Jo Nesbo - The Leopard

‘His fingers though,’ Harry said. ‘Aren’t they distorted?’

‘Sure. Utmo had terrible problems with arthritis, poor fella. It was Bellman who asked me to inform you directly. Wasn’t quite what you hoped for, eh, Hole?’

Harry pushed the chair from the desk. ‘At least not quite what I was expecting. Could it have been an accident, Krongli?’

But he knew the answer before it came. There had been moonlight the whole evening and night; even without headlamps the ravine would have been impossible to miss. Especially for a local guide. Especially when he was driving so slowly that he landed only three metres from a perpendicular drop of over seventy metres.

‘Forget it, Krongli. Tell me about the burns.’

The other end went silent for a bit before the answer came.

‘Arms and back. The skin on the arms was cracked and you can see the red flesh beneath. Parts of the back are charred. And a motif has been scorched in between the shoulder blades…’

Harry closed his eyes. Saw the pattern on the wood burner in the cabin. The smoking fragments of flesh.

‘… looks like a stag. Anything else, Hole? We have to start moving-’

‘No, that’s it, Krongli. Thanks.’

Harry rang off. Sat for a while deliberating. Not Tony Leike. Of course that changed the details, but not the bigger picture. Utmo was probably a victim of Altman’s avenging crusade, someone who had found himself in the way of something or other. They had Tony Leike’s finger, but where was the rest of his body? A thought struck Harry. If he was dead. In theory, Tony could be locked up somewhere. A place only Sigurd Altman knew.

Harry tapped in Skai’s number.

‘He refuses to say a single word to anyone,’ Skai said, masticating something or other. ‘Apart from his solicitor.’

‘Who is?’

‘Johan Krohn. Do you know him? Looks like a boy and-’

‘I know Johan Krohn very well.’

Harry rang Krohn’s office, was transferred and Krohn sounded half welcoming and half dismissive, the way a professional defence counsel should when a prosecuting authority calls. He listened to Harry. Then he answered.

‘I’m afraid not. Unless you have concrete evidence that can establish beyond doubt that my client is keeping someone locked up or otherwise exposing someone to danger by not revealing their whereabouts, I cannot allow you to speak to Altman at this juncture, Hole. These are serious allegations you’re making against him, and I don’t need to tell you that it is my job to protect his interests as far as I am able.’

‘Agreed,’ Harry said. ‘You didn’t need to tell me.’

They rang off.

Harry looked out of the window onto the city centre. The chair was good, no doubt about that. But his eyes found the familiar glass building in Gronland.

Then he dialled another number.

Katrine Bratt was as happy as a lark, and twittered like one, too.

‘I’m going to be discharged in a couple of days,’ she said.

‘I thought you were there of your own free will.’

‘Yes I am, but I have to be formally discharged. I’m looking forward to it. They’ve offered me a desk job at the station when my sick leave runs out.’

‘Good.’

‘Anything special you want?’

Harry explained.

‘So you’ll have to find Tony Leike without Altman’s help?’

‘Yup.’

‘Any ideas where I can start?’

‘Just one. Right after Tony went missing we checked he hadn’t stayed anywhere around Ustaoset. Thing is, I’ve checked recent years a bit more closely, and he’s almost never registered at accommodation anywhere in Ustaoset, a couple of Tourist Association cabins, that’s all. And that’s weird because he’s been up there a lot.’

‘Perhaps he was freeloading at the cabins, not registering or paying.’

‘He’s not the type,’ Harry said. ‘I wonder if Tony has a cabin or suchlike up there no one knows anything about.’

‘OK. Anything else?’

‘No. Yes – see what you can find out about Odd Utmo’s activities over the last few days.’

‘Are you still single, Harry?’

‘What sort of a bloody question’s that?’

‘You sound less single.’

‘Do I?’

‘You do. But it suits you.’

‘Does it?’

‘Since you ask, no.’

Aslak Krongli straightened his stiff back and looked up the scree.

It was one of the men in the search party who had called, and he was shouting again now, obviously excited. ‘Over here!’

Aslak uttered a low curse. The crime scene officers had finished, and the snowmobile and Odd Utmo had been hoisted to the top. It was complicated and time-consuming work as the only possible access to the scree was by rope, and even that was hard enough.

In the lunch break one man had told them something a maid at the hotel had whispered into his ear in confidence: there were bloodstains on the sheets in the room occupied by Rasmus Olsen, the husband of the dead woman MP, when he checked out. At first, she had thought it was menstrual blood, but then she had heard that Rasmus Olsen had been on his own and his wife had been at the Havass cabin.

Krongli had answered that he must have had a local girl in his room or met his wife the morning she arrived in Ustaoset and they had made up in bed. The man had mumbled it was not certain it was menstrual blood.

‘Over here!’

What a lot of hassle. Aslak Krongli wanted to go home. Dinner, coffee, sleep. Put this whole shitty case behind him. The money he had owed in Oslo was paid, and he would never go there again. Never go back down into the quagmire. It was a promise he would keep this time.

They had used a dog to be sure they found all the bits of Utmo in the snow, and it was the dog that had leapt up the scree and stood barking a hundred metres further along. A hundred steep metres. Aslak assessed the climb.

‘Is it important?’ he shouted and set off a symphony of echoes.

He received an answer, and ten minutes later he was staring at what the dog had dug up from the snow. It was wedged in between the rocks so tightly that it must have been impossible to spot from the top.

‘Jesus,’ Aslak said. ‘Who could that be?’

‘Not that Tony Leike anyway,’ said the dog handler. ‘Here in the cold scree it would be a long time before the skeleton was picked that clean. Several years.’

‘Eighteen years.’ It was Roy Stille. The officer had followed them and was panting.

‘She’s been here eighteen years,’ Roy said, crouching down.

‘She?’ Aslak queried.

The officer pointed to the hips on the skeleton. ‘Women have a larger pelvis. We never did find her when she went missing. That’s Karen Utmo.’

Krongli heard something he had never heard before in Roy Stille’s voice. A quiver. The quiver of a man emotionally upset. Grief-stricken. But his granite face was as smooth as always, closed.

‘Well, I never, so it was true then,’ said the dog handler. ‘She topped herself out of anguish for her boy.’

‘Hardly,’ Krongli said. The other two looked at him. He had stuck his little finger in a delicate round aperture in the forehead of the skull.

‘Is that a bullet hole?’ the dog handler asked.

‘Yep,’ said Stille, feeling the back of the skull. ‘And there’s no exit wound, so I reckon we’ll find the bullet in the skull.’

‘And should we bet that the bullet will match Utmo’s rifle?’ said Krongli.

‘Well, I never,’ the dog handler repeated. ‘Do you mean he shot his wife? How is that possible? To kill a person you’ve loved? Because you think she and your son… it’s like entering hell.’

‘Eighteen years,’ Stille said, getting up with a groan. ‘Seven years left before the murder was deemed too old. That must be what they call irony. You wait and wait, afraid of being found out. The years pass and then, when you’re approaching freedom – bang! – you’re killed yourself and end up in the same scree.’