The Leopard(112)

‘We don’t have a prime suspect any more,’ he said. ‘But the good news is we have fresh leads. And they all take us from the Håvass cabin to Ustaoset.’

He went to the laptop, tapped a key and the first page of a PowerPoint presentation he had prepared came to life.

Half an hour later he had been through all the facts they possessed, with names, times and assumed routes.

‘The question’, he said, switching off the computer, ‘is what kind of murders we are dealing with here. I think we can exclude the typical serial killer. The victims have not been chosen at random inside a demographic group; they are tied to a specific place and a specific time. Accordingly, there is reason to believe that we are also talking about a specific motive which may even be perceived as rational. If so, that makes the task considerably easier for us: find the motive and we have the killer.’

Bellman saw several detectives nod.

‘The problem is that there are no witnesses to tell us anything. The only one we know to be alive, Iska Peller, was ill in bed, alone. The others are either dead or have not come forward. We know, for example, that Adele Vetlesen was with a man she had met recently, but no one in her circle of acquaintances seems to know anything about him, so we have to assume it was a short-lived relationship. We’re looking at the men she contacted by phone or on the Net, but it will take time to work our way through them. And in the absence of witnesses we will have to find our own starting point. We need hypotheses for the motive. What is the motive for killing at least four people?’

‘Jealousy or hearing voices,’ someone from the back replied.

‘All our experience tells us that.’

‘Agreed. Who might hear voices commanding them to kill?’

‘Anyone with a psychiatric record,’ came a sing-song response from Finnmark.

‘And anyone without one,’ said someone else.

‘Good. Who might be jealous?’

‘Partner or spouse of someone there.’

‘And who might that be?’

‘But we’ve checked the victims’ partners’ alibis and potential motives,’ another said. ‘That’s the first thing we do. And either they didn’t have partners or we eliminated them from our inquiries.’

Mikael Bellman knew all too well they were just putting their foot on the accelerator while the wheels spun round in the same rut they had been in for a while, but the important point now was that they were ready to do exactly that: to put their foot down. For he was in no doubt that the Håvass cabin was a plank that could be levered under the wheel to get them out of the rut.

‘We didn’t eliminate all the partners and spouses,’ Bellman said, rocking on his heels. ‘We just didn’t think every one was a suspect. Who didn’t have an alibi for the time his wife was killed?’

‘Rasmus Olsen!’

‘Correct. And when I went to Stortinget and spoke to Rasmus Olsen he admitted that there had been what he called a little “jealous patch” some months ago. A woman Rasmus had been flirting with. And Marit Olsen went to the Håvass cabin for a couple of days to think things over. The days may match. Perhaps she did more than think. Perhaps she got her own back. And here’s a thought. On the night in question, when the victims were at the Håvass cabin, Rasmus Olsen was not in Oslo; he was booked into a hotel in Ustaoset. What was Rasmus doing in the area if his wife was in Håvass? And did he spend the night in the hotel or did he go for a longish skiing trip?’

The eyes in front of him were no longer heavy-lidded or tired, quite the opposite, he was igniting a spark in them. He waited for an answer. Such a large investigative group was not normally the most efficient way to organise this kind of improvised brainstorming, but they had worked on the case for so long that everyone in the room had had their slants, their sure-fire hunches and fanciful hypotheses rejected and their egos flattened.

A young detective took a punt. ‘He may have arrived at the cabin in the evening unannounced and caught her in the act. The guy saw and sneaked off again. Then planned the whole thing at his leisure.’

‘Maybe,’ Bellman said, going over to the speaker’s chair and holding up a note. ‘Argument one in favour of such a theory: I’ve just been given this by Telenor. It shows that Rasmus Olsen spoke to his wife on the phone some time that morning. So let’s assume he knew which cabin she was going to. Argument two in favour of this hypothesis is the weather report, which shows there was a moon and clear visibility all evening and night, so he could easily have skied there, as Tony Leike did. Argument one against the hypothesis: why kill anyone apart from his wife and her alleged partner?’