The Leopard

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Bombay Garden?’

  ‘Yup. Aslak Krongli has a not insubstantial gambling problem. Thing is, I’ve checked his credit card payments on the computer here. Time of payment and everything. Krongli has used his card a lot, and the times give him an alibi. Unfortunately.’

  ‘I see. And they’ve got the computer in the same room as the race course?’

  ‘Eh? They’re in the final straight now, you’ll have to talk louder!’

  ‘They’ve … Forget it. I’m ringing to say we’ve got semen off the ski pants that Adele Vetlesen was wearing at Håvass.’

  ‘What? You’re kidding? That means . . .’

  ‘We may soon have the DNA of the eighth guest. If it’s his semen. And the only way we can be sure is by excluding the other men at Håvass.’

  ‘We need their DNA.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bjørn Holm. ‘Elias Skog’s fine, of course, we’ve got his DNA. Not so good with Tony Leike. We’d have found it at his house, no problem, but for that we need a warrant. And after what happened last time it’s gonna be really tough.’

  ‘Leave it to me,’ Harry said. ‘We should also have Krongli’s DNA profile. Even though he didn’t kill either Charlotte or Borgny, he may have raped Adele.’

  ‘OK. How do we get it?’

  ‘As a policeman he must have been at a crime scene at some point or other,’ Harry said. It was unnecessary to conclude his reasoning. Bjørn Holm was already nodding. To avoid confusion and identity mistakes, fingerprints and DNA were routinely taken from all officers who had been present at a crime scene and had potentially contaminated it.

  ‘I’ll check the database.’

  ‘Well done, Bjørn.’

  ‘Wait, there’s more. You asked us to look harder for a nurse’s uniform and we did. We found one with PSG on it. And I’ve checked. There’s a disused PSG factory in Oslo, up in Nydalen. If it’s empty and the eighth guest had sex with Adele there, we may still be able to find semen there.’

  ‘Mm. Knobbed in Nydalen and humped in Håvass. The eighth guest may just have fucked his bolt-hole. PSG, you said. Is that the Kadok factory?’

  ‘Yes, how … ?’

  ‘Pal’s father worked there.’

  ‘Repeat, there’s a helluva racket now.’

  ‘They’re crossing the finishing line. See you.’

  Harry put the phone in his jacket pocket, swivelled round in his chair, so he didn’t see the gloomy faces of the losers around the felt course, nor the croupier’s smile. ‘Conglatulations again, Hally!’

  Harry got up, donned his jacket and looked at the note the Vietnamese man was holding out for him. With the portrait of Edvard Munch. A thousand kroner.

  ‘Mm, velly lucky,’ Harry said. ‘Put it on the green horse in the next race. I’ll pick up the cash another day, Duc.’

  Lene Galtung was sitting in the living room staring at the double-glazed window, at the double-exposed reflection. Her iPod was playing Tracy Chapman. ‘Fast Car’. She could listen to the song again and again, never got tired of it. It was about a poor girl wanting to flee from everything, just get in her lover’s fast car and leave the life she had, working on the till at the supermarket, being responsible for her drunken father, burn all the bridges. This could not have been further from Lene’s own life, nevertheless the song was about her. The Lene she could have been. The Lene she actually was. One of the two she saw in the double reflection. The ordinary one, the grey one. In all her years at school she had been scared stiff that the classroom door would open, someone would come in, point a finger at her and say, we’re on to you now, take off those fine clothes. Then they would toss her a few rags and say, now everyone can see who you really are, the illegitimate child. She had been sitting there, year in, year out, hiding, as quiet as a mouse, glancing at the door, just waiting. Listening to friends, listening for the telltale signs that would give her away. The embarrassment, the fear, the defence she put up seemed like arrogance to others. And she knew she overplayed her role as rich, successful, spoilt and carefree. She was not at all good-looking and radiant, like the other girls in her circle, the ones who could chirrup with a selfassured smile ‘I don’t have a clue’, in the charming knowledge that whatever they didn’t know couldn’t possibly be important and that the world would never require any more from them than their beauty. So she had to pretend. That she was beautiful. Radiant. Superior to everything. But she was so tired of it. Had just wanted to sit in Tony’s car and ask him to leave everything behind. Drive to a place where she could be the real Lene and not these two false personae who hated each other. As the song said, together, she and Tony could find that place.

