The Leopard(183)

Mikael Bellman studied Sigurd Altman. He didn’t like his cold eyes. Didn’t like the bony body, the teeth pressing against the inside of his lips, the staccato movements or the clumsy lisp. But he didn’t need to like Sigurd Altman to see him as his redeemer and benefactor. For every word Altman said, Bellman was a step nearer his triumph.

‘I assume you’ve read Harry Hole’s report presenting the course of events,’ Altman said.

‘You mean Skai’s report?’ Bellman said. ‘Skai’s presentation?’

Altman let slip a wry smile. ‘As you prefer. The story Harry told was astonishingly accurate, anyway. The problem with it is that it contains only one concrete piece of evidence. My fingerprints at Leike’s. Well, let’s say I was there. I was paying him a visit. And we talked about the good old days.’

Bellman shrugged. ‘And you think a jury will fall for that?’

‘I like to think I can inspire trust. But . . .’ Altman’s lips stretched and revealed his gums, ‘… now I won’t ever have to face a jury, will I.’

Harry found the woodpile under a green tarpaulin beneath a rock jutting out from the mountainside. An axe stood bowed in a chopping block, beside it a knife. Harry looked around and kicked the snow. Not much of interest here. His boot brushed something. An empty white plastic bag. He bent down. On it was a contents label. Ten metres of gauze. What was that doing here?

Harry angled his head and examined the chopping block for a few moments. Looked at the black blade in the wood. At the knife. At the handle. Yellow, smooth. What was a knife doing on a chopping block? Could be several reasons, of course, yet . . .

He laid his right hand on the block in such a way that the remaining stump of his middle finger pointed upwards and the other fingers pressed down beside it.

Harry freed the knife cautiously with two fingers at the top of the handle. The blade was as sharp as a razor. With traces of the material he was always seeing in his profession. Then he ran like an elk on long legs through the deep snow.

Bjørn looked up from the computer as Harry burst in. ‘Just more Tony Leike,’ he sighed.

‘There’s blood on the blade,’ Harry said, out of breath. ‘Check the handle for prints.’

Bjørn held the knife with care. Sprinkled black powder on the smooth, varnished yellow wood and blew gently.

‘There’s only one set of prints here; however, they are tasty,’ he said. ‘Maybe there are epithel cells here, too.’

‘Yess!’ Harry said.

‘What’s the deal?’

‘Whoever left the fingerprint cut off Leike’s finger.’

‘Oh? What makes you—’

‘There’s blood on the chopping block. And he had gauze ready to bandage the wound. And I have an inkling I’ve seen that knife before. On a grainy photo of Adele Vetlesen.’

Bjørn Holm whistled softly, pressed the transparency against the handle so that the powder stuck. Then he put the transparency on the scanner.

‘Sigurd Altman, you might have got a good lawyer to explain away the prints on Leike’s desk,’ Harry whispered while Bjørn pressed the search button and they both followed the blue line that moved in fits and starts towards the right of the bar. ‘But not the print on this knife.’

Ready . . .

Found 1 match.

Bjørn Holm pressed ‘show’.

Harry stared at the name that came up.

‘Still think the print belongs to the person who cut off Tony’s finger?’ Bjørn Holm asked.





78


The Deal


‘AFTER I SAW ADELE AND TONY BANGING AWAY LIKE DOGS by the toilet, everything came back to me. Everything I had succeeded in burying. Everything the psychologist said I had put behind me. It was like an animal that had been chained up, but it had been fed, it had grown and was stronger than ever. And now it was free. Harry was quite right. I planned to avenge myself on Tony by humiliating him just as he had done to me.’

Sigurd Altman looked down at his hands and smiled.

‘However, from thereon Harry was wrong. I didn’t plan Adele’s murder. I just wanted to humiliate Tony in public. Particularly in front of those he hoped would become his in-laws, the milch cow Galtung who was to finance that Congo adventure of his. Why would someone like Tony bother to marry a field mouse like Lene Galtung otherwise?’

‘True enough,’ smiled Mikael Bellman, to show he was on his side.

‘So I wrote a letter to Tony pretending to be Adele. I wrote that he had made me pregnant and I wanted the child. However, as a future single mother I would have to provide for it, and therefore I wanted silence money. Four hundred thousand first time round. He was to show up at midnight in the car park behind Lefdal electrical appliances in Sandvika with the money two days later. Then I sent Adele a letter, pretending to be Tony, and asked if we could meet at the same time and place for a date. I knew the setting would be to Adele’s taste, and I assumed they hadn’t exchanged names and phone numbers, if you know what I mean. The deception wouldn’t be discovered until it was too late, until I had what I wanted. At eleven I was in position, sitting in my car with a camera ready. The plan was to take photos of the rendezvous however it ended up, a row or bonking, and to send the whole lot to Anders Galtung with the revelatory story. That was all.’