Jo Nesbo - The Leopard

‘If you’re thinking about Aftenposten-’

‘I’m thinking about this, yes!’ Bellman smacked the newspaper down on the desk in front of him.

The headlines covered half the front page. PRINCE CHARMING ARRESTED LAST NIGHT. The press had got hold of the sobriquet Prince Charming the same day they had christened him in the Odin conference room. ARRESTED LAST NIGHT was not quite accurate, of course, it was more early evening, but Skai had not had time to send out the press report until midnight, after the TV stations’ last news programmes and before the newspapers’ deadlines. It had been brief and did not specify the time or circumstances, only that Prince Charming, after intense investigation by local police, had been arrested outside the old dance hall in Ytre Enebakk.

‘What’s this supposed to mean?’ Bellman repeated.

‘I presume it means the police have one of Norway’s most notorious killers under lock and key,’ Harry said, trying to release the high-backed chair.

‘The police?’ hissed Bellman. ‘The local police in -’ he had to consult the newspaper – ‘Ytre Enebakk?’

‘I don’t suppose it matters who clears up the case so long as it’s cleared up, does it?’ said Harry, groping for the lever beside the seat. ‘How do these things work?’

Bellman shut the door. ‘Listen here, Hole.’

‘No Harry any more?’

‘Shut your mouth and listen carefully. I know what’s gone on here. You’ve been talking to Hagen and were told you couldn’t hand over the arrest to him and Crime Squad, it was too risky. So, as you couldn’t go for a home win, you went for a draw. You bequeathed the honour and the points to a police bumpkin who couldn’t tell you one end of a murder investigation from the other.’

‘Me, boss?’ Harry said, giving him a blue-eyed, aggrieved look. ‘One of the bodies was found in his district, so it’s natural enough that he followed up on a local level. Then he picked up on this background story about Tony Leike. Cracking police work, if you ask me.’

The white patches on Bellman’s forehead seemed to be turning all the colours of the rainbow.

‘Do you know how this will be construed by the Ministry of Justice? They have put the investigation in my hands, I keep at it week after week, no result. Then along comes this bloody inbred and after a couple of days cuts us up on the inside lane.’

‘Mm.’ Harry yanked at the lever and the seat tipped back violently. ‘Doesn’t sound too good when you put it like that, boss.’

Bellman placed his palms on the desk, leaned forward and snarled, sending small, white spit balls in Harry’s direction. ‘I hope it doesn’t sound too good, Hole. This afternoon a lump of opium found in your house is going to the lab to be identified. Your goose is cooked, Hole!’

‘And afterwards, boss?’ Harry bobbed up and down as he wrestled with the lever.

Bellman frowned. ‘What the hell do you mean?’

‘What are you going to say to the press and the Ministry of Justice? When they see the date of the search warrant you used, issued in your name? And ask how it can be that the day after you find opium at a policeman’s house, you give the selfsame officer a prominent position in your own investigative unit? Some might claim that if Kripos is governed like that, it’s no wonder a country copper with one cell and a wife who cooks is better at finding killers.’

Bellman’s jaw dropped and he kept blinking.

‘There!’ Harry leaned against the seat back, now locked into position, with a contented smile on his face. And screwed up his eyes to meet the rush of air after the door was slammed.

The sun had slipped over the edge of the mountain as Krongli stopped the snowmobile, got off and went over to Roy Stille, who was standing beside a ski pole stuck deep in the snow.

‘Well?’

‘I think we’ve found it,’ Stille said. ‘This has to be the stick that Hole fellow marked the site with.’

The soon-to-be-retired policeman had never had any ambitions to rise up the career ladder, but the thick white hair, the intent gaze and the calm voice were such that when he spoke people concluded he was the superior officer and not Krongli.

‘Oh?’ Krongli said.

He accompanied Stille to the edge of the precipice. Stille pointed. And there, down in the scree, he saw the snowmobile. He adjusted the binoculars. Focused on the bare, burned arm sticking out. Mumbled half aloud: ‘Oh shit. At last. Or both.’

The breakfast customers had begun to leave Stopp Pressen when Bent Nordbo heard a cough, looked up from the New York Times, removed his glasses, squinted and mustered the closest he would ever get to a smile.

‘Gunnar.’

‘Bent.’

The greeting, saying each other’s name, was something they had from the lodge and always reminded Gunnar Hagen of ants meeting and exchanging smells. The Crime Squad boss sat down, but did not remove his coat. ‘You said on the phone you’d found something.’

‘One of my journalists has dug this up.’ Nordbo pushed a brown envelope across the table. ‘Looks like Mikael Bellman protected his wife in a drugs case. It’s old, so from a legal point of view they’re untouchable, but in the press…’

‘… they’re always touchable,’ Hagen said, taking the envelope.

‘I believe you may safely regard Mikael Bellman as neutralised.’

‘At least a balance of terror can be achieved. He has things on me, too. Besides, I may not even need this – he’s just been humiliated by an officer from Ytre Enebakk.’

‘I read that. And the Ministry of Justice has read it too, isn’t that so?’

‘Up there, they read papers and keep their ears to the ground. But thank you, anyway.’

‘My pleasure, we help each other.’

‘Who knows, I may need this one day.’ Gunnar Hagen put the envelope inside his coat.

He didn’t receive a response as Bent Nordbo had already resumed his reading of an article about a young black American senator by the name of Barack Obama who, the writer maintained in all seriousness, could one day become the President of the United States.

When Krongli was down, he called up to the others that he had arrived, and he untied the rope.

The snowmobile was an Arctic Cat and lay with its runners in the air. He dragged himself the three metres to the wreck and instinctively became conscious of where he was placing his feet and hands. As if he were at a crime scene. He crouched down. An arm was protruding from under the snowmobile. He touched the vehicle. It was swaying on two rocks. He took a deep breath and tipped the snowmobile on its side.

The dead body lay on its back. Krongli’s first thought was that presumably it was a man. The head and face had been crushed between the vehicle and the rocks, and the result looked like the remains of a crab party. He didn’t need to feel the smashed body to know it was like jelly, like a piece of tender meat with the bones removed or that the torso had been squashed flat, hips and knees pulverised. Krongli would hardly have been able to identify the body, had it not been for the red flannel shirt. And the single rotten, brown-stained tooth left in the lower jaw.

‘What did you say?’ Harry exclaimed, pressing the phone harder to his ear as if the mistake were there.

‘I said the body under the snowmobile is not Tony Leike,’ Krongli said.

‘Who then?’

‘Odd Utmo. A local recluse and local guide. He always wears the same red flannel shirt. And it’s his snowmobile. But it was the teeth that decided it. One single rotten stump of a tooth. God knows what happened to the rest of his teeth and the orthodontic brace.’

Utmo. Orthodontic brace. Harry remembered Kaja telling him about the guide who had driven her to Havass.