The Leopard

12
Crime Scene

Harry was smoking a cigarette outside the hospital entrance. Above him the sky was pale blue, but beneath him, the town, lying in a dip between low, green mountain ridges, was wreathed in mist. The sight reminded him of his childhood in Oppsal when he and Oystein had skipped the first lesson at school and gone to the German bunkers in Nordstrand. From there they had looked down on the peasouper enveloping Oslo city centre. But with the years the morning fog had gradually drifted away from Oslo, along with industry and woodburning.

Harry crushed the cigarette with his heel.

Olav Hole looked better. Or perhaps it was merely the light. He asked why Harry was smiling. And what had actually happened to his jaw.

Harry said something about being clumsy and wondered at what age the change took place, when children started protecting parents from reality. Around the age of ten, he concluded.

‘Your little sister was here,’ Olav said.

‘How is she?’

‘Fine. When she heard you were back, she said that now she would look after you. Because she’s big now. And you’re small.’

‘Mm. Smart girl. How are you today?’

‘Well. Very well, actually. Think it’s about time I got out of here.’

He smiled, and Harry smiled back.

‘What do the doctors say?’

Olav Hole was still smiling. ‘Far too much. Shall we talk about something else?’

‘Of course. What would you like to talk about?’

Olav Hole reflected. ‘I’d like to talk about her.’

Harry nodded. And sat silently listening to his father tell him about how he and Harry’s mother had met. Got married. About her illness when Harry was a boy.

‘Ingrid helped me all the time. All the time. But she needed me so rarely. Until she fell ill. Sometimes I thought the illness was a blessing.’

Harry flinched.

‘It gave me the chance to repay, you understand. And I did. Everything she asked me, I did.’ Olav Hole fixed his eyes on his son. ‘Everything, Harry. Almost.’

Harry nodded.

His father kept talking. About Sis and Harry, how wonderfully gentle Sis had been. And what willpower Harry had possessed. How frightened he had been but kept it to himself. When he and Ingrid had listened at the door, they had heard Harry crying and cursing invisible monsters in turn. However, they knew they shouldn’t go in to console and reassure him. He would become furious, shout that they were ruining everything and tell them to get out.

‘You always wanted to fight the monsters on your own, you did, Harry.’

Olav Hole told the ancient story about Harry not speaking until he was nearly five. And then – one day – whole sentences just flowed out of him. Slow, earnest sentences with adult words; they had no idea where he had learned them.

‘But your sister is right,’ Olav smiled. ‘You’re a small boy again. You don’t speak.’

‘Mm. Do you want me to speak?’

Olav shook his head. ‘You have to listen. But that’s enough for now. You’ll have to come back another day.’

Harry squeezed his father’s left hand with his right and stood up. ‘Is it OK if I stay in Oppsal for a few days?’

‘Thanks for the offer. I didn’t want to hassle you, but the house does need to be looked after.’

Harry dropped his plan to tell him that the power was going to be cut off in his flat.

Olav rang a bell and a young, smiling nurse came in and used his father’s first name in an innocent, flirty way. And Harry noted how his father deepened his voice as he explained that Harry needed the suitcase containing the keys. He saw the way the sick man in the bed tried to fluff his plumage for her. And for some reason it didn’t seem pathetic; it was the way it should be.

In parting, his father repeated: ‘Everything she asked me.’ And whispered: ‘Bar one thing.’

Leading him to the storage room, the nurse told Harry the doctor wanted to have a couple of words with him. After locating the keys in the suitcase, Harry knocked on the door the nurse had indicated.

The doctor nodded to a seat, leaned back on his swivel chair and pressed his fingertips together. ‘Good thing you came home. We had been trying to get hold of you.’

‘I know.’

‘The cancer has spread.’

Harry nodded. Someone had once told him that was a cancer cell’s function: to spread.

The doctor studied him, as though considering his next move.

‘OK,’ Harry said.

‘OK?’

‘OK, I’m ready to hear the rest.’

‘We don’t usually say how much time a person has left. The errors of judgement and the psychological strain that ensue are too great for that. However, in this case, I think it is appropriate to tell you he is already living on borrowed time.’

