Jo Nesbo - The Leopard

‘The print’s old,’ Harry said. ‘It was here before we moved in. What’s going on?’

The lookalike questioned Holm, who nodded that would be enough.

‘One of the prison wardens discovered this on the floor by the door,’ Hagen said, holding up an evidence bag containing a brown envelope. Through the transparent bag Harry read his name. Printed on an address label stuck to the envelope.

‘The prison warden reckoned it had been lying here for a couple of days max. People don’t go through this culvert every day, of course.’

‘We’re measuring the moisture in the paper,’ Bjorn said. ‘We’ve put a similar envelope here and are waiting to see how long it takes to reach the same level of moisture. Then we work backwards.’

‘There you go. Shades of CSI,’ Harry said.

‘Not that the timing will help us,’ Hagen said. ‘There are no surveillance cameras where I assume he must have been. Which, of course, is fairly straightforward. Into a busy reception area, in the lift, down here, no locked doors before you go up into the prison.’

‘No, why should we lock up here?’ Harry said. ‘Anyone object to me having a smoke?’

No one answered, but looks were eloquent enough. Harry shrugged.

‘I suppose at some point someone is going to tell me what was in the envelope,’ he said.

Bjorn Holm held up another evidence bag.

It was difficult to see the contents in the poor lighting, so Harry stepped closer.

‘Oh shit,’ he said and recoiled half a step.

‘The middle finger,’ Hagen said.

‘The finger looks as if it might have been broken first,’ Bjorn said. ‘Clean, smooth cut, no ragged skin. Chop. An axe. Or a large knife.’

From the culvert came the resonant sound of rapid strides approaching.

Harry stared. The finger was white, drained of blood, but the tip was a bluish-black.

‘What’s that? Have you taken fingerprints already?’

‘Yes,’ Bjorn said. ‘And if we’re lucky the answer is on its way.’

‘My guess is right hand,’ Harry said.

‘You’re correct. ‘Well observed,’ Hagen said.

‘Did the envelope contain anything else?’

‘No. Now you know as much as we do.’

‘Maybe,’ Harry said, fidgeting with the cigarette packet. ‘But I know something else about the finger.’

‘We thought about that, too,’ Hagen said, exchanging glances with Bjorn Holm. The sound of clomping steps rose. ‘The middle finger of the right hand. It’s the same finger the Snowman took off you.’

‘I’ve got something here,’ the female forensics officer interrupted.

The others turned to her.

She was squatting down holding an object between her thumb and first finger. It was greyish black. ‘Doesn’t it look like the tiny stones we found at the Borgny crime scene?’

Harry went closer. ‘Yup. Lava.’

The runner was a young man with a police ID card hanging from the breast pocket of his shirt. He stopped in front of Bjorn Holm, placed his hands on his knees and gasped for breath.

‘Well, Kim Erik?’ Holm said.

‘We found a match,’ the young man panted.

‘Let me guess,’ Harry said, poking a cigarette between his lips.

The others turned their attention to him.

‘Tony Leike.’

Kim Erik looked genuinely disappointed: ‘H-how…?’

‘I thought I saw his right hand protruding from under the scooter, and it wasn’t missing any fingers. So it must have been the left.’ Harry nodded towards the evidence bag. ‘The finger isn’t broken, it’s just distorted. Good old-fashioned arthritis. Hereditary but not contagious.’

The woman who opened the door of the terraced house in Hovseter was as broad-shouldered as a wrestler and as tall as Harry. She gazed at him and waited patiently, as if in the habit of giving people the necessary seconds to state their business.

‘Yes?’

Harry recognised Frida Larsen’s voice from the telephone. Which had made him visualise a slender, petite woman.

‘Harry Hole,’ he said. ‘I found your address through the phone number. Is Felix in?’

‘Out playing chess,’ she intoned flatly; a standard response, it seemed. ‘Email him.’

‘I would like to talk to him.’

‘What about?’ She filled the doorway in a manner that prevented prying. And not only through the size of her.

‘We found a fragment of lava down at the police station. I was wondering if it was from the same volcano as the previous sample we sent him.’

Harry stood two steps below her, holding the little stone. But she didn’t budge from the threshold.

‘Impossible to see,’ she said. ‘Email Felix.’ She made a move to close the door.

‘I suppose lava is lava, is it?’ Harry said.

She hesitated. Harry waited. He knew from experience that experts can never resist correcting laymen.

‘Each volcano has its own unique lava composition,’ she said. ‘But it also varies from eruption to eruption. You have to analyse the stone. The iron ore content can tell you a lot.’ Her face was expressionless, her eyes uninterested.

‘What I would really like,’ Harry said, ‘is to enquire about these people who travel round the world studying volcanoes. There can’t be that many of them, so I was wondering if Felix had an overview of the Norwegian contingent.’

‘There are more of us than you imagine,’ she said.

‘So you’re one of them?’

She shrugged.

‘What’s the last volcano you two were on?’

‘Ol Doinyo Lengai in Tanzania. And we weren’t on it, but nearby. It was erupting. Magmatic natrocarbonites. The lava that emerges is black, but it reacts with air and after a few hours it’s completely white. Like snow.’

Her voice and face were suddenly alive.

‘Why doesn’t he want to speak?’ Harry asked. ‘Is your brother mute?’

Her face went rigid again. The voice was flat and dead. ‘Email.’

The door was slammed so hard Harry got dust in his eyes.

Kaja parked in Maridalsveien, jumped over the crash barrier and trod carefully down the steep slope to the wood where the Kadok factory was situated. She switched on her torch and tramped through the shrubs, brushed away bare branches that wanted to thrust themselves into her face. The growth was dense, shadows leapt around like silent wolves and even when she stopped, listened and watched, shadows of trees fell upon trees, so that you didn’t know what was what, like in a labyrinth of mirrors. But she wasn’t frightened. It was an oddity that she who was so frightened of closed doors was not frightened of the dark. She listened to the roar of the river. Had she heard anything? A sound that ought not to be there? She went on. Ducked under a wind-blown tree trunk and stopped again. But the other sounds stopped the second she stopped. Kaja took a deep breath and finished her line of thought: as if someone who didn’t want to be seen was following her.

She turned and shone the light behind her. Was no longer so sure about not being scared of the dark. Some branches swayed in the light, but they must be the ones she had disturbed, mustn’t they?

She faced forward again.

And screamed when her torch lit up a deathly pale face with enlarged eyes. She dropped the torch and backed away, but the figure followed her with a grunting noise reminiscent of laughter. In the dark she could make out the figure bending down, standing up, then the next moment the blinding light from her torch was shining in her face.

She held her breath.

The grunted laughter stopped.

‘Here,’ rasped a man’s voice and the light jumped.

‘Here?’

‘Your torch,’ the voice said.

Kaja took it and shone the torch to the side of him. So that she could see him without blinding him. He had blond hair and a prognathous jaw.