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The Leopard(43)

By:Jo Nesbo


‘Did you talk to him?’

‘Just his sister, who lives with him. She asked me to email or text. He doesn’t communicate in any other way, she said. Anyway, he was out playing chess. I sent him the stones and the information.’

They advanced at a snail’s pace through the shallow channel to the pontoon. Bjørn held up the torch as a lantern to light their way through the hazy mist drifting across the water. The officer cut the motor.

‘Look!’ whispered Kaja, leaning even closer to Harry. He could smell her scent as he followed her index finger. From the rushes behind the jetty emerged a large, lone, white swan through the veil of mist into the torchlight.

‘Isn’t it just … beautiful,’ she whispered, entranced, then laughed and fleetingly squeezed his hand.

Skai accompanied them to the treatment plant. Then they got into the Volvo Amazon and were about to set off when Bjørn feverishly wound down the window and shouted to the officer: ‘FRITJOF!’

Skai stopped and turned slowly. The light from a street lamp fell onto his heavy, expressionless face.

‘The funny guy on TV,’ Bjørn shouted. ‘Fritjof from Ytre Enebakk.’

‘Fritjof ?’ Skai said and spat. ‘Never heard of him.’

As the Amazon turned onto the E-road by the incinerator in Grønmo twenty-five minutes later, Harry had made a decision.

‘We must leak this information to Kripos,’ he said.

‘What?!’ Bjørn and Kaja said in unison.

‘I’ll talk to Beate, then she’ll pass the message on so that it looks like her people at Krimteknisk have discovered the business with the rope and not us.’

‘Why?’ Kaja asked.

‘If the killer lives in the Lyseren area, there’ll have to be a door-to-door search. We don’t have the means or the manpower for that.’

Bjørn Holm smacked the steering wheel.

‘I know,’ Harry said. ‘But the most important thing is that he’s caught, not who catches him.’

They drove on in silence with the false ring of the words hanging in the air.





20


Øystein


NO ELECTRICITY. HARRY STOOD IN THE DARK HALL FLIPPING the light switch on and off. Did the same in the sitting room.

Then he sat down in the wing chair staring into the black void.

After he had sat there for a while, his mobile rang.

‘Hole.’

‘Felix Røst.’

‘Mm?’ Harry said. The voice sounded as if it belonged to a slender, petite woman.

‘Frida Larsen, his sister. He asked me to ring and say that the stones you found are mafic, basalt lava. Alright?’

‘Just a minute. What does that mean? Mafic?’

‘It’s hot lava, over a thousand degrees C, low viscosity, which thins it and allows it to spread over a wide distance on eruption.’

‘Could it have come from Oslo?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? Oslo is built on lava.’

‘Old lava. This lava is recent.’

‘How recent?’

He heard her put her hand over the phone and speak. But he couldn’t hear any other voices. She must have received an answer though, because soon afterwards she was back.

‘He says anything from five to fifty years. But if you were thinking of establishing which volcano it comes from, you’ve got quite a job on your hands. There are over one and a half thousand active volcanoes in the world. And that’s just the ones we know about. If there are any other queries, Felix can be contacted by email. Your assistant has got the address.’

‘But . . .’

She had already rung off.

He considered calling back, but changed his mind and punched in another number.

‘Oslotaxi.’

‘Hi, Øystein, this is Harry H.’

‘You’re kidding. Harry H is dead.’

‘Not quite.’

‘OK, then I must be dead.’

‘Feel like driving me from Sofies gate to my childhood home?’

‘No, but I’ll do it anyway. Just have to do this trip.’ Øystein’s laugh morphed into a cough. ‘Harry H! Bloody hell … Call you when I’m there.’

Harry rang off, went into the bedroom, packed a bag in the light from the street lamp outside the window and chose a couple of CDs from the sitting room in the light from his mobile. Carton of smokes, handcuffs, service pistol.

He sat in the wing chair, making use of the dark to repeat the revolver exercise. Started the stopwatch on his wrist, flicked out the cylinder of his Smith & Wesson, emptied and loaded. Four cartridges out, four in, without a speed-loader, just nimble fingers. Flicked the cylinder back in so that the first cartridge was first in line. Stop. Nine sixty-six. Almost three seconds over the record. He opened the cylinder. He had messed up. The first chamber ready to fire was one of the two empty ones. He was dead. He repeated the exercise. Nine fifty. And dead again. When Øystein rang, after twenty minutes, he was down to eight seconds and had died six times.