Hong Kong
The Leopard (Jo Nesbø Edition)Hong Kong becomes Harry Hole’s provisional home after his arrival: a place of paid, comparatively simple work and a fragile routine that keeps him away from drugs and alcohol. In the epilogue, a break in weeks of rain brightens the city just as the horse-racing season begins, while a new lead sends Harry toward the cable car and the next stage of his pursuit.
Setting and Weather
The epilogue opens beneath blue-black clouds over Victoria Peak. Rain has fallen without interruption since early September, but at last it stops; sunlight appears between the clouds, and a huge rainbow stretches between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. Harry closes his eyes and lets the sun warm his face. The shift in weather arrives just in time for the opening of the horse-racing season that evening at Happy Valley Racecourse, giving the scene a brief sense of release before its attention turns back to risk and pursuit.
The city’s movement is present in ordinary details as well as the panoramic view. Japanese tourists’ voices draw nearer and pass Harry’s bench, carried by the cable car that has taken residents and visitors into the cooler air above the city since 1888. Harry opens his eyes, looks through the evening’s racing programme, and remains poised between the elevated quiet of the Peak and the crowded spectacle below.
Harry’s Work and Routine
After arriving in Hong Kong, Harry contacts Herman Kluit, who offers him work as a debtor-finder. Harry’s task is to locate people who have failed to repay their debts and disappeared. Finding them allows Kluit to avoid selling the debts to the Hong Kong Triads at a substantial discount, as well as the burden of dealing with their brutal methods.
Harry does not particularly enjoy the job, but it is well paid and straightforward: he is expected to find debtors, not collect the money himself. In practice, his appearance often makes that distinction moot. At 193 centimetres tall and marked by a prominent scar running from the corner of his mouth to his ear, he is imposing enough that most people hand over what they owe as soon as he finds them. He rarely resorts to the search engine on a server in Germany.
Harry identifies abstaining from drugs and alcohol as the secret of his present arrangement, and so far he has managed to maintain it. The work gives him income without requiring him to collect debts, while the discipline of staying sober marks a precarious but real change in how he is living.
Racing, History, and the Next Lead
The race meeting brings together ordinary bettors and the dead. The ghosts of the hundreds who died in the 1918 fire at Happy Valley Racecourse are imagined among those who will fill the stands, study their programmes, and queue to place bets. They share the living crowd’s hope of beating the odds, although some already know the race results. The scene’s gambling vocabulary—doubles, quinellas, exactas, trippels, and superfectas—makes wagering feel at once like a familiar ritual and a repeated attempt to master chance.
The epilogue turns that atmosphere of uncertain outcomes into forward motion. Katrine Bratt has informed Harry that Sigurd Altman is staying at a hotel in Shanghai, less than an hour away by plane. Harry takes one last look at the racing programme, checks the time, and heads for the cable car after receiving a tip about a promising horse in the third race. Hong Kong thus holds two immediate possibilities in tension: the wager below and the pursuit drawing Harry beyond the city.
