The Leopard (39 page)

‘The question’, he said, switching off the computer, ‘is what kind of murders we are dealing with here. I think we can exclude the typical serial killer. The victims have not been chosen at random inside a demographic group; they are tied to a specific place and a specific time. Accordingly, there is reason to believe that we are also talking about a specific motive which may even be perceived as rational. If so, that makes the task considerably easier for us: find the motive and we have the killer.’

Bellman saw several detectives nod.

‘The problem is that there are no witnesses to tell us anything. The only one we know to be alive, Iska Peller, was ill in bed, alone. The others are either dead or have not come forward. We know, for example, that Adele Vetlesen was with a man she had met recently, but no one in her circle of acquaintances seems to know anything about him, so we have to assume it was a short-lived relationship. We’re looking at the men she contacted by phone or on the Net, but it will take time to work our way through them. And in the absence of witnesses we will have to find our own starting point. We need hypotheses for the motive. What is the motive for killing at least four people?’

‘Jealousy or hearing voices,’ someone from the back replied.

‘All our experience tells us that.’

‘Agreed. Who might hear voices commanding them to kill?’

‘Anyone with a psychiatric record,’ came a sing-song response from Finnmark.

‘And anyone without one,’ said someone else.

‘Good. Who might be jealous?’

‘Partner or spouse of someone there.’

‘And who might that be?’

‘But we’ve checked the victims’ partners’ alibis and potential motives,’ another said. ‘That’s the first thing we do. And either they didn’t have partners or we eliminated them from our inquiries.’

Mikael Bellman knew all too well they were just putting their foot on the accelerator while the wheels spun round in the same rut they had been in for a while, but the important point now was that they were ready to do exactly that: to put their foot down. For he was in no doubt that the Håvass cabin was a plank that could be levered under the wheel to get them out of the rut.

‘We didn’t eliminate
all
the partners and spouses,’ Bellman said, rocking on his heels. ‘We just didn’t think every one was a suspect. Who didn’t have an alibi for the time his wife was killed?’

‘Rasmus Olsen!’

‘Correct. And when I went to Stortinget and spoke to Rasmus Olsen he admitted that there had been what he called a little “jealous patch” some months ago. A woman Rasmus had been flirting with. And Marit Olsen went to the Håvass cabin for a couple of days to think things over. The days may match. Perhaps she did more than think. Perhaps she got her own back. And here’s a thought. On the night in question, when the victims were at the Håvass cabin, Rasmus Olsen was not in Oslo; he was booked into a hotel in Ustaoset. What was Rasmus doing in the area if his wife was in Håvass? And did he spend the night in the hotel or did he go for a longish skiing trip?’

The eyes in front of him were no longer heavy-lidded or tired, quite the opposite, he was igniting a spark in them. He waited for an answer. Such a large investigative group was not normally the most efficient way to organise this kind of improvised brainstorming, but they had worked on the case for so long that everyone in the room had had their slants, their sure-fire hunches and fanciful hypotheses rejected and their egos flattened.

A young detective took a punt. ‘He may have arrived at the cabin in the evening unannounced and caught her in the act. The guy saw and sneaked off again. Then planned the whole thing at his leisure.’

‘Maybe,’ Bellman said, going over to the speaker’s chair and holding up a note. ‘Argument one in favour of such a theory: I’ve just been given this by Telenor. It shows that Rasmus Olsen spoke to his wife on the phone some time that morning. So let’s assume he knew which cabin she was going to. Argument two in favour of this hypothesis is the weather report, which shows there was a moon and clear visibility all evening and night, so he could easily have skied there, as Tony Leike did. Argument one against the hypothesis: why kill anyone apart from his wife and her alleged partner?’

‘Maybe she had more than one,’ shouted one of the female detectives, a short, buxom number Bellman reckoned was sufficiently lesbian for him to have toyed with the idea of inviting her to Kaja’s one night. No more than a passing thought of course. ‘Perhaps there was a whole fucking orgy going on up there.’

Laughter all round. Good, that lightened the atmosphere.

