The Leopard(173)

‘I wanted to avoid having to speak in public,’ Sigurd said with an ironic smile. ‘I assumed as a nurse I would be exempt.’

‘I rang a speech therapist today, and he told me it depends which muscles are damaged. In theory, even with half a tongue you can train yourself to speak almost perfectly again.’

‘The “s”s are tricky without the tip of a tongue. Was that what gave me away?’

Harry rolled down the window and lit his cigarette. Inhaled so hard the paper crackled and rustled.

‘That was one of the things. But we went off on the wrong track for a while. The speech therapist told me that people have a tendency to associate lisping with male homosexuality. In English it’s called a “gay lisp” and does not constitute lisping in a speech-therapy sense, it’s just a different way of articulating the letter “s”. Gay men can switch lisping on and off, they use it as a sort of code. And the code works. The speech therapist told me an American university had done some linguistic research to see whether it was possible to deduce sexual tendencies in people by listening only to recorded speech. The results were fairly accurate; however, it transpired that the perception of a gay lisp was so strong that it overrode other language signals that were characteristic of heteros. When the receptionist at Hotel Bristol said that the man asking after Iska Peller spoke in an effeminate way he was a victim of stereotypical thinking. It was only when he acted out how the person had spoken that I realised he had allowed himself to be duped by the lisp.’

‘There must have been a bit more than that.’

‘Yes indeed. Bristol. It’s a suburb in Sydney, Australia. I can see you’ve twigged the connection now.’

‘Hang on,’ Bjørn said. ‘I haven’t.’

Harry blew smoke out of the window. ‘The Snowman told me. The killer wanted to be close. He had crossed my field of vision, he had cosied up to me. So when a bottle of Bristol Cream crossed my field of vision, I clicked at long last. I remembered seeing the same name, and telling someone something. Someone who had cosied up to me. And then I realised that what I had said had been misunderstood. I gave Iska Peller’s place of residence as Bristol. By which the person inferred I meant Hotel Bristol in Oslo. I said that to you, Sigurd. At the hospital right after the avalanche.’

‘You have a good memory.’

‘For some things. When suspicion first fell on you, other things became quite obvious. Like you saying that you have to work in anaesthestics to get hold of ketanome in Norway. Like a friend of mine saying that we often desire those things we see every day, which would suggest that whoever has sexual fantasies about women dressed in a nurse’s outfit may work at a hospital. Like the the computer at the Kadok factory being called Nashville, the name of a film directed by . . .’

‘Robert Altman in 1975,’ Sigurd said. ‘A much underrated masterpiece.’

‘And the chair at the headquarters being, it goes without saying, a director’s chair. For the master director, Sigurd Altman.’

Sigurd didn’t react.

‘But still I didn’t know what your motive was,’ Harry continued. ‘The Snowman told me that the killer was driven by hatred. And the hatred was engendered by one single event, one that lay back in the mists of time. Perhaps I already had a hunch. The tongue. The lisping. I got a friend from Bergen to do a bit of digging on Sigurd Altman. It took her about thirty seconds to discover your change of name on the national register and to connect it with the old name mentioned in Tony Leike’s conviction for assault.’

A cigarette was flicked out of the Cherokee window leaving a trail of sparks.

‘So there was just the question of the timeline left,’ Harry said. ‘We checked the duty roster at Rikshospital. That seems to give you an alibi for two of the murders. You were working when Marit Olsen and Borgny Stem-Myhre were killed. But both murders were committed in Oslo, and no one at the hospital can remember with certainty having seen you at the times in question. And since you travel between departments no one would have missed you if they hadn’t seen you for a couple of hours. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you’ll tell me you spend most of your free time alone. And indoors.’

Sigurd Altman shrugged. ‘Probably.’

‘So there we are,’ Harry said with a clap of his hands.

‘Just a minute,’ Altman said. ‘The story you’ve told is pure fiction. You don’t have a scrap of evidence.’

‘Oh, I forgot to say. You remember the snaps I showed you earlier today? The ones I asked you to flick through and you said were sticky?’