by Jo Nesbo
‘And the better he becomes at what he’s doing,’ Bellman said. ‘Remember that Tony Leike was no novice at violence. You aren’t a mercenary in Africa for as long as he was without having blood on your hands. As you yourself have.’
‘Blood on my hands?’ Altman shrieked, in a sudden burst of anger. ‘I broke into Tony’s house and rang Elias Skog so you would find the trail at Telenor. It’s you who have blood on your hands! Whores like Adele and Mia, murderers like Tony. If not—’
‘Stop now, Sigurd.’ Johan Krohn had got to his feet. ‘Let’s have a break, shall we?’
Altman closed his eyes, raised his hands and shook his head. ‘I’m OK, I’m OK. Let’s get this over and done with.’
Johan Krohn eyed his client, glanced at Bellman and sat down.
Altman took a deep, tremulous breath. Then he continued. ‘After the third murder or so, Tony knew, of course, that the next letter was not necessarily from the person it purported to be from. Nonetheless, he went on killing them, in increasingly violent ways. It was as if he wanted to frighten me, make me pull back, to show that he could kill everyone and everything and in the end would kill me, too.’
‘Or he wanted to get rid of potential witnesses who had seen him and Adele,’ Bellman said. ‘He knew there had been seven other people at Håvass, he just didn’t have the means to establish who they were.’
Altman laughed. ‘Imagine! I swear he went up to the cabin to look at the guest book. Only to find the stub of a torn-out sheet. Tony Pony!’
‘What about your motive for continuing?’
‘What do you mean?’ Altman asked, on the alert now.
‘You could have given the police an anonymous tip-off much earlier in the case. Perhaps you wanted to get rid of all the witnesses as well?’
Altman tilted his head, so that his ear almost touched his shoulder.
‘As I said, it’s difficult to keep tabs on all the reasons for doing what you do. Your subconscious is controlled by your survival instinct and is therefore often more rational than conscious thought. Perhaps my subconscious realised it would also be safer for me if Tony eliminated all the witnesses. Then no one would be able to say I was there, or suddenly recognise me one day in the street. But we will never get an answer to that, will we.’
The wood burner crackled and spat.
‘But why on earth would Tony Leike chop off his own finger?’ Bjørn Holm asked.
He had settled down on the sofa while Harry went through the firstaid kit he had found at the back of a kitchen drawer. It contained several rolls of bandages. And an astringent ointment that made blood coagulate faster. The date on the tube showed it was only two months old.
‘Altman forced him,’ Harry said, revolving a tiny unlabelled brown bottle. ‘Leike had to be humiliated.’
‘You don’t sound as if you believe that yourself.’
‘I damn well do believe it,’ Harry said, unscrewing the lid and sniffing the contents.
‘Oh? There’s not a single fingerprint here that isn’t Leike’s, not a hair that isn’t Leike’s raven-black hair, not a shoe print that isn’t size forty-five, Leike’s. Sigurd Altman is ash blond and takes size forty-two, Harry.’
‘He made a good job of clearing up afterwards. Remind me to have this analysed.’ Harry slipped the brown bottle into his jacket pocket.
‘A good job of clearing up? In what probably isn’t even a crime scene? The same man who didn’t care about leaving big fat fingerprints on Leike’s desk in Holmenveien? Who you said yourself didn’t clear up very well at the cabin where he killed Utmo? I don’t think so, Harry. And you don’t, either.’
‘Fuck!’ Harry shouted. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ He rested his forehead on his hands and stared at the table.
Bjørn Holm held one of the small bits of wire from under the drainpipe in the air and scraped off the gold coating with his fingernail. ‘By the way, I think I know what this is.’
‘Oh?’ Harry said, without lifting his head.
‘Iron, chrome, nickel and titanium.’
‘What?’
‘I had a dental brace when I was a kid. The wires had to be bent and clipped on.’
Harry suddenly looked up and stared at the map of Africa. He studied the countries that slotted into each other like jigsaw pieces. Except Madagascar, which was separate, like a bit that didn’t fit.
