The Leopard(123)

‘Dad said you were home! Why haven’t you rung before?’

‘I wasn’t ready, Sis. Now I am. Are you?’

‘I’m always ready, Harry. You know that.’

‘Yes, I do. Lunch in town before visiting Dad some time soon? My treat.’

‘Yes! You sound happy, Harry. Is it Rakel? Have you been speaking to her? I spoke to her yesterday. What was that sound? Harry?’

‘Just the crispbreads falling out of the packet onto the floor. What did she want?’

‘To ask about Dad. She’d heard he’s ill.’

‘Was that all?’

‘Yes. No. She said Oleg was fine.’

Harry swallowed. ‘Good. Let’s talk soon then.’

‘Don’t forget. I’m so happy you’re home, Harry! I have so much to tell you!’

Harry put the phone on the worktop and was bending down to pick up the crispbreads when the phone hummed again. Sis was like that, remembering things she should have said after they had rung off. He straightened up.

‘What is it?’

Sonorous clearing of throat. Then a voice introduced itself as Abel. The name was familiar, and Harry instantly ransacked his memory. There were the files of old murder cases, neatly organised with data that never seemed to be deleted: names, faces, house numbers, dates, sound of a voice, colour and year of a car. But he could suddenly forget the name of neighbours who had lived in his block for three years or when Oleg’s birthday was. They called that the detective memory.

Harry listened without interrupting.

‘I see,’ he said at length. ‘Thank you for ringing.’

He hung up and tapped in a new number.

‘Kripos,’ answered a weary receptionist. ‘You are trying to get through to Mikael Bellman.’

‘Yes. Hole from Crime Squad. Where’s Bellman?’

The receptionist informed him of the POB’s whereabouts.

‘Logical,’ Harry said.

‘I beg your pardon,’ she yawned.

‘That’s what he’s doing, isn’t it?’

Harry slipped the phone into his pocket. Stared out of the kitchen window. Crispbread crunched under his feet as he walked.

‘Skøyen Climbing Club’ it said on the glass door facing the car park. Harry pushed the door and entered. On his way in, he had to wait for a class of excited schoolchildren on their way out. He flipped off his boots by a shoe rack at the bottom of the stairs. In the large hall, there were half a dozen people climbing up the ten-metre-high walls, although they looked more like the artificial papier mâché mountainsides of Tarzan films Harry and Øystein had seen at Symra cinema when they were kids. Except that these were peppered with multicoloured holds and pegs with loops and carabiner hooks. A discreet smell of soap and sweaty feet emanated from the blue mats on the floor that Harry walked across. He stopped beside a bow-legged, squat man staring intently up at the overhang above them. A rope went from his climbing harness to a man who at that moment was swinging like a pendulum from one arm eight metres above them. At the end of one arc he swung up a foot, threaded the heel under a pink, pear-shaped hold, put the other foot on a piece of the structure and clipped the climbing rope into the top anchor in one elegant sweeping movement.

‘Gotcha!’ he shouted, leaned back on the rope and placed his legs against the wall.

‘Great heel hook,’ Harry said. ‘Your boss is a bit of a poseur, isn’t he?’

Jussi Kolkka neither answered nor graced Harry with a glance, just pulled the lever on the rope brake.

‘Your receptionist told me you’d be here,’ Harry said to the man being lowered towards them.

‘Regular slot every week,’ Bellman said. ‘One of the perks of being a policeman is being able to train during working hours. How are you, Harry? Muscles look defined at any rate. Lots of muscle per kilo, I reckon. Ideal for climbing, you know.’

‘For limited ambitions,’ Harry said.

Bellman landed with legs shoulder-width apart and pulled down some rope so that he could slacken the figure-of-eight knot.

‘I didn’t understand that.’

‘I can’t see the point of climbing so high. I clamber around a few crags now and then.’

‘Clambering,’ Bellman snorted, loosening the harness and stepping out of it. ‘You know, it hurts more to fall from two metres without a rope than it does from thirty metres with one?’

‘Yes,’ Harry said, a smile tugging at his mouth. ‘I know.’

Bellman sat down on one of the wooden benches, pulled off the balletshoe-like climbing slippers and rubbed his feet while Kolkka brought down the rope and started to gather it in a coil. ‘You got my message?’