Jo Nesbo - The Leopard

‘Logical,’?rdal said. ‘And to make quite sure we didn’t go after him he had to supply us with an apparent guilty party. Tony Leike.’

‘And that’s why he had to wait until the end to kill Tony Leike,’ said one of the detectives, a man with a fertile Fridtjof Nansen moustache whose surname was all Harry could recall.

His neighbour, a young man with bright, shiny skin and eyes, none of whose names Harry could remember, interjected: ‘But unfortunately for him Tony had an alibi for the times of the deaths. And since Tony’s role as a scapegoat was redundant now, it was finally time to kill enemy numero uno.’

The temperature in the room had risen, and the pale tentative winter sun seemed to be brightening the proceedings. They were making progress, the knot had finally loosened. Harry could see that Bellman was sitting further forward in his chair.

‘That’s all well and good,’ Beate Lonn said, and while Harry was waiting for the but, he clicked what she was going to ask, knew she was going to play the devil’s advocate because she knew he had the answers, ‘but why has Prince Charming made this so unnecessarily complicated?’

‘Because humans are complicated,’ Harry said and could hear an echo of something he had heard and forgotten. ‘We want to do things that are complex, that mesh, where we control our fates and can feel like rulers of our own universes. The room that burned down at the Kadok factory – do you know what it reminded me of most? A control room. The headquarters. And it’s not certain he even planned to take Leike’s life. Perhaps he just wanted him arrested and convicted.’

The silence was so pervasive that they could hear a bird twittering outside.

‘Why?’ asked the Pelican. ‘If he could have killed him? Or tortured him?’

‘Because pain and death are not the worst that can befall mankind,’ Harry said, again hearing the echo. ‘Humiliation is. That was what he wanted for Leike. The humiliation of having everything you possess taken from you. The fall, the shame.’

He saw a tiny smile playing on Beate Lonn’s lips, saw her give a nod of acknowledgement.

‘But,’ he continued, ‘as has been indicated, Tony had – unluckily for our killer – an alibi. And so Tony got away with the subsidiary punishment. Which was a slow and decidedly brutal death.’

In the ensuing silence Harry sensed something flutter past. The smell of roasted meat. Then the room seemed to draw breath all at once.

‘So what do we do now?’ asked the Pelican.

Harry looked up. The twittering bird on the branch outside the window was a chaffinch. A migratory bird which had arrived too soon. Which gave people hopes of spring, but which froze to death on the first frosty night.

Buggered if I know, Harry thought. Buggered if I know.

It was a long Kripos meeting that morning.

Bjorn Holm reported back on the forensic investigations at Kadok. No semen was found, nor any other physical evidence of the perpetrator. The room he had used was indeed completely burned out, and the computer had been reduced to a lump of metal, leaving no chance of recovering any data.

‘He’s probably been online using those unsecured networks in the area. Nydalen’s full of them.’

‘He must have left some electronic trails,’?rdal said, but it sounded more like a refrain he had heard than something he could expatiate on beyond ‘must have’ speculation.

‘Of course, we could apply to access some of the hundreds of networks up there and search for whatever it is we don’t know,’ Holm said. ‘But I have no idea how many weeks it could take. Or whether we would find anything.’

‘Leave it to me,’ Harry said. He had already got up and was on his way to the door while keying in a number. ‘I know someone.’

He left the door ajar, and while he was waiting for an answer he heard one of the detectives say that no one they had spoken to had seen anyone come or go at Kadok, but that was not so surprising since it was hidden behind trees and bushes and, anyway, it was so dark now, in the winter months.

Harry got an answer. ‘Katrine Bratt’s secretary.’

‘Hello?’

‘Froken Bratt is at lunch right now.’

‘Sorry, Katrine, but eating will have to wait. Listen…’

Katrine listened as Harry explained what he wanted.

‘Prince Charming had pictures on the wall that had probably been printed off Internet news sites. With the search engine you could get onto the networks in the area, check the server logs and find out who has been on the news pages which covered the murders. Loads of people must have been-’

‘Not as much as he was,’ Katrine said. ‘I’ll just ask for a list sorted according the number of downloads.’

‘Mm. You’ve learned this quickly.’

‘It’s in the name. Katrine Bratt. Bratt, steep. Steep learning curve. Get it?’

Harry went back to the others.

They were playing the message that Harry had received from Leike’s mobile phone. It had been sent to NTNU, the technical university in Trondheim, for voice analysis. They had achieved useful results with sound recordings of bank robberies, in fact better than with CCTV, as the voice – even if you try to distort it – is very difficult to disguise. But Bjorn Holm had been told that a bad recording of an indeterminate sound, coughing or laughter, was worthless and could not be used to make a voice profile.

‘Damn,’ said Bellman, banging the table with his hand. ‘With a voice profile, a foothold, we could have started eliminating possible suspects from the case.’

‘Which possible suspects?’ mumbled?rdal.

‘The base station signal tells us that whoever used Leike’s phone was near the centre of Ustaoset when he rang,’ Holm said. ‘The signal faded straight afterwards – the operators’ network only has coverage around the centre of Ustaoset. But the fact that the signal faded strengthens the theory that it was Prince Charming who had the phone.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Even when the phone’s not being used the base station will pick up signals every other hour. The fact that it didn’t receive any signals shows that the phone, before or after the call, was in the deserted mountain region around Ustaoset. Where perhaps it was carried during the avalanche and torture and so on.’

No reaction. Harry knew that the euphoria from earlier had evaporated. He went to his chair.

‘There’s one possible way we could get a foothold as Bellman suggested,’ he said softly, knowing that he no longer had to work to gain attention. ‘Cast your minds back to Leike’s house and the break-in. Let’s assume our killer broke into Leike’s place to ring Elias Skog from there. And let’s assume that our white-clad crime scene officers were doing such a thorough job, as it appeared when I arrived and inadvertently… bumped into Holm…’ Bjorn Holm tilted his head and sent Harry a spare-methe-jokes look. ‘… Shouldn’t we already have fingerprints from Holmenveien that might well be… Prince Charming’s?’

The sun lit up the room again. The others exchanged glances. Ashamed almost. So simple. So obvious. And none of them had thought of it…

‘It’s been a long meeting with lots of new information,’ Bellman said. ‘Our brains are clearly beginning to get a bit sluggish. But what do you think about this, Holm?’

Bjorn Holm slapped his forehead. ‘Course we’ve got all the fingerprints. We did the investigation thinking Leike was the killer and his house a possible crime scene. We were hoping to find fingerprints that would match some of the victims’.’

‘Have you got many that were not identified?’ Bellman asked.

‘That’s the point,’ said Bjorn Holm, smiling. ‘Leike had two Polish women who did the cleaning once a week. They’d been there six days before and done a thorough job. So we only found prints for Leike himself, Lene Galtung, the two Polish women and an unknown person whose prints definitely did not match those of the victims. We stopped looking for matches after Leike came up with his alibi and was released. But I don’t remember off the top of my head where we found the unknown prints.’