The Leopard Read Online Free

warm.
    ‘I’m Norwegian,’ she said.
    There was no response. She swallowed. She knew that her first words would be the most important.
    ‘My name is Kaja Solness. I have been tasked with finding you. By Gunnar Hagen.’
    No reaction to the name of his Crime Squad boss. Had he gone?
    ‘I work as a detective on murder investigations for Hagen,’ she said into the blackness.
    ‘Congratulations.’
    ‘No congratulations necessary. Not if you’ve been reading Norwegian papers for the last months.’ She could have bitten her tongue. Was she trying to be funny? Had to be the lack of sleep. Or nerves.
    ‘I mean congratulations on a well-accomplished mission,’ said the voice. ‘I have been found. Now you can go back.’
    ‘Wait!’ she shouted. ‘Don’t you want to hear what I have to say?’
    ‘I’d prefer not to.’
    But the words she had jotted down and practised rolled out. ‘Two women have been killed. Forensic evidence suggests it’s the same perp. Beyond that we don’t have any leads. Even though the press has been given minimal info, they’ve been screaming for ages that another serial killer is on the loose. Some commentators have written that he may have been inspired by the Snowman. We’ve called in experts from Interpol, but they haven’t made any headway. The pressure from the media and authorities –’
    ‘By which I mean no,’ the voice said.
    A door slammed.
    ‘Hello? Hello? Are you there?’
    She fumbled her way forward and found a door. Opened it before terror managed to gain a foothold and she was in another darkened stairwell. She glimpsed light further up and climbed three steps at a time. The light was coming through the glass of a swing door, and she pushed it open. Entered a plain, bare corridor in which attempts to patch the peeling plaster had been given up, and damp steamed off the walls like bad breath. Leaning against the wall were two men with cigarettes hanging from the corners of their mouths, and a sweet stench drifted towards her. They appraised her through sluggish eyes. Too sluggish to move, she hoped. The smaller of the two was black, of African origin, she assumed. The big one was white and had a pyramid-shaped scar on his forehead, like a warning triangle. She had read in The Police magazine that Hong Kong had almost thirty thousand officers on the street and was reckoned to be the world’s safest metropolis. But then that was on the street.
    ‘Looking for hashish, lady?’
    She shook her head, tried to flash a confident smile, tried to act as she had advised young girls to do when she had been going around schools: to look like someone who knew where she was going, not like someone who had lost the flock. Like prey.
    They returned her smile. The only other doorway in the corridor had been bricked up. They took their hands out of their pockets, the cigarettes from their mouths.
    ‘Looking for fun then?’
    ‘Wrong door, that’s all,’ she said, turning to go back out. A hand closed around her wrist. Her terror tasted like tinfoil in her mouth. In theory, she knew how to get out of this. Had practised it on a rubber mat in an illuminated gym with an instructor and colleagues gathered around her.
    ‘Right door, lady. Right door. Fun is this way.’ The breath in her face stank of fish, onions and marijuana. In the gym there had only been one adversary.
    ‘No, thanks,’ she said, struggling to keep her voice steady.
    The black man sidled up, grabbed her other wrist and said in a voice that slipped in and out of falsetto: ‘We’ll show you the way.’
    ‘Only there’s not much to see, is there.’
    All three turned towards the swing door.
    She knew it said one ninety-two in his passport, but standing there in the doorway that had been built to Hong Kong measurements he looked at least two ten. And twice as wide as only an hour ago. His arms hung down by his sides, slightly away from his body, but he didn’t move, didn’t stare, didn’t snarl, just looked