  The reflection in the glass moved. Lene recoiled when she realised it was not her face after all. She hadn’t heard her come in. Lene straightened up and pulled out the earphones.

  ‘Put the coffee tray there, Nanna.’

  The woman hesitated. ‘You should forget him, Lene.’

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘I’m just saying. He won’t be a good man for you.’

  ‘Stop it, I told you!’

  ‘Shh!’ The woman smacked down the tray with a clatter on the table, and her turquoise eyes flashed. ‘You have to see common sense, Lene. We’ve all had to do that in this house when the situation demanded it. I’m just saying this as your—’

  ‘As my what?’ Lene snorted. ‘Look at you. What could you be to me?’

  The woman ran her hands down the white apron, went to put one on Lene’s cheek, but Lene waved it away. The woman sighed, and it sounded like a drop of water falling in a well. Then she turned and left. As the door closed behind her, the black phone next to Lene rang. She felt her heart leap. Since Tony had disappeared, her phone had been constantly switched on and always within arm’s length. She grabbed it. ‘Lene Galtung.’

  ‘Harry Hole, Crime Squ— I mean, Kripos. I’m sorry to intrude, but I need to ask you for some help with a case. It’s about Tony.’

  Lene could feel her voice careering out of control as she replied: ‘Has … has something happened?’

  ‘We’re looking for someone we suspect died from a fall in the mountains around Ustaoset.’

  She felt herself going dizzy; the floor was rising and the ceiling falling.

  ‘We haven’t located the body yet. It’s been snowing and the search area is vast and extremely rugged. Can you hear me?’

  ‘Y–yes, I can.’

  The policeman’s voice, a touch hoarse, continued. ‘When the body has been recovered, we’ll try to get it identified as soon as possible. But there may be extensive burns. Therefore we require DNA now from anyone who might conceivably be the deceased person. And while Tony is a missing person . . .’

  Lene’s heart felt as if it was coming up her throat, ready to leap out of her mouth. The voice at the other end droned on.

  ‘That is why I was wondering if you could help one of our forensics officers to find DNA material in Tony’s home.’

  ‘S-such as what?’

  ‘A hair from a brush, saliva on a toothbrush, they know what they need. The important thing is that you, as his fiancée, give us permission and come to his house with a key.’

  ‘Of c-course.’

  ‘Thank you very much indeed. I’ll send an officer to Holmenveien right away.’

  Lene rang off. Felt the tears coming. Put her iPod earphones back in.

  Caught Tracy Chapman singing about taking a fast car and keeping on driving. Then the song finished. She pressed repeat.

  65

  Kadok

  NYDALEN EMBODIED THE DEINDUSTRIALISATION OF OSLO. The factory buildings that had not been demolished – and had not given way to gleaming, elegant designer office blocks in glass and steel – had been converted into TV studios, restaurants and large, open-plan redbrick affairs with exposed ventilation and plumbing.

  The latter were often rented by advertising firms who wanted to flag up that they thought in untraditional ways, that creativity flourished just
as well in cheap industrial rooms as in the expensive and centrally located head offices of their well-established competitors. But the premises in Nydalen now cost at least as much because all advertising agencies basically think in traditional patterns. That is: they follow the fashion and drive the prices upwards for whatever is the fashion.

  The owners of the disused Kadok factory site had, however, not participated in this bonanza. When the factory had finally closed fourteen years ago, after several annual deficits and the dumping of PSG in China, the founder’s heirs went for each other’s throats. And while they were arguing about who should have what, the factory fell into decay, isolated behind the fences to the west of the River Akerselva. Shrubs and deciduous trees were allowed to grow wild and eventually masked the factory from its surroundings. Bearing all this in mind, Harry thought the large padlock on the gate seemed strangely new.

  ‘Cut it,’ Harry told the officer beside him.

  The jaws of the enormous bolt cutter went through the metal as if it were butter, and the lock was snapped as quickly as it had taken Harry to get a blue chit. The solicitor at Kripos had sounded as if he had more important things to do than issue search warrants, and Harry had barely finished talking before he had the chit filled and signed in his hand. And he had thought to himself that they could do with a couple of stressedout, negligent solicitors at Crime Squad as well.

