called him ‘The Float’ as he had to rise to the surface and exchange oxygen cylinders so often.

  Jarle knew that there was still good daylight at the top, but down here it was as black as night. He tried to swim at the regulation one and a half metres above the lakebed, yet he still stirred up mud, which reflected the light from his torch and partially blinded him. Even though he knew there were other divers a few metres away on either side, he felt alone. Alone and frozen to the marrow. And there were probably still hours of diving ahead of them. He knew he had less air left than the others and cursed to himself. Being the first fire station diver to change cylinders was fine by him, but he feared he would have to surface before the voluntary club divers as well. He refocused in front of him and stopped breathing. Not as a conscious action to reduce consumption. But because in the middle of his torch beam, inside the swaying forest of stalks that grew in the muddy bed closer to land, he could see a form floating free. A form that did not belong down here, that would be unable to live here. An alien feature. That was what made it so fascinating and at the same time so frightening. Or perhaps it was the light from his torch shining on the dark eyes that made it look as if it were alive.

  ‘Everything OK, Jarle?’

  It was the team head. One of his tasks was to listen to his divers’ breathing. Not just to be sure they were breathing, but to hear if there were signs of anxiety. Or excessive calm. At twenty metres the brain began to store so much nitrogen that the so-called rapture of the deep could emerge, the nitrogen narcosis that meant you began to forget things, that simple jobs became more difficult and could, at greater depths, produce dizziness, tunnel vision and downright irrational behaviour. Jarle didn’t know if they were just yarns that did the rounds, but he had heard of divers who had pulled off their masks with a smile at fifty metres below. So far the only narcosis he had experienced was the cosy red-wine-induced serenity that he enjoyed with his partner late on Saturday nights.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ Jarle Andreassen said and started breathing again. He sucked in the mixture of oxygen and nitrogen and heard it rumble past his ears as he released clusters of bubbles that fought their way desperately to the surface.

  It was a large red stag. It was hanging upside down, its huge antlers apparently caught on the rock face. It must have been feeding on the bank and fallen. Or perhaps something or someone had chased it into the water. What else would it have been doing there? It had probably got tangled up in the rushes and the long stems of the water lilies, tried to struggle free, with the result that it had only got even more enmeshed in the tough, green tentacles. And then it must have gone under and wrestled on until it drowned. Sunk to the bottom and lain there until the bacteria and the body’s chemistry had filled it with gas and it had risen towards the top again, but the antlers had snagged on the lattice of green plants growing down here. In a few days the gas would have drained from the cadaver and it would have sunk again. Just like a drowned human body. The same thing was as likely to have happened to the person they were looking for, and that was why the body had not been found: it had never floated to the surface. If so, it would be lying down here somewhere, probably covered with a layer of mud. Mud which inevitably swirled upwards as they approached, which meant that even small defined search areas such as this could keep their secrets concealed for all eternity.

  Jarle Andreassen took out his large diver’s knife, swam over to the stag and cut the stems obstructing the antlers. He had an inkling his boss would not appreciate that, but he couldn’t bear the thought of this handsome beast being held under water. The cadaver rose half a metre, but then there were more stems holding it back. Jarle was careful not to let his lifeline get snarled in the reeds and made some hurried slashes. Then he felt a pull on the line. Hard enough for him to feel irritation. Hard enough for him to lose concentration for a moment. The knife slipped out of his hand. He shone his torch downwards and caught a glimpse of the blade before it was lost from view in the mud. Cautiously he swam after it. Thrust his hand into the mud drifting up towards him like ash. Groped along the bottom. Felt stones, branches, slippery, rotten and green. And something hard. Chain. Probably from a boat. More chain. Something else. Solid. The contours of something. A hole, an opening. He heard the sudden hiss of bubbles before his brain could formulate the thought. That he was afraid.

  ‘Everything OK, Jarle? Jarle?’

  No, everything was not OK. For even through thick gloves, even with a brain that seemed unable to absorb enough air, he had no doubts about where his hand had strayed. Into the open mouth of a human body.

  PART FOUR

  36

  Helicopter

  MIKAEL BELLMAN ARRIVED AT THE LAKE IN A HELICOPTER. The rotor blades whisked the mist into candyfloss as he dashed, bent double, from the passenger seat across the field to the ropery. Kolkka and Beavis followed at a half-run. From the opposite direction came four men carrying a stretcher. Bellman stopped them and lifted the blanket. The stretcher-bearers averted their faces as Bellman leaned over and studiously examined the naked, white bloated body.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said and let them continue towards the helicopter.

