The Leopard

53
Heel Hook

When Harry woke it was nine o’clock, the room was bathed in daylight and there was no one lying beside him. There were four messages on his phone.

The first was from Kaja, saying she was on her way home to get changed for work. And thanking him for… he couldn’t hear what, just a shriek of laughter before she rang off.

The second was from Gunnar Hagen, who was wondering why Harry had not answered any of his calls and saying the press were on his back because of Tony Leike’s unjustified arrest.

The third was from Gunther, who repeated the Dirty Harry witticism and said the Leipzig police had not found Juliana Verni’s passport and therefore could not confirm whether it had been stamped in Kigali or not.

The fourth was from Mikael Bellman, who simply told Harry to be at Kripos for two. He assumed Solness had passed on his instructions.

Harry got up. He felt good. Better than good. Fantastic maybe. He listened to his body. OK, fantastic was an exaggeration.

Harry went downstairs, took out a packet of crispbreads and made the important phone call first.

‘You’re talking to Sos Hole.’ It was Sos, or Sis, as Harry called her. Her voice sounded so formal he had to smile.

‘And you’re talking to Harry Hole,’ he said.

‘Harry!’ She screamed his name two more times.

‘Hi, Sis.’

‘Dad said you were home! Why haven’t you rung before?’

‘I wasn’t ready, Sis. Now I am. Are you?’

‘I’m always ready, Harry. You know that.’

‘Yes, I do. Lunch in town before visiting Dad some time soon? My treat.’

‘Yes! You sound happy, Harry. Is it Rakel? Have you been speaking to her? I spoke to her yesterday. What was that sound? Harry?’

‘Just the crispbreads falling out of the packet onto the floor. What did she want?’

‘To ask about Dad. She’d heard he’s ill.’

‘Was that all?’

‘Yes. No. She said Oleg was fine.’

Harry swallowed. ‘Good. Let’s talk soon then.’

‘Don’t forget. I’m so happy you’re home, Harry! I have so much to tell you!’

Harry put the phone on the worktop and was bending down to pick up the crispbreads when the phone hummed again. Sis was like that, remembering things she should have said after they had rung off. He straightened up.

‘What is it?’

Sonorous clearing of throat. Then a voice introduced itself as Abel. The name was familiar, and Harry instantly ransacked his memory. There were the files of old murder cases, neatly organised with data that never seemed to be deleted: names, faces, house numbers, dates, sound of a voice, colour and year of a car. But he could suddenly forget the name of neighbours who had lived in his block for three years or when Oleg’s birthday was. They called that the detective memory.

Harry listened without interrupting.

‘I see,’ he said at length. ‘Thank you for ringing.’

He hung up and tapped in a new number.

‘Kripos,’ answered a weary receptionist. ‘You are trying to get through to Mikael Bellman.’

‘Yes. Hole from Crime Squad. Where’s Bellman?’

The receptionist informed him of the POB’s whereabouts.

‘Logical,’ Harry said.

‘I beg your pardon,’ she yawned.

‘That’s what he’s doing, isn’t it?’

Harry slipped the phone into his pocket. Stared out of the kitchen window. Crispbread crunched under his feet as he walked.

‘Skoyen Climbing Club’ it said on the glass door facing the car park. Harry pushed the door and entered. On his way in, he had to wait for a class of excited schoolchildren on their way out. He flipped off his boots by a shoe rack at the bottom of the stairs. In the large hall, there were half a dozen people climbing up the ten-metre-high walls, although they looked more like the artificial papier mache mountainsides of Tarzan films Harry and Oystein had seen at Symra cinema when they were kids. Except that these were peppered with multicoloured holds and pegs with loops and carabiner hooks. A discreet smell of soap and sweaty feet emanated from the blue mats on the floor that Harry walked across. He stopped beside a bow-legged, squat man staring intently up at the overhang above them. A rope went from his climbing harness to a man who at that moment was swinging like a pendulum from one arm eight metres above them. At the end of one arc he swung up a foot, threaded the heel under a pink, pear-shaped hold, put the other foot on a piece of the structure and clipped the climbing rope into the top anchor in one elegant sweeping movement.