  The low afternoon sun flashed on the jagged glass of smashed windows high in the brick walls. The atmosphere was marked by the desolation you find only in disused factories where everything you see has been constructed for hectic, efficient activity, yet there is no one around. Where the echo of iron on iron, of workers shouting, cursing and laughing over the drone of the machines still reverberates silently between the walls, and the wind blows through the soot-darkened, broken windows, making the spiders’ webs and the dead shells of insects quiver.

  There was no lock on the door into the factory hall. The five men walked through a rectangular area with church-like acoustics, which gave the impression of an evacuation rather than closure; work tools were still laid out, a pallet loaded with white buckets labelled PSG TYPE 3 stood ready to be driven away, a blue coat hung over the back of a chair.

  They stopped when they reached the centre of the hall. In one corner there was a kind of kiosk, shaped like a lighthouse and raised a metre off the ground. Foreman’s office, Harry thought. Around the walls ran a gallery, which at one end led into a mezzanine floor with its own rooms. Harry guessed they were the lunch room and admin offices.

  ‘Where shall we begin?’ Harry asked.

  ‘The same place as always,’ Bjørn Holm said, casting round. ‘Top lefthand corner.’

  ‘What are we looking for?’

  ‘A table, a bench with blue PSG on it. The stains on the trousers were rubbed in slightly below the back pockets, so she must have been sitting on something – in other words, she wasn’t lying flat.’

  ‘If you begin down here, this officer and I will go upstairs with the bolt cutters,’ Harry said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘To open doors for you forensics boys. We promise not to spray semen anywhere.’

  ‘Very droll. Don’t—’

  ‘—touch anything.’

  Harry and the officer, whom he called ‘officer’ for the simple reason that he had forgotten his name two seconds after hearing it, stomped up a winding staircase, making the iron steps sing. The doors they met were open, and inside, as Harry had envisaged, there were offices from which the furniture had been removed. A cloakroom with rows of iron lockers. A large communal shower. But no blue stains.

  ‘What do you think that is?’ Harry asked, standing in the lunch room. He pointed to a narrow padlocked door at the back.

  ‘Pantry,’ the officer said, already on his way out.

  ‘Wait!’

  Harry went to the door. Scratched a nail on the apparently rusty lock. It was genuine rust. He turned it round, looked at the cylinder. No rust.

  ‘Cut it,’ Harry said.

  The officer did as he was bidden. Then Harry opened the door.

  The officer smacked his lips.

  ‘Just a secret door,’ Harry said.

  Behind it was neither a pantry nor a room, but another door. Fitted with what looked like a solid lock.

  The officer dropped the bolt cutter.

  Harry scanned the area and found what he was looking for. A large red fire extinguisher, fairly conspicuous, hanging from the middle of the wall in the lunch room. Hadn’t Øystein mentioned something about that once? The materials they made where his father worked were so inflammable that they were instructed to smoke by the river. In to which the cigarette ends were to be thrown afterwards.

  He lifted the extinguisher off the wall and carried it to the door. Took a run-up of two strides, aimed and smashed the metal cylinder into the door like a battering ram.

  The door split around the lock, but still clung to the frame.

  Harry repeated the attack. Splinters flew all around.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ he heard Bjørn call from the factory floor.

  At the third attempt the door gave with a despairing scream and swung open. They stared into a pitch-black void.

  ‘Can I borrow your torch?’ Harry asked the officer, putting down the fire extinguisher and wiping off the sweat. ‘Thanks. Wait here.’

  Harry stepped into the room. There was a smell of ammonia. He shone the torch along the walls. The room – which he estimated was three metres square – had no windows. The beam swept across a black folding chair, a desk with a lamp and a Dell computer screen. The keyboard was relatively unworn. The desk was tidy and made of bare wood, no blue stains. In the litter bin there were strips of paper, as though someone had been cutting out pictures. And, sure enough, a Dagbladet with the front page cut up. Harry read the headline over the missing picture and knew they had come to the right place. They had arrived. This was it.

