Jo Nesbo - The Leopard

He lifted the extinguisher off the wall and carried it to the door. Took a run-up of two strides, aimed and smashed the metal cylinder into the door like a battering ram.

The door split around the lock, but still clung to the frame.

Harry repeated the attack. Splinters flew all around.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ he heard Bjorn call from the factory floor.

At the third attempt the door gave with a despairing scream and swung open. They stared into a pitch-black void.

‘Can I borrow your torch?’ Harry asked the officer, putting down the fire extinguisher and wiping off the sweat. ‘Thanks. Wait here.’

Harry stepped into the room. There was a smell of ammonia. He shone the torch along the walls. The room – which he estimated was three metres square – had no windows. The beam swept across a black folding chair, a desk with a lamp and a Dell computer screen. The keyboard was relatively unworn. The desk was tidy and made of bare wood, no blue stains. In the litter bin there were strips of paper, as though someone had been cutting out pictures. And, sure enough, a Dagbladet with the front page cut up. Harry read the headline over the missing picture and knew they had come to the right place. They had arrived. This was it. – DIED IN AVALANCHE -

Harry instinctively shone the torch upwards, on the wall above the desk, past some blue stains. And there they were.

All of them.

Marit Olsen, Charlotte Lolles, Borgny Stem-Myhre, Adele Vetlesen, Elias Skog, Jussi Kolkka. And Tony Leike.

Harry concentrated on breathing from his diaphragm. On absorbing the information piecemeal. The pictures had been cut out of news papers or were printouts, probably from news pages on the Internet. Apart from the picture of Adele. His heart felt like a bass drum, dull thuds as it tried to send more blood to his brain. The picture was on photographic paper and so grainy that Harry assumed it must have been taken with a telephoto lens and then blown up. It showed a car window, Adele’s profile in the front seat from which the plastic cover did not seem to have been removed, and there was something protruding from her neck. A large knife with a shiny, yellow handle. Harry forced his eyes to look further. Underneath the pictures hung a line of letters, also printed off a computer. Harry skimmed the introduction to one of them.

IT IS SO SIMPLE. I KNOW WHO YOU KILLED. YOU DON’T KNOW WHO I AM, BUT YOU KNOW WHAT I WANT. MONEY. IF YOU DON’T PAY UP, THE COPS WILL BE ROUND. SIMPLE, EH?

The text continued, but his eye was caught by the end of the letter. No name, no sign off. The police officer was standing in the doorway. Harry heard his hand fumbling along the wall as he muttered: ‘Must be a light switch here somewhere.’

Harry shone the torch at the blue ceiling, on four large neon tubes.

‘There must be,’ Harry said, illuminating the wall above several blue stains, before the cone of light found a sheet pinned to the right of the pictures. A tiny alarm bell had begun to go off in his brain. The sheet was torn at the side and covered in hand-drawn lines and columns. But there were different handwriting styles.

‘Here it is,’ the officer said.

For some reason, Harry suddenly thought about the work lamp. And the blue ceiling. And the smell of ammonia. And realised at that instant that the alarm in his head had nothing to do with the paper.

‘Don’t…’ Harry started.

But too late.

The explosion was not technically an explosion but – as it would appear in the report the fire chief would sign the following day – an explosion-like fire triggered by an electric spark from cables connected to a canister of ammonia gas that in its turn ignited the PSG painted over the whole ceiling and splattered on the walls.

Harry gasped as the oxygen in the room was drawn into the flames and he felt an immense heat bear down on his head. He automatically fell to his knees and ran his hands through his hair to see if it was alight. When he looked up again, flames were coming off the walls. He wanted to breathe in, but managed to stop the reflex. Got to his feet. The door was only two metres away, but he had to have… he stretched for the sheet of paper. For the missing page from the Havass guest book.

‘Move away!’ The officer appeared in the doorway with the fire extinguisher under his arm and the hose in his hand. As though in slow motion, Harry saw it squirt out. Saw the golden-brown jet released from the hose splash against the wall. Brown that should have been white; liquid that should have been powder. And already, before he looked into the jaws of the flames that rose on two legs and roared at him from where the liquid landed, before he smelt the sweet sting of petrol in his nostrils, before he saw the flames follow the jet of petrol towards the officer standing in the doorway, with the handle still depressed, in shock, Harry knew why the extinguisher had been hanging from the middle of the lunch-room wall, on display, impossible to miss, red and new, screaming out to be used.

Harry’s shoulder hit the policeman at waist height, folding him over the rampaging inspector and knocking him backwards into the room with Harry on top.

They sent a couple of chairs flying as they skidded under the table. The officer, gasping for air, gesticulated and pointed while opening and closing his mouth like a fish. Harry turned. Wrapped in flames, the red extinguisher rumbled and rolled towards them. The hose was spitting melted rubber. Harry shot up, dragging the officer after him, pulled him to the door as a stopwatch ticked timelessly in his head. He shoved the swaying officer out of the room, onto the gallery, thrust him down to the floor alongside him as it came, what the fire chief in his report would describe as an explosion, and which blew out all the windows and set fire to the entire lunch room.

The cutting room is burning. It’s on the news. You have to serve and protect, Harry Hole, not demolish and destroy. You will have to pay compensation. If not, I will take something from you that you hold dear. In a matter of seconds. You have no idea how easy it will be.

The evening darkness had descended over Nydalen. Harry stood with a blanket over his shoulders and a large paper cup in his hand as he and Bjorn Holm watched the smoke divers running in and out with the last PSG buckets that would ever leave the Kadok factory.

‘So he’d pinned up the pictures of the murder victims, had he?’ Bjorn Holm said.

‘Yep,’ Harry said. ‘Except for the prostitute in Leipzig, Juliana Verni.’

‘What about the page? Are you sure it was from the Havass guest book?’

‘Yes. I saw the guest book when I was in the cabin and the pages were identical.’

‘And so you were standing half a metre from the name of the eighth guest, but you didn’t see it?’

Harry shrugged. ‘Perhaps I need reading glasses. Things happened bloody quickly in there, Bjorn. And my interest in the page waned rather when the officer started spraying petrol.’

‘Course, I didn’t mean-’

‘There were some letters on the wall. From what I could see they were blackmail letters. Maybe someone had already rumbled him.’

A fireman came towards them. His clothes creaked and groaned as he walked.

‘Kripos, aren’t you?’ The man’s voice resonated in a way that matched the helmet and boots. And he had body language that said boss.

Harry hesitated, but confirmed with a nod; no reason to complicate matters.

‘What actually happened in there?’

‘That’s what I’m hoping you boys will eventually be able to tell us,’ Harry said. ‘But in general terms I think we can say that whoever found himself a rent-free office in there had a clear plan for dealing with uninvited guests.’