‘At the dentist’s—’
‘Shh!’ Harry said, holding up a hand. Now he had it. Something had just clicked into place. All that could be heard was the wood burner and the gusting wind that was closer outside now. Two jigsaw pieces that had been far apart, each on their own side of the puzzle. A maternal grandfather by Lake Lyseren. Father of his mother. And the photograph in the drawer at the cabin. The family photograph. The picture didn’t belong to Tony Leike, but to Odd Utmo. Arthritis. What was it that Tony had told him? Not contagious, but hereditary. The boy with the large, bared teeth. And the man with the hard, pinched mouth, as if he were hiding a dark secret. Hiding his rotten teeth and a brace.
The stone. The dark stone he had found on the bathroom floor in the cabin. He put his hand in his pocket. It was still there. He tossed it over to Bjørn.
‘Tell me,’ he said with a gulp. ‘I came across this. Think it could be a tooth?’
Bjørn held it up to the light. Scraped it with his nail. ‘Could be.’
‘Let’s get back,’ Harry said, feeling the hairs on his neck prickle. ‘Now. It wasn’t bloody Altman who killed them.’
‘Oh?’
‘It was Tony Leike.’
‘You must have read in the papers that Tony Leike was released after being arrested,’ Bellman said. ‘He had a wonderful little thing called an alibi. He could prove he was somewhere else when Borgny and Charlotte died.’
‘I know nothing about that,’ Sigurd Altman said, crossing his arms. ‘I know only that I saw him stick a knife into Adele’s neck. And that the letters I sent caused the ostensible senders to be murdered straight afterwards.’
‘You’re aware that at least makes you an accessory to murder, aren’t you?’
Johan Krohn coughed. ‘And you’re aware, aren’t you, that you made a deal that will serve up the real killer on a silver platter, for you and Kripos? All your internal problems will be solved, Bellman. You’ll get all the credit, and you have a witness who will say in court that he saw Tony Leike kill Adele Vetlesen. What happened beyond that remains between you and me.’
‘And your client goes free?’
‘That’s the deal.’
‘What about if Leike kept the letters and they turn up at the trial?’ Bellman said. ‘Then we have a problem.’
‘That’s precisely why I have a feeling they won’t turn up,’ Krohn smiled. ‘Or, will they?’
‘What about the photographs you took of Adele and Tony?’
‘Went up in the blaze at Kadok,’ Altman said. ‘That bastard Hole.’
Mikael Bellman nodded slowly. Then he lifted his pen. S.T. Dupont. Lead and steel. It was heavy. Once he had set it to paper, though, it was as if the signature wrote itself.
‘Thanks,’ Harry said. ‘Over and out.’
He received a rasping sound by way of answer and then it was still, there was only the helicopter engine’s monotonous noise outside his headset. Harry bent the microphone and looked out.
Too late.
He had just finished talking over the radio to the tower at Gardemoen Airport. For security reasons they had access to most information, including passenger lists. And could confirm that Odd Utmo had travelled on his pre-booked ticket to Copenhagen two days ago.
The countryside moved slowly beneath them.
Harry visualised him standing there with the passport of the man he had tortured and killed. The man or the woman behind the counter routinely reading to see if the passport matched the name on the list and thinking – if they looked at the photo at all – that was one hell of a brace. Looked up and registered the same dental work on th
e probably artifically browned teeth in front of him, a brace which Tony Leike must have had to bend and cut to fit on top of his own porcelain highrises.
They flew into a rainstorm that exploded on the plexiglas bubble, ran to the sides in quivering streaks of water and disappeared. Seconds later it was as if they had never been there.
The finger.
Tony Leike had cut off his finger and sent it to Harry as a final red herring, to demonstrate that Tony Leike had to be considered dead. He could be forgotten, written off, put aside. Was it chance that Leike had chosen the same finger as Harry’s missing digit, that he had made himself like him?
But what about the alibi, his water-tight alibi?
Harry had entertained the thought before, but had rejected it because cold-blooded murderers are rarities, deviants, perverted souls in the true sense of the word. But could there have been someone else? Could the answer be as simple as Tony Leike working together with a sidekick?
