The Leopard (35 page)

‘Altman,’ Harry said, sitting on the edge of the bed, smacking his lips loudly as though they were coated with glue. ‘Unusual name. Only know one person called that.’

‘Robert,’ said Sigurd, sitting on the only chair in the room. ‘I didn’t like who I was in the little village where I grew up. As soon as I got away I applied to change my surname from a much too common -sen. I justified my application by saying, as was the truth, that Robert Altman was my favourite director. And the case officer must have had a hangover that day because it was passed. We can all do with being reborn once in a while.’

‘
The Player
,’ Harry said.

‘
Gosford Park
,’ Altman said.

‘
Short Cuts
.’

‘Ah, a masterpiece.’

‘Good, but overrated. Too many themes. The direction and editing make the plot unnecessarily complicated.’

‘Life is complicated. People are complicated. Watch it again, Harry.’

‘Mm.’

‘How’s it going? Any progress on the Marit Olsen case?’

‘Progress,’ Harry said. ‘The guy who did it was arrested today.’

‘Jeez, well, I can understand you celebrating.’ Altman pressed his chin to his chest and peered over his glasses. ‘I have to confess I’m hoping I can tell my grandchildren that it was my information about ketanome that cracked the case.’

‘By all means, but it was a phone call to one of the victims that gave him away.’

‘Poor things.’

‘Poor who?’

‘Poor all of them, I assume. So why the haste to see your father right now, tonight?’

Harry put his hand in front of his mouth and produced a noiseless belch.

‘There is a reason,’Altman said. ‘However drunk you are, there’s always a reason. On the other hand, that reason is none of my business, so perhaps I should keep my mou—’

‘Have you ever been asked to carry out euthanasia?’

Altman shrugged. ‘A few times, yes. As an anaesthetic nurse, I’m an obvious choice. Why?’

‘My father asked me.’

Altman nodded slowly. ‘It’s a heavy burden to place on someone. Is that why you came here now? To get it over with?’

Harry’s gaze had already wandered around the room to see if there was anything alcoholic to drink. Now it did another round. ‘I came to ask for forgiveness. For not being able to do it for him.’

‘You hardly need forgiveness for that. Taking a life is not something you can demand of anyone, let alone of your own son.’

Harry rested his head in his hands. It felt hard and heavy, like a bowling ball.

‘I’ve done it once before,’ he said.

Altman’s voice sounded more surprised than actually shocked. ‘Carried out euthanasia?’

‘No,’ Harry said. ‘Refused to carry it out. To my worst enemy. He has an incurable, fatal and very painful disease. He is slowly being suffocated by his own shrinking skin.’

‘Scleroderma,’ Altman said.

‘When I arrested him, he tried to make me shoot him. We were alone at the top of a tower, just him and me. He had killed an unknown number of people and hurt me and people I love. Permanent damage. My gun was pointing at him. Just us. Self-defence. I didn’t risk a thing by shooting him.’

‘But you preferred him to suffer,’ Altman said. ‘Death was too easy for him.’

‘Yes.’

‘And now you feel you’re doing the same with your father, you’re making him suffer rather than allowing him release.’

Harry rubbed his neck. ‘It’s not because I hold with the principles of the sanctity of life or any of that bullshit. It’s weakness, pure and simple. It’s cowardice. Christ, you haven’t got anything to drink here, have you, Altman?’

Sigurd Altman shook his head. Harry wasn’t sure if it was in answer to his last question or the other things he had said. Perhaps both.

‘You can’t just disregard your own feelings like that, Harry. You, like everyone else, are trying to leapfrog the fact that we are governed by notions of what’s right and wrong. Your intellect may not have all the arguments for these notions, but nonetheless they are rooted deep, deep inside you. Right and wrong. Perhaps it’s things you were told by your parents when you were a child, a fairy tale with a moral your grandmother read, or something unfair you experienced at school and you spent time thinking through. The sum of all these half-forgotten things.’ Altman leaned forward. ‘
Anchored deep within
is in fact a pretty apposite expression. Because it tells you that you may not be able to see the anchor in the depths, but you damn well can’t move from the spot, that’s what you float around and that’s where your home is. Try and accept that, Harry. Accept the anchor.’

