Jo Nesbo - The Leopard

Bjorn Holm didn’t even slow down.

‘OK. Then something does happen. Ole receives a letter. It’s from a blackmailer. He writes that he knows Ole has killed and he wants money. Otherwise the police will be round. Ole’s first thought is that it must be someone who knows he was at Havass, so it must be one of the two survivors. Iska Peller. Or Tony Leike. He excludes Iska Peller right away. She’s Australian, went back and, anyway, is hardly likely to write in Norwegian. Tony Leike, what irony! They never met at the cabin, but Adele may of course have mentioned Ole’s name while they were flirting. Or Tony may have seen Ole’s name in the guest book. At any rate, Tony must have guessed the connection as the murders appeared in the newspapers. The blackmail attempt squares pretty well with what the financial press is writing about Tony being desperately in need of funds for his Congo project. Ole takes a decision. Even though he would have preferred Tony to live with the shame, he has to turn to the second option before things spiral out of control. Tony has to die. He tails Tony. Follows him onto the train which goes where Tony always goes – Ustaoset. Follows his snowmobile tracks which lead to a locked Tourist Association cabin situated among cliffs and crevices. And that’s where Ole finds him. And Tony recognises the ghost, the boy from the dance hall, the boy whose tongue he cut off. And realises what’s in store for him. Ole takes his revenge. He tortures Tony. Burns him. Maybe to make him reveal possible partners in the blackmail venture. Maybe for his own enjoyment.’

Altman rolled the window back up, hard.

‘Cold,’ he said.

‘While this is going on, he hears on the news that Iska Peller is in the cabin at Havass. Ole senses that the final solution may be at hand, but smells a trap. He remembers the snowdrift above the cabin that locals said was dangerous. He reaches a decision. Perhaps he takes Tony with him as a guide, heads for the Havass cabin, starts the avalanche with dynamite. Then he drives the snowmobile back, unloads Tony – dead or alive – off the precipice and sends the snowmobile after him. If, contrary to expectation, the body should ever be found, it will look like an accident. A man who has burned himself and is on his way to find help perhaps.’

The countryside opened up. They passed a lake with the moon reflected in it.

‘Ole triumphs, he’s won. He’s tricked everyone, pulled the wool over their eyes. And he’s started to enjoy the game, the feeling of being in power, of having everyone follow his directions. So the master, who has bound eight individual fates into one big drama, decides to leave us with a parting gesture. To leave me with a parting gesture.’

A cluster of houses, a petrol station and a shopping centre. They took the left exit off a roundabout.

‘Ole cuts off the middle finger of Tony’s right hand. And he has Leike’s phone. It’s the one he used when he called me from the centre of Ustaoset. My number is ex-directory, but Tony Leike has my number on his mobile phone. Ole doesn’t leave a message. Perhaps it was just playful whimsy.’

‘Or to confuse us,’ Bjorn Holm said.

‘Or to show us his superiority,’ Harry said. ‘Like when he quite literally gives us the finger by leaving Tony’s middle finger outside my door, inside Police HQ, right under our very noses. Because he can do that. He’s Prince Charming, he’s recovered from the shame, he’s retaliated, avenged himself on all those who mocked him and on their understudies. The witnesses. The whore. And the lech. Then something unforeseen happens. The headquarters at Kadok are found. In fact, the police still don’t have any evidence to lead them straight to Ole, but they’re beginning to get dangerously close. So Ole goes to his boss and says that finally he’ll take his holiday and accumulated time in lieu. He’ll be away for a good while. His plane goes the day after tomorrow by the way.’

‘Twenty-one fifteen to Bangkok via Stockholm,’ Bjorn Holm said.

‘OK, lots of the details in this story are assumptions, but we’re getting close. Here we are.’

Bjorn turned off the road and onto the gravel in front of the large, red timber building. Stopped and switched off the ignition.

There was no light in any of the windows, but advertisements hung on the ground-floor walls, showing that a corner of the building had once been a grocery shop. At the other end of the square, fifty metres in front of them and beneath a street light, stood a green Jeep Cherokee.

It was still. Sound-still, time-still, wind-still. From the top of the window on the driver’s side of the Cherokee cigarette smoke rose into the light.

‘This is the place where it all began,’ Harry said. ‘The dance hall.’

‘Who’s that?’ Altman asked, nodding towards the Cherokee.

‘Don’t you recognise him?’ Harry took out a packet of cigarettes, placed one between his lips, unlit, and stared hungrily at the tobacco smoke. ‘You might be deceived by the street lamp, of course. Most of the older street lamps cast a yellow light, making a blue car seem green.’

‘I’ve seen the film,’ Altman said. ‘In the Valley of Elah.’

‘Mm. Good film. Almost Altman class.’

‘Almost.’

‘Sigurd Altman class.’

Sigurd didn’t answer.

‘So,’ Harry said. ‘Are you happy? Was it the masterpiece you had envisaged, Sigurd? Or can I call you Ole Sigurd?’

‘I prefer Sigurd.’

‘Pity it’s not as easy to change first names as surnames,’ Harry said, leaning forward between the seats again. ‘When you told me you’d changed the usual -sen surname, I didn’t think that the S in Ole S. Hansen might stand for Sigurd. But did it help, Sigurd? Did the new name make you into someone different from the person who lost everything in the gravel on this very spot?’

Sigurd shrugged. ‘We flee as far as we can. I suppose the new name took me part of the way.’

‘Mm. I’ve checked out a number of things today. When you moved to Oslo you started nursing studies. Why not medicine? After all, you had top grades from school.’

‘I wanted to avoid having to speak in public,’ Sigurd said with an ironic smile. ‘I assumed as a nurse I would be exempt.’

‘I rang a speech therapist today, and he told me it depends which muscles are damaged. In theory, even with half a tongue you can train yourself to speak almost perfectly again.’

‘The “s”s are tricky without the tip of a tongue. Was that what gave me away?’

Harry rolled down the window and lit his cigarette. Inhaled so hard the paper crackled and rustled.

‘That was one of the things. But we went off on the wrong track for a while. The speech therapist told me that people have a tendency to associate lisping with male homosexuality. In English it’s called a “gay lisp” and does not constitute lisping in a speech-therapy sense, it’s just a different way of articulating the letter “s”. Gay men can switch lisping on and off, they use it as a sort of code. And the code works. The speech therapist told me an American university had done some linguistic research to see whether it was possible to deduce sexual tendencies in people by listening only to recorded speech. The results were fairly accurate; however, it transpired that the perception of a gay lisp was so strong that it overrode other language signals that were characteristic of heteros. When the receptionist at Hotel Bristol said that the man asking after Iska Peller spoke in an effeminate way he was a victim of stereotypical thinking. It was only when he acted out how the person had spoken that I realised he had allowed himself to be duped by the lisp.’

‘There must have been a bit more than that.’