  – DIED IN AVALANCHE –

  Harry instinctively shone the torch upwards, on the wall above the desk, past some blue stains. And there they were.

  All of them.

  Marit Olsen, Charlotte Lolles, Borgny Stem-Myhre, Adele Vetlesen, Elias Skog, Jussi Kolkka. And Tony Leike.

  Harry concentrated on breathing from his diaphragm. On absorbing the information piecemeal. The pictures had been cut out of news papers or were printouts, probably from news pages on the Internet. Apart from the picture of Adele. His heart felt like a bass drum, dull thuds as it tried to send more blood to his brain. The picture was on photographic paper and so grainy that Harry assumed it must have been taken with a telephoto lens and then blown up. It showed a car window, Adele’s profile in the front seat from which the plastic cover did not seem to have been removed, and there was something protruding from her neck. A large knife with a shiny, yellow handle. Harry forced his eyes to look further. Underneath the pictures hung a line of letters, also printed off a computer. Harry skimmed the introduction to one of them.

  IT IS SO SIMPLE. I KNOW WHO YOU KILLED.

  YOU DON’T KNOW WHO I AM, BUT YOU KNOW WHAT I

  WANT.

  MONEY. IF YOU DON’T PAY UP, THE COPS WILL BE ROUND.

  SIMPLE, EH?

  The text continued, but his eye was caught by the end of the letter. No name, no sign off. The police officer was standing in the doorway. Harry heard his hand fumbling along the wall as he muttered: ‘Must be a light switch here somewhere.’

  Harry shone the torch at the blue ceiling, on four large neon tubes.

  ‘There must be,’ Harry said, illuminating the wall above several blue stains, before the cone of light found a sheet pinned to the right of the pictures. A tiny alarm bell had begun to go off in his brain. The sheet was torn at the side and covered in hand-drawn lines and columns. But there were different handwriting styles.

  ‘Here it is,’ the officer said.

  For some reason, Harry suddenly thought about the work lamp. And t
he blue ceiling. And the smell of ammonia. And realised at that instant that the alarm in his head had nothing to do with the paper.

  ‘Don’t . . .’ Harry started.

  But too late.

  The explosion was not technically an explosion but – as it would appear in the report the fire chief would sign the following day – an explosion-like fire triggered by an electric spark from cables connected to a canister of ammonia gas that in its turn ignited the PSG painted over the whole ceiling and splattered on the walls.

  Harry gasped as the oxygen in the room was drawn into the flames and he felt an immense heat bear down on his head. He automatically fell to his knees and ran his hands through his hair to see if it was alight. When he looked up again, flames were coming off the walls. He wanted to breathe in, but managed to stop the reflex. Got to his feet. The door was only two metres away, but he had to have … he stretched for the sheet of paper. For the missing page from the Håvass guest book.

  ‘Move away!’ The officer appeared in the doorway with the fire extinguisher under his arm and the hose in his hand. As though in slow motion, Harry saw it squirt out. Saw the golden-brown jet released from the hose splash against the wall. Brown that should have been white; liquid that should have been powder. And already, before he looked into the jaws of the flames that rose on two legs and roared at him from where the liquid landed, before he smelt the sweet sting of petrol in his nostrils, before he saw the flames follow the jet of petrol towards the officer standing in the doorway, with the handle still depressed, in shock, Harry knew why the extinguisher had been hanging from the middle of the lunch-room wall, on display, impossible to miss, red and new, screaming out to be used.

  Harry’s shoulder hit the policeman at waist height, folding him over the rampaging inspector and knocking him backwards into the room with Harry on top.

  They sent a couple of chairs flying as they skidded under the table. The officer, gasping for air, gesticulated and pointed while opening and closing his mouth like a fish. Harry turned. Wrapped in flames, the red extinguisher rumbled and rolled towards them. The hose was spitting melted rubber. Harry shot up, dragging the officer after him, pulled him to the door as a stopwatch ticked timelessly in his head. He shoved the swaying officer out of the room, onto the gallery, thrust him down to the floor alongside him as it came, what the fire chief in his report would describe as an explosion, and which blew out all the windows and set fire to the entire lunch room.