‘He may not have seen who she was having sex with, didn’t even know if it was a woman or a man, just that someone was under the covers with her,’ another voice said. ‘And so he hedged his bets.’

More laughter.

‘Come on, we can’t waste time on this rubbish,’ said Eskildsen, a veteran, though no one knew exactly how long he had been a detective. The room fell silent. ‘Any of you young ’uns remember the case they solved at Crime Squad a few years back when everyone thought there was a serial killer on the loose?’ Eskildsen continued. ‘When they got the killer it turned out he only had a motive for murdering number three. But because he knew he would come under suspicion if she was the only victim, he killed the others to camouflage it as an insane rampage.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ shouted a young officer. ‘Did the Crime Squad actually manage to solve a case? Must have been a fluke.’

The young man looked around with a grin and his face slowly coloured as no response was forthcoming. Everyone with any investigative experience at all remembered the case. It was on the syllabus of all police colleges throughout Scandinavia. It was a legend. As indeed was the man who cracked it.

* * *

‘Harry Hole.’

‘G’day, Holy, mate. Neil McCormack here. How are you? And where are you?’

McCormack thought he heard Harry answer ‘in a coma’, but assumed he must have been saying the name of some Norwegian town.

‘I talked to Iska Peller. She didn’t have a lot to say about the night at the cabin. However, the following evening . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘She and her friend Charlotte were picked up from the cabin by a cop from the outback and taken to his place. Turned out that while Miss Peller was trying to sleep off her flu, the policeman and her friend were having a glass of grog in the sitting room and he tried to seduce Charlotte. Got pretty physical, so physical that she shouted for help, Miss Peller woke up, and rushed into the room where the policeman had already pulled her friend’s ski pants down to her knees. He stopped, and Miss Peller and her friend decided to go to the station and stay at a hotel somewhere I’m afraid I can’t . . .’

‘Geilo.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You say “tried to seduce”, Neil, but you mean
rape
, I suppose?’

‘No, I had to do the rounds with Miss Peller before we landed on a precise formulation. She said her friend’s description was that the policeman had pulled down her trousers against her will, but he hadn’t touched her intimate parts.’

‘But . . .’

‘We can perhaps assume it was his intention, but we don’t know. The point is that nothing punishable by law had happened yet. Miss Peller accepted that. After all, they hadn’t bothered to report the matter, they just skedaddled. The cop had even found a village wacko to run all three of them to the station and he had helped them board the train. According to Miss Peller, the man seemed relatively unfazed by the whole business; he was more interested in getting the girlfriend’s phone number than apologising. As if it were just perfectly normal bloke-meets-sheila stuff.’

‘Mm. Anything else?’

‘No, Harry. Except that we’ve given her police protection as you suggested. Twenty-four-hour service, tucker and necessities brought to the door. She can just enjoy the sun. If the sun shines in Bristol, that is.’

‘Thanks, Neil. If anything—’

‘—should crop up, I’ll ring. And vice versa.’

‘Of course. Take care.’

Says you, McCormack thought, ringing off and peering out at the blue afternoon sky. The days were a bit longer now in the summer, he could still get in an hour and a half’s sailing before it was dark.

Harry got out of bed and went for a shower. Stood motionless, letting the boiling hot water run down his body for twenty minutes. Then he came out, dried his sensitive, red-flecked skin and dressed. Saw from his mobile phone that he had received eighteen calls while he had been asleep. So they had managed to get hold of his number. He recognised the first numbers as those of Norway’s three biggest newspapers and the two most important TV channels since they all had switchboard numbers beginning with the same prefixes. The remainder were more arbitrary and probably belonged to comment-hungry journalists. But his gaze paused at one of the numbers, although he couldn’t say why. Because there were some bytes up in his brain that had fun memorising numbers perhaps. Or because the dialling code told him it was Stavanger. He flicked back through his call log and found the number from two days earlier. Colbjørnsen.

Harry rang back and squeezed the phone between cheek and shoulder as he tied his boots and noted that it was time he bought some new ones. The iron plate in the sole, so that you could tread on nails without worrying, was hanging off.

‘Bloody hell, Harry. They really hung you out to dry in the papers today. They butchered you. What does your boss say?’

