The Leopard

Epilogue

Bluish-black clouds swept over Hong Kong’s highest point, Victoria Peak, but it had finally stopped raining after dripping constantly since the beginning of September. The sun poked through, and a huge rainbow formed a bridge between Kong Island and Kowloon. Harry closed his eyes and let the sun warm his face. The spell of good weather had come just in time for the horse-racing season due to open in Happy Valley later that evening.

Harry heard the buzz of Japanese voices approach and then pass the bench on which he was sitting. They were coming from the funicular railway, which since 1888 had attracted tourists and locals up here to the fresh air above the town. Harry opened his eyes again and flicked through the racing programme.

He had contacted Herman Kluit as soon as he’d arrived in Hong Kong. Kluit had offered Harry a job as a debt collector, that is, he had to trace people who were trying to flee from their debts. In this way, Kluit would not have to sell the debt with a substantial discount to the Triad, or think about the brutal recovery methods they employed.

It would have been stretching things to say Harry enjoyed the job, but it was well paid and simple. He didn’t have to recover the money, just locate the debtors. However, it turned out that his appearance – one metre ninety-two and a grinning scar from mouth to ear – was often enough for them to settle their accounts on the spot. And he very rarely had to resort to using a search engine on a server in Germany.

The trick, nevertheless, was to keep off dope and alcohol, which he had succeeded in doing thus far. There were two letters waiting for him in reception today. How they had found him he had no idea. Only that Kaja must have been involved. One letter bore the logo of Oslo Police District on the envelope, and Harry guessed Gunnar Hagen. With the other he didn’t need to guess, he immediately recognised Oleg’s upright and still childish handwriting. Harry had put both letters in his jacket pocket without taking a decision on when or indeed whether he would read them.

Harry folded the racing programme and put it down beside him on the bench. He peered across to the Chinese mainland where the yellow smog was becoming thicker by the year. But up here at the top of the mountain the air still felt almost fresh. He looked down on Happy Valley. On the cemeteries, west of the Wong Nai Chong road, where there were separate sections for Protestants, Catholics, Muslims and Hindus. He could see the racecourse where he knew jockeys and horses were already on the turf being tested before the evening’s races. Soon the spectators would be pouring in: those with hope, those without, the lucky and the unlucky. Those who went to have their dreams fulfilled and those who went purely to dream. The losers who took uncalculated risks and those who took calculated risks, but lost anyway. They had been here before, and they all came back, even the ghosts from the cemeteries down there, the several hundred who died in the great fire at Happy Valley Racecourse in 1918. For tonight it was definitely their turn to beat the odds, to conquer chance, to stuff their pockets full of crisp Hong Kong dollars, to get away with murder. In a couple of hours from now they would have entered the gates, read the racing programme, filled the coupons with the day’s doubles, quinellas, exactas, triples, superfectas, whatever their gambling god is called. They would have queued by the bookies’ hatches, holding their stakes at the ready. Most of them would have died a bit every time the tape was crossed, but redemption is only fifteen minutes away, when the staring gates open for the next race. Unless you’re a bridge jumper, of course, someone who risks all their assets on one horse in a race. But no one complains. Everyone knows the odds.

But you have those who know the odds, and then you have those who know the outcome. At a racecourse in South Africa they recently found underground pipes in the starting gates. The pipes contained compressed air and mini-darts with tranquillisers that could be fired into the horses’ stomachs by pressing a remote control.

Katrine Bratt had informed him that Sigurd Altman was booked into a hotel in Shanghai. It was barely an hour’s flight away.

Harry cast a final glance at the front page of the programme.

Those who know the outcome.

‘It’s just a game.’ Herman Kluit used to say that. Perhaps because he used to win.

Harry looked at his watch, got to his feet and started to walk to the tram. He had been tipped off about a promising horse in the third race.