The Leopard (54 page)

Harry shrugged. ‘I had assumed we would reach the body much more quickly, so I saw no reason to speculate aloud. After all, arthritis is not that unusual.’

Bellman rested his gaze on Harry for a second before addressing the rest. ‘We have a suspect, folks. Anyone want to christen him?’

‘The Eighth Guest,’ said Ærdal.

‘Prince Charming,’ declared the Pelican.

For a few moments there was total silence, as though something had come up that required time to digest before they went on.

‘Now I’m no strategist,’ Beate Lønn began, in the secure knowledge that everyone in the room knew that Beate Lønn never commented on anything she hadn’t researched thoroughly first, ‘but isn’t there something here that makes you sit up and wonder? Leike had an alibi for the times of the murders, but what about all these leads pointing to him? What about the call from his home phone to Elias Skog? What about the murder weapon that was acquired in the Congo? Furthermore from an area where Leike had financial interests. Chance?’

‘No,’ Harry said. ‘From day one Prince Charming has guided us towards Tony Leike. It was Prince Charming who paid Juliana Verni to go to the Congo because he knew that any clue pointing to the Congo would point to Tony Leike. And as far as his phone call to Elias Skog is concerned, today I checked something we should have checked long ago, but which we typically let go when we were getting close to a result. Because we resist any weakening of our evidence. Around the time the call went out from Leike’s house to Skog there were three calls made from Leike’s direct line in the Aker Brygge office block. Leike can’t have been in two places at the same time. I’d bet two hundred kroner he was in Aker Brygge. Any takers?’

Silent but wide-eyed faces.

‘Do you mean that Prince Charming rang Elias Skog from Leike’s house?’ said the Pelican. ‘How … ?’

‘When Leike came to Police HQ he told me there had been a breakin through the cellar door a few days earlier. That matches the time of the phone call to Skog. Prince Charming took a bike to disguise it as a standard burglary, innocent enough for us to make a note of it, but no more than that. Leike knows we don’t do anything about that kind of break-in, so he didn’t even report it. And with that Prince Charming had planted some irrefutable evidence against Leike.’

‘What a snake!’ the Pelican erupted.

‘I buy the explanation of how,’ Beate Lønn said. ‘But why? Why finger Tony Leike?’

‘Because he knew that sooner or later we would link the murders with the Håvass cabin,’ Harry said. ‘And that would limit the number of suspects in such a way that everyone who had been there that night would have the spotlight on them. There were two reasons he tore out the page from the guest book. Number one, he had the names of those who were there, so that he could find them and kill them at his leisure, while we didn’t and were therefore unable to stop him. Number two, and more important, he could keep his own name hidden.’

‘Logical,’ Ærdal said. ‘And to make quite sure we didn’t go after him he had to supply us with an apparent guilty party. Tony Leike.’

‘And that’s why he had to wait until the end to kill Tony Leike,’ said one of the detectives, a man with a fertile Fridtjof Nansen moustache whose surname was all Harry could recall.

His neighbour, a young man with bright, shiny skin and eyes, none of whose names Harry could remember, interjected: ‘But unfortunately for him Tony had an alibi for the times of the deaths. And since Tony’s role as a scapegoat was redundant now, it was finally time to kill enemy numero uno.’

The temperature in the room had risen, and the pale tentative winter sun seemed to be brightening the proceedings. They were making progress, the knot had finally loosened. Harry could see that Bellman was sitting further forward in his chair.

‘That’s all well and good,’ Beate Lønn said, and while Harry was waiting for the but, he clicked what she was going to ask, knew she was going to play the devil’s advocate because she knew he had the answers, ‘but why has Prince Charming made this so unnecessarily complicated?’

‘Because humans
are
complicated,’ Harry said and could hear an echo of something he had heard and forgotten. ‘We want to do things that are complex, that mesh, where we control our fates and can feel like rulers of our own universes. The room that burned down at the Kadok factory – do you know what it reminded me of most? A control room. The headquarters. And it’s not certain he even planned to take Leike’s life. Perhaps he just wanted him arrested and convicted.’

The silence was so pervasive that they could hear a bird twittering outside.

‘Why?’ asked the Pelican. ‘If he could have killed him? Or tortured him?’

