Jo Nesbo - The Leopard

‘It’s a bit cold in here, don’t you think?’

Then he heard a scraping sound followed by a low hiss. He stared at the match. At the unwavering, yellow, tulip-shaped flame.

Evening came, a starry sky and bitingly cold.

Harry parked the car on the hill outside the Voksenkollen address he had been given. In a street consisting of large expensive houses this one stood out. The building was like something out of a fairy tale, a royal palace with black timbers, immense wooden pillars at the entrance and turf on the roof. In the garden there were two other buildings plus a Disney version of a Norwegian storehouse supported on pillars. Harry thought it unlikely that the shipowner Anders Galtung did not possess a big enough fridge.

Harry rang the doorbell, noticed a camera high up the wall and said his name when requested by a female voice. He walked up a floodlit gravel drive that sounded as if it was eating what was left of his boot soles.

A middle-aged woman with turquoise eyes, wearing an apron, received him at the door and led him into an unoccupied living room. She did it with such an elegant mixture of dignity, superiority and professional friendliness that even after she had left Harry with a ‘Coffee or tea?’ he was unsure whether this was fru Galtung, a servant or both.

When foreign fairy tales came to Norway, kings and nobility did not exist, so in Norwegian versions the king was represented by a well-todo farmer in ermine. And that was exactly what Harry saw when Anders Galtung came into the living room: a fat, smiling, gentle and somewhat sweaty farmer in a traditional Norwegian sweater. However, after a handshake, the smile was replaced by a concerned expression, more fitting for the occasion. His question – ‘Anything new?’ – was followed by heavy breathing.

‘Nothing, I’m afraid.’

‘Tony has a habit of disappearing, I understand from my daughter.’

Harry thought he detected a certain reluctance to articulate the first name of his future son-in-law. The shipowner fell heavily into a rosepainted chair opposite Harry.

‘Have you… any personal theories, herr Galtung?’

‘Theories?’ Anders Galtung shook his head, making his jowls quiver. ‘I don’t know him well enough to form theories. Gone to the mountains, gone to Africa, what do I know?’

‘Mm. In fact, I came here to speak to your daughter-’

‘Lene’ll be right here,’ Galtung interrupted. ‘I just wanted to enquire first.’

‘Enquire about what?’

‘About what I said, whether there was anything new. And… and whether the police are sure the man has a clear conscience.’

Harry noticed that ‘Tony’ had been exchanged for ‘the man’ and knew his first instinct had not deceived him: the father-in-law was not enamoured of his daughter’s choice.

‘Do you think he has, Galtung?’

‘Me? I would have thought I was showing trust. After all, I am in the process of investing a considerable sum in this Congo project of his. A very considerable sum.’

‘So a lad in rags knocks on the door and gets a princess plus half a kingdom, like in a fairy tale, does he?’

Within two seconds flat the living room was quiet, as Galtung eyed Harry.

‘Maybe,’ he said.

‘And maybe your daughter is exerting some pressure on you to invest. The venture is pretty dependent on finance, isn’t it?’

Galtung opened his arms. ‘I’m a shipowner. Risk is what I live off.’

‘And could die of.’

‘Two sides of the same coin. In risk markets one man’s loss is another man’s gain. So far the others have lost, and I hope this trend will continue.’

‘Other people losing?’

‘Shipowning is a family business, and if Leike is going to be family we have to ensure…’ He paused as the door opened. She was a tall, blonde girl with her father’s coarse features and her mother’s turquoise eyes, but without her father’s bluff farmer-made-good air or her mother’s dignified superiority. She walked with a hunched bearing, as if to reduce her height, so as not to stand out, and she observed her shoes rather than Harry when she shook hands and introduced herself as Lene Gabrielle Galtung.

She didn’t have a lot to say. And even less to ask. She seemed to cower under her father’s gaze every time she answered Harry’s questions, and Harry wondered whether his assumption that she had forced her father to invest might be wrong.

Twenty minutes later Harry expressed his gratitude, stood up and, right on invisible cue, there she was again, the woman with the turquoise eyes.

When she opened the front door for him, the cold surged in and Harry stopped to button up his coat. He looked at her.

‘Where do you believe Tony Leike is, fru Galtung?’

‘I don’t believe anything,’ she said.

Perhaps she answered too quickly, perhaps there was a twitch at the corner of her eye, perhaps it was just Harry’s intense desire to find something, anything, but he was convinced she was telling the truth. The second thing she said did not allow any room for doubt.

‘And I am not fru Galtung. She is upstairs.’

Mikael Bellman adjusted the microphone in front of him and surveyed the audience. There was a hushed whisper, but all eyes were directed towards the podium, fearful of missing anything. In the packed room he recognised the journalist from Stavanger Aftenblad and Roger Gjendem from Aftenposten. He could hear Ninni, who was wearing a freshly ironed uniform, as usual. Someone counted down the seconds to the start, which was normal for live broadcasts of press conferences.

‘Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. We have called this press conference to give you an update on what we are doing. Any questions. ..’

Chuckles all round.

‘… will be answered at the end. I will pass over now to the officer leading the investigation, POB Mikael Bellman.’

Bellman cleared his throat. Full turnout. The TV channels had been given permission to place their microphones on the podium table.

‘Thank you. Let me start by being a party-pooper. I can see from the attendance and your faces that we may have ratcheted up your expectations a little too high in calling you here. There will be no announcement of a final breakthrough in the investigation.’ Bellman saw the disappointment on their faces and heard scattered groans. ‘We are here in order to fulfil the desire you expressed to be kept informed. I apologise if you had more important things planned for today.’

Bellman gave a wry smile, heard a few journalists laugh and knew that he had already been forgiven.

Mikael Bellman gave them the gist of where the investigation stood. That is, he repeated their success stories, such as the rope being traced to a building by Lake Lyseren, finding another victim, Adele Vetlesen, and identifying the murder weapon used in two of the murders: a socalled Leopold’s apple. Old news. He saw one of the journalists stifle a yawn. Mikael Bellman looked down at the papers in front of him. At the script. Because that was what it was, a script for a bit of theatre, each and every word written down, weighed carefully, gone over. Not too much, not too little; the bait should smell, but it shouldn’t stink.

‘Finally, something about the witnesses,’ he began and the press corps sat up in their chairs. ‘As you know, we have asked anyone who was at the Havass cabin on the same night as the murder victims to come forward. And one person by the name of Iska Peller has come forward. She is arriving by plane from Sydney tonight, and she will proceed to the cabin with one of our detectives tomorrow. We will try to reconstruct the crime scene as faithfully as possible.’

Normally, they would never have mentioned the name of the witness, but it was important here that the man they were addressing – the murderer – would understand that they had indeed found someone from the guest book. Bellman had not laid special emphasis on the word ‘one’ when he mentioned the detective, but that was the message. There would be just two people, the witness and an ordinary detective. In a cabin. Far from habitation.