The Leopard (64 page)

‘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

T
HE 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.’

‘Murder?’

‘I’ve checked Odd Utmo’s record. He was, like his son, known for his rages. As a young man he went to prison for eight years for committing a murder out of jealousy. After that, he moved into the wastelands. He married Karen Leike, and they had a son. The son reached his teens and was already good-looking, tall and a charmer. Two men and a woman in almost total isolation. A man who had a conviction for killing in a jealous rage. It looks like Karen tried to prevent a tragedy unfolding by sending her son away in secret and leaving one of his shoes in an area where there had just been a big avalanche.’

‘News to me, Hole.’

Harry nodded slowly. ‘I’m afraid she managed only to postpone the tragedy. Her body has just been found at the bottom of a precipice with a bullet through the head. A few metres away her husband and murderer was crushed beneath a snowmobile. He’d been tortured, had most of the skin on his back and arms burned off and his teeth ripped out. Guess who did it?’

‘Oh, my God . . .’

Harry put a cigarette between his lips.

‘How did you trace the link?’ Skai asked.

‘The similarity, the genes.’ He lit the cigarette. ‘Father and son. You can try to run, but it will always be there, like a curse. I think Odd Utmo realised the Håvass murders meant he would be hunted, too, and that it was the ghost of his own deceased son who was after him. So he fled from the farm up to this Tourist Association cabin safely hidden between precipices. He took a family photo with him, the family he had himself destroyed. Imagine, a frightened, maybe remorseful killer alone with his thoughts.’

‘He had already been given his punishment.’

‘I found the photo. Tony was lucky, he took after his mother in looks. It was hard to see anything of the adult Tony in the photograph of the boy. But he already had the big white teeth. While his father hid his. That’s where they were different.’

‘I thought you said it was the similarity that gave them away?’

Harry nodded. ‘They had the same disease.’

‘They were killers.’

Harry shook his head. ‘Disease, as in physical ailment, Skai. I meant they both had arthritis. The family relationship was confirmed this morning. The DNA analysis of the flesh on the wood burner and Tony Leike’s hair prove they are father and son.’

Skai nodded.

‘Well,’ Harry said. ‘I came by to thank you for your help and to bemoan the outcome. Bjørn Holm sends his regards to your wife and says she makes the best meatballs and mashed swede he’s ever tasted.’

Flicker of a smile from Skai. ‘Most people think that. Even Tony liked them.’

‘Oh?’

Skai shrugged and pulled a knife from the sheath on his belt.

‘I told you Mia was stuck on the boy, didn’t I? It was soon after he had knifed Ole. She brought him home for lunch one day when she knew I wouldn’t be there. The wife said nothing when they showed up, though there was a humdinger when I got to hear about it, of course. But you know what girls are like at that age and in love. I tried to explain that Tony was violent, fool that I was. I should have known the worse I made her boyfriend out to be, the more determined she would become to hang on to him. Then it’s two together against the rest of the world, kind of. Well, you’ve seen it yourself with women who start writing letters to convicted murderers.’

Harry nodded.

‘Mia would have left home, followed him to the end of the world, there was no moderation in anything,’ Skai said, cutting the fishing line and reeling in.

Harry followed the retreat of the slack line. ‘Mm. End of the world.’

‘Yep.’

‘I see.’

Skai stopped winding and looked at Harry. ‘No,’ he said with conviction.

‘No what?’

‘No to what you’re thinking.’

‘Which is?’

‘That Mia and Tony met again later. He broke up with her; since then they have never met. Her life has continued without him. She has nothing to do with this case, got it? You have my word. She is putting her life together again, so please don’t . . .’

Harry nodded and took the cigarette, which had been extinguished by the rain, from his mouth.

‘I’m not on the case any more,’ he said. ‘But your word would have been good enough, anyway.’

As Harry drove from the car park he looked in the mirror and watched Skai packing up his fishing gear.

Rikshospital. He was in the rhythm now. Time was not chopped up by events; it flowed in an even stream. He had thought of asking for a mattress. That would be a bit like Chungking Mansion.

81

The Cones of Light

T
HREE DAYS PASSED
. H
E WAS ALIVE
. E
VERYONE WAS ALIVE
.

