The Leopard(191)
Harry got up, went into the corridor and rang Katrine Bratt. It still wasn’t even seven o’clock, but she was up. She was leaving today. Beginning at Bergen Police Station over the weekend.
He hoped she would take it easy at the start. Although it was difficult to imagine Katrine Bratt taking anything easy.
‘Last job,’ he said.
‘And after that?’ she asked.
‘Then I’m off.’
‘No one will miss you.’
‘… more than I will.’
‘There was a full stop at the end, dear.’
‘It’s about Crédit Suisse in Zurich. I’d like to know if Lene Galtung has an account there. She’s supposed to have been given a whopping preinheritance. Swiss banks are tricky. Probably take a bit of time.’
‘Fine, I’m getting the hang of this now.’
‘Good. And there’s a woman whose movements I want you to check.’
‘Lene Galtung?’
‘No.’
‘No? What’s the name of the beast?’
Harry spelt it for her.
At a quarter past eight Harry pulled up outside the fairy-tale homestead in Voksenkollen. There were a couple of cars parked, and through the raindrops Harry could make out the tired faces and the long telephoto lenses of paparazzi. They seemed to have been camping there the whole night. Harry rang the bell by the gate and went in.
The woman with the turquoise eyes was standing by the door, waiting.
‘Lene’s not here,’ she said.
‘Where is she?’
‘Somewhere they won’t find her,’ she said, motioning to the cars outside the gate. ‘And you lot promised me you would leave her alone after the last interview. Three hours it lasted.’
‘I know,’ Harry lied. ‘But it was you I wanted to talk to.’
‘Me?’
‘May I come in?’
He followed her into the kitchen. She gestured to a chair, turned her back on him and filled a cup from a coffee machine on the worktop.
‘What’s the story?’
‘Which story?’
‘The one about you being Lene’s mother.’
The coffee cup hit the floor and smashed into a thousand pieces. She clutched the worktop, and he could see her back heaving. Harry hesitated for a moment, but then took a deep breath and said what he’d made up his mind to say.
‘We’ve done a DNA test.’
She whirled around, furious. ‘How? You haven’t . . .’ She came to an abrupt halt.
Harry’s gaze met her turquoise eyes. She had fallen for the bluff. He was aware of a vague sense of discomfort. Which could have been caused by shame. It melted away, nonetheless.
‘Get out!’ she hissed.
‘Out to them?’ Harry asked, nodding towards the paparazzi. ‘I’m finishing my police career, going to travel. I could do with a bit of capital. If a hairstylist can be paid twenty thousand kroner for saying which hair colour Lene requested, how much do you think I’d get for telling them who her real mother is?’
The woman took a step forward, raising a hand in anger, but then her tears flowed, the burning light in her eyes extinguished and she sank into a kitchen chair, impotent. Harry cursed himself, knowing he had been unnecessarily brutal. But time was not on his side for any finely attuned stratagems.
‘I apologise,’ he said. ‘But I’m trying to save your daughter. And to do that I require assistance. Do you understand?’
He placed a hand upon hers, but she pulled it away.
‘He’s a killer,’ Harry said. ‘But she couldn’t care less, could she. She’ll do it anyway.’
‘Do what?’ the woman sniffled.
‘Follow him to the end of the world.’
She didn’t answer, just shook her head weeping silent tears.
Harry waited. Stood up, poured himself a cup of coffee, tore a sheet off the kitchen roll, put it on the table in front of her, sat down and waited. Took a sip. Waited.
‘I said she shouldn’t do what I did,’ she sniffled. ‘She shouldn’t love a man because he … because he made her feel beautiful. More beautiful than she is. You think it’s a blessing when it happens, but it’s a curse.’
Harry waited.
‘When you’ve seen yourself become beautiful in his eyes once it’s like … like being bewitched. And so you are. Again and again, because you think you’ll be allowed to see it one more time.’
Harry waited.
‘I spent my early years in a caravan. We travelled around, I wasn’t able to go to school. When I was eight the child welfare people came for me. At sixteen I began to clean at the shipping company owned by Galtung. Anders was engaged when he got me pregnant. He wasn’t the one with the money, she was. He had gambled in the stock market, but the prices for tankers fell and he had no choice. He sent me packing. But she found out. And it was she who decided I would keep the child, that I would be retained as a house cleaner, that my little girl would be raised as the daughter of the house. She couldn’t have any children herself, so they took Lene from me. They asked what kind of upbringing I could offer her. Me, a single mother, uneducated, no family around me, did I really wish to deprive my daughter of the chance of a good life? I was so young and afraid, I thought they were right, this was for the best.’