Jo Nesbo - The Leopard

‘You don’t know them.’

‘Well, who do we know? At least they and I are from the same place. Perhaps ultimately that’s what it’s about. The tribe. We want to be with our tribe.’

‘Do we?’

‘Yes, we do. Whether we are aware of it or not, that’s what we want.’

The nurse with the badge bearing the name Altman came in, flashed a quick smile at Harry and tapped his watch.

Harry went downstairs and met two uniformed policemen on their way up. He nodded automatically; it was a convention. They stared at him in silence, as though he were a stranger.

Usually Harry longed for solitude and all the benefits that came with it: peace, calm, freedom. But standing at the tram stop, suddenly he didn’t know where to go. Or what to do. He just knew that being alone in the house in Oppsal would be unbearable right now.

He dialled Oystein’s number.

Oystein was on a long trip to Fagernes, but suggested a beer at Lompa at around midnight to celebrate the relatively satisfactory completion of another day in Oystein Eikeland’s life. Harry reminded Oystein that Harry was an alcoholic, and received the response that even an alcoholic had to go on a bender once in a while, didn’t he.

Harry wished Oystein a safe journey and rang off. Glanced at his watch. And the question arose again. Forty-eight hours. Why?

A tram stopped in front of him and the doors banged open. Harry peered into the invitingly warm, lit carriage. Then he turned and began to walk down towards town.

‘I was in the vicinity,’ Harry said. ‘But I suppose you’re on your way out.’

‘Not at all,’ smiled Kaja, who was standing in the doorway with a thick puffa jacket on. ‘I was sitting on the veranda. Come in. Take the slippers over there.’

Harry removed his shoes and followed her through the living room. They each sat down on an enormous wooden chair on the covered veranda. It was quiet and deserted in Lyder Sagens gate, only one parked car. But on the first floor of the house over the road Harry could see the outline of a man in an illuminated window.

‘That’s Greger,’ Kaja said. ‘He’s eighty now. He’s sat like that and followed everything that’s happened on the street since the war, I think. I like to believe he looks after me.’

‘Yes, we need that,’ Harry said, taking out a pack of cigarettes. ‘To believe someone is looking after us.’

‘Have you got a Greger as well?’

‘No,’ Harry said.

‘Can I have one?’

‘A cigarette?’

She laughed. ‘I smoke occasionally. It makes me… calmer, I think.’

‘Mm. Thought about what you’re going to do? After these forty-eight hours, I mean.’

She shook her head. ‘Back to Crime Squad. Feet on the table. Wait for a murder that is trivial enough for Kripos not to whisk it away from under our noses.’

Harry tapped out two cigarettes, put them between his lips, lit both and passed her one.

‘Now, Voyager,’ she said. ‘Hen… Hen… What was the name of the man who did that?’

‘Henreid,’ Harry said. ‘Paul Henreid.’

‘And the woman whose cigarette he lit?’

‘Bette Davis.’

‘Killer film. Would you like to borrow a thicker jacket?’

‘No, thanks. Why are you sitting on the veranda by the way? It’s not exactly a tropical night.’

She held up a book. ‘My brain is sharper in cold air.’

Harry read the front cover. ‘Materialistic Monism. Hm. Long-forgotten fragments from philosophy studies spring to mind.’

‘Right. Materialism holds that everything is matter and energy. Everything that happens is a part of a larger calculation, a chain reaction, consequences of something that has already happened.’

‘And free will is illusory?’

‘Yep. Our actions are determined by our brain’s chemical composition, which is determined by who chose to have children with whom, who in turn are determined by their brain chemistry. And so on. Everything can be taken back to the big bang, for example, and even further back. Including the fact that this book came to be written, and what you’re thinking right now.’

‘I remember that bit,’ Harry nodded and blew smoke into the winter night. ‘Made me think of the meteorologist who said that if only he had all the relevant variables he could forecast all future weather.’

‘And we could prevent murders before they took place.’

‘And predict that cigarette-cadging policewomen would sit on cold verandas with expensive philosophy books.’

She laughed. ‘I didn’t buy the book myself, I found it on the shelf here.’ She pouted and sucked at the cigarette, and got smoke in her eyes. ‘I never buy books, I only borrow them. Or steal them.’

‘I don’t exactly see you as a thief.’

‘No one does, that’s why I’m never caught,’ she said, resting the cigarette on the ashtray.

Harry coughed. ‘And why do you pilfer?’

‘I only steal from people I know and who can afford it. Not because I’m greedy, but because I’m a bit tight. When I was studying, I nicked loo rolls from the university toilet. By the way, have you thought of the title of the Fante book that was so good?’

‘No.’

‘Text me when you remember it.’

Harry chuckled. ‘Sorry, I don’t text.’

‘Why not?’

Harry shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I don’t like the concept. Like Aborigines who don’t want their photo taken because they think they’ll lose a bit of their souls, maybe.’

‘I know!’ she said with enthusiasm. ‘You don’t want to leave traces. Tracks. Irrefutable evidence of who you are. You want to know that you are going to disappear, utterly and totally.’

‘You’ve hit the nail on the head,’ Harry said drily, and inhaled. ‘Do you want to go back in?’ He nodded towards her hands which she had put between her thighs and the chair.

‘No, it’s just my hands that are cold,’ she smiled. ‘Warm heart though. What about you?’

Harry gazed across the garden fence, onto the road. At the car standing there. ‘What about me?’

‘Are you like me? Kind, light-fingered and tight-fisted?’

‘No, I’m evil, honest and tight-fisted. What about your husband?’

It came out harder than Harry had intended, as though he wanted to put her in her place because she… because she what? Because she was sitting here and was beautiful and liked the same things as he did and lent him slippers belonging to a man she pretended didn’t exist.

‘What about him?’ she asked with a tiny smile.

‘Well, he’s got big feet,’ Harry heard himself say, feeling an urgent desire to bang his head on the table.

She laughed out loud. The laughter trilled into the dark Fagerborg silence that lay over the houses, gardens and garages. The garages. Everyone had a garage. There was only one car parked in the street. Of course there could be a thousand reasons for it being there.

‘I don’t have a husband,’ she said.

‘So…’

‘So it’s a pair of my brother’s slippers you’re wearing on your feet.’

‘And the shoes on the steps…?’

‘… are also my brother’s, and are there because I suspect that men’s size forty-six and a half shoes have a deterrent effect on evil men with sinister plans.’

She sent Harry a meaningful look. He chose to believe the ambiguity was not intended.

‘So your brother lives here?’

She shook her head. ‘He died. Ten years ago. It’s Daddy’s house. In the last years, when Even was studying at Blindern, he and Daddy lived here.’

‘And Daddy?’

‘He died soon after Even. And as I was already living here, I took over the house.’