The Leopard

79
Missed Calls

At a quarter past two the helicopter landed at Fornebu, the disused aerodrome twelve minutes’ drive from the city centre. When Harry and Bjorn went through the door of the Kripos building and Harry asked the receptionist why neither Bellman nor any of the senior detectives were answering their phones, he was told they were all in a meeting.

‘Why the hell weren’t we called?’ mumbled Harry as he strode down the corridor with Bjorn jogging after him.

He pushed open the door without knocking. Seven heads turned towards them. The eighth, Mikael Bellman’s, didn’t need to turn as he was sitting at the end of the long table facing the door, and he was the one on whom all the others had been focused.

‘Stan and Ollie,’ Bellman chortled, and Harry gathered from the chuckling that they had been a subject of conversation in their absence. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Well, while you were sitting here and playing Snow White and the seven dwarfs we’ve been to Tony Leike’s cabin,’ Harry said, throwing himself down on a free chair at the opposite end of the table. ‘And we have some news. It isn’t Altman. We’ve arrested the wrong man. It was Tony Leike.’

Harry didn’t know what reaction he had expected, but at any rate it hadn’t been this: none at all.

The POB leaned back in his chair with a friendly quizzical smile.

‘We’ve arrested the wrong man? To my recollection, Skai was the officer who took it upon himself to arrest Sigurd Altman. And, regarding news value, this is pretty scant. As for Tony Leike, perhaps we should be saying “Welcome back”.’

Harry’s gaze jumped from?rdal to the Pelican and back to Bellman as his brain churned. And drew the only possible conclusion.

‘Altman,’ Harry said. ‘Altman said it was Leike. He knew all the time.’

‘He not only knew,’ Bellman said. ‘Just as Leike triggered the avalanche in Havass, Altman set this whole murder case in motion, without even realising. Skai arrested an innocent man, Harry.’

‘Innocent?’ Harry shook his head. ‘I saw the pictures in the Kadok factory, Bellman. Altman is involved here, I just don’t know how as yet.’

‘But we do,’ Bellman said. ‘So if you wouldn’t mind leaving this to us…’ Harry heard the word ‘adults’ forming in Bellman’s mouth, but it came out as: ‘… enlightened ones, you can join in when you’re up to speed, Harry. Alright? Bjorn, too? So let’s move on. I was saying that we cannot exclude the possibility that Leike had a partner, someone who committed at least two of the murders, the two for which Leike has an alibi. We know that when both Borgny and Charlotte died Leike was at business meetings with several witnesses present.’

‘A clever bastard,’ said?rdal. ‘Leike knew, of course, that the police would find a link between all the murders. So if he found himself a cast-iron alibi for one or two of them, he would automatically be cleared of the others.’

‘Yes,’ said Bellman. ‘But who is the accomplice?’

Harry heard suggestions, comments and queries fluttering past him in the room.

‘Tony Leike’s motive for killing Adele Vetlesen was hardly the demand for four hundred thousand,’ the Pelican said. ‘But rather the fear that if it came out that he had got some woman pregnant, Lene Galtung would end the relationship and he could kiss goodbye to the Galtung millions for the Congo project. So the question we should be asking ourselves is who had identical interests.’

‘The other investors in the Congo,’ said the smooth-faced detective. ‘What about his financial friends at the office block?’

‘It’s make or break for Tony Leike with the Congo project,’ Bellman said. ‘But none of the other finance squirts would have killed two people to secure their ten per cent share in a project. Those boys are used to winning and losing money. Besides, Leike had to collaborate with someone he could trust at both a personal and a professional level. Bear in mind that the murder weapon was the same for Borgny and Charlotte. What did you call it, Harry?’

‘A Leopold’s apple,’ Harry intoned, still befuddled.

‘Louder, please.’

‘A Leopold’s apple.’

‘Thank you. From Africa. Same place Leike had been a mercenary. It is therefore fair to assume that Leike used one of his former comrades, and I think we should start there.’

‘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 Gronland, 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. Oystein. Kaja. Kaja again. He would have to answer her calls soon. He rang her.

‘Can I come to yours tonight?’ she asked.