Harry nodded. Gazed out the window. Fog was still as thick down below.

‘Have you got a mobile number we can contact you on should anything happen?’

Harry shook his head. Was that a siren he heard down in the fog?

‘Anyone you know who can pass on a message?’

Harry shook his head again. ‘Not a problem. I’ll ring in and visit him every day. OK?’

The doctor nodded and watched Harry get up and stride out.

It was nine by the time Harry got to Frogner Lido. The whole of Frogner Park measures about fifty hectares, but since the public lido constitutes a small fraction of this and, furthermore, is fenced in, the police had an easy job cordoning off the crime scene; they had simply run a cordon round the entire fence and put a guard in the ticket office. The kettle of crime-correspondent vultures was in flight and they swooped in, stood cackling outside the gate wondering when they would gain access to the cadaver. For Christ’s sake, this was a bona fide MP, didn’t the public have a right to photos of such a prominent corpse?

Harry bought an americano at Kaffepikene. They had chairs and tables on the pavement throughout February, and Harry took a seat, lit a cigarette and watched the flock in front of the ticket booth.

A man sat down on the chair next to him.

‘Harry Hole himself. Where have you been?’

Harry looked up. Roger Gjendem, the Aftenposten crime correspondent, lit a cigarette and gestured towards Frogner Park. ‘At last Marit Olsen gets what she wants. By eight this evening she’ll be a celeb. Hanging herself from the diving tower? Good career move.’ He turned to Harry and grimaced. ‘What happened to your jaw? You look dreadful.’

Harry didn’t answer. Just sipped his coffee and said nothing to alleviate the embarrassing silence in the futile hope that the journalist would twig that he was not desirable company. From the bank of fog above them came the noise of whirring rotors. Roger Gjendem peered up.

‘Gotta be Verdens Gang. Typical of that tabloid to hire a helicopter. Hope the fog doesn’t lift.’

‘Mm. Better that no one gets photos than VG does?’

‘Right. What do you know?’

‘I’m sure less than you,’ said Harry. ‘The body was found by one of the nightwatchmen at dawn, and he rang the police straight away. And you?’

‘Head torn off. Woman jumped from the top of the tower with a rope around her neck, it seems. And she was pretty hefty, as you know. Over a hundred kilos.

‘They’ve found threads that may match her tracksuit on the fence where they reckon she entered. They didn’t find any other clues, so they think she was alone.’

Harry inhaled the cigarette smoke. Head torn off. They spoke how they wrote, these journalists, the inverted pyramid, as they called it: the most important information first.

‘Must have happened in the early hours, I suppose?’ Harry fished.

‘Or in the evening. According to Marit Olsen’s husband, she left home at a quarter to ten to go jogging.’

‘Late for a jog.’

‘Must have been when she usually jogged. Liked having the park to herself.’

‘Mm.’

‘By the way, I tried to track down the nightwatchman who found her.’

‘Why?’

Gjendem sent Harry a surprised look. ‘To get a first-hand account, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Harry said, sucking on his cigarette.

‘But he seems to have gone into hiding. He’s not here or at home. Must be in shock, poor fella.’

‘Well, it’s not the first time he’s found bodies in the pool. I assume the detective leading the investigation has seen to it that you can’t lay your hands on him.’

‘What do you mean, it’s not the first time?’

Harry shrugged. ‘I’ve been called here two or three times before. Young lads sneaking in during the night. One time it was suicide, another an accident. Four drunken friends on their way home from a party wanted to play, see who dared to stand closest to the edge of the diving board. The boy who won the dare was nineteen. The oldest was his brother.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Gjendem said dutifully.

Harry checked his watch as if he had to hurry off.

‘Must have been some strength in that rope,’ Gjendem said. ‘Head torn off. Ever heard the like?’

‘Tom Ketchum,’ said Harry, draining the rest of his coffee in one swig and getting up.

‘Ketchup?’

‘Ketchum. Hole-in-the-Wall gang. Hanged in New Mexico Territory in 1901. Standard gallows, they just used too much rope.’

‘Oh. How much?’

