The Leopard(25)

‘Mm.’

‘By the way, I tried to track down the nightwatchman who found her.’

‘Why?’

Gjendem sent Harry a surprised look. ‘To get a first-hand account, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Harry said, sucking on his cigarette.

‘But he seems to have gone into hiding. He’s not here or at home. Must be in shock, poor fella.’

‘Well, it’s not the first time he’s found bodies in the pool. I assume the detective leading the investigation has seen to it that you can’t lay your hands on him.’

‘What do you mean, it’s not the first time?’

Harry shrugged. ‘I’ve been called here two or three times before. Young lads sneaking in during the night. One time it was suicide, another an accident. Four drunken friends on their way home from a party wanted to play, see who dared to stand closest to the edge of the diving board. The boy who won the dare was nineteen. The oldest was his brother.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Gjendem said dutifully.

Harry checked his watch as if he had to hurry off.

‘Must have been some strength in that rope,’ Gjendem said. ‘Head torn off. Ever heard the like?’

‘Tom Ketchum,’ said Harry, draining the rest of his coffee in one swig and getting up.

‘Ketchup?’

‘Ketchum. Hole-in-the-Wall gang. Hanged in New Mexico Territory in 1901. Standard gallows, they just used too much rope.’

‘Oh. How much?’

‘Just over two metres.’

‘Not more? He must have been a fat lump.’

‘Nope. Tells you how easy it is to lose your head, doesn’t it.’

Gjendem shouted something after him, but Harry didn’t catch it. He crossed the car park north of the lido, continued across the grass and took a left over the bridge to the main gate. The fence was more than two and a half metres high all the way round. Over a hundred kilos. Marit Olsen might have tried, but she did not get over the lido fence unaided.

On the other side of the bridge, Harry turned left so that he could approach the lido from the opposite angle. He stepped over the orange police cordon and stopped at the top of the slope by a shrub. Harry had forgotten an alarming amount over recent years. But the cases stuck. He could still remember the names of the four boys on the diving tower. The older brother’s distant eyes as he answered Harry’s questions in a monotone. And the hand pointing to the place where they had got in.

Harry chose his steps carefully, not wishing to destroy possible clues, and bent the shrub to one side. Oslo Parks’ maintenance planned well in advance. If they planned at all. The tear in the fence was still there.

Harry crouched down and studied the jagged edges of the tear. He could see dark threads. Someone who had not sneaked in, but had forced her way through here. Or was pushed. He looked for other evidence. From the top of the tear hung a long black piece of wool. The tear was so high that the person must have been standing upright to touch the fence at that point. The head. Wool made sense, a woollen hat. Had Marit Olsen been wearing a woollen hat? According to Roger Gjendem, Marit Olsen had left home at a quarter to ten to jog in the park. As usual, he had surmised.

Harry tried to visualise it. He imagined an abnormally mild evening in the park. He saw a large, sweaty woman jogging. He didn’t see a woollen hat. He couldn’t see anyone else wearing a woollen hat, either. Not because it was cold at any rate. But perhaps so as not to be seen or recognised. Black wool. A balaclava maybe.

He stepped out of the bushes with care.

He hadn’t heard them coming.

One man held a pistol – probably a Steyr, Austrian, semi-automatic. It was pointed at Harry. The man behind it had blond hair, an open mouth with a powerful underbite, and when he emitted a grunt of a laugh, Harry remembered the nickname belonging to Truls Berntsen from Kripos. Beavis. As in Beavis and Butt-Head.

The second man was short, unusually bow-legged and had his hands in the pockets of a coat that Harry knew concealed a gun and an ID card bearing a Finnish-sounding name. But it was the third man, the one in an elegant grey trench coat, who attracted Harry’s attention. He stood to the side of the other two, but there was something about the gunman and the Finn’s body language, the way they partly addressed Harry, partly this man. As though they were an extension of him, as though this man was actually holding the gun. What struck Harry about the man was not his almost feminine good looks. Nor that his eyelashes were so clearly visible above and below his eyes, incurring suspicions he used make-up. Nor the nose, the chin, the fine shape of his cheeks. Nor that his hair was thick, dark, grey, elegantly cut and a great deal longer than was standard for the force. Nor the many tiny colourless blemishes in the suntanned skin that made him look as if he had been exposed to acid rain. No, what struck Harry was the hatred. The hatred in the eyes that bored into him, a hatred so fierce that Harry seemed to sense it physically, as something white and hard.