‘News to me, Hole.’
Harry nodded slowly. ‘I’m afraid she managed only to postpone the tragedy. Her body has just been found at the bottom of a precipice with a bullet through the head. A few metres away her husband and murderer was crushed beneath a snowmobile. He’d been tortured, had most of the skin on his back and arms burned off and his teeth ripped out. Guess who did it?’
‘Oh, my God . . .’
Harry put a cigarette between his lips.
‘How did you trace the link?’ Skai asked.
‘The similarity, the genes.’ He lit the cigarette. ‘Father and son. You can try to run, but it will always be there, like a curse. I think Odd Utmo realised the Håvass murders meant he would be hunted, too, and that it was the ghost of his own deceased son who was after him. So he fled from the farm up to this Tourist Association cabin safely hidden between precipices. He took a family photo with him, the family he had himself destroyed. Imagine, a frightened, maybe remorseful killer alone with his thoughts.’
‘He had already been given his punishment.’
‘I found the photo. Tony was lucky, he took after his mother in looks. It was hard to see anything of the adult Tony in the photograph of the boy. But he already had the big white teeth. While his father hid his. That’s where they were different.’
‘I thought you said it was the similarity that gave them away?’
Harry nodded. ‘They had the same disease.’
‘They were killers.’
Harry shook his head. ‘Disease, as in physical ailment, Skai. I meant they both had arthritis. The family relationship was confirmed this morning. The DNA analysis of the flesh on the wood burner and Tony Leike’s hair prove they are father and son.’
Skai nodded.
‘Well,’ Harry said. ‘I came by to thank you for your help and to bemoan the outcome. Bjørn Holm sends his regards to your wife and says she makes the best meatballs and mashed swede he’s ever tasted.’
Flicker of a smile from Skai. ‘Most people think that. Even Tony liked them.’
‘Oh?’
Skai shrugged and pulled a knife from the sheath on his belt.
‘I told you Mia was stuck on the boy, didn’t I? It was soon after he had knifed Ole. She brought him home for lunch one day when she knew I wouldn’t be there. The wife said nothing when they showed up, though there was a humdinger when I got to hear about it, of course. But you know what girls are like at that age and in love. I tried to explain that Tony was violent, fool that I was. I should have known the worse I made her boyfriend out to be, the more determined she would become to hang on to him. Then it’s two together against the rest of the world, kind of. Well, you’ve seen it yourself with women who start writing letters to convicted murderers.’
Harry nodded.
‘Mia would have left home, followed him to the end of the world, there was no moderation in anything,’ Skai said, cutting the fishing line and reeling in.
Harry followed the retreat of the slack line. ‘Mm. End of the world.’
‘Yep.’
‘I see.’
Skai stopped winding and looked at Harry. ‘No,’ he said with conviction.
‘No what?’
‘No to what you’re thinking.’
‘Which is?’
‘That Mia and Tony met again later. He broke up with her; since then they have never met. Her life has continued without him. She has nothing to do with this case, got it? You have my word. She is putting her life together again, so please don’t . . .’
Harry nodded and took the cigarette, which had been extinguished by the rain, from his mouth.
‘I’m not on the case any more,’ he said. ‘But your word would have been good enough, anyway.’
As Harry drove from the car park he looked in the mirror and watched Skai packing up his fishing gear.
Rikshospital. He was in the rhythm now. Time was not chopped up by events; it flowed in an even stream. He had thought of asking for a mattress. That would be a bit like Chungking Mansion.
81
The Cones of Light
THREE DAYS PASSED. HE WAS ALIVE. EVERYONE WAS ALIVE.
No one knew where Tony Leike was, the trail of the fake Odd Utmo ended in Copenhagen. A photograph of Lene Galtung with a shawl over her head and large sunglasses in the best Greta Garbo style was splashed across one newspaper. The headline was: NO COMMENT. And now no one had seen her for two days after she had gone into hiding, apparently at her father’s house in London. The photograph of Tony in work clothes in front of the helicopter had been in several newspapers. It was captioned PRINCE CHARMING’S VANISHING ACT in one. He had been dubbed Prince Charming now, people had taken to it, and anyway, it suited Leike better than Altman. Strangely enough, no one in the press had managed to link Tony Leike with the Utmo farm yet. The mother and later Tony had obviously covered their tracks well.