Bellman’s jaw dropped and he kept blinking.

‘There!’ Harry leaned against the seat back, now locked into position, with a contented smile on his face. And screwed up his eyes to meet the rush of air after the door was slammed.

The sun had slipped over the edge of the mountain as Krongli stopped the snowmobile, got off and went over to Roy Stille, who was standing beside a ski pole stuck deep in the snow.

‘Well?’

‘I think we’ve found it,’ Stille said. ‘This has to be the stick that Hole fellow marked the site with.’

The soon-to-be-retired policeman had never had any ambitions to rise up the career ladder, but the thick white hair, the intent gaze and the calm voice were such that when he spoke people concluded he was the superior officer and not Krongli.

‘Oh?’ Krongli said.

He accompanied Stille to the edge of the precipice. Stille pointed. And there, down in the scree, he saw the snowmobile. He adjusted the binoculars. Focused on the bare, burned arm sticking out. Mumbled half aloud: ‘Oh shit. At last. Or both.’

The breakfast customers had begun to leave Stopp Pressen when Bent Nordbo heard a cough, looked up from the New York Times, removed his glasses, squinted and mustered the closest he would ever get to a smile.

‘Gunnar.’

‘Bent.’

The greeting, saying each other’s name, was something they had from the lodge and always reminded Gunnar Hagen of ants meeting and exchanging smells. The Crime Squad boss sat down, but did not remove his coat. ‘You said on the phone you’d found something.’

‘One of my journalists has dug this up.’ Nordbo pushed a brown envelope across the table. ‘Looks like Mikael Bellman protected his wife in a drugs case. It’s old, so from a legal point of view they’re untouchable, but in the press…’

‘… they’re always touchable,’ Hagen said, taking the envelope.

‘I believe you may safely regard Mikael Bellman as neutralised.’

‘At least a balance of terror can be achieved. He has things on me, too. Besides, I may not even need this – he’s just been humiliated by an officer from Ytre Enebakk.’

‘I read that. And the Ministry of Justice has read it too, isn’t that so?’

‘Up there, they read papers and keep their ears to the ground. But thank you, anyway.’

‘My pleasure, we help each other.’

‘Who knows, I may need this one day.’ Gunnar Hagen put the envelope inside his coat.

He didn’t receive a response as Bent Nordbo had already resumed his reading of an article about a young black American senator by the name of Barack Obama who, the writer maintained in all seriousness, could one day become the President of the United States.

When Krongli was down, he called up to the others that he had arrived, and he untied the rope.

The snowmobile was an Arctic Cat and lay with its runners in the air. He dragged himself the three metres to the wreck and instinctively became conscious of where he was placing his feet and hands. As if he were at a crime scene. He crouched down. An arm was protruding from under the snowmobile. He touched the vehicle. It was swaying on two rocks. He took a deep breath and tipped the snowmobile on its side.

The dead body lay on its back. Krongli’s first thought was that presumably it was a man. The head and face had been crushed between the vehicle and the rocks, and the result looked like the remains of a crab party. He didn’t need to feel the smashed body to know it was like jelly, like a piece of tender meat with the bones removed or that the torso had been squashed flat, hips and knees pulverised. Krongli would hardly have been able to identify the body, had it not been for the red flannel shirt. And the single rotten, brown-stained tooth left in the lower jaw.

76

Redefinition

‘What did you say?’ Harry exclaimed, pressing the phone harder to his ear as if the mistake were there.

‘I said the body under the snowmobile is not Tony Leike,’ Krongli said.

‘Who then?’

‘Odd Utmo. A local recluse and local guide. He always wears the same red flannel shirt. And it’s his snowmobile. But it was the teeth that decided it. One single rotten stump of a tooth. God knows what happened to the rest of his teeth and the orthodontic brace.’

Utmo. Orthodontic brace. Harry remembered Kaja telling him about the guide who had driven her to Havass.

‘His fingers though,’ Harry said. ‘Aren’t they distorted?’

‘Sure. Utmo had terrible problems with arthritis, poor fella. It was Bellman who asked me to inform you directly. Wasn’t quite what you hoped for, eh, Hole?’

Harry pushed the chair from the desk. ‘At least not quite what I was expecting. Could it have been an accident, Krongli?’

But he knew the answer before it came. There had been moonlight the whole evening and night; even without headlamps the ravine would have been impossible to miss. Especially for a local guide. Especially when he was driving so slowly that he landed only three metres from a perpendicular drop of over seventy metres.

‘Forget it, Krongli. Tell me about the burns.’

The other end went silent for a bit before the answer came.

‘Arms and back. The skin on the arms was cracked and you can see the red flesh beneath. Parts of the back are charred. And a motif has been scorched in between the shoulder blades…’

Harry closed his eyes. Saw the pattern on the wood burner in the cabin. The smoking fragments of flesh.

‘… looks like a stag. Anything else, Hole? We have to start moving-’

‘No, that’s it, Krongli. Thanks.’

Harry rang off. Sat for a while deliberating. Not Tony Leike. Of course that changed the details, but not the bigger picture. Utmo was probably a victim of Altman’s avenging crusade, someone who had found himself in the way of something or other. They had Tony Leike’s finger, but where was the rest of his body? A thought struck Harry. If he was dead. In theory, Tony could be locked up somewhere. A place only Sigurd Altman knew.

Harry tapped in Skai’s number.

‘He refuses to say a single word to anyone,’ Skai said, masticating something or other. ‘Apart from his solicitor.’

‘Who is?’

‘Johan Krohn. Do you know him? Looks like a boy and-’

‘I know Johan Krohn very well.’

Harry rang Krohn’s office, was transferred and Krohn sounded half welcoming and half dismissive, the way a professional defence counsel should when a prosecuting authority calls. He listened to Harry. Then he answered.

‘I’m afraid not. Unless you have concrete evidence that can establish beyond doubt that my client is keeping someone locked up or otherwise exposing someone to danger by not revealing their whereabouts, I cannot allow you to speak to Altman at this juncture, Hole. These are serious allegations you’re making against him, and I don’t need to tell you that it is my job to protect his interests as far as I am able.’

‘Agreed,’ Harry said. ‘You didn’t need to tell me.’

They rang off.

Harry looked out of the window onto the city centre. The chair was good, no doubt about that. But his eyes found the familiar glass building in Gronland.

Then he dialled another number.

Katrine Bratt was as happy as a lark, and twittered like one, too.

‘I’m going to be discharged in a couple of days,’ she said.

‘I thought you were there of your own free will.’

‘Yes I am, but I have to be formally discharged. I’m looking forward to it. They’ve offered me a desk job at the station when my sick leave runs out.’

‘Good.’

‘Anything special you want?’

Harry explained.

‘So you’ll have to find Tony Leike without Altman’s help?’

‘Yup.’

‘Any ideas where I can start?’

‘Just one. Right after Tony went missing we checked he hadn’t stayed anywhere around Ustaoset. Thing is, I’ve checked recent years a bit more closely, and he’s almost never registered at accommodation anywhere in Ustaoset, a couple of Tourist Association cabins, that’s all. And that’s weird because he’s been up there a lot.’