‘Because pain and death are not the worst that can befall mankind,’ Harry said, again hearing the echo. ‘Humiliation is. That was what he wanted for Leike. The humiliation of having everything you possess taken from you. The fall, the shame.’

He saw a tiny smile playing on Beate Lønn’s lips, saw her give a nod of acknowledgement.

‘But,’ he continued, ‘as has been indicated, Tony had – unluckily for our killer – an alibi. And so Tony got away with the subsidiary punishment. Which was a slow and decidedly brutal death.’

In the ensuing silence Harry sensed something flutter past. The smell of roasted meat. Then the room seemed to draw breath all at once.

‘So what do we do now?’ asked the Pelican.

Harry looked up. The twittering bird on the branch outside the window was a chaffinch. A migratory bird which had arrived too soon. Which gave people hopes of spring, but which froze to death on the first frosty night.

Buggered if I know, Harry thought. Buggered if I know.

68

Pike

I
T WAS A LONG
K
RIPOS MEETING THAT MORNING
.

Bjørn Holm reported back on the forensic investigations at Kadok. No semen was found, nor any other physical evidence of the perpetrator. The room he had used was indeed completely burned out, and the computer had been reduced to a lump of metal, leaving no chance of recovering any data.

‘He’s probably been online using those unsecured networks in the area. Nydalen’s full of them.’

‘He must have left some electronic trails,’ Ærdal said, but it sounded more like a refrain he had heard than something he could expatiate on beyond ‘must have’ speculation.

‘Of course, we could apply to access some of the hundreds of networks up there and search for whatever it is we don’t know,’ Holm said. ‘But I have no idea how many weeks it could take. Or whether we would find anything.’

‘Leave it to me,’ Harry said. He had already got up and was on his way to the door while keying in a number. ‘I know someone.’

He left the door ajar, and while he was waiting for an answer he heard one of the detectives say that no one they had spoken to had seen anyone come or go at Kadok, but that was not so surprising since it was hidden behind trees and bushes and, anyway, it was so dark now, in the winter months.

Harry got an answer. ‘Katrine Bratt’s secretary.’

‘Hello?’

‘Frøken Bratt is at lunch right now.’

‘Sorry, Katrine, but eating will have to wait. Listen . . .’

Katrine listened as Harry explained what he wanted.

‘Prince Charming had pictures on the wall that had probably been printed off Internet news sites. With the search engine you could get onto the networks in the area, check the server logs and find out who has been on the news pages which covered the murders. Loads of people must have been—’

‘Not as much as he was,’ Katrine said. ‘I’ll just ask for a list sorted according the number of downloads.’

‘Mm. You’ve learned this quickly.’

‘It’s in the name. Katrine Bratt. Bratt, steep. Steep learning curve. Get it?’

Harry went back to the others.

They were playing the message that Harry had received from Leike’s mobile phone. It had been sent to NTNU, the technical university in Trondheim, for voice analysis. They had achieved useful results with sound recordings of bank robberies, in fact better than with CCTV, as the voice – even if you try to distort it – is very difficult to disguise. But Bjørn Holm had been told that a bad recording of an indeterminate sound, coughing or laughter, was worthless and could not be used to make a voice profile.

‘Damn,’ said Bellman, banging the table with his hand. ‘With a voice profile, a foothold, we could have started eliminating possible suspects from the case.’

‘Which possible suspects?’ mumbled Ærdal.

‘The base station signal tells us that whoever used Leike’s phone was near the centre of Ustaoset when he rang,’ Holm said. ‘The signal faded straight afterwards – the operators’ network only has coverage around the centre of Ustaoset. But the fact that the signal faded strengthens the theory that it was Prince Charming who had the phone.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Even when the phone’s not being used the base station will pick up signals every other hour. The fact that it didn’t receive any signals shows that the phone, before or after the call, was in the deserted mountain region around Ustaoset. Where perhaps it was carried during the avalanche and torture and so on.’

No reaction. Harry knew that the euphoria from earlier had evaporated. He went to his chair.

