The Leopard(12)

Of course, she could not be sure that this was the same person, but something about the sound of the footsteps told her it was. There was just a bit of the slope up to the Monolith, then it was an easy downhill run home, to Skøyen, her husband and a reassuringly unprepossessing, overfed Rottweiler. The steps came closer. And now it was not so wonderful that it was ten at night and the park was dark and deserted. Marit Olsen was frightened of several things, but primarily she was frightened of foreigners. Yes, indeed, she knew it was xenophobia and ran counter to party policy, but fearing whatever is alien nevertheless constitutes a sensible survival strategy. Right now she wished she had voted against all the immigrant-friendly bills her party had pushed, and that she had shot from her notorious hip a bit more.

Her body was moving all too slowly, her thigh muscles ached, her lungs were screaming for air, and she knew that soon she would not be able to move at all. Her brain tried to combat the fear, tried to tell her she was not exactly an obvious victim for rape.

Fear had borne her aloft, she could see over the hill now, down to Madserud allé. A car was reversing out of a garden gate. She could make it, there was little more than a hundred metres left. Marit Olsen ran onto the slippery grass, down the slope, only just managing to stay on her feet. She could no longer hear the steps behind her, everything was drowned out by her panting. The car had backed onto the road now, there was a crash of gears as the driver went from reverse to first. Marit was nearing the bottom, only a few metres left to the road, to the blessed cones of light emitted by the headlamps. Her considerable body weight had a slight start on her in the descent, and now it was relentlessly pulling her forward. Such that her legs could no longer keep up. She fell headlong, into the road, into the light. Her stomach, encased in sweaty polyester, hit the tarmac, and she half slid, half rolled forward. Then Marit lay still, the bitter taste of road dust in her mouth and her grazed palms stinging from contact with gravel.

Someone was standing over her. Grabbed her shoulders. With a groan she rolled onto her side and held her arms over her face in defence. Not a commando, just an elderly man wearing a hat. The car door behind him was open.

‘Are you alright, frøken?’ he enquired.

‘What d’you think?’ said Marit Olsen, feeling the anger boil inside her.

‘Hang on! I’ve seen you somewhere before.’

‘Well, that’s a turn-up,’ she said, waving away his helping hand and struggling noisily to her feet.

‘Aren’t you in that comedy programme?’

‘You . . .’ she said, staring into the dark, silent void of the park and massaging her notorious hip, ‘… mind your own bloody business, grandpa.’





6


Homecoming


A VOLVO AMAZON, THE LAST TO ROLL OUT OF THE VOLVO factory in 1970, had stopped in front of the pedestrian crossing by the arrivals terminal at Gardemoen Airport in Oslo.

A crocodile of nursery children paraded past the car in chafing rain gear. Some of them glanced with curiosity at the strange old car with rally stripes along the bonnet, and at the two men behind the windscreen wipers swishing away the morning rain.

The man in the passenger seat, Politioverbetjent, shortened to POB, Gunnar Hagen, knew that the sight of children walking in hand in hand ought to make him smile and think of solidarity, consideration for others and a society where everyone looked after everyone else. But Hagen’s first association was a search party hunting for a person they expected to find dead. That was what working as the head of Crime Squad did to you. Or, as some wit had written in English on Harry Hole’s office door: I see dead people.

‘What the heck’s a nursery class doing at an airport?’ asked the man in the driver’s seat. His name was Bjørn Holm, and the Amazon was his dearest possession. The mere smell of the noisy but uncannily efficient heater, the sweat-ingrained imitation leather and the dusty rear shelf gave him inner peace. Especially if it was accompanied by the engine at the right revs, that is about eighty kilometres an hour on the flat, and Hank Williams on the cassette player. Bjørn Holm from Krimteknisk, the Forensics Unit in Bryn, was a hillbilly from Skreia with snakeskin cowboy boots, a moon face and bulging eyes which lent him a constantly surprised expression. This face had caused more than one leader of an investigation to misjudge Bjørn Holm. The truth was that he was the greatest crime-scene talent since the glory days of Weber. Holm was wearing a soft suede jacket with fringes and a knitted Rastafarian hat from under which grew the most vigorous, intensely red sideburns Hagen had seen this side of the North Sea and they as good as covered his cheeks.