The Leopard

66
After the Fire

The evening darkness had descended over Nydalen. Harry stood with a blanket over his shoulders and a large paper cup in his hand as he and Bjorn Holm watched the smoke divers running in and out with the last PSG buckets that would ever leave the Kadok factory.

‘So he’d pinned up the pictures of the murder victims, had he?’ Bjorn Holm said.

‘Yep,’ Harry said. ‘Except for the prostitute in Leipzig, Juliana Verni.’

‘What about the page? Are you sure it was from the Havass guest book?’

‘Yes. I saw the guest book when I was in the cabin and the pages were identical.’

‘And so you were standing half a metre from the name of the eighth guest, but you didn’t see it?’

Harry shrugged. ‘Perhaps I need reading glasses. Things happened bloody quickly in there, Bjorn. And my interest in the page waned rather when the officer started spraying petrol.’

‘Course, I didn’t mean-’

‘There were some letters on the wall. From what I could see they were blackmail letters. Maybe someone had already rumbled him.’

A fireman came towards them. His clothes creaked and groaned as he walked.

‘Kripos, aren’t you?’ The man’s voice resonated in a way that matched the helmet and boots. And he had body language that said boss.

Harry hesitated, but confirmed with a nod; no reason to complicate matters.

‘What actually happened in there?’

‘That’s what I’m hoping you boys will eventually be able to tell us,’ Harry said. ‘But in general terms I think we can say that whoever found himself a rent-free office in there had a clear plan for dealing with uninvited guests.’

‘Oh?’

‘I should have known as soon as I saw the neon tubes on the ceiling. If they’d been working, the tenant wouldn’t have needed a desk lamp. The switch was connected to something else, some kind of ignition device.’

‘You think so, do you? Well, right, we’ll get some experts in tomorrow morning.’

‘What does it look like inside?’ Holm asked. ‘The room where it started.’

The fireman scrutinised Holm. ‘PSG on the walls and ceiling, son. What do you think it looks like?’

Harry was tired. Tired of being on the receiving end, tired of being afraid, tired of always being too late. But right now most tired of grown men who never tire of playing cock of the walk. Harry spoke in a low voice, so low that the fireman had to lean in to hear.

‘Unless you’re seriously interested in what my forensics officer thinks about the room you’ve just sent umpteen smoke divers into, I suggest you spit out what you know in concise but exhaustive terms. You know there was a guy sitting there planning six or seven murders. Which he carried out. And we’re very interested to know if we can expect to find clues which might help us to stop this very, very bad man. Can you be concise like that?’

The fireman straightened. Coughed. ‘PSG is extremely-’

‘Listen. We’re asking you for the consequences, not the cause.’

The fireman’s face had gone a colour that was not solely due to the heat from the burning PSG. ‘Burned out. Totally burned out. Papers, furniture, computer, the lot.’

‘Thank you, boss,’ Harry said.

The two policemen watched the fireman’s back as he left.

‘My forensics officer?’ Holm repeated, pulling a face as if he had swallowed something nasty.

‘Had to sound like a bit of a boss, too.’

‘Good to outsmart someone when you’ve just been outsmarted yourself, isn’t it?’

Harry nodded and pulled the blanket around him more tightly. ‘He said burned out, didn’t he?’

‘Burned out. How does that feel?’

Harry stared miserably at the smoke still seeping out of the factory windows into the fire service’s searchlights.

‘Like being knobbed in Nydalen,’ he answered, draining the rest of the cold coffee.

Harry drove away from Nydalen, but got no further than the red lights in Uelandsgate before Bjorn Holm rang again.

‘Forensics have done tests on the semen on Adele’s ski pants, and we’ve got a DNA profile.’

‘Already?’ Harry exclaimed.

‘Partial profile. But enough for them to state with 93 per cent certainty that we have a match.’

Harry sat up straight in the seat.

Match. What a wonderful word. Perhaps the day wasn’t a waste after all.

‘Out with it then!’ Harry said.

‘You’ve got to learn to savour dramatic pauses,’ Holm said.

Harry groaned.

‘OK, OK. They found the matching DNA profile with hair from Tony Leike’s hairbrush.’

Harry stared into the distance.

Tony Leike had raped Adele Vetlesen at the cabin.

Harry hadn’t seen it coming. Tony Leike? He couldn’t make it tally. Violent criminal, yes, but to rape a woman who’s come to a cabin with another man? Elias Skog said he’d seen him holding her mouth and pulling her into the toilet. Perhaps it wasn’t a rape when it came to the crunch?

And then – all of a sudden – it did come to the crunch.

Harry saw it, crystal clear.

It wasn’t a rape. And there it was: the motive.

The cars behind hooted. The lights had turned green.