The Leopard

49
Bombay Garden

Bombay Garden was the kind of restaurant that did not appear to have the right to keep going, but unlike its trendier competitors it had managed to survive year after year. Its location at the centre of east Oslo was dire, down a side street between a timber warehouse and a disused factory that was now a theatre. The alcohol licence had come and gone after countless breaches of the rules; the same was also true for its licence to serve food. The health inspectors had on one occasion found a species of rodent in the kitchen they had not been able to identify, beyond declaring it had a certain similarity to Rattus norvegicus. In the comments box of the report the inspector had let rip and described the kitchen as a ‘crime scene’ where ‘murders of the foulest kind had unquestionably taken place’. The slot machines along the walls brought in quite a bit of money, but were regularly vandalised and robbed. The Vietnamese owners did not use the place to launder drugs money, as some suspected, though. The reason Bombay Garden could keep its head above water was to be found at the back, behind two closed doors. Concealed there was a so-called private club, and to be allowed in you had to apply for membership. In practice, that meant you signed an application form at the bar of the restaurant, membership was granted on the spot and you paid a hundred kroner as an annual fee. Afterwards you were escorted in and the door was locked behind you.

Then you stood in a smoke-filled room – as smoking laws do not pertain to private clubs – and in front of you there was a miniature oval racecourse, four metres by two. The course itself was covered with green felt and had seven tracks. Seven flat metal horses, each attached to a pin, moved forward in spasmodic jerks. The speed of each horse was determined by a computer that hummed and buzzed under the table, and was – as far as anyone had ascertained – completely arbitrary and legitimate. That is, the computer program gave some of the horses a greater chance of a higher speed, which was reflected in the odds and thus any eventual payout. Around the racecourse sat the club members – some were regulars, others were new faces – in comfortable leather swivel chairs, smoking, drinking the restaurant’s beer at membership prices, cheering on their horse or the combination they had backed.

Since the club operated in a legal grey area with respect to gambling laws, the rules were that if twelve or more members were present, the stake was restricted to a hundred kroner per member, per race. If there were fewer than twelve, the club’s regulations stipulated it was regarded as a limited gathering, and at small private gatherings you could not prevent adults from making private wagers. How much they chose to bet was up to the participants. For this reason, it was conspicuous how often precisely eleven people could be counted in the back room of the Bombay Garden. And where the garden came into the picture, no one knew.

At ten past two in the afternoon a man with the club’s most recent membership, forty seconds old to be precise, was admitted into the room where he soon established that the only people there, apart from himself, were one member sitting in a swivel chair with his back to him and a man of presumably Vietnamese origin who was clearly administrating the races and stakes; at any rate he was wearing the kind of waistcoat croupiers do.

The back in the swivel chair was broad and filled out the flannel shirt. Black curls hung down onto the collar.

‘Are you winning, Krongli?’ Harry asked, sitting in the chair beside him.

The man’s head of curls twisted round. ‘Harry!’ he shouted, with genuine pleasure in his voice and on his face. ‘How did you find me?’

‘Why do you think I’m looking for you? Perhaps I’m a regular here.’

Krongli laughed as he watched the horses jerking down the long straight, each with a tin jockey on its back. ‘No, you aren’t. I come here whenever I’m in Oslo, and I’ve never seen you.’

‘OK. Someone told me I’d probably find you here.’

‘Hell, have I got a reputation? Perhaps it’s not quite appropriate for a policeman to come here, even though it’s on the right side of the law.’

‘Regarding right side of the law,’ Harry said, shaking his head to the croupier who pointed to the beer tap with a raised eyebrow. ‘There was something I wanted to talk to you about.’

‘Fire away,’ Krongli said, concentrating on the racecourse, where the blue horse on the far track was in the lead, but heading towards a wide outside bend.

‘Iska Peller, the Australian woman you gave a lift to from the Havass cabin, says you groped her friend, Charlotte Lolles.’

Harry didn’t detect any change in Krongli’s concentrated expression. He waited. At length, Krongli looked up.

‘Do you want me to react?’

‘Only if you want to,’ Harry said.

‘I interpret that as you would like me to. Groped is the wrong word. We flirted a bit. Kissed. I wanted to go further. She thought it was enough. I maintained a bit of constructive persuasion, the way women often expect of a man – after all, that’s part of the role play between the sexes. But nothing more than that.’

‘That doesn’t match what Iska Peller says Charlotte told her. Do you think Peller’s lying?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘But I do think Charlotte wanted to give a slightly different version to her friend. Catholic girls like to appear more virtuous than they are, don’t they?’

‘They decided to spend the night in Geilo rather than at your house. Even though Peller was ill.’

‘She was the one who insisted on leaving. I don’t know what was going on between those two, friendship between girls is often a complicated business, isn’t it. And it’s my bet the Peller girl hasn’t got a boyfriend.’ He lifted the half-empty glass in front of him. ‘Where are you going with this, Harry?’

‘It’s a bit strange you didn’t say anything to Kaja Solness about meeting Charlotte Lolles when Kaja was in Ustaoset.’