‘Just over two metres.’

‘Not more? He must have been a fat lump.’

‘Nope. Tells you how easy it is to lose your head, doesn’t it.’

Gjendem shouted something after him, but Harry didn’t catch it. He crossed the car park north of the lido, continued across the grass and took a left over the bridge to the main gate. The fence was more than two and a half metres high all the way round. Over a hundred kilos. Marit Olsen might have tried, but she did not get over the lido fence unaided.

On the other side of the bridge, Harry turned left so that he could approach the lido from the opposite angle. He stepped over the orange police cordon and stopped at the top of the slope by a shrub. Harry had forgotten an alarming amount over recent years. But the cases stuck. He could still remember the names of the four boys on the diving tower. The older brother’s distant eyes as he answered Harry’s questions in a monotone. And the hand pointing to the place where they had got in.

Harry chose his steps carefully, not wishing to destroy possible clues, and bent the shrub to one side. Oslo Parks’ maintenance planned well in advance. If they planned at all. The tear in the fence was still there.

Harry crouched down and studied the jagged edges of the tear. He could see dark threads. Someone who had not sneaked in, but had forced her way through here. Or was pushed. He looked for other evidence. From the top of the tear hung a long black piece of wool. The tear was so high that the person must have been standing upright to touch the fence at that point. The head. Wool made sense, a woollen hat. Had Marit Olsen been wearing a woollen hat? According to Roger Gjendem, Marit Olsen had left home at a quarter to ten to jog in the park. As usual, he had surmised.

Harry tried to visualise it. He imagined an abnormally mild evening in the park. He saw a large, sweaty woman jogging. He didn’t see a woollen hat. He couldn’t see anyone else wearing a woollen hat, either. Not because it was cold at any rate. But perhaps so as not to be seen or recognised. Black wool. A balaclava maybe.

He stepped out of the bushes with care.

He hadn’t heard them coming.

One man held a pistol – probably a Steyr, Austrian, semi-automatic. It was pointed at Harry. The man behind it had blond hair, an open mouth with a powerful underbite, and when he emitted a grunt of a laugh, Harry remembered the nickname belonging to Truls Berntsen from Kripos. Beavis. As in Beavis and Butt-Head.

The second man was short, unusually bow-legged and had his hands in the pockets of a coat that Harry knew concealed a gun and an ID card bearing a Finnish-sounding name. But it was the third man, the one in an elegant grey trench coat, who attracted Harry’s attention. He stood to the side of the other two, but there was something about the gunman and the Finn’s body language, the way they partly addressed Harry, partly this man. As though they were an extension of him, as though this man was actually holding the gun. What struck Harry about the man was not his almost feminine good looks. Nor that his eyelashes were so clearly visible above and below his eyes, incurring suspicions he used make-up. Nor the nose, the chin, the fine shape of his cheeks. Nor that his hair was thick, dark, grey, elegantly cut and a great deal longer than was standard for the force. Nor the many tiny colourless blemishes in the suntanned skin that made him look as if he had been exposed to acid rain. No, what struck Harry was the hatred. The hatred in the eyes that bored into him, a hatred so fierce that Harry seemed to sense it physically, as something white and hard.

The man was cleaning his teeth with a toothpick. His voice was higher and softer than Harry would have imagined. ‘You’ve trespassed into territory that has been cordoned off for an investigation, Hole.’

‘An incontrovertible fact,’ Harry said, looking around him.

‘Why?’

Harry eyed the man, quietly rejecting one potential answer after the other until he realised he simply didn’t have one.

‘Since you appear to know me,’ Harry said, ‘who do I have the pleasure of meeting?’

‘I doubt it will be much of a pleasure for either of us, Hole. So I suggest you leave the area now and never show your face near a Kripos crime scene again. Is that understood?’

‘Well, received but not completely understood. What about if I can help the police in the form of a tip about how Marit Olsen-’

‘The only help you’ve given the police’, the gentle voice interrupted, ‘has been to besmirch its reputation. In my book, you’re a drunk, a lawbreaker and vermin, Hole. So my advice to you is this: crawl back under the stone you came from before someone crushes you with their heel.’

