Cockroaches(102)
Liz looked at her watch. It was half past eight, and she and Harry had been sitting in Millie’s Karaoke for close on an hour. Even Madonna was beginning to look impatient rather than hungry in the photo.
“Where is he?” she said.
“Løken will come,” Harry said. He was standing by the window; he had pulled up the blind and saw his own reflection run through by car headlights crawling past on Silom Road.
“When did you talk to him?”
“Straight after talking to you. He was at home, tidying up the photos and camera equipment. Løken will come.”
He pressed the backs of his hands against his eyes. They had been irritated and red when he woke up today.
“Let’s make a start,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“We have to go through everything,” Harry said. “One last reconstruction.”
“OK. But why?”
“Liz, we’ve been on the wrong track the whole time.”
He let go of the cord, the blind crashed down and it sounded as if something was falling through thick foliage.
* * *
Løken was sitting in a chair. A line of knives lay on the table in front of him. Each one of them was capable of killing a man in seconds. Indeed it was strange how easy it was to kill another human being. So easy that now and then it seemed incredible that most people got as old as they did. One circular movement, like peeling an orange, and the throat was cut. Blood pumped out at such a rate that death occurred in seconds, at least if the murder was carried out by someone who knew their trade.
A stab to the back required greater precision. You could strike twenty to thirty times without hitting anything in particular; you were just hacking away harmlessly at human flesh. But if you knew your anatomy, knew how to puncture a lung or the heart, it was child’s play. If you stabbed from the front it was best to aim low and pull upward so that you got under the rib cage and reached the vital organs. But it was easier from behind, as long as you aimed to the side of the spine.
How easy was it to shoot someone? Very easy. The first time he had killed was with a semiautomatic in Korea. He had taken aim, pulled the trigger and seen a man fall. That was it. Never any pangs of conscience, nightmares or nervous breakdowns. Perhaps because it was war, but he didn’t believe that was the whole explanation. Perhaps he lacked empathy? A psychologist had explained to him that he was a pedophile because he had a damaged soul. He might just as well have said evil.
“OK, listen carefully now.” Harry had taken a seat opposite Liz. “On the day of the murder the ambassador’s car went to Ove Klipra’s house at seven o’clock, but the ambassador wasn’t driving.”
“He wasn’t?”
“No. The guard doesn’t remember seeing anyone in a yellow suit.”
“So?”
“You’ve seen the suit, Liz. It would make a petrol-pump attendant seem discreet. Do you think you would forget a suit like that?”
She shook her head, and Harry continued.
“The driver parked the car in the garage, rang the bell by the side door and when Klipra opened up he was probably looking straight down a gun muzzle. The visitor went inside, closed the door and politely asked Klipra to open his mouth.”
“Politely?”
“I’m trying to give the story a bit of color. OK?”
Liz pursed her lips and placed a finger over them.
“Then he inserted the gun barrel, ordered Klipra to bite and fired, cold-blooded, ruthless. The bullet went through the back of Klipra’s head and into the wall. The murderer wiped up the blood and … well, you know what a mess that makes.”
Liz nodded and waved him on.
“In short: the mystery person removed all the traces. At the end, he fetched the screwdriver from the boot and used it to lever the bullet out of the wall.”
“How do you know that?”
“I found plaster on the floor in the hall and a hole left by the bullet. Forensics has proved it’s the same limewash solution we found on the screwdriver in the boot.”
“And then?”
“Then the murderer left again in the car and moved the ambassador’s body so that he could put the screwdriver back in its place.”
“So he’d already killed the ambassador?”
“I’ll come back to that later. The murderer changed into the ambassador’s suit, then he entered Klipra’s office, took one of the two Shan knives and the keys to the hideaway. He also made a quick call from Klipra’s office and took along the tape of the conversation. Then he dumped Klipra’s body in the boot and drove off at around eight.”
“This is pretty hard to follow, Harry.”