‘Fuck!’ said Harry, loud enough for the sound-sensitive microphone to transmit the last part of the syllable to the other three headsets in the helicopter. He caught Jens Rath’s sidelong glance. Maybe Rath had been right after all. Maybe Tony Leike was indeed sitting with a shot of the hard stuff, some exotic wildcat of a woman on his arm and grinning because he had come up with a solution.
79
Missed Calls
AT A QUARTER PAST TWO THE HELICOPTER LANDED AT Fornebu, the disused aerodrome twelve minutes’ drive from the city centre. When Harry and Bjørn went through the door of the Kripos building and Harry asked the receptionist why neither Bellman nor any of the senior detectives were answering their phones, he was told they were all in a meeting.
‘Why the hell weren’t we called?’ mumbled Harry as he strode down the corridor with Bjørn jogging after him.
He pushed open the door without knocking. Seven heads turned towards them. The eighth, Mikael Bellman’s, didn’t need to turn as he was sitting at the end of the long table facing the door, and he was the one on whom all the others had been focused.
‘Stan and Ollie,’ Bellman chortled, and Harry gathered from the chuckling that they had been a subject of conversation in their absence. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Well, while you were sitting here and playing Snow White and the seven dwarfs we’ve been to Tony Leike’s cabin,’ Harry said, throwing himself down on a free chair at the opposite end of the table. ‘And we have some news. It isn’t Altman. We’ve arrested the wrong man. It was Tony Leike.’
Harry didn’t know what reaction he had expected, but at any rate it hadn’t been this: none at all.
The POB leaned back in his chair with a friendly quizzical smile.
‘We’ve arrested the wrong man? To my recollection, Skai was the officer who took it upon himself to arrest Sigurd Altman. And, regarding news value, this is pretty scant. As for Tony Leike, perhaps we should be saying “Welcome back”.’
Harry’s gaze jumped from Ærdal to the Pelican and back to Bellman as his brain churned. And drew the only possible conclusion.
‘Altman,’ Harry said. ‘Altman said it was Leike. He knew all the time.’
‘He not only knew,’ Bellman said. ‘Just as Leike triggered the avalanche in Håvass, Altman set this whole murder case in motion, without even realising. Skai arrested an innocent man, Harry.’
‘Innocent?’ Harry shook his head. ‘I saw the pictures in the Kadok factory, Bellman. Altman is involved here, I just don’t know how as yet.’
‘But we do,’ Bellman said. ‘So if you wouldn’t mind leaving this to us . . .’ Harry heard the word ‘adults’ forming in Bellman’s mouth, but it came out as: ‘… enlightened ones, you can join in when you’re up to speed, Harry. Alright? Bjørn, too? So let’s move on. I was saying that we cannot exclude the possibility that Leike had a partner, someone who committed at least two of the murders, the two for which Leike has an alibi. We know that when both Borgny and Charlotte died Leike was at business meetings with several witnesses present.’
‘A clever bastard,’ said Ærdal. ‘Leike knew, of course, that the police would find a link between all the murders. So if he found himself a cast-iron alibi for one or two of them, he would automatically be cleared of the others.’
‘Yes,’ said Bellman. ‘But who is the accomplice?’
Harry heard suggestions, comments and queries fluttering past him in the room.
‘Tony Leike’s motive for killing Adele Vetlesen was hardly the demand for four hundred thousand,’ the Pelican said. ‘But rather the fear that if it came out that he had got some woman pregnant, Lene Galtung would end the relationship and he could kiss goodbye to the Galtung millions for the Congo project. So the question we should be asking ourselves is who had identical interests.’
‘The other investors in the Congo,’ said the smooth-faced detective. ‘What about his financial friends at the office block?’
‘It’s make or break for Tony Leike with the Congo project,’ Bellman said. ‘But none of the other finance squirts would have killed two people to secure their ten per cent share in a project. Those boys are used to winning and losing money. Besides, Leike had to collaborate with someone he could trust at both a personal and a professional level. Bear in mind that the murder weapon was the same for Borgny and Charlotte. What did you call it, Harry?’
‘A Leopold’s apple,’ Harry intoned, still befuddled.
‘Louder, please.’
‘A Leopold’s apple.’
