The Leopard(186)

The stone. The dark stone he had found on the bathroom floor in the cabin. He put his hand in his pocket. It was still there. He tossed it over to Bjørn.

‘Tell me,’ he said with a gulp. ‘I came across this. Think it could be a tooth?’

Bjørn held it up to the light. Scraped it with his nail. ‘Could be.’

‘Let’s get back,’ Harry said, feeling the hairs on his neck prickle. ‘Now. It wasn’t bloody Altman who killed them.’

‘Oh?’

‘It was Tony Leike.’

‘You must have read in the papers that Tony Leike was released after being arrested,’ Bellman said. ‘He had a wonderful little thing called an alibi. He could prove he was somewhere else when Borgny and Charlotte died.’

‘I know nothing about that,’ Sigurd Altman said, crossing his arms. ‘I know only that I saw him stick a knife into Adele’s neck. And that the letters I sent caused the ostensible senders to be murdered straight afterwards.’

‘You’re aware that at least makes you an accessory to murder, aren’t you?’

Johan Krohn coughed. ‘And you’re aware, aren’t you, that you made a deal that will serve up the real killer on a silver platter, for you and Kripos? All your internal problems will be solved, Bellman. You’ll get all the credit, and you have a witness who will say in court that he saw Tony Leike kill Adele Vetlesen. What happened beyond that remains between you and me.’

‘And your client goes free?’

‘That’s the deal.’

‘What about if Leike kept the letters and they turn up at the trial?’ Bellman said. ‘Then we have a problem.’

‘That’s precisely why I have a feeling they won’t turn up,’ Krohn smiled. ‘Or, will they?’

‘What about the photographs you took of Adele and Tony?’

‘Went up in the blaze at Kadok,’ Altman said. ‘That bastard Hole.’

Mikael Bellman nodded slowly. Then he lifted his pen. S.T. Dupont. Lead and steel. It was heavy. Once he had set it to paper, though, it was as if the signature wrote itself.

‘Thanks,’ Harry said. ‘Over and out.’

He received a rasping sound by way of answer and then it was still, there was only the helicopter engine’s monotonous noise outside his headset. Harry bent the microphone and looked out.

Too late.

He had just finished talking over the radio to the tower at Gardemoen Airport. For security reasons they had access to most information, including passenger lists. And could confirm that Odd Utmo had travelled on his pre-booked ticket to Copenhagen two days ago.

The countryside moved slowly beneath them.

Harry visualised him standing there with the passport of the man he had tortured and killed. The man or the woman behind the counter routinely reading to see if the passport matched the name on the list and thinking – if they looked at the photo at all – that was one hell of a brace. Looked up and registered the same dental work on the probably artifically browned teeth in front of him, a brace which Tony Leike must have had to bend and cut to fit on top of his own porcelain highrises.

They flew into a rainstorm that exploded on the plexiglas bubble, ran to the sides in quivering streaks of water and disappeared. Seconds later it was as if they had never been there.

The finger.

Tony Leike had cut off his finger and sent it to Harry as a final red herring, to demonstrate that Tony Leike had to be considered dead. He could be forgotten, written off, put aside. Was it chance that Leike had chosen the same finger as Harry’s missing digit, that he had made himself like him?

But what about the alibi, his water-tight alibi?

Harry had entertained the thought before, but had rejected it because cold-blooded murderers are rarities, deviants, perverted souls in the true sense of the word. But could there have been someone else? Could the answer be as simple as Tony Leike working together with a sidekick?

‘Fuck!’ said Harry, loud enough for the sound-sensitive microphone to transmit the last part of the syllable to the other three headsets in the helicopter. He caught Jens Rath’s sidelong glance. Maybe Rath had been right after all. Maybe Tony Leike was indeed sitting with a shot of the hard stuff, some exotic wildcat of a woman on his arm and grinning because he had come up with a solution.





79


Missed Calls


AT A QUARTER PAST TWO THE HELICOPTER LANDED AT Fornebu, the disused aerodrome twelve minutes’ drive from the city centre. When Harry and Bjørn went through the door of the Kripos building and Harry asked the receptionist why neither Bellman nor any of the senior detectives were answering their phones, he was told they were all in a meeting.