Colbjørnsen sounded ill from overindulgence. Or just ill.

‘I don’t know,’ Harry said. ‘I haven’t spoken to him.’

‘Crime Squad comes out OK. It’s you personally carrying the entire can. Did your boss make you take one for the team?’

‘No.’

The question came after a long silence. ‘It wasn’t … it wasn’t Bellman, was it?’

‘What do you want, Colbjørnsen?’

‘Shit, Harry. I’ve been running a somewhat illegal solo investigation, just like you. So first of all I have to know whether we’re still on the same team or not.’

‘I haven’t got a team, Colbjørnsen.’

‘Great, I can hear you’re still on our team. The losers.’

‘I’m on my way out.’

‘Right. I had another chat with Stine Ølberg, the girl Elias Skog was so taken by.’

‘Yes?’

‘It transpires that Skog told her more about what went on in the cabin that night than I had understood at the first interview.’

‘I’ve started to believe in second interviews,’ Harry said.

‘Eh?’

‘Nothing. Come on, out with it.’

49

Bombay Garden

B
OMBAY
G
ARDEN WAS THE KIND OF RESTAURANT THAT DID
not appear to have the right to keep going, but unlike its trendier competitors it had managed to survive year after year. Its location at the centre of east Oslo was dire, down a side street between a timber warehouse and a disused factory that was now a theatre. The alcohol licence had come and gone after countless breaches of the rules; the same was also true for its licence to serve food. The health inspectors had on one occasion found a species of rodent in the kitchen they had not been able to identify, beyond declaring it had a certain similarity to
Rattus norvegicus
. In the comments box of the report the inspector had let rip and described the kitchen as a ‘crime scene’ where ‘murders of the foulest kind had unquestionably taken place’. The slot machines along the walls brought in quite a bit of money, but were regularly vandalised and robbed. The Vietnamese owners did not use the place to launder drugs money, as some suspected, though. The reason Bombay Garden could keep its head above water was to be found at the back, behind two closed doors. Concealed there was a so-called private club, and to be allowed in you had to apply for membership. In practice, that meant you signed an application form at the bar of the restaurant, membership was granted on the spot and you paid a hundred kroner as an annual fee. Afterwards you were escorted in and the door was locked behind you.

Then you stood in a smoke-filled room – as smoking laws do not pertain to private clubs – and in front of you there was a miniature oval racecourse, four metres by two. The course itself was covered with green felt and had seven tracks. Seven flat metal horses, each attached to a pin, moved forward in spasmodic jerks. The speed of each horse was determined by a computer that hummed and buzzed under the table, and was – as far as anyone had ascertained – completely arbitrary and legitimate. That is, the computer program gave some of the horses a greater chance of a higher speed, which was reflected in the odds and thus any eventual payout. Around the racecourse sat the club members – some were regulars, others were new faces – in comfortable leather swivel chairs, smoking, drinking the restaurant’s beer at membership prices, cheering on their horse or the combination they had backed.

Since the club operated in a legal grey area with respect to gambling laws, the rules were that if twelve or more members were present, the stake was restricted to a hundred kroner per member, per race. If there were fewer than twelve, the club’s regulations stipulated it was regarded as a limited gathering, and at small private gatherings you could not prevent adults from making private wagers. How much they chose to bet was up to the participants. For this reason, it was conspicuous how often precisely eleven people could be counted in the back room of the Bombay Garden. And where the garden came into the picture, no one knew.

At ten past two in the afternoon a man with the club’s most recent membership, forty seconds old to be precise, was admitted into the room where he soon established that the only people there, apart from himself, were one member sitting in a swivel chair with his back to him and a man of presumably Vietnamese origin who was clearly administrating the races and stakes; at any rate he was wearing the kind of waistcoat croupiers do.

The back in the swivel chair was broad and filled out the flannel shirt. Black curls hung down onto the collar.

‘Are you winning, Krongli?’ Harry asked, sitting in the chair beside him.

The man’s head of curls twisted round. ‘Harry!’ he shouted, with genuine pleasure in his voice and on his face. ‘How did you find me?’