‘And it’s a bit strange you’re still working on this case. Thought it was a Kripos matter, especially after the newspaper headlines today.’ Krongli’s mind was back on the horses. Out of the bend came the yellow horse in the third track, leading by a tin horse’s length.

‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘But rape cases are still a Crime Squad matter.’

‘Rape? Haven’t you sobered up yet, Harry?’

‘Well.’ Harry pulled a pack of cigarettes from his trouser pocket. ‘I’m more sober than I hope you were, Krongli.’ He stuffed a crumpled cigarette between his lips. ‘All the times you beat up and raped your ex up there in Ustaoset.’

Krongli turned slowly to Harry, knocking over his beer glass with his elbow. The beer was soaked up by the green felt; the stain advanced like the Wehrmacht over a map of Europe.

‘I’ve just come from the school where she works,’ Harry continued, lighting the cigarette. ‘She was the one who told me I’d probably find you here. She also told me that when she left you and Ustaoset, she was escaping rather than moving out. You-’

Harry got no further. Krongli was fast, spun his chair round with his foot and was on Harry before he could react. Harry felt the grip around his hand, knew what was coming, knew because this was what they practised from the first year at college: the police power half nelson. And yet he was a second too late, two days’ drinking too sluggish, forty years too stupid. Krongli twisted his wrist and arm behind his back and pushed his temple forward into the felt. The side of his damaged jaw. Harry screamed with pain and blacked out for a second. Then he was back with the pain and made a frenetic attempt to free himself. Harry was strong, always had been, but immediately knew he had no hope against Krongli. The powerfully built officer’s breath was hot and moist against his face.

‘You shouldn’t have done that, Harry. You shouldn’t have spoken to the whore. She says whatever comes into her head. Does whatever comes into her head. Did she show you her cunt? Did she, Harry?’

There was a crunch inside Harry’s head as Krongli increased the pressure. A yellow and then a green horse banged against Harry’s forehead and nose respectively as he brought up his right foot and stamped. Hard. He heard Krongli scream, twisted out of the half nelson, turned and struck. Not with his fist – he had destroyed enough bones with that nonsense – but with his elbow. It hit Krongli where Harry had learned the effect was greatest – not on the point of the chin, but slightly to the side. Krongli staggered backwards, fell over a low swivel chair and landed on the floor with his feet pointing north. Harry noticed that the material of Krongli’s Converse shoe on his right foot was torn and bloodstained after its meeting with an iron plate under a boot that definitely should have been thrown away. He also noticed that his cigarette was still hanging from his lips. And – out of the corner of his eye – that the red horse in the first track rode in as the clear winner.

Harry bent down, grabbed Krongli’s collar, pulled him up and dumped him in the chair. Took a deep drag, felt it burn and warm his lungs.

‘I agree this rape case of mine doesn’t have a lot going for it,’ he said. ‘At least since neither Charlotte Lolles nor your wife reported you. That’s why, as a detective, I have to try and dig a bit deeper, isn’t it. And that’s why I come back to the Havass cabin.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Krongli sounded as if he had caught a bad chill.

‘There’s this girl in Stavanger who Elias Skog confided in the same evening he was murdered. They were on a bus and Elias told her about the night at Havass when he’d witnessed what he subsequently thought might have been a rape.’

‘Elias?’

‘Elias, yes. I suppose he must have been a light sleeper. He was woken in the night by sounds outside the bedroom window and looked out. The moon was up and he saw two people in the shadow under the ridge of the outside toilet roof. The woman was facing him with the man behind her, hiding his face. Elias’s impression was that they were screwing, the woman seemed to be performing a belly dance and the man had his hand over her mouth, obviously so that they wouldn’t disturb anyone. And when the man had dragged her into the toilet, Elias – disappointed not to see a full live show – had gone back to bed. It was only when he read about the murders that he’d started to wonder. Perhaps the woman had been wriggling to get away. The hand over her mouth might have been to suffocate calls for help.’ Harry took another drag. ‘Was it you, Krongli? Were you there?’

Krongli rubbed his chin.

‘Alibi?’ Harry asked airily.

‘I was at home, in bed, alone. Did Elias Skog say who the woman was?’

‘No. Nor the man, as I said.’

‘It wasn’t me. And you’re living dangerously, Hole.’

‘Shall I take that as a threat or a compliment?’

Krongli didn’t answer. But there was a gleam in his eyes, yellow and cold.

Harry stubbed out his cigarette and got up. ‘By the way, your ex didn’t show me anything. We were in the staffroom. Something tells me she’s afraid of being alone in the same room as a man. So you achieved something, didn’t you, Krongli.’

‘Don’t forget to look over your shoulder, Hole.’

Harry turned. The croupier appeared completely unruffled by the scene and had already set up the horses for another race.

‘Wan’ a bet?’ he asked in pidgin Norwegian with a smile.

Harry shook his head. ‘Sorry, got nothing to bet with.’

‘All the more to win,’ the croupier said.

Harry allowed that to sink in and concluded that either it was a linguistic error or his logic didn’t carry that far. Or it was just another terrible Oriental proverb.