Jo Nesbo - The Leopard

Bjorn looked up from the computer as Harry burst in. ‘Just more Tony Leike,’ he sighed.

‘There’s blood on the blade,’ Harry said, out of breath. ‘Check the handle for prints.’

Bjorn held the knife with care. Sprinkled black powder on the smooth, varnished yellow wood and blew gently.

‘There’s only one set of prints here; however, they are tasty,’ he said. ‘Maybe there are epithel cells here, too.’

‘Yess!’ Harry said.

‘What’s the deal?’

‘Whoever left the fingerprint cut off Leike’s finger.’

‘Oh? What makes you-’

‘There’s blood on the chopping block. And he had gauze ready to bandage the wound. And I have an inkling I’ve seen that knife before. On a grainy photo of Adele Vetlesen.’

Bjorn Holm whistled softly, pressed the transparency against the handle so that the powder stuck. Then he put the transparency on the scanner.

‘Sigurd Altman, you might have got a good lawyer to explain away the prints on Leike’s desk,’ Harry whispered while Bjorn pressed the search button and they both followed the blue line that moved in fits and starts towards the right of the bar. ‘But not the print on this knife.’

Ready…

Found 1 match.

Bjorn Holm pressed ‘show’.

Harry stared at the name that came up.

‘Still think the print belongs to the person who cut off Tony’s finger?’ Bjorn Holm asked.

‘After I saw Adele and Tony banging away like dogs by the toilet, everything came back to me. Everything I had succeeded in burying. Everything the psychologist said I had put behind me. It was like an animal that had been chained up, but it had been fed, it had grown and was stronger than ever. And now it was free. Harry was quite right. I planned to avenge myself on Tony by humiliating him just as he had done to me.’

Sigurd Altman looked down at his hands and smiled.

‘However, from thereon Harry was wrong. I didn’t plan Adele’s murder. I just wanted to humiliate Tony in public. Particularly in front of those he hoped would become his in-laws, the milch cow Galtung who was to finance that Congo adventure of his. Why would someone like Tony bother to marry a field mouse like Lene Galtung otherwise?’

‘True enough,’ smiled Mikael Bellman, to show he was on his side.

‘So I wrote a letter to Tony pretending to be Adele. I wrote that he had made me pregnant and I wanted the child. However, as a future single mother I would have to provide for it, and therefore I wanted silence money. Four hundred thousand first time round. He was to show up at midnight in the car park behind Lefdal electrical appliances in Sandvika with the money two days later. Then I sent Adele a letter, pretending to be Tony, and asked if we could meet at the same time and place for a date. I knew the setting would be to Adele’s taste, and I assumed they hadn’t exchanged names and phone numbers, if you know what I mean. The deception wouldn’t be discovered until it was too late, until I had what I wanted. At eleven I was in position, sitting in my car with a camera ready. The plan was to take photos of the rendezvous however it ended up, a row or bonking, and to send the whole lot to Anders Galtung with the revelatory story. That was all.’

Sigurd looked at Bellman and repeated: ‘That was all.’

Bellman nodded, and Sigurd Altman continued. ‘Tony arrived early. He parked, got out and did a recce. Then he disappeared into the shadows under the trees by the river. I hid behind the steering wheel. Adele came. I rolled down the window to catch what happened. She stood there waiting, looking around, checking her watch. I saw Tony right behind her, so close it was unbelievable she couldn’t hear him. I saw him pull out a large Sami knife and close his arm around her neck. She wriggled and kicked as he carried her to his car. When the door fell open I saw that he had plastic over the seats. I didn’t hear what Tony said to her, but I picked up my camera and zoomed in. Saw him pressing a pen into her hand, obviously dictating what she was to write on a postcard.’

‘The postcard from Kigali,’ Bellman said. ‘He had planned everything in advance. She was going to disappear.’

‘I took pictures, not thinking about anything else. Until I saw him suddenly raise his hand and drive the knife into her neck. I couldn’t believe my own eyes. Blood spurted out spraying the windscreen.’

The two men were unaware that Krohn was gasping for air.

‘He waited a while, leaving the knife in her neck, as though he wanted to drain her of blood first. Then he lifted her up, carried her to the rear of his car and dumped her in the boot. As he was about to get back in the car, he stopped and seemed to sniff the air. He was standing under the light of a street lamp, and that was when I saw it: the same widened eyes, the same grin on his lips that he’d had when he pinned me down outside the dance hall and forced the knife in my mouth. Long after Tony had driven off with Adele, I was still in my car, numb with horror, unable to move. I knew I couldn’t send a letter telling all to Anders Galtung now. Or to anyone else. Because I had just become an accessory to murder.’

Sigurd took a tiny, restrained sip of water from the glass in front of him and glanced at Johan Krohn, who nodded in return.

Bellman cleared his throat. ‘Technically speaking, you were not an accessory to murder. The worst charge would have been blackmail or deception. You could have stopped there. It would have been very unpleasant for you, but you could have gone to the police. You even had photographs proving your story.’

‘Nevertheless, I would have been charged and found guilty. They would have maintained that I, better than anyone else, knew Tony reacted with violence when put under pressure and that I had started the whole business, it was premeditated.’

‘Hadn’t you considered that this might happen?’ Bellman asked, ignoring the admonitory glare from Krohn.

Sigurd Altman smiled. ‘Isn’t it odd how often our own deliberations are the hardest to interpret? Or remember? I honestly don’t recall what I anticipated would happen.’

Because you don’t want to, Bellman thought, nodding and mmm-ing as if in gratitude to Altman for giving him new insights into the human soul.

‘I deliberated for several days,’ Altman said. ‘Then I went back to the Havass cabin and tore out the page in the guest book with all the names and addresses. Then I wrote another letter to Tony. In which I said that I knew what he had done, and I knew why. I had seen him screw Adele at the cabin in Havass. And I wanted money. Signed it Borgny Stem-Myhre. Five days later I read in the papers that she had been killed in a cellar. It should have stopped there. The police should have investigated the case and found Tony. That’s what they should have done. Arrested him.’

Sigurd Altman had raised his voice and Bellman could have sworn he saw tears welling up in the eyes behind the round glasses.

‘But you didn’t even have a lead, you were completely befogged. So I had to keep feeding him with more victims, threatening him with new names from the Havass list. I cut out pictures of the victims from the papers and hung them on the wall of the cutting room in the Kadok factory with copies of letters I had sent in the victims’ names. As soon as Tony killed one person, another letter arrived insisting they had sent the previous ones and now they knew he had two, three and four lives on his conscience. And that the price for their silence had risen accordingly.’ Altman leaned forward; his voice sounded anguished. ‘I did it to give you a chance to catch him. A killer makes mistakes, doesn’t he. The more murders there are, the greater the chance he will be arrested.’