up the scree and stood barking a hundred metres further along. A hundred steep metres. Aslak assessed the climb.
‘Is it important?’ he shouted and set off a symphony of echoes.
He received an answer, and ten minutes later he was staring at what the dog had dug up from the snow. It was wedged in between the rocks so tightly that it must have been impossible to spot from the top.
‘Jesus,’ Aslak said. ‘Who could that be?’
‘Not that Tony Leike anyway,’ said the dog handler. ‘Here in the cold scree it would be a long time before the skeleton was picked that clean. Several years.’
‘Eighteen years.’ It was Roy Stille. The officer had followed them and was panting.
‘She’s been here eighteen years,’ Roy said, crouching down.
‘She?’ Aslak queried.
The officer pointed to the hips on the skeleton. ‘Women have a larger pelvis. We never did find her when she went missing. That’s Karen Utmo.’
Krongli heard something he had never heard before in Roy Stille’s voice. A quiver. The quiver of a man emotionally upset. Grief-stricken. But his granite face was as smooth as always, closed.
‘Well, I never, so it was true then,’ said the dog handler. ‘She topped herself out of anguish for her boy.’
‘Hardly,’ Krongli said. The other two looked at him. He had stuck his little finger in a delicate round aperture in the forehead of the skull.
‘Is that a bullet hole?’ the dog handler asked.
‘Yep,’ said Stille, feeling the back of the skull. ‘And there’s no exit wound, so I reckon we’ll find the bullet in the skull.’
‘And should we bet that the bullet will match Utmo’s rifle?’ said Krongli.
‘Well, I never,’ the dog handler repeated. ‘Do you mean he shot his wife? How is that possible? To kill a person you’ve loved? Because you think she and your son… it’s like entering hell.’
‘Eighteen years,’ Stille said, getting up with a groan. ‘Seven years left before the murder was deemed too old. That must be what they call irony. You wait and wait, afraid of being found out. The years pass and then, when you’re approaching freedom – bang! – you’re killed yourself and end up in the same scree.’
Krongli closed his eyes and thought, yes, it is possible to kill a person you have loved. Easily possible. But, no, you’re never free. Never. He would never come here again.
Johan Krohn enjoyed the limelight. You don’t become the country’s most popular defence counsel without enjoying it. And when he had agreed to defend Sigurd Altman, Prince Charming, without a second’s hesitation, he knew there was going to be more limelight than he had hitherto experienced in his remarkable career. He had already reached his goal of beating his father as the youngest lawyer ever entitled to attend the Supreme Court. As a defence counsel in his twenties he was already being proclaimed the new star, the wonder boy. But that might have gone to his head a bit; he had not been used to so much attention at school. Then he had been the irritating top pupil who always waved his hand too eagerly in the classroom, who always tried a bit too hard socially and yet was always the last to know where the Saturday-night party was – if he knew about it at all. But now young female assistants and clerks might giggle and blush when he complimented them or suggested a dinner after work. And invitations rained down, to give talks, participate in debates on radio or TV and even to the odd premiere his wife valued so highly. Such events may have occupied too much of his attention over recent years. At any rate, he had detected a downward trend in the number of legal triumphs, big media cases and new clients. Not so many that it had begun to affect his reputation, but enough for him to be aware that he needed the Sigurd Altman case. Needed something high profile to put him back where he belonged: at the top.
That was why Johan Krohan sat listening quietly to the lean man with the round glasses. Listening while Sigurd Altman told a story that was not only the least likely story Krohn had ever heard but also a story he believed. Johan Krohn could already see himself in the courtroom, the sparkling rhetorician, the agitator, the manipulator, who nonetheless never lost sight of legal justice, a delight for both layman and judge. He was therefore disappointed at first when Sigurd Altman revealed the plans he had made. However, after reminding himself of his father’s repeated admonition that the lawyer was there for the client, and not vice versa, he accepted the brief. For Johan Krohn was not really a bad person.
And when Krohn left Oslo District Prison where Sigurd Altman had been transferred during the day, he saw new potential in the assignment, which in its way, despite everything, was extraordinary. The first thing he did when he got back to his office was contact Mikael Bellman. They had met only once before, at a murder trial of course, but Johan Krohn had immediately known where he was with Bellman. A hawk recognises a hawk. So he appreciated how Bellman was feeling after the day’s headlines about the County Officer’s arrest.
‘Bellman.’
‘Johan Krohn. Nice to talk to you again.’
‘Good afternoon, Krohn.’ The voice sounded formal, but not unfriendly.
‘Is it? I imagine you feel you’ve been overtaken down the final straight, don’t you?’
Short pause. ‘What’s this about, Krohn?’ Teeth clenched. Angry.
Johan Krohn knew he was on to a winner.
Harry and Sis sat by their father’s bed at Rikshospital. On the bedside table and on two other tables in the room there were vases of flowers that had appeared from nowhere in the last few days. Harry had done the rounds and read the cards. One of them had been addressed to ‘My dear, dear Olav’, and was signed ‘Your Lise’. Harry had never heard of any Lise, even less considered the notion that there may have been any women in his father’s life other than his mother. The remaining cards were from colleagues and neighbours. It must have reached their ears that the end was nigh. And despite knowing that Olav would not be able to read the cards, they had sent these sweet-smelling flowers to compensate for the fact that they had not taken the time to visit him. Harry saw the flowers surrounding the bed as vultures hovering around a dying man. Heavy, hanging heads on thin stalk necks. Red and yellow beaks.
‘You’re not allowed to have your mobile on here, Harry!’ Sis whispered severely.
Harry took out his phone and read the display. ‘Sorry, Sis. Important.’
Katrine Bratt got straight to the point. ‘Leike has undoubtedly been in Ustaoset and the surrounding district a fair bit,’ she said. ‘In recent years he’s bought the odd train ticket on the Net, paid for fuel with a credit card at the petrol station in Geilo. The same with provisions, mostly in Ustaoset. The only thing to stand out is a bill for building materials, also in Geilo.’
‘Building materials?’
‘Yep. I went onto the lists of invoices. Boards, nails, tools, steel cables, leca blocks, cement. Over thirty thousand kroner’s worth. But it’s four years old.’
‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’
‘He’s been building himself a little annexe or something up there?’
‘He didn’t have a registered cabin to build an annexe on to, we’ve checked. But you don’t stock up with provisions if you’re going to live in a hotel or Tourist Association cabins. I reckon Tony built himself an illegal bolt- hole in the national park, just as he told me he dreamed about. Well hidden from view, of course. A place where he could be very, very undisturbed. But where?’ Harry realised he had got up and was pacing to and fro in the room.
‘Well, you tell me,’ said Katrine Bratt.
‘Wait! What time of the year did he buy this?’
‘Let me see… The 6th of July it says on the printout.’
‘If the cabin has to be hidden it must be somewhere off the beaten track. A desolate area without roads. Did you say steel cables?’
‘Yes. And I can guess why. When Bergensians built cabins in the most wind-blown parts of Ustaoset in the sixties, they generally used steel cables to anchor the cabins.’
‘So Leike’s cabin would be somewhere wind-blown, desolate, and he has to transport thirty thousand kroner’s worth of building materials there. Weighing at least a couple of tons. How do you do that in the summer when there’s no snow, so you can’t use a snowmobile?’
‘Horse? Jeep?’
‘Over rivers, marshland, up mountains? Keep going.’
‘I have no idea.’
