‘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,’ Bjørn 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.’
‘Oh, I forgot to say. You remember the snaps I showed you earlier today? The ones I asked you to flick through and you said were sticky?’
‘What about them?’
‘You get great fingerprints from them. Yours matched the ones we found on the desk at Leike’s place.’
Sigurd Altman’s expression changed slowly as the realisation sank in. ‘You only showed them to me … so that I would hold them?’ Altman stared at Harry for a few seconds, as if turned to stone. Then he put his face in his hands. And a sound emerged from behind his fingers. Laughter.
‘You considered almost every angle,’ Harry said. ‘Why didn’t you think it prudent to find yourself a respectable alibi?’
‘It didn’t occur to me that I needed one.’ Altman took his hand away. ‘You would have seen through everything anyway, Harry, wouldn’t you.’
The eyes behind the glasses were moist, but not devastated. Resigned. Harry had experienced this before. The relief at being caught. Being able to unburden yourself at last.
‘Probably,’ Harry said. ‘I mean, officially, I didn’t see through any of this. The man sitting in the vehicle over there did. He’s the one who will arrest you.’
Sigurd removed his glasses and dried his tears of laughter. ‘So you were lying when you said you needed me to tell you about ketanome?’
‘Yes, but I wasn’t lying when I said your name would go down in Norwegian crime history.’
Harry nodded to Bjørn, who flashed his lights.
A man jumped out of the Cherokee in front of them.
‘An old acquaintance of yours,’ Harry said. ‘At least his daughter was.’
The man ambled over, slightly bow-legged, hitched up his trousers by the belt. Like an old policeman.
‘One last thing I was wondering,’ Harry said. ‘The Snowman said you would steal up on me, unnoticed, while I was vulnerable maybe. How did that come about?’
Sigurd put his glasses back on. ‘All patients admitted have to give the name of their next of kin. Your father must have given your name because in the canteen one of the nurses mentioned that the father of the man who had caught the Snowman, Harry Hole himself, was on her ward. I took it for granted that someone with your reputation would be given the case. At that time I was actually working on other wards, but I asked the ward manager if I could use your father in an anaesthesia paper I was writing, said he fitted my test group exactly. I thought that if I could get to know you via your father then I would find out of how the case was going.’
‘You could be close, you mean. Feel the pulse of the case and have your superiority confirmed.’
‘When you finally made an appearance, I had to take care not to ask you direct questions about the investigation.’ Sigurd Altman took a deep breath. ‘I didn’t want to arouse suspicion. I had to be patient, wait until I had built up trust.’
‘And you succeeded.’
Sigurd nodded slowly. ‘Thank you, I like to believe I inspire trust. By the way, I called my office at the Kadok factory the cutting room. When you broke in I lost my mind. It was my home. I was so furious I was on the point of disconnecting your father from the respirator, Harry. But I didn’t. I would like you to know that.’
Harry didn’t respond.
‘One more thing.’ Sigurd said. ‘How did you find out about the locked Tourist Association cabin?’
Harry shrugged. ‘By chance. A colleague and I had to stay the night. It seemed as if someone had just been there. And something was stuck to the wood burner. Bits of flesh, I guessed. It was a while before I connected it with the arm sticking out from under the snowmobile. It looked like an overdone sausage. The County Officer went to the cabin, poked at the flesh and sent the bits for DNA testing. We’ll have the results in a few days. Tony kept personal possessions there. I found a family photo in a drawer, for instance. Tony as a lad. You didn’t clear up after yourself properly, Sigurd.’
The policeman had stopped by the driver’s window, and Bjørn rolled it down. He stooped, looked past Bjørn and at Sigurd Altman.
‘Hi, Ole,’ Skai said. ‘I am hereby arresting you for the murder of a whole load of people whose names I should have swotted up on, but we’ll take things one step at a time. Before I come round and open the door, I would like you to place both hands on the dashboard so that I can see them. I’m going to handcuff you, and you will have to accompany me to a nice, freshly spruced-up cell. The wife has made meatballs with mashed swede. Seem to remember you like that. That sound alright, Ole?’