A cluster of houses, a petrol station and a shopping centre. They took the left exit off a roundabout.

‘Ole cuts off the middle finger of Tony’s right hand. And he has Leike’s phone. It’s the one he used when he called me from the centre of Ustaoset. My number is ex-directory, but Tony Leike has my number on his mobile phone. Ole doesn’t leave a message. Perhaps it was just playful whimsy.’

‘Or to confuse us,’ Bjorn Holm said.

‘Or to show us his superiority,’ Harry said. ‘Like when he quite literally gives us the finger by leaving Tony’s middle finger outside my door, inside Police HQ, right under our very noses. Because he can do that. He’s Prince Charming, he’s recovered from the shame, he’s retaliated, avenged himself on all those who mocked him and on their understudies. The witnesses. The whore. And the lech. Then something unforeseen happens. The headquarters at Kadok are found. In fact, the police still don’t have any evidence to lead them straight to Ole, but they’re beginning to get dangerously close. So Ole goes to his boss and says that finally he’ll take his holiday and accumulated time in lieu. He’ll be away for a good while. His plane goes the day after tomorrow by the way.’

‘Twenty-one fifteen to Bangkok via Stockholm,’ Bjorn Holm said.

‘OK, lots of the details in this story are assumptions, but we’re getting close. Here we are.’

Bjorn turned off the road and onto the gravel in front of the large, red timber building. Stopped and switched off the ignition.

There was no light in any of the windows, but advertisements hung on the ground-floor walls, showing that a corner of the building had once been a grocery shop. At the other end of the square, fifty metres in front of them and beneath a street light, stood a green Jeep Cherokee.

It was still. Sound-still, time-still, wind-still. From the top of the window on the driver’s side of the Cherokee cigarette smoke rose into the light.

‘This is the place where it all began,’ Harry said. ‘The dance hall.’

‘Who’s that?’ Altman asked, nodding towards the Cherokee.

‘Don’t you recognise him?’ Harry took out a packet of cigarettes, placed one between his lips, unlit, and stared hungrily at the tobacco smoke. ‘You might be deceived by the street lamp, of course. Most of the older street lamps cast a yellow light, making a blue car seem green.’

‘I’ve seen the film,’ Altman said. ‘In the Valley of Elah.’

‘Mm. Good film. Almost Altman class.’

‘Almost.’

‘Sigurd Altman class.’

Sigurd didn’t answer.

‘So,’ Harry said. ‘Are you happy? Was it the masterpiece you had envisaged, Sigurd? Or can I call you Ole Sigurd?’

74

Bristol Cream

‘I prefer Sigurd.’

‘Pity it’s not as easy to change first names as surnames,’ Harry said, leaning forward between the seats again. ‘When you told me you’d changed the usual -sen surname, I didn’t think that the S in Ole S. Hansen might stand for Sigurd. But did it help, Sigurd? Did the new name make you into someone different from the person who lost everything in the gravel on this very spot?’

Sigurd shrugged. ‘We flee as far as we can. I suppose the new name took me part of the way.’

‘Mm. I’ve checked out a number of things today. When you moved to Oslo you started nursing studies. Why not medicine? After all, you had top grades from school.’

‘I wanted to avoid having to speak in public,’ Sigurd said with an ironic smile. ‘I assumed as a nurse I would be exempt.’

‘I rang a speech therapist today, and he told me it depends which muscles are damaged. In theory, even with half a tongue you can train yourself to speak almost perfectly again.’

‘The “s”s are tricky without the tip of a tongue. Was that what gave me away?’

Harry rolled down the window and lit his cigarette. Inhaled so hard the paper crackled and rustled.

‘That was one of the things. But we went off on the wrong track for a while. The speech therapist told me that people have a tendency to associate lisping with male homosexuality. In English it’s called a “gay lisp” and does not constitute lisping in a speech-therapy sense, it’s just a different way of articulating the letter “s”. Gay men can switch lisping on and off, they use it as a sort of code. And the code works. The speech therapist told me an American university had done some linguistic research to see whether it was possible to deduce sexual tendencies in people by listening only to recorded speech. The results were fairly accurate; however, it transpired that the perception of a gay lisp was so strong that it overrode other language signals that were characteristic of heteros. When the receptionist at Hotel Bristol said that the man asking after Iska Peller spoke in an effeminate way he was a victim of stereotypical thinking. It was only when he acted out how the person had spoken that I realised he had allowed himself to be duped by the lisp.’

‘There must have been a bit more than that.’

‘Yes indeed. Bristol. It’s a suburb in Sydney, Australia. I can see you’ve twigged the connection now.’

‘Hang on,’ Bjorn said. ‘I haven’t.’

Harry blew smoke out of the window. ‘The Snowman told me. The killer wanted to be close. He had crossed my field of vision, he had cosied up to me. So when a bottle of Bristol Cream crossed my field of vision, I clicked at long last. I remembered seeing the same name, and telling someone something. Someone who had cosied up to me. And then I realised that what I had said had been misunderstood. I gave Iska Peller’s place of residence as Bristol. By which the person inferred I meant Hotel Bristol in Oslo. I said that to you, Sigurd. At the hospital right after the avalanche.’

‘You have a good memory.’

‘For some things. When suspicion first fell on you, other things became quite obvious. Like you saying that you have to work in anaesthestics to get hold of ketanome in Norway. Like a friend of mine saying that we often desire those things we see every day, which would suggest that whoever has sexual fantasies about women dressed in a nurse’s outfit may work at a hospital. Like the the computer at the Kadok factory being called Nashville, the name of a film directed by. ..’

‘Robert Altman in 1975,’ Sigurd said. ‘A much underrated masterpiece.’

‘And the chair at the headquarters being, it goes without saying, a director’s chair. For the master director, Sigurd Altman.’

Sigurd didn’t react.

‘But still I didn’t know what your motive was,’ Harry continued. ‘The Snowman told me that the killer was driven by hatred. And the hatred was engendered by one single event, one that lay back in the mists of time. Perhaps I already had a hunch. The tongue. The lisping. I got a friend from Bergen to do a bit of digging on Sigurd Altman. It took her about thirty seconds to discover your change of name on the national register and to connect it with the old name mentioned in Tony Leike’s conviction for assault.’

A cigarette was flicked out of the Cherokee window leaving a trail of sparks.

‘So there was just the question of the timeline left,’ Harry said. ‘We checked the duty roster at Rikshospital. That seems to give you an alibi for two of the murders. You were working when Marit Olsen and Borgny Stem-Myhre were killed. But both murders were committed in Oslo, and no one at the hospital can remember with certainty having seen you at the times in question. And since you travel between departments no one would have missed you if they hadn’t seen you for a couple of hours. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you’ll tell me you spend most of your free time alone. And indoors.’

Sigurd Altman shrugged. ‘Probably.’

‘So there we are,’ Harry said with a clap of his hands.

‘Just a minute,’ Altman said. ‘The story you’ve told is pure fiction. You don’t have a scrap of evidence.’