The Leopard

26
The Needle

Gunnar Hagen was in Harry’s chair waiting for them when Harry and Kaja stepped into the hot, damp office.

Bjorn Holm, who was sitting behind Hagen, shrugged and gestured that he didn’t know what the POB wanted.

‘Stavanger, I hear,’ Hagen said, getting up.

‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘Don’t get up, boss.’

‘It’s your chair. I’ll be going soon.’

‘Uh-uh?’

Harry inferred that it was bad news. Bad news of a certain significance. Bosses don’t hasten down the culvert to Botsen Prison to tell you your travel invoice has been completed incorrectly.

Hagen remained standing, so Holm was the only person in the room to be seated.

‘I’m afraid I have to inform you that Kripos has already discovered that you are working on the murders. And I have no choice but to close the investigation.’

In the ensuing silence Harry could hear the boiler rumbling in the adjacent room. Hagen ran his eyes over them, meeting each gaze in turn and stopping at Harry. ‘I can’t say this is an honourable discharge, either. I gave you clear instructions that this was to be a discreet operation.’

‘Well,’ Harry said, ‘I asked Beate Lonn to leak information about a certain ropery to Kripos, but she promised she would do it in a way that made Krimteknisk appear to be the source.’

‘And I’m sure she did,’ Hagen said. ‘It was the County Officer in Ytre Enebakk who gave you away, Harry.’

Harry rolled his eyes and uttered a low curse.

Hagen clapped his hands together and a dry bang resounded between the brick walls. ‘So that’s why, sadly, I have to command you to drop all investigative work with immediate effect. And to clear this office within forty-eight hours. Gomen nasai.’

Harry, Kaja and Bjorn looked at one another as the iron door closed and Hagen’s hurried footsteps faded down the culvert.

‘Forty-eight hours,’ Bjorn said at length. ‘Anyone want fresh coffee?’

Harry kicked the bin beside the desk. It hit the wall with a crash, spilling its modest contents and rolling back towards him.

‘I’ll be at Rikshospital,’ he said and strode towards the door.

Harry had positioned the hard wooden chair by the window and listened to his father’s regular breathing as he flicked through the newspaper. A wedding and a funeral side by side. On the left, pictures of Marit Olsen’s funeral, showing the Norwegian Prime Minister’s serious, compassionate face, party colleagues’ black suits, and the husband, Rasmus Olsen, behind a pair of large, unbecoming sunglasses. On the right, an article announcing that the shipping magnate’s daughter, Lene, would get her Tony in the spring, with photos of the (A-list) wedding guests who would all be flown in to St Tropez. On the back page, it said that the sun would go down today at precisely 16.58 in Oslo. Harry looked at his watch and established that it was in fact doing that now, behind the low clouds that would not release either rain or snow. He watched the lights coming on in all the homes on the side of the ridge around what had once been a volcano. In a way, it was a liberating thought that the volcano would open beneath them one day, swallow them up and remove all traces of what had once been a contented, well-organised and slightly sad town.

Forty-eight hours. Why? It wouldn’t take them more than two hours to clear their so-called office.

Harry closed his eyes and considered the case. Wrote a last mental report for his personal archive.

Two women killed in the same way, drowning in their own blood, with ketanome in the bloodstream. One woman hanged from a diving tower, with a rope taken from an old ropery. One man drowned in his own bathtub. All the victims had probably been in the same cabin at the same time. They didn’t know yet who else had been there, what the motive behind the murders could be or what had gone on in the Havass cabin that day or night. There was just effect, no cause. Case closed.

‘Harry…’

He hadn’t heard his father wake, and he turned.

Olav Hole looked renewed, but perhaps that was because of the colour in his cheeks and the feverish glow in his eyes. Harry got up and moved his chair over to his father’s bedside.

‘Have you been here long?’

‘Ten minutes,’ Harry lied.

‘I’ve slept so well,’ Olav said. ‘And had such wonderful dreams.’

‘I can see. You look like you’re ready to get up and leave.’