Harry stared down at his folded hands. ‘The pain he has . . .’

‘Physical pain is not the worst thing a human has to deal with,’ Altman said. ‘Believe me, I see it every day. Not death, either. Nor even fear of death.’

‘What is the worst then?’

‘Humiliation. To be deprived of honour and dignity. To be disrobed, to be cast out by the flock. That’s the worst punishment, it’s akin to burying a person alive. And the only consolation is that the person will perish fairly quickly.’

‘Mm.’ Harry kept eye contact with Altman. ‘You don’t have anything in that cupboard to lighten the atmosphere, do you?’

45

Questioning

M
IKAEL
B
ELLMAN HAD BEEN DREAMING ABOUT FREE FALL
again. Climbing solo in El Chorro, the fingerhold that isn’t, the mountain wall racing past your eyes, the ground accelerating towards you. The alarm clock ringing at the last moment. He wiped the egg yolk from his mouth and looked up at Ulla standing right behind him and filling his cup with coffee from the cafetière. She had learned to recognise the precise moment when he was ready to eat, and it was then and not a second before that he wanted his coffee, boiling hot, poured into the blue cup. And that was only one of the reasons he appreciated her. Another was that she kept herself in such good shape that she still attracted admiring glances at the parties they were invited to more and more often. Ulla had, after all, been Manglerud’s undisputed beauty queen when they got together, he had been eighteen, she nineteen. A third reason was that Ulla, without making any great fuss about it, had set aside her dreams of further education so that he could prioritise his job. But the three most important reasons sat around the table arguing about who should have the plastic figure in the cornflakes box and who should sit in front today when she drove them to school. Two girls, one boy. Three perfect reasons to appreciate the woman and her genes’ compatibility with his.

‘Will you be late again tonight?’ she asked, furtively stroking his hair. He knew she loved his hair.

‘It might be a long session,’ he said. ‘We’re starting with the suspect today.’ He knew that over the course of the day the papers would publish what they already knew: that the arrestee was Tony Leike. But he had made it a principle never to reveal confidentialities even at home. That also enabled him to explain overtime regularly with ‘I can’t talk about that, darling’.

‘Why didn’t you question him yesterday?’ she asked while buttering the children’s bread for their packed lunches.

‘We had to gather more facts. And finish searching his house.’

‘Did you find anything?’

‘Afraid I can’t be that specific, darling,’ he said and gave her the regretful confidentiality look so as not to reveal the fact that she had actually put her finger on a sensitive point. Bjørn Holm and the crime scene officers hadn’t found anything during the search that could have linked Leike to any of the murders. Fortunately, for the moment, however, that was of minor importance.

‘Softening him up in a cell overnight won’t hurt,’ Bellman said. ‘It’ll just make him more receptive when we start. And the first part of the questioning is always the crunch.’

‘Is it?’ she asked, and he could tell she was trying to sound interested.

‘I have to be off.’ He got up and kissed her on the cheek. Yes, he certainly did appreciate her. The thought of forgoing her and the children, the framework and infrastructure that had enabled him to rise through the ranks, through the classes, was of course absurd. To follow the impulses of his heart, to throw up everything for love or whatever it was, was utopian, a dream he could think and talk about, with Kaja as a listener. But if you were going to dream, Mikael Bellman preferred dreams that were grander than that.

He inspected his front teeth in the hall mirror and checked his silk tie was straight. The press were bound to be out in force.

How long would he be able to keep Kaja? He thought he had detected some doubts in her last night. And a lack of enthusiasm in their lovemaking. But he also knew that as long as he was heading for the top, as he had been doing so far, he would be able to control her. It wasn’t that Kaja was a gold-digger with clear objectives of what he, as overall boss, could do for her own career. It wasn’t about intellect; it was pure biology. Women could be as modern as they liked, but when it came to submitting to the alpha male they were still at primate level. However, if she was beginning to entertain doubts because she thought that he would never renounce his wife for her sake, perhaps it was time to give her some encouragement. After all, he needed her to feed him with inside info about Crime Squad for a while yet, until all the loose ends were tied, until this battle was over. And the war won.