  Bellman stopped at the top of the slope and looked down on the people standing between the building and the water. Among the divers divesting themselves of their equipment and dry suits he could see Beate Lønn and Kaja Solness. Further away was Harry Hole, talking to a man Bellman guessed was Skai, the local County Officer.

  The POB signalled to Beavis and Kolkka that they should wait, and with lithe, nimble steps, he glided down the slope.

  ‘Hello, Skai,’ Bellman said, brushing twigs off his long coat. ‘Mikael Bellman, Kripos, we’ve spoken on the phone.’

  ‘Correct,’ Skai said. ‘The night his people found some rope here.’ He jerked his thumb back towards Harry.

  ‘And now it seems he’s here again,’ Bellman said. ‘The question is, of course, what he’s doing at my crime scene.’

  ‘Well,’ Harry said, clearing his throat, ‘firstly, this is hardly a crime scene. Secondly, I’m looking for a missing person. And it does seem as if we’ve found what we were looking for. How’s the triple murder going? Found anything? You got our information about the Håvass cabin, did you?’

  The County Officer acknowledged a glance from Bellman and absented himself in discreet haste.

  Bellman surveyed the lake while running a forefinger along his lower lip as if to rub in some ointment. ‘Alright, Hole, you are aware, are you, that you have just ensured that both you and your superior officer, Gunnar Hagen, have not only lost your jobs but will also be charged with dereliction of duty?’

  ‘Mm, because we do the job we’ve been entrusted with?’

  ‘I think the Minister of Justice will be demanding a pretty detailed explanation as to why you initiated a search for a missing person right outside the ropery which supplied the rope that was used to kill Marit Olsen. I gave you Crime Squad people a chance. You won’t get another. Game over, Hole.’

  ‘Then we’ll have to give the Minister of Justice a pretty detailed explanation, Bellman. Naturally, it will include information about how we found out where the rope came from, how we got onto the trail of Elias Skog and the Håvass cabin, how we found out that there was a fourth victim called Adele Vetlesen and how we found her here today. A job Kripos, with all its manpower and resources, failed to carry out over two months. Eh, Bellman?’

  Bellman didn’t answer.

 
; ‘Frightened it might affect the Minister of Justice’s decision on who is best suited to investigate murders in this country, are you?’

  ‘Don’t overplay your hand, Hole. I’ll crush you just like that.’ Bellman flicked his fingers.

  ‘OK,’ Harry said. ‘Neither of us has a winning hand, so what if I pass over the kitty?’

  ‘What the hell do you mean?’

  ‘You get everything. Everything we have. We don’t take credit for anything.’

  Bellman looked askance at Harry. ‘And why should you help us?’

  ‘Simple,’ Harry said, plucking the last smoke from the pack. ‘I get paid for helping to catch the killer. That’s my job.’

  Bellman grimaced and his head and shoulders moved as if he were laughing, but not a sound issued forth. ‘Come on, Hole, what do you want?’

  Harry lit his cigarette. ‘I don’t want Gunnar Hagen, Kaja Solness or Bjørn Holm to take the rap for this. Your prospects in the force won’t be affected.’

  Bellman squeezed his full lower lip between thumb and first finger. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘And I want to be part of this. I want access to all the material you have and to resources for the investigation.’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Bellman said, raising a hand. ‘Are you hard of hearing, Hole? I told you to stay away from this case.’

  ‘We can catch this killer, Bellman. Right now that should be more bloody important than who’s in charge afterwards, shouldn’t it?’

  ‘Don’t you … !’ Bellman shouted, but held back when he saw a couple of heads turn in their direction. He took a step closer to Harry and lowered his voice. ‘Don’t you talk to me as if I were an idiot, Hole.’

  The wind blew the smoke from Harry’s cigarette into Bellman’s face, but he didn’t blink. Harry shrugged.

  ‘Do you know what, Bellman? I don’t think this has much to do with power or politics. You’re a little boy who wants to be the hero who saves the day. Simple as that. And you’re scared I’ll ruin the epic. But there’s an easy way of resolving this. What about unzipping and seeing who can piss as far as the divers’ dinghy?’