The Leopard(16)
‘They’ll detail a policeman to keep an eye on me,’ she said. ‘And the press will want to know why a woman MP no one has ever heard of should be walking around with a bloody bodyguard at the taxpayer’s expense. And when they find out why – she suspected someone had been following her in the park – they will write that with that kind of reasoning every woman in Oslo will be asking for state-subsidised police protection. I don’t want any protection. Drop it.’
Rasmus laughed silently and used his fingers to massage his approval.
* * *
The wind howled through the leafless trees in Frogner Park. A duck with its head drawn deep into its plumage drifted across the pitch-black surface of the lake. Rotting leaves stuck to the tiles of the empty pools at Frogner Lido. The place seemed abandoned for all eternity, a lost world. The wind blew up a storm in the deep pool and sang its monotonous lament beneath the ten-metre-high diving tower that stood out against the night sky like a gallows.
8
Snow Patrøl
IT WAS THREE O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON WHEN HARRY awoke. He opened his bag, put in a set of clean clothes, found a woollen coat in the wardrobe and went out. The drizzle roused Harry enough for him to look moderately sober as he entered the brown, smoky rooms of Schrøder’s. His table was taken, so he went into the corner, under the TV.
He looked around. He spotted a couple of faces he hadn’t seen before, hunched over beer glasses, otherwise time had stood still. Rita came and placed a white mug and a steel jug of coffee in front of him.
‘Harry,’ she said. Not as a form of welcome, but to confirm that it was indeed he.
Harry nodded. ‘Hi, Rita. Old newspapers?’
Rita scuttled off to the back room and returned with a pile of yellowing papers. Harry had never been given a clear explanation as to why they kept newspapers at Schrøder’s, but he had benefited from this arrangement on more than one occasion.
‘Been a long time,’ said Rita and was gone. And Harry remembered what he liked about Schrøder’s, apart from its being the closest taproom to his flat. The short sentences. And respect for your private life. Your return was noted; no elucidation was required.
Harry downed two mugs of the surprisingly unpleasant coffee while flicking through the newspapers in a fast-forward kind of way to furnish himself with a general perspective of what had happened in the kingdom over the last months. Not much, as usual. Which was what he liked best about Norway.
Someone had won Norwegian Idol, a celeb had been eliminated from a dance competition, a footballer in the third division had been caught taking cocaine, and Lene Galtung, daughter of the shipping magnate Anders Galtung, had pre-inherited some of the millions and got engaged to a better-looking but presumably less affluent investor called Tony. The editor of Liberal, Arve Støp, wrote that for a nation wanting to stand out as a social-democratic model, it was beginning to be embarrassing that Norway was still a monarchy. Nothing had changed.
In the December newspapers Harry saw the first articles about the murders. He recognised Kaja’s description of the crime scene, a basement in an office complex under construction in Nydalen. The cause of death was unclear, but the police suspected foul play.
Harry thumbed through, preferring to read about a politician who boasted that he was standing down to spend more time with his family.
Schrøder’s newspaper archives were by no means complete, but the second murder appeared in a paper dated a couple of weeks later.
The woman had been found behind a wrecked Datsun dumped at the edge of a wood by Lake Daudsjøen in Maridalen. The police did not rule out a ‘criminal act’, but nor did they reveal any details about the cause of death.
Harry’s eyes scanned the article and established that the reason for police silence was the usual: they had no leads, nada, the radar was sweeping across an open sea of nothingness.
Only two murders. Yet Hagen had seemed so certain of his facts when he said this was a serial killer. So, what was the connection? What was it that the press didn’t say? Harry could feel his brain beginning to pursue the old, familiar paths; he cursed himself for his inability to refrain and continued to leaf through.
When the steel coffee jug was empty, he left a crumpled banknote on the table and went into the street. Tightened his coat around him and squinted up at the grey sky.
He hailed an unoccupied taxi, which pulled into the kerb. The driver leaned across and the rear door swung open. A trick you rarely saw nowadays, and one Harry decided to reward with a tip. Not just because he could step right in, but because the window in the door had reflected a face at the wheel of a car parked behind Harry.