He went over to the window while buttoning up his coat. The house they had taken over from his parents was in Manglerud, not the best area of town, if you asked the West Enders. But those who had grown up here had a tendency to stay; it was a quarter with soul. And it was his quarter. With a view over the rest of Oslo. Which would also soon be his.

‘They’re coming now,’ the uniformed officer said. He stood in the doorway of one of the new interview rooms at Kripos.

‘OK,’ Mikael Bellman said.

Some interrogators liked to have the interviewee led to the room first, to keep him or her waiting, to make it clear who was in charge. So that they could enjoy the great entrance and go in hard straight away while they had them at their most defensive and vulnerable. Bellman preferred to be seated and ready when the suspect was ushered in. To mark his territory, to announce who owned the room. He was still able to keep the suspect waiting while he skimmed through his papers, able to feel the nervousness mounting in the room and then – when the time was ripe – raise his eyes and shoot. But these were the fine details of interview techniques. Which, naturally, he was happy to discuss with other competent chief interrogators. Again, he checked that the red recording light was switched on. Fiddling with technical equipment after the suspect had arrived could spoil the preliminary establishing of status.

Through the window he saw Beavis and Kolkka enter the adjacent office. Between them walked Tony Leike, whom they had brought from the custody block at Police HQ.

Bellman took a deep breath. Yes, his pulse was a bit higher now. A mixture of aggression and nerves. Tony Leike had declined the opportunity to have a solicitor present. In essence, of course, that was an advantage for Kripos, it gave them greater latitude. But at the same time it was a signal that Leike considered he had little to fear. Poor sucker. He can’t have known that Bellman had proof that Leike had rung Elias Skog immediately before he was murdered. Someone whose name Leike had claimed he didn’t even know.

Bellman looked down at the papers and heard Leike entering the room. Beavis closed the door behind him as he had been instructed.

‘Take a seat,’ Bellman said without looking up.

He heard Leike do what he was told.

Bellman stopped at an arbitrary piece of paper and stroked his lower lip with a forefinger while slowly counting to himself, from one upwards. The silence quivered in the small enclosed room. One, two, three. He and his colleagues had been sent on a course in the new interrogation methods they were being instructed to use – so-called investigative viewing – the point of which, according to these ungrounded academic types, was openness, dialogue and trust. Four, five, six. Bellman had listened quietly – after all, the model had been chosen at the highest level – but what sort of characters did these people actually think Kripos interviewed? Sensitive but obliging souls who tell you everything you want to know in exchange for a shoulder to cry on? They insisted the methods the police had used hitherto, the traditional nine-step American FBI model, was inhuman, manipulative, and it made innocent people confess to crimes they hadn’t committed and was therefore counterproductive. Seven, eight, nine. OK, so say it put the odd suggestible chicken in the coop, but what was that compared with the grinning scum who strolled away, killing themselves with laughter at ‘openness, dialogue and trust’?

Ten.

Bellman pressed his fingertips together and raised his eyes.

‘We know you rang Elias Skog from Oslo, and that two days later you were in Stavanger. And that you killed him. These are the facts we have, but what I am wondering is why. Or didn’t you have a motive, Leike?’

That was step one of the nine-step model drawn up by the FBI agents Inbau, Reid and Buckley: the confrontation, the attempt to use the shock effect to land a knockout punch straight away, the declaration that they knew everything already, there was no point denying guilt. This had one sole aim: confession. Here Bellman combined step one with another interviewing technique: linking one fact with one or several non-facts. In this case he linked the incontestable date of the phone call with the contention that Leike had been to Stavanger and he was a killer. Hearing the proof for the first claim, Leike would automatically conclude that they also had concrete proof for the others. And that these facts were so simple and irrefutable that they could jump straight to the only thing left to answer: why?

Bellman saw Leike swallow, saw him bare his white milestone-sized teeth in an attempted smile, saw the confusion in his eyes and knew that they had already won.

‘I didn’t ring any Elias Skog,’ Leike said.

Bellman sighed. ‘Do you want me to show you the listed calls from Telenor?’