Harry looked at the man, and his gut instinct and his brain concurred: Take it. Withdraw. You have no ammunition to counter with. Be smart.

And he really wished he was smart; he would really have appreciated that quality. Harry took out his pack of cigarettes.

‘And that someone would be you, would it, Bellman? You are Bellman, aren’t you? The genius who sent the sauna-ape after me?’ Harry nodded towards the Finn. ‘Judging from that attempt, I doubt you would be able to crush… er… er…’ Harry struggled feverishly to remember the analogy, but it wouldn’t come. Bloody jet lag.

Bellman interceded. ‘Piss off now, Hole.’ The POB jerked his thumb behind him. ‘Come on. Hop it.’

‘I-’ Harry began.

‘That’s it,’ Bellman said with a broad smile. ‘You’re under arrest, Hole.’

‘What?!’

‘You’ve been told three times to vacate the crime scene and you haven’t complied. Hands behind your back.’

‘Now listen here!’ Harry snarled with a niggling feeling that he was a very predictable rat caught in the laboratory maze. ‘I just want-’

Berntsen, alias Beavis, jogged his arm, knocking the cigarette out of his mouth and onto the wet ground. Harry bent down to pick it up, but got Jussi’s boot in his backside and toppled forwards. He banged his head on the ground and tasted earth and bile. And heard Bellman’s soft voice in his ear.

‘Resisting arrest, Hole? I told you to put your hands behind your back, didn’t I? Told you to put them here…’

Bellman placed his hand lightly on Harry’s bottom. Harry breathed hard through his nose without moving. He knew exactly what Bellman was after. Assault on a police officer. Two witnesses. Paragraph 127. Sentence: five years. Game over. And even though this was already as clear as day to Harry, he knew that Bellman would get what he wanted before long. So he concentrated on something else, excluded Beavis’s grunted laugh and Bellman’s eau de cologne from his mind. He thought about her. About Rakel. He put his hands behind his back, on top of Bellman’s hand and turned his head. Now the wind had blown away the fog hanging over them and he could see the slim, white diving tower outlined against the grey sky. Something was dangling aloft, from the platform, a rope perhaps.

The handcuffs clicked gently into place.

Bellman stood in the car park by Middelthunsgate watching them as they drove away. The wind was tugging gently at his coat.

The custody officer was reading the newspaper when he noticed the three men in front of the counter.

‘Hi, Tore,’ Harry said. ‘Got a non-smoker with a view?’

‘Hi, Harry. Long time no see.’ The officer picked up a key from the cupboard behind him and passed it to Harry. ‘Honeymoon suite.’

Harry saw the confusion on Tore’s face when Beavis leaned forward, grabbed the key and snarled, ‘He’s the prisoner, you old git.’

Harry grimaced an apology to Tore as Jussi frisked him and turned up some keys and a wallet.

‘Would you mind ringing Gunnar Hagen, Tore? He-’

Jussi snatched at the handcuffs, cutting into Harry’s skin, and Harry tumbled backwards after the two men heading for the custody block.

Once they had locked him in the two-and-a-half by one-and-a-half-metre cell, Jussi went back to Tore to sign the papers while Beavis stood outside the barred door, peering in at Harry. Harry could see he had something on his chest and waited. And at last it came, in a voice shaking with suppressed fury.

‘How does it feel, eh? You being such a bloody hotshot, catching two serial killers, being on TV and all that? And here you are now, looking at bars from the inside, eh?’

‘What are you so angry about, Beavis?’ Harry asked softly and closed his eyes. He could feel the swell in his body as if he had just come ashore after a long voyage.

‘I’m not angry. But as far as punks shooting good policemen are concerned, I’m furious with them.’

‘Three mistakes in one sentence,’ Harry said, lying down on the cell bed. ‘First of all, it’s “is” not “are”, secondly Inspector Waaler was not a good policeman and thirdly I didn’t shoot him. I pulled off his arm. Here, up by the shoulder.’ Harry demonstrated.

Beavis’s mouth opened and shut, but nothing emerged.

Harry closed his eyes again.