The Leopard

61
The Drop

Harry and Bellman lay on their stomachs at the edge where the snowmobile tracks stopped. They stared down. Steep, black rock faces sliced inwards to the ground and disappeared in the thickening swirl of snow.

‘Can you see anything?’ Bellman asked.

‘Snow,’ Harry answered, passing him the binoculars.

‘The snowmobile’s there.’ Bellman got up and walked back to their vehicle. ‘We’re climbing down.’

‘We?’

‘You.’

‘Me? Thought you were the mountaineer here, Bellman.’

‘Correct,’ said Bellman who had already started strapping on the harness. ‘That’s why it’s logical for me to operate the ropes and rope brake. The rope’s seventy metres long. I’ll lower it as far as it can go. Alright?’

Six minutes later Harry stood on the edge with his back to the chasm, binoculars around his neck and a cigarette smoking from his mouth.

‘Nervous?’ Bellman smiled.

‘Nope,’ Harry said. ‘Scared shitless.’

Bellman checked the rope ran through the brake without a hitch, round the narrow tree trunk behind them and to Harry’s harness.

Harry closed his eyes, breathed in and concentrated on leaning backwards, overriding the body’s evolution-conditioned protest, formed from millions of years of experience that the species cannot survive if it steps off cliffs.

The brain won over the body by the smallest possible margin.

For the first few metres he could support his legs against the rock face, but as it jutted in he was left hanging in the air. The rope was released in fits and starts, but its elasticity softened the tightening of the harness against his back and thighs. Then the rope came more evenly, and after a while he had lost sight of the top and was alone, hovering between the white snowflakes and the black cliff faces.

He leaned to the side and peered down. And there, twenty metres below, he glimpsed sharp black rocks protruding from the snow. Steep scree. And in the midst of all the black and white, something yellow.

‘I can see the snowmobile!’ Harry shouted and the echo ricocheted between the rock walls. It was upside down with the skis in the air. Since he and the rope were unaffected by the wind, he could judge that the vehicle lay about three metres further along. More than seventy metres down. The snowmobile must therefore have been travelling at an unusually slow speed before it took off.

The rope went taut.

‘More!’ Harry shouted.

The resonant answer from above sounded as if it had come from a pulpit. ‘There is no more rope.’

Harry stared down at the snowmobile. Something was sticking out from under it to the left. A bare arm. Black, bloated, like a sausage that had been on the grill for too long. A white hand against a black rock. He tried to focus, to force his eyes to see better. Open palm, the right hand. Fingers. Distorted, crooked. Harry’s brain rewound. What had Tony Leike said about his illness? Not contagious, just hereditary. Arthritis.

Harry glanced at his watch. Detective’s reflex. The dead man was found at 17.54. Darkness covered the walls down in the scree.

‘Up!’ Harry shouted.

Nothing happened.

‘Bellman?’

No answer.

A gust of wind twirled Harry round on the rope. Black rocks. Twenty metres. And all of a sudden, without warning, he felt his heart pound and he automatically grabbed the rope with both hands to make sure it was still there. Kaja. Bellman knew.

Harry breathed in deep, three times, before shouting again.

‘It’s getting dark, the wind’s picking up and I’m freezing my balls off, Bellman. Time to find shelter.’

Still no answer. Harry closed his eyes. Was he frightened? Frightened that an apparently rational colleague would kill him on a whim because circumstances happened to be propitious? Course he was bloody frightened. For this was no whim. It wasn’t chance that he stayed behind to go into the frozen wastes with Harry. Or was it? He took a deep breath. Bellman could easily arrange for this to look like an accident. Climb down afterwards and remove the harness and rope, say that Harry had missed his footing in the snow. His throat had gone dry. This was not happening. He hadn’t dug his way out of a sodding avalanche just to be dropped down a ravine twelve hours later. By a policeman. This didn’t bloody happen, this…

The pressure from the harness was gone. He was falling. Free fall. Fast.

‘The rumour is that Bellman is supposed to have manhandled a colleague,’ Gjendem said. ‘Just because the guy had danced a couple of times too many with her at the police Christmas party. The guy wanted to report a broken jaw and a cracked skull, but had no evidence – the attacker had been wearing a balaclava. But everyone knew it was Bellman. Trouble was brewing so he applied for a move to Europol to get away.’

‘Do you believe there is anything to these rumours, Gjendem?’

Roger shrugged. ‘It certainly looks as if Bellman has a certain… um, predilection for that kind of transgression. We’ve looked into Jussi Kolkka’s background following the avalanche at Havass. He beat up a rapist under interrogation. And Truls Berntsen, Bellman’s sidekick, is not exactly a mummy’s boy, either.’

‘Good. I want you to cover this duel between Kripos and Crime Squad. I want you to let off a few bombshells. Preferably about a psychopathic management style. That’s all. Then let’s see how the Minister of Justice reacts.’

Without any gestures, or parting salutations, Bent Nordbo put on his newly polished spectacles, unfolded the newspaper and started to read.

Harry didn’t have time to think. Not one thought. Nor did he see his life passing before him, faces of people he should have said he loved, or feel impelled to walk towards any light. Possibly because you don’t get that far when you fall five metres. The harness tightened against his groin and back, but the elasticity in the rope allowed him a gentle slackening of speed.

Then he felt himself being hoisted up again. The wind was blowing snow in his face.

‘What the fuck happened?’ Harry asked when, fifteen minutes later, he was standing on the edge of the ravine swaying in the wind as he untied the rope from the harness.

‘Scared then, were you?’ Bellman smiled.

Instead of putting the rope down, Harry wound it round his right hand. Checked that he had enough slack in the rope to have a swing. A short uppercut to the chin. The rope meant he would be able to use his hand again tomorrow, not like when he hit Bjorn Holm and suffered two days of painful knuckles.

He took a step towards Bellman. Saw the POB’s surprised expression when he noticed the rope around Harry’s fist, saw him retreat, stagger and fall backwards in the snow.

‘Don’t! I… I just had to tie a knot at the end of the rope so that it wouldn’t slide through the brake…’

Harry continued towards him, and Bellman – who was cowering in the snow – automatically raised his arm in front of his face.

‘Harry! There… there was a gust of wind and I slipped…’

Harry stopped, eyed Bellman in surprise. Then he continued past the trembling POB and lumbered through the snow.

The icy wind blew through outer clothing, underclothes, skin, flesh, muscles and into the bones. Harry grabbed a ski pole strapped to the snowmobile, cast around for some other material he could tie to the top, but found nothing, and sacrificing anything he was wearing was out of the question. Then he speared the pole into the snow to mark the site. God knows how long it would take them to find it again. He pressed the button on the electric starter. Found the lights, turned them on. And Harry knew at once. Saw it in the snow blowing horizontally into the cones of light and forming an impenetrable white wall: they would never get out of this labyrinth and back to Ustaoset.