Jo Nesbo - The Leopard

Kaja drew her legs up onto the chair and rested her head on her knees. Harry gazed at the slim neck, the hollow where her pinned-up hair was taut and a few loose strands fell back onto her skin.

‘Do you often think about them?’ Harry asked.

She raised her head from her knees.

‘Mostly about Even,’ she said. ‘Daddy moved out when we were small, and Mummy lived in her own bubble, so Even became sort of both parents in one for me. He looked after me, encouraged me, brought me up, he was my role model. He could do no wrong in my eyes. When you’ve been as close to someone as Even and I were to each other, that closeness never wears off. Never.’

Harry nodded.

With a tentative cough, Kaja said: ‘How’s your father?’

Harry studied the cigarette glow.

‘Don’t you think it’s odd?’ he said. ‘Hagen giving us forty-eight hours. We could have cleared the office in two with ease.’

‘I suppose. Now you say so.’

‘Maybe he thought we could spend our final two days doing something useful.’

Kaja looked at him.

‘Not investigating the present murder case, of course. We’ll have to leave that to Kripos. But the Missing Persons Unit needs help, I hear.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Adele Vetlesen is a young woman who, to my knowedge, is not connected with any murder case.’

‘You think we should…?’

‘I think we should meet for work at seven tomorrow morning,’ Harry said. ‘And see if we can do something useful.’

Kaja Solness sucked on the cigarette again. Harry stubbed his out.

‘Time to go,’ he said. ‘Your teeth are chattering.’

On his way out he tried to see if there was anyone in the parked car, but it was impossible without going closer. And he chose not to go any closer.

In Oppsal the house was waiting for him. Big, empty and full of echoes.

He went to bed in the boy’s room and closed his eyes.

And dreamed the dream he so often had. He is standing by a marina in Sydney, a chain is hauled up, a poisonous jellyfish rises to the surface, it is not a jellyfish but red hair floating around a white face. Then came the second dream. The new one. It had first appeared in Hong Kong, just before Christmas. He is on his back staring up at a nail protruding from the wall, a face is impaled on it, a face, a sensitive-looking face with a neatly trimmed moustache. In the dream Harry has something in his mouth, something that feels as if it would blow his head to pieces. What was it, what was it? It was a promise. Harry twitched. Three times. Then he fell asleep.

‘So it was you who reported Adele Vetlesen missing,’ Kaja confirmed.

‘Yes,’ said the young man sitting in front of her at People amp; Coffee. ‘We lived together. She didn’t come home. I felt I had to do something.’

‘Of course,’ Kaja said with a glance at Harry. It was half past eight. It had taken them thirty minutes to drive from Oslo to Drammen after the trio’s morning meeting which had ended in Harry discharging Bjorn Holm. Holm hadn’t said much, had expelled a deep sigh, washed his coffee cup and then driven back to Krimteknisk in Bryn to resume his work there.

‘Have you heard anything from Adele?’ the man asked, looking from Kaja to Harry.

‘No,’ Harry said. ‘Have you?’

The man shook his head and peered over his shoulder, at the counter, to make sure there weren’t any customers waiting. They perched on high bar stools in front of the window facing one of Drammen’s many squares, that is, an open area that was used as a car park. People amp; Coffee sold coffee and cakes at airport prices and tried to give the impression they belonged to an American chain, and indeed perhaps they did. The man Adele Vetlesen lived with, Geir Bruun, appeared to be around thirty, was unusually white with a shiny, perspiring crown and constantly wandering blue eyes. He worked at the place as a ‘barista’, a title that had attracted awe-inspiring respect in the nineties when coffee bars had first invaded Oslo. And it also involved making coffee, an art form which – the way Harry saw it – was primarily about avoiding obvious pitfalls. As a policeman, Harry used people’s intonation, diction, vocabulary and grammatical solecisms to place them. Geir Bruun neither dressed, nor combed his hair, nor behaved like a homosexual, but as soon as he opened his mouth, it was impossible to think of anything else. There was something about the rounding of the vowels, the tiny redundant lexical embellishments, the lisping that almost seemed feigned. Harry knew that the guy could be a die-hard hetero, but he had already decided that Katrine had jumped to a premature conclusion when she described Adele Vetlesen and Geir Bruun as living togther. They were just two people who had shared a city-centre flat in Drammen for economic reasons.

‘Yes, I have,’ Geir Bruun said in answer to Harry’s question. ‘I remember she went to some kind of mountain cabin in the autumn.’ He uttered this as though it were a concept he found fairly alien. ‘But that wasn’t where she disappeared.’

‘We know that,’ Kaja said. ‘Did she go there with anyone, and if so, do you know who?’

‘No idea. We didn’t talk about that sort of thing – it was enough to share a bathroom, if you know what I mean. She had her private life, I had mine. But I doubt she would have gone into the wilds on her own, if I may put it like that.’

‘Oh?’

‘Adele did very little on her own. I don’t see her in a cabin without a guy. But impossible to say who. She was – if I may be frank – a bit promiscuous. She had no female friends, though she compensated with male friends. Whom she kept apart. Adele didn’t live a double life so much as a quadruple life. Or thereabouts.’

‘So she was dishonest?’

‘Not necessarily. I remember she gave me advice on honest ways to finish with someone. She said that once while she was being shagged from behind she took a photo over her shoulder with her mobile, wrote the name of the guy, sent the photo and deleted the addressee. All in one swift operation.’ Geir Bruun’s face was expressionless.

‘Impressive,’ Harry said. ‘We know she paid for two people in the mountains. Could you give us the name of a male friend, so we could start our enquiries there?’

‘’Fraid I can’t,’ Geir Bruun said, ‘but when I reported her missing, you lot checked who she’d been talking to on the phone over the last few weeks.’

‘Which officers precisely?’

‘I don’t remember any names. Local police.’

‘Fine, we have a meeting at the police station now,’ Harry said, looking at his watch and getting up.

‘Why’, asked Kaja, who hadn’t moved, ‘did the police stop investigating the case? I don’t even recall reading about it in the newspapers.’

‘Don’t you know?’ the man said, signalling to two women with a pram that he would attend to them immediately. ‘She sent a postcard.’

‘Postcard?’ Harry said.

‘Yes. From Rwanda. Down in Africa.’

‘What did she write?’

‘It was very brief. She’d met her dream guy, and I would have to pay the rent on my own until she was back in March. The bitch.’

It was walking distance to the police station. An inspector with a squat pumpkin head and a name Harry forgot as soon as he heard it received them in a smoke-infested office, served them coffee in plastic cups that burned their fingers, and cast long looks at Kaja every time he considered himself unobserved.

He began by delivering a lecture about there being somewhere between five hundred and a thousand missing Norwegians at any one time. Sooner or later they would all turn up. If the police were to investigate every missing person case whenever there was suspicion of a criminal act or an accident, they wouldn’t have time for anything else. Harry stifled a yawn.