‘There’s one possible way we could get a foothold as Bellman suggested,’ he said softly, knowing that he no longer had to work to gain attention. ‘Cast your minds back to Leike’s house and the break-in. Let’s assume our killer broke into Leike’s place to ring Elias Skog from there. And let’s assume that our white-clad crime scene officers were doing such a thorough job, as it appeared when I arrived and inadvertently … bumped into Holm . . .’ Bjørn Holm tilted his head and sent Harry a spare-methe-jokes look. ‘… Shouldn’t we already have fingerprints from Holmenveien that might well be … Prince Charming’s?’

The sun lit up the room again. The others exchanged glances. Ashamed almost. So simple. So obvious. And none of them had thought of it . . .

‘It’s been a long meeting with lots of new information,’ Bellman said. ‘Our brains are clearly beginning to get a bit sluggish. But what do you think about this, Holm?’

Bjørn Holm slapped his forehead. ‘Course we’ve got all the fingerprints. We did the investigation thinking Leike was the killer and his house a possible crime scene. We were hoping to find fingerprints that would match some of the victims’.’

‘Have you got many that were not identified?’ Bellman asked.

‘That’s the point,’ said Bjørn Holm, smiling. ‘Leike had two Polish women who did the cleaning once a week. They’d been there six days before and done a thorough job. So we only found prints for Leike himself, Lene Galtung, the two Polish women and an unknown person whose prints definitely did not match those of the victims. We stopped looking for matches after Leike came up with his alibi and was released. But I don’t remember off the top of my head where we found the unknown prints.’

‘But
I
do,’ Beate Lønn said. ‘I was given the report with sketches and photographs. The prints from X1’s left hand were found on top of the pompous and very ugly desk. Like so.’ She stood up and leaned on her left hand. ‘If I’m not much mistaken, it’s where the landline is. Like so.’ She used her right hand to make the international sign for a telephone, thumb to her ear and little finger to her mouth.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Bellman said with a broad smile and a sweeping arm gesture, ‘I’ll be damned if we don’t have a genuine lead. Carry on searching for a match to X1, Holm. But
promise
me it isn’t the husband of one of the Polish women who joined them to make a few free calls home, alright?’

On the way out, the Pelican sidled up to Harry. She tossed one of her new dreads. ‘You might be better than I thought, Harry. But when you advance your theories, it wouldn’t hurt to intersperse the occasional “I think” here and there.’ She smiled and nudged him in the hip.

Harry appreciated the smile; the nudge in the hip on the other hand … His phone vibrated in his pocket. He took it out. Not Rikshospital.

‘He calls himself Nashville,’ said Katrine Bratt.

‘Like the American town?’

‘Yep. He’s been on the websites of all the big newspapers, read the whole caboodle about the murders. The bad news is that’s all I’ve got for you. Nashville’s only been active on the Net for a couple of months, you see, and he’s searched exclusively for things related to the murders. It almost seems as if Nashville has been waiting to be investigated.’

‘Sounds like our man, alright,’ Harry said.

‘Well,’ Katrine said, ‘you’ll have to search for men with cowboy hats.’

‘What?’

‘Nashville. Mecca of country music and all that.’

Pause.

‘Hello? Harry?’

‘I’m here. Right. Thanks, Katrine.’

‘Kisses?’

‘All over.’

‘No, thank you.’

They rang off.

Harry had been allocated an office with a view of Bryn and was observing some of the more unlovely details of the area when there was a knock at the door.

Beate Lønn was standing in the doorway.

‘Hm, how does it feel to be in bed with the enemy?’

Harry shrugged. ‘The enemy’s name is Prince Charming.’

‘Good. Just wanted to say we’ve run the fingerprints on the desk against the database and he’s not on it.’

‘I didn’t expect him to be.’

‘How’s your dad?’

‘Days away.’

‘Sorry to hear that.’

‘Thank you.’

They looked at each other. And suddenly it struck Harry that this was a face he would see at the funeral. A small pale face he had seen at other funerals, tear-stained, with large tragic eyes. A face as if made for funerals.

‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.

‘I know only one killer who has murdered in this way,’ Harry said, turning back to the view.

‘He reminds you of the Snowman, does he?’

Harry nodded slowly.

She sighed. ‘I promised I wouldn’t say, but Rakel rang.’

Harry stared at the blocks of flats in Helsfyr.

‘She asked about you. I said you were fine. Did I do the right thing, Harry?’