Silent but wide-eyed faces.
‘Do you mean that Prince Charming rang Elias Skog from Leike’s house?’ said the Pelican. ‘How … ?’
‘When Leike came to Police HQ he told me there had been a breakin through the cellar door a few days earlier. That matches the time of the phone call to Skog. Prince Charming took a bike to disguise it as a standard burglary, innocent enough for us to make a note of it, but no more than that. Leike knows we don’t do anything about that kind of break-in, so he didn’t even report it. And with that Prince Charming had planted some irrefutable evidence against Leike.’
‘What a snake!’ the Pelican erupted.
‘I buy the explanation of how,’ Beate Lønn said. ‘But why? Why finger Tony Leike?’
‘Because he knew that sooner or later we would link the murders with the Håvass cabin,’ Harry said. ‘And that would limit the number of suspects in such a way that everyone who had been there that night would have the spotlight on them. There were two reasons he tore out the page from the guest book. Number one, he had the names of those who were there, so that he could find them and kill them at his leisure, while we didn’t and were therefore unable to stop him. Number two, and more important, he could keep his own name hidden.’
‘Logical,’ Ærdal said. ‘And to make quite sure we didn’t go after him he had to supply us with an apparent guilty party. Tony Leike.’
‘And that’s why he had to wait until the end to kill Tony Leike,’ said one of the detectives, a man with a fertile Fridtjof Nansen moustache whose surname was all Harry could recall.
His neighbour, a young man with bright, shiny skin and eyes, none of whose names Harry could remember, interjected: ‘But unfortunately for him Tony had an alibi for the times of the deaths. And since Tony’s role as a scapegoat was redundant now, it was finally time to kill enemy numero uno.’
The temperature in the room had risen, and the pale tentative winter sun seemed to be brightening the proceedings. They were making progress, the knot had finally loosened. Harry could see that Bellman was sitting further forward in his chair.
‘That’s all well and good,’ Beate Lønn said, and while Harry was waiting for the but, he clicked what she was going to ask, knew she was going to play the devil’s advocate because she knew he had the answers, ‘but why has Prince Charming made this so unnecessarily complicated?’
‘Because humans are complicated,’ Harry said and could hear an echo of something he had heard and forgotten. ‘We want to do things that are complex, that mesh, where we control our fates and can feel like rulers of our own universes. The room that burned down at the Kadok factory – do you know what it reminded me of most? A control room. The headquarters. And it’s not certain he even planned to take Leike’s life. Perhaps he just wanted him arrested and convicted.’
The silence was so pervasive that they could hear a bird twittering outside.
‘Why?’ asked the Pelican. ‘If he could have killed him? Or tortured him?’
‘Because pain and death are not the worst that can befall mankind,’ Harry said, again hearing the echo. ‘Humiliation is. That was what he wanted for Leike. The humiliation of having everything you possess taken from you. The fall, the shame.’
He saw a tiny smile playing on Beate Lønn’s lips, saw her give a nod of acknowledgement.
‘But,’ he continued, ‘as has been indicated, Tony had – unluckily for our killer – an alibi. And so Tony got away with the subsidiary punishment. Which was a slow and decidedly brutal death.’
In the ensuing silence Harry sensed something flutter past. The smell of roasted meat. Then the room seemed to draw breath all at once.
‘So what do we do now?’ asked the Pelican.
Harry looked up. The twittering bird on the branch outside the window was a chaffinch. A migratory bird which had arrived too soon. Which gave people hopes of spring, but which froze to death on the first frosty night.
Buggered if I know, Harry thought. Buggered if I know.
68
Pike
IT WAS A LONG KRIPOS MEETING THAT MORNING.
Bjørn Holm reported back on the forensic investigations at Kadok. No semen was found, nor any other physical evidence of the perpetrator. The room he had used was indeed completely burned out, and the computer had been reduced to a lump of metal, leaving no chance of recovering any data.
‘He’s probably been online using those unsecured networks in the area. Nydalen’s full of them.’
‘He must have left some electronic trails,’ Ærdal said, but it sounded more like a refrain he had heard than something he could expatiate on beyond ‘must have’ speculation.