‘Thank you. From Africa. Same place Leike had been a mercenary. It is therefore fair to assume that Leike used one of his former comrades, and I think we should start there.’
‘If he used a mercenary for murders number two and three, why not for all of them?’ the Pelican asked. ‘Then he would have had an alibi right the way through.’
‘He would have got a per capita discount, too,’ the Nansen moustache said. ‘The mercenary can’t get any more than life imprisonment anyway.’
‘There may be angles of which we are unaware,’ Bellman said. ‘Banal reasons like not having enough time or Leike not having the money. Or the most usual reason in crime cases: it just happened like that.’
Nods of agreement round the table; even the Pelican seemed content with the answer.
‘Any other questions? No? Then I would like to use this opportunity to thank Harry Hole who has been with us thus far. As we no longer have any use for his expertise, he will return to Crime Squad with immediate effect. It was stimulating to experience another view of how to work on murders, Harry. You might not have solved this case but who knows. There may be some interesting Crime Squad cases waiting for you down there in Grønland, if not murders. So thank you again. I have a press conference now, folks.’
Harry looked at Bellman. He could not help but admire him. The way you admire a cockroach you flush down the toilet, that comes creeping back. Again and again. And in the end it inherits the world.
* * *
At Olav’s bedside in Rikshospital, seconds, minutes and hours passed in a slow, undulating swell of monotony. A nurse came and went, Sis came and went. Flowers moved imperceptibly closer.
Harry had seen how many relatives could not bear to wait for the last breath of their loved ones, how in the end they prayed, begged for death to come and liberate them. Them, meaning themselves. But for Harry it was the opposite. He had never felt closer to his father than now, here, in this wordless room where all was breathing and the next heartbeat. For seeing Olav Hole there was like seeing himself, in the peace-filled existence between life and nothingness.
The detectives at Kripos had seen and understood a lot. But not the evident link. Which made the entirety so much clearer. The link between the Leike farm and Ustaoset. Between the rumours and the ghost of a missing boy from the Utmo farm and a man who called the wasteland ‘his terrain’. Between Tony Leike and the boy in the photograph with his ugly father and beautiful mother.
Now and then Harry glanced at his
mobile phone and saw a missed call. Hagen. Øystein. Kaja. Kaja again. He would have to answer her calls soon. He rang her.
‘Can I come to yours tonight?’ she asked.
80
The Rhythm
THE RAIN BEAT DOWN ON THE BOARDS OF THE JETTY. Harry walked up behind the man standing at the edge, facing the other way.
‘Morning, Skai.’
‘Morning, Hole,’ the officer said without turning. The tip of the fishing rod was bent towards the line that disappeared in the reeds on the opposite bank.
‘Caught something?’
‘Nope,’ Skai said. ‘Snarled up on the bloody reeds.’
‘Sorry to hear that. Read the papers today?’
‘They don’t arrive before late morning in the sticks.’
Harry knew that was not true, but nodded anyway.
‘But I suppose they’ve written that I’m a village idiot,’ Skai said. ‘They had to get townsfolk in from Kripos to sort out the muddle.’
‘As I said: I’m sorry.’
Skai shrugged. ‘I’ve got no complaints. You gave it to me straight, I knew what I was doing. And it was a bit of fun, too. Not much happens out here, you know.’
‘Mm. They don’t write much about you, they’re mostly interested in Tony Leike being the killer, after all. Bellman is much-quoted.’
‘He is that.’
‘Soon they’ll work out who Tony’s father is as well.’
Skai turned and looked at Harry.
‘I should have thought of it before, and especially after we talked about the changing of names.’
‘Now I don’t follow you, Hole.’
‘You were even the person who told me, Skai. Tony lived with his grandfather at the Leike farm. Mother’s father. Tony had taken his mother’s name.’
‘Nothing unusual in that.’
‘Maybe not. But in this case there was a good reason for it. Tony was hiding at his grandfather’s. His mother sent him there.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘A colleague,’ Harry said, and for a second he seemed to have the night’s scent of her in his nostrils again. ‘She told me something the Ustaoset officer had told her. About the Utmo family. About a father and a son who hated each other so intensely that it threatened to culminate in murder.’