‘Gotcha!’ he shouted, leaned back on the rope and placed his legs against the wall.

‘Great heel hook,’ Harry said. ‘Your boss is a bit of a poseur, isn’t he?’

Jussi Kolkka neither answered nor graced Harry with a glance, just pulled the lever on the rope brake.

‘Your receptionist told me you’d be here,’ Harry said to the man being lowered towards them.

‘Regular slot every week,’ Bellman said. ‘One of the perks of being a policeman is being able to train during working hours. How are you, Harry? Muscles look defined at any rate. Lots of muscle per kilo, I reckon. Ideal for climbing, you know.’

‘For limited ambitions,’ Harry said.

Bellman landed with legs shoulder-width apart and pulled down some rope so that he could slacken the figure-of-eight knot.

‘I didn’t understand that.’

‘I can’t see the point of climbing so high. I clamber around a few crags now and then.’

‘Clambering,’ Bellman snorted, loosening the harness and stepping out of it. ‘You know, it hurts more to fall from two metres without a rope than it does from thirty metres with one?’

‘Yes,’ Harry said, a smile tugging at his mouth. ‘I know.’

Bellman sat down on one of the wooden benches, pulled off the balletshoe-like climbing slippers and rubbed his feet while Kolkka brought down the rope and started to gather it in a coil. ‘You got my message?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what’s the hurry? I’m seeing you at two.’

‘That was what I wanted to clarify with you, Bellman.’

‘Clarify?’

‘Before we meet the others. Agreeing on the conditions for me to join the team.’

‘The team?’ Bellman laughed. ‘What are you talking about, Harry?’

‘Do you want me to spell it out for you? You don’t need me to ring Australia and persuade a woman to come here to act as a decoy, you can do that yourself without any bother. What you’re asking for is help.’

‘Harry! Really now…’

‘You look knackered, Bellman. You’ve started to feel it, haven’t you. You’ve felt the pressure escalate since Marit Olsen.’ Harry sat down on the bench beside him. Even then, he was almost ten centimetres taller. ‘Feeding frenzy in the press every sodding day. Impossible to walk past a newspaper stand or switch on the TV without being reminded of the Case. The Case you haven’t solved. The Case your bosses are nagging you about all the time. The Case that requires a press conference a day where the vultures scream questions into each other’s beaks. And now the man you yourself released has vanished into the blue beyond. The vultures swarm in, some of them cackling in Swedish, Danish and even English. I’ve been where you are now, Bellman. Soon they’ll be talking fucking French. For this is the Case you have to solve, Bellman. And the Case has gone stale.’

Bellman didn’t answer, but his jaw muscles were grinding. Kolkka had packed the rope in the sack and came towards them, but Bellman waved him away. The Finn turned and waddled towards the exit like an obedient terrier.

‘What do you want, Harry?’

‘I’m offering you the chance to get this sorted out one on one, instead of at a meeting.’

‘You want me to ask you for help?’

Harry saw Bellman’s complexion redden.

‘What sort of bargaining position do you imagine you’re in, Harry?’

‘Well, I imagine it’s better than it has been for a while.’

‘You’re mistaken there.’

‘Kaja Solness doesn’t want to work for you. Bjorn Holm you’ve already promoted, and if you send him back to being a crime scene officer he’ll be only too pleased. The only person you can hurt now is me, Bellman.’

‘Have you forgotten I can lock you up so that you can’t visit your father before he dies?’

Harry shook his head. ‘There’s no one to visit any more, Bellman.’

Mikael Bellman arched an eyebrow in surprise.

‘They rang from the hospital this morning,’ Harry said. ‘My father went into a coma last night. Dr Abel says he won’t come out of it. Whatever was left unsaid between my father and me will remain unsaid.’