‘I know nothing about that,’ Sigurd Altman said, crossing his arms. ‘I know only that I saw him stick a knife into Adele’s neck. And that the letters I sent caused the ostensible senders to be murdered straight afterwards.’
‘You’re aware that at least makes you an accessory to murder, aren’t you?’
Johan Krohn coughed. ‘And you’re aware, aren’t you, that you made a deal that will serve up the real killer on a silver platter, for you and Kripos? All your internal problems will be solved, Bellman. You’ll get all the credit, and you have a witness who will say in court that he saw Tony Leike kill Adele Vetlesen. What happened beyond that remains between you and me.’
‘And your client goes free?’
‘That’s the deal.’
‘What about if Leike kept the letters and they turn up at the trial?’ Bellman said. ‘Then we have a problem.’
‘That’s precisely why I have a feeling they won’t turn up,’ Krohn smiled. ‘Or, will they?’
‘What about the photographs you took of Adele and Tony?’
‘Went up in the blaze at Kadok,’ Altman said. ‘That bastard Hole.’
Mikael Bellman nodded slowly. Then he lifted his pen. S.T. Dupont. Lead and steel. It was heavy. Once he had set it to paper, though, it was as if the signature wrote itself.
‘Thanks,’ Harry said. ‘Over and out.’
He received a rasping sound by way of answer and then it was still, there was only the helicopter engine’s monotonous noise outside his headset. Harry bent the microphone and looked out.
Too late.
He had just finished talking over the radio to the tower at Gardemoen Airport. For security reasons they had access to most information, including passenger lists. And could confirm that Odd Utmo had travelled on his pre- booked ticket to Copenhagen two days ago.
The countryside moved slowly beneath them.
Harry visualised him standing there with the passport of the man he had tortured and killed. The man or the woman behind the counter routinely reading to see if the passport matched the name on the list and thinking – if they looked at the photo at all – that was one hell of a brace. Looked up and registered the same dental work on the probably artifically browned teeth in front of him, a brace which Tony Leike must have had to bend and cut to fit on top of his own porcelain highrises.
They flew into a rainstorm that exploded on the plexiglas bubble, ran to the sides in quivering streaks of water and disappeared. Seconds later it was as if they had never been there.
The finger.
Tony Leike had cut off his finger and sent it to Harry as a final red herring, to demonstrate that Tony Leike had to be considered dead. He could be forgotten, written off, put aside. Was it chance that Leike had chosen the same finger as Harry’s missing digit, that he had made himself like him?
But what about the alibi, his water-tight alibi?
Harry had entertained the thought before, but had rejected it because cold-blooded murderers are rarities, deviants, perverted souls in the true sense of the word. But could there have been someone else? Could the answer be as simple as Tony Leike working together with a sidekick?
‘Fuck!’ said Harry, loud enough for the sound-sensitive microphone to transmit the last part of the syllable to the other three headsets in the helicopter. He caught Jens Rath’s sidelong glance. Maybe Rath had been right after all. Maybe Tony Leike was indeed sitting with a shot of the hard stuff, some exotic wildcat of a woman on his arm and grinning because he had come up with a solution.
79
Missed Calls
At a quarter past two the helicopter landed at Fornebu, the disused aerodrome twelve minutes’ drive from the city centre. When Harry and Bjorn went through the door of the Kripos building and Harry asked the receptionist why neither Bellman nor any of the senior detectives were answering their phones, he was told they were all in a meeting.
‘Why the hell weren’t we called?’ mumbled Harry as he strode down the corridor with Bjorn jogging after him.
He pushed open the door without knocking. Seven heads turned towards them. The eighth, Mikael Bellman’s, didn’t need to turn as he was sitting at the end of the long table facing the door, and he was the one on whom all the others had been focused.
‘Stan and Ollie,’ Bellman chortled, and Harry gathered from the chuckling that they had been a subject of conversation in their absence. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Well, while you were sitting here and playing Snow White and the seven dwarfs we’ve been to Tony Leike’s cabin,’ Harry said, throwing himself down on a free chair at the opposite end of the table. ‘And we have some news. It isn’t Altman. We’ve arrested the wrong man. It was Tony Leike.’
Harry didn’t know what reaction he had expected, but at any rate it hadn’t been this: none at all.
The POB leaned back in his chair with a friendly quizzical smile.
‘We’ve arrested the wrong man? To my recollection, Skai was the officer who took it upon himself to arrest Sigurd Altman. And, regarding news value, this is pretty scant. As for Tony Leike, perhaps we should be saying “Welcome back”.’
Harry’s gaze jumped from?rdal to the Pelican and back to Bellman as his brain churned. And drew the only possible conclusion.
‘Altman,’ Harry said. ‘Altman said it was Leike. He knew all the time.’
‘He not only knew,’ Bellman said. ‘Just as Leike triggered the avalanche in Havass, Altman set this whole murder case in motion, without even realising. Skai arrested an innocent man, Harry.’
‘Innocent?’ Harry shook his head. ‘I saw the pictures in the Kadok factory, Bellman. Altman is involved here, I just don’t know how as yet.’
‘But we do,’ Bellman said. ‘So if you wouldn’t mind leaving this to us…’ Harry heard the word ‘adults’ forming in Bellman’s mouth, but it came out as: ‘… enlightened ones, you can join in when you’re up to speed, Harry. Alright? Bjorn, too? So let’s move on. I was saying that we cannot exclude the possibility that Leike had a partner, someone who committed at least two of the murders, the two for which Leike has an alibi. We know that when both Borgny and Charlotte died Leike was at business meetings with several witnesses present.’
‘A clever bastard,’ said?rdal. ‘Leike knew, of course, that the police would find a link between all the murders. So if he found himself a cast-iron alibi for one or two of them, he would automatically be cleared of the others.’
‘Yes,’ said Bellman. ‘But who is the accomplice?’
Harry heard suggestions, comments and queries fluttering past him in the room.
‘Tony Leike’s motive for killing Adele Vetlesen was hardly the demand for four hundred thousand,’ the Pelican said. ‘But rather the fear that if it came out that he had got some woman pregnant, Lene Galtung would end the relationship and he could kiss goodbye to the Galtung millions for the Congo project. So the question we should be asking ourselves is who had identical interests.’
‘The other investors in the Congo,’ said the smooth-faced detective. ‘What about his financial friends at the office block?’
‘It’s make or break for Tony Leike with the Congo project,’ Bellman said. ‘But none of the other finance squirts would have killed two people to secure their ten per cent share in a project. Those boys are used to winning and losing money. Besides, Leike had to collaborate with someone he could trust at both a personal and a professional level. Bear in mind that the murder weapon was the same for Borgny and Charlotte. What did you call it, Harry?’
‘A Leopold’s apple,’ Harry intoned, still befuddled.
‘Louder, please.’