Harry plumped his pillow, and his father let him do it even though they both knew that it wasn’t necessary.

‘How’s the house?’

‘Fine,’ Harry said. ‘It will stand for ever.’

‘Good. There’s something I want to talk to you about, Harry.’

‘Mm?’

‘You’re a grown man now. You’ll lose me in a natural way. That’s how it should be. Not how you lost your mother. You were on the verge of going insane.’

‘Was I?’ Harry said, straightening the pillowslip.

‘You demolished your room. You wanted to kill the doctors, those that had infected her, and even me. Because I had… well, because I hadn’t discovered it earlier, I suppose. You were so full of love.’

‘Of hatred, you mean?’

‘No, of love. It’s the same currency. Everything starts with love. Hatred is just the other side of the coin. I’ve always thought that your mother’s death is what drove you to drink. Or rather the love for your mother.’

‘Love is a killer,’ Harry mumbled.

‘What?’

‘Just something someone once said to me.’

‘I did everything your mother asked me to do. Apart from one thing. She asked me to help her when the time came.’

It felt as if someone had injected ice-cold water into Harry’s chest.

‘But I couldn’t. And do you know what, Harry? It has given me nightmares. Not a day has passed when I haven’t thought about not being able to fulfil that wish for her, for the woman I loved above all else on this earth.’

The thin wooden chair creaked as Harry jumped up. He walked over to the window. He heard his father draw breath a couple of times behind him, deep, trembling. Then it came.

‘I know that this is a heavy burden to impose on you, son. But I also know that you’re like me – it will haunt you if you don’t. So let me explain what you do…’

‘Dad,’ Harry said.

‘Can you see this hypodermic needle?’

‘Dad! Stop!’

Everything went quiet behind him. Except for the rasp of his breathing. Outside, Harry saw the black-and-white film of a town with face-like clouds pressing their blurred, leaden-grey features against the rooftops.

‘I want to be buried in Andalsnes,’ his father said.

Buried. The word sounded like an echo from Easters with Mum and Dad in Lesja when Olav Hole, with great earnestness, explained to Harry and Sis what they should do if they were buried in an avalanche and they had constrictive pericarditis, a hardened sac around the heart that prevented it from expanding. An armoured heart. Around them were flat fields and gently sloping ridges; it was a bit like when air hostesses on domestic flights over Inner Mongolia explain how to use life jackets. Absurd, but nevertheless: it gave them a feeling of security, the sense that they would all survive if they just did the right things. And now Dad was saying that wasn’t true, after all.

Harry coughed. ‘Andalsnes… to be with Mum…?’

Harry fell quiet.

‘And I want to lie alongside my fellow villagers.’

‘You don’t know them.’

‘Well, who do we know? At least they and I are from the same place. Perhaps ultimately that’s what it’s about. The tribe. We want to be with our tribe.’

‘Do we?’

‘Yes, we do. Whether we are aware of it or not, that’s what we want.’

The nurse with the badge bearing the name Altman came in, flashed a quick smile at Harry and tapped his watch.

Harry went downstairs and met two uniformed policemen on their way up. He nodded automatically; it was a convention. They stared at him in silence, as though he were a stranger.

Usually Harry longed for solitude and all the benefits that came with it: peace, calm, freedom. But standing at the tram stop, suddenly he didn’t know where to go. Or what to do. He just knew that being alone in the house in Oppsal would be unbearable right now.

He dialled Oystein’s number.

Oystein was on a long trip to Fagernes, but suggested a beer at Lompa at around midnight to celebrate the relatively satisfactory completion of another day in Oystein Eikeland’s life. Harry reminded Oystein that Harry was an alcoholic, and received the response that even an alcoholic had to go on a bender once in a while, didn’t he.

Harry wished Oystein a safe journey and rang off. Glanced at his watch. And the question arose again. Forty-eight hours. Why?

A tram stopped in front of him and the doors banged open. Harry peered into the invitingly warm, lit carriage. Then he turned and began to walk down towards town.