Free The Leopard by Jo Nesbø

against his knees. Jim Beam was whispering his name from inside.
    Harry pulled on a pair of trousers and a T-shirt, went into the sitting room and put on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue . It was the original, the one where they didn’t compensate for the reel tape in the studio running a tiny bit slow, so the whole record was an almost imperceptible displacement of reality.
    He listened for a while before increasing the volume to drown the whispering from the kitchen. Closed his eyes.
    Kripos. Bellman.
    He had never heard the name. He could, of course, have rung Hagen and enquired, but he couldn’t be bothered. Because he had a feeling he knew what this might be about. Best to let sleeping dogs lie.
    Harry had come to the last track, ‘Flamenco Sketches’, then he gave up. He got to his feet and left the sitting room for the kitchen. In the hall he turned left, emerged wearing Doc Martens boots and went out.
    He found it under a split plastic bag. Something akin to dried pea soup coated the front of the file.
    Back in his sitting room he sat down in the green wing chair and began to read with a shiver.
    The first woman was Borgny Stem-Myhre, thirty-three years old, originally from Levanger, in the north. Single, no children, resident of Sagene in Oslo. Worked as a hairstylist, had a large circle of acquaintances, particularly among hairdressers, photographers and people in the fashion press. She frequented several of Oslo’s restaurants, and not just the coolest. Besides that, she was keen on the outdoors and liked walking or skiing from mountain cabin to mountain cabin.
    ‘You can take the woman out of Levanger, but you can’t take Levanger out of the woman,’ was the general summary of interviews with her colleagues. Harry assumed the remark came from colleagues who had succeeded in erasing their own small-town upbringings.
    ‘We all liked her. In this line of business she was one of the few who was genuine.’
    ‘It’s incomprehensible. We can’t understand how anyone could take her life.’
    ‘She was too nice. And sooner or later all the men she fell for exploited her. She became a toy for them. She aimed too high, that was basically the problem.’
    Harry studied a photograph of her. One in the file of when she was still alive. Blonde, maybe not natural. Run-of-the-mill looker, no obvious beauty, but she was smartly dressed in a military jacket and a Rastafarian hat. Smartly dressed and too nice – did they go together?
    She had been to Mono restaurant for the monthly launch and preview of the fashion magazine Sheness . That had been between seven and eight, and Borgny had told a colleague slash friend that she would be at home preparing for a photo shoot the day after, at which the photographer had wanted a ‘jungle meets punk meets eighties look’.
    They assumed she would go to the nearest taxi rank, but none of the taxi drivers in the vicinity at the time in question (computerised lists from Norgestaxi and Oslotaxi attached) had recognised the photograph of Borgny Stem-Myhre or had driven to Sagene. In short, no one had seen her after she left Mono. Until two Polish brickies had showed up for work, noticed the padlock on the iron bomb shelter door had been snapped, and gone in. Borgny had been lying in the middle of the floor, in a contorted position, with all her clothes on.
    Harry examined the photo. The same military jacket. The face looked as if it had been made up with white foundation. The flash cast sharp shadows against the cellar wall. Photo shoot. Smart.
    The pathologist had determined that Borgny Stem-Myhre died somewhere between ten and eleven o’clock at night. Traces of the drug ketanome were found in her blood, a strong anaesthetic that worked fast even when injected intramuscularly. But the direct cause of death was drowning, triggered by blood from wounds in the mouth. And this was where the most disturbing elements came in. The pathologist found twenty-four stab wounds in the mouth,