The Leopard(159)

‘Of course, we could apply to access some of the hundreds of networks up there and search for whatever it is we don’t know,’ Holm said. ‘But I have no idea how many weeks it could take. Or whether we would find anything.’

‘Leave it to me,’ Harry said. He had already got up and was on his way to the door while keying in a number. ‘I know someone.’

He left the door ajar, and while he was waiting for an answer he heard one of the detectives say that no one they had spoken to had seen anyone come or go at Kadok, but that was not so surprising since it was hidden behind trees and bushes and, anyway, it was so dark now, in the winter months.

Harry got an answer. ‘Katrine Bratt’s secretary.’

‘Hello?’

‘Frøken Bratt is at lunch right now.’

‘Sorry, Katrine, but eating will have to wait. Listen . . .’

Katrine listened as Harry explained what he wanted.

‘Prince Charming had pictures on the wall that had probably been printed off Internet news sites. With the search engine you could get onto the networks in the area, check the server logs and find out who has been on the news pages which covered the murders. Loads of people must have been—’

‘Not as much as he was,’ Katrine said. ‘I’ll just ask for a list sorted according the number of downloads.’

‘Mm. You’ve learned this quickly.’

‘It’s in the name. Katrine Bratt. Bratt, steep. Steep learning curve. Get it?’

Harry went back to the others.

They were playing the message that Harry had received from Leike’s mobile phone. It had been sent to NTNU, the technical university in Trondheim, for voice analysis. They had achieved useful results with sound recordings of bank robberies, in fact better than with CCTV, as the voice – even if you try to distort it – is very difficult to disguise. But Bjørn Holm had been told that a bad recording of an indeterminate sound, coughing or laughter, was worthless and could not be used to make a voice profile.

‘Damn,’ said Bellman, banging the table with his hand. ‘With a voice profile, a foothold, we could have started eliminating possible suspects from the case.’

‘Which possible suspects?’ mumbled Ærdal.

‘The base station signal tells us that whoever used Leike’s phone was near the centre of Ustaoset when he rang,’ Holm said. ‘The signal faded straight afterwards – the operators’ network only has coverage around the centre of Ustaoset. But the fact that the signal faded strengthens the theory that it was Prince Charming who had the phone.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Even when the phone’s not being used the base station will pick up signals every other hour. The fact that it didn’t receive any signals shows that the phone, before or after the call, was in the deserted mountain region around Ustaoset. Where perhaps it was carried during the avalanche and torture and so on.’

No reaction. Harry knew that the euphoria from earlier had evaporated. He went to his chair.

‘There’s one possible way we could get a foothold as Bellman suggested,’ he said softly, knowing that he no longer had to work to gain attention. ‘Cast your minds back to Leike’s house and the break-in. Let’s assume our killer broke into Leike’s place to ring Elias Skog from there. And let’s assume that our white-clad crime scene officers were doing such a thorough job, as it appeared when I arrived and inadvertently … bumped into Holm . . .’ Bjørn Holm tilted his head and sent Harry a spare-methe-jokes look. ‘… Shouldn’t we already have fingerprints from Holmenveien that might well be … Prince Charming’s?’

The sun lit up the room again. The others exchanged glances. Ashamed almost. So simple. So obvious. And none of them had thought of it . . .

‘It’s been a long meeting with lots of new information,’ Bellman said. ‘Our brains are clearly beginning to get a bit sluggish. But what do you think about this, Holm?’

Bjørn Holm slapped his forehead. ‘Course we’ve got all the fingerprints. We did the investigation thinking Leike was the killer and his house a possible crime scene. We were hoping to find fingerprints that would match some of the victims’.’

‘Have you got many that were not identified?’ Bellman asked.

‘That’s the point,’ said Bjørn Holm, smiling. ‘Leike had two Polish women who did the cleaning once a week. They’d been there six days before and done a thorough job. So we only found prints for Leike himself, Lene Galtung, the two Polish women and an unknown person whose prints definitely did not match those of the victims. We stopped looking for matches after Leike came up with his alibi and was released. But I don’t remember off the top of my head where we found the unknown prints.’