No one knew where Tony Leike was, the trail of the fake Odd Utmo ended in Copenhagen. A photograph of Lene Galtung with a shawl over her head and large sunglasses in the best Greta Garbo style was splashed across one newspaper. The headline was:
NO COMMENT
. And now no one had seen her for two days after she had gone into hiding, apparently at her father’s house in London. The photograph of Tony in work clothes in front of the helicopter had been in several newspapers. It was captioned
PRINCE CHARMING’S VANISHING ACT
in one. He had been dubbed Prince Charming now, people had taken to it, and anyway, it suited Leike better than Altman. Strangely enough, no one in the press had managed to link Tony Leike with the Utmo farm yet. The mother and later Tony had obviously covered their tracks well.

Mikael Bellman had daily press conferences. In a TV talk show he demonstrated his pedagogic skills and flashed his winsome smile explaining how the case had been cracked. His version of the story, that went without saying. And made it seem like an oversight that the killer had not been arrested; the important thing first off was that Tony ‘Prince Charming’ Leike had been unmasked, rendered ineffective, sidelined.

The dark descended a few minutes later every evening. Everyone was waiting for spring or frost, one of the two, but neither came.

The cones of light swept across the ceiling.

Harry lay on his side, staring at the smoke from his cigarette curling up towards the ceiling in intricate and ever-unpredictable patterns.

‘You’re so quiet,’ Kaja said, snuggling up to his back.

‘I’ll be here until the funeral,’ he said. ‘Then I’m off.’

He took another drag. She didn’t answer. Then, to his surprise, he felt something warm and wet on his shoulder blade. He put the cigarette on the edge of the ashtray and turned to her. ‘Are you crying?’

‘Trying not to,’ she laughed with a sniffle. ‘I don’t know what’s got into me.’

‘Do you want a cigarette?’

She shook her head and dried the tears. ‘Mikael rang today, wanting to meet.’

‘Mm.’

She laid her head against his chest. ‘Don’t you want to know what I answered?’

‘Only if you want to tell me.’

‘I said no. Then he said I would regret that. He said you would drag me down. That it wasn’t the first time you had done that to someone.’

‘Well, he’s right.’

She lifted her head. ‘But that doesn’t matter, don’t you understand? I want to be wherever you are.’ Tears began to roll again. ‘And if it’s down, I want to be there, too.’

‘But there’ll be nothing,’ Harry said. ‘Not even me. I’ll have gone. You saw me in Chungking. It would be like right after the avalanche. The same cabin, but alone and abandoned.’

‘But you found me and got me out. I can do the same for you.’

‘What about if I don’t want to get out? You haven’t got any more dying fathers to entice me with.’

‘But you love me, Harry. I know you love me. That’s a good enough reason, isn’t it?
I’m
a good enough reason.’

Harry caressed her hair, her cheeks, caught her tears with his fingers, carried them to his mouth and kissed them.

‘Yes,’ he said with a sad smile. ‘You are reason enough.’

She took his hand, kissed it where he had kissed it.

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t say it. Don’t say that’s why you’re going. So that you don’t drag me down. I’ll follow you to the end of the world, you see?’

He pulled her into him. And at once felt something slacken, like a muscle that had been held in quivering tension for a long time without his realising. He let go, gave up, let himself fall. And the pain that had been there melted away, became something warm following the bloodstream around his body, softening it, giving it peace. The feeling of free fall was so liberating that he felt his throat thicken. And knew part of him had wanted it, this, also up there in the snowy mist above the scree.

‘To the end of the world,’ she whispered, already breathing faster.

The cones of light swept across the ceiling, again and again.

82

Red

H
ARRY WAS SITTING BY HIS FATHER
’
S BEDSIDE
. I
T WAS STILL
dark when a nurse came in with a cup of coffee, asked him whether he had had any breakfast and dropped a glossy mag in his lap.

‘You have to think about something else, you know,’ she said, angling her head and giving the impression she was about to stroke his cheek.

Harry dutifully flicked through the magazine while she tended to his father. But he couldn’t distract himself in the celebrity press, either. Photographs of Lene Galtung leaving premieres, gala lunches in her new Porsche.
MISSING TONY
was the headline, and the assertion was underpinned by comments not from Lene herself, but from celebrity friends. There were pictures outside the gates of a house in London, but no one had seen Lene there, either. At least no one had recognised her. There was a grainy photograph taken from a distance of a red-haired woman in front of Crédit Suisse in Zurich, which the magazine claimed was Lene Galtung, because they were able to quote Lene’s hairstylist who Harry assumed had been paid a sizeable sum to say: ‘She asked me to curl her hair and dye it brick red.’ Tony was referred to as a ‘suspect’ in what was portrayed as an average society scandal rather than one of the country’s worst ever murder cases.