‘A Leopold’s apple.’
‘Thank you. From Africa. Same place Leike had been a mercenary. It is therefore fair to assume that Leike used one of his former comrades, and I think we should start there.’
‘If he used a mercenary for murders number two and three, why not for all of them?’ the Pelican asked. ‘Then he would have had an alibi right the way through.’
‘He would have got a per capita discount, too,’ the Nansen moustache said. ‘The mercenary can’t get any more than life imprisonment anyway.’
‘There may be angles of which we are unaware,’ Bellman said. ‘Banal reasons like not having enough time or Leike not having the money. Or the most usual reason in crime cases: it just happened like that.’
Nods of agreement round the table; even the Pelican seemed content with the answer.
‘Any other questions? No? Then I would like to use this opportunity to thank Harry Hole who has been with us thus far. As we no longer have any use for his expertise, he will return to Crime Squad with immediate effect. It was stimulating to experience another view of how to work on murders, Harry. You might not have solved this case but who knows. There may be some interesting Crime Squad cases waiting for you down there in Gronland, if not murders. So thank you again. I have a press conference now, folks.’
Harry looked at Bellman. He could not help but admire him. The way you admire a cockroach you flush down the toilet, that comes creeping back. Again and again. And in the end it inherits the world.
At Olav’s bedside in Rikshospital, seconds, minutes and hours passed in a slow, undulating swell of monotony. A nurse came and went, Sis came and went. Flowers moved imperceptibly closer.
Harry had seen how many relatives could not bear to wait for the last breath of their loved ones, how in the end they prayed, begged for death to come and liberate them. Them, meaning themselves. But for Harry it was the opposite. He had never felt closer to his father than now, here, in this wordless room where all was breathing and the next heartbeat. For seeing Olav Hole there was like seeing himself, in the peace-filled existence between life and nothingness.
The detectives at Kripos had seen and understood a lot. But not the evident link. Which made the entirety so much clearer. The link between the Leike farm and Ustaoset. Between the rumours and the ghost of a missing boy from the Utmo farm and a man who called the wasteland ‘his terrain’. Between Tony Leike and the boy in the photograph with his ugly father and beautiful mother.
Now and then Harry glanced at his mobile phone and saw a missed call. Hagen. Oystein. Kaja. Kaja again. He would have to answer her calls soon. He rang her.
‘Can I come to yours tonight?’ she asked.
80
The Rhythm
The rain beat down on the boards of the Jetty. Harry walked up behind the man standing at the edge, facing the other way.
‘Morning, Skai.’
‘Morning, Hole,’ the officer said without turning. The tip of the fishing rod was bent towards the line that disappeared in the reeds on the opposite bank.
‘Caught something?’
‘Nope,’ Skai said. ‘Snarled up on the bloody reeds.’
‘Sorry to hear that. Read the papers today?’
‘They don’t arrive before late morning in the sticks.’
Harry knew that was not true, but nodded anyway.
‘But I suppose they’ve written that I’m a village idiot,’ Skai said. ‘They had to get townsfolk in from Kripos to sort out the muddle.’
‘As I said: I’m sorry.’
Skai shrugged. ‘I’ve got no complaints. You gave it to me straight, I knew what I was doing. And it was a bit of fun, too. Not much happens out here, you know.’
‘Mm. They don’t write much about you, they’re mostly interested in Tony Leike being the killer, after all. Bellman is much-quoted.’
‘He is that.’
‘Soon they’ll work out who Tony’s father is as well.’
Skai turned and looked at Harry.
‘I should have thought of it before, and especially after we talked about the changing of names.’
‘Now I don’t follow you, Hole.’
‘You were even the person who told me, Skai. Tony lived with his grandfather at the Leike farm. Mother’s father. Tony had taken his mother’s name.’
‘Nothing unusual in that.’
‘Maybe not. But in this case there was a good reason for it. Tony was hiding at his grandfather’s. His mother sent him there.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘A colleague,’ Harry said, and for a second he seemed to have the night’s scent of her in his nostrils again. ‘She told me something the Ustaoset officer had told her. About the Utmo family. About a father and a son who hated each other so intensely that it threatened to culminate in murder.’
‘Murder?’
‘I’ve checked Odd Utmo’s record. He was, like his son, known for his rages. As a young man he went to prison for eight years for committing a murder out of jealousy. After that, he moved into the wastelands. He married Karen Leike, and they had a son. The son reached his teens and was already good-looking, tall and a charmer. Two men and a woman in almost total isolation. A man who had a conviction for killing in a jealous rage. It looks like Karen tried to prevent a tragedy unfolding by sending her son away in secret and leaving one of his shoes in an area where there had just been a big avalanche.’
‘News to me, Hole.’
Harry nodded slowly. ‘I’m afraid she managed only to postpone the tragedy. Her body has just been found at the bottom of a precipice with a bullet through the head. A few metres away her husband and murderer was crushed beneath a snowmobile. He’d been tortured, had most of the skin on his back and arms burned off and his teeth ripped out. Guess who did it?’
‘Oh, my God…’
Harry put a cigarette between his lips.
‘How did you trace the link?’ Skai asked.
‘The similarity, the genes.’ He lit the cigarette. ‘Father and son. You can try to run, but it will always be there, like a curse. I think Odd Utmo realised the Havass murders meant he would be hunted, too, and that it was the ghost of his own deceased son who was after him. So he fled from the farm up to this Tourist Association cabin safely hidden between precipices. He took a family photo with him, the family he had himself destroyed. Imagine, a frightened, maybe remorseful killer alone with his thoughts.’
‘He had already been given his punishment.’
‘I found the photo. Tony was lucky, he took after his mother in looks. It was hard to see anything of the adult Tony in the photograph of the boy. But he already had the big white teeth. While his father hid his. That’s where they were different.’
‘I thought you said it was the similarity that gave them away?’
Harry nodded. ‘They had the same disease.’
‘They were killers.’
