Leopard

Leopard is a predator imagined by a drugged, captive woman as she wakes in darkness and senses someone nearby. Its significance is psychological rather than literal: the image gives her fear a form, while the predator’s stealth mirrors the threat she cannot see or locate.

The Leopard in the Darkness

The woman remembers that a leopard hunts at night and pictures it creeping up on its prey, matching its breathing to the victim’s and holding its breath when the victim does. She imagines its warmth behind her. When she turns suddenly and throws an arm backward, she hits only empty air; the animal remains an explanation for a presence she feels but cannot confirm, not a creature she sees.

Her body makes the image more than a passing thought. Still affected by an injection, she wakes with a dry mouth and a foreign object in it, and understands that the numbness is beginning to fail. A brief lapse in the drug’s effect gives her a glimpse of the pain to come. Against that bodily helplessness, the Leopard’s imagined patience makes the unseen threat seem deliberate and close.

The Predator and the Captive’s Fear

The image supplies a pattern for interpreting uncertainty: silence becomes concealment, an unexplained sense of warmth becomes proximity, and the attacker’s absence from sight becomes evidence of stealth. The woman holds her breath to listen, then believes she hears another person breathing at her neck. Her response—turning, striking at empty air, and curling in on herself—shows how the Leopard shapes her experience even though it does not resolve who is there.

The passage also contrasts the dark, warm depth she longs to sink back into with the danger she anticipates as the drug wears off. Her thoughts move from imagined animal to physical pain and the object lying before her, then to the Christmas she expects to spend with her family in seven days and the songs and gifts she hopes to share the day after. That future makes the present threat more stark: she imagines all the places and experiences she would pursue if she could live differently.

A Threat Within a Delayed Revelation

Elsewhere, the novel presents a murderer’s first-person reflections from a dark workroom. The narrator has cut newspaper photographs of victims’ families away from their stories, and believes the police have not yet recognized the connection between the murders. The reflections turn killing into a theory about human nature and call murder an act of mercy, even as they acknowledge that a person facing death may sacrifice dignity, position, and principles to keep living. This perspective is chillingly at odds with the captive woman’s urgent desire for more life, but the available evidence does not establish that the Leopard in her thoughts is the murderer or belongs to this narrator’s account.

The investigation’s later details reinforce the novel’s pattern of uncertainty without directly identifying the imagined animal. Borgny Stem-Myhre’s autopsy establishes that she died by drowning in blood from wounds in her mouth; investigators find 24 symmetrically arranged punctures, each seven centimeters deep except those that pierced her face. They have no identified instrument and no fingerprints, DNA, or footwear impressions. These facts establish the deliberate and unexplained nature of the killing, not a connection to a literal Leopard.

Limits of the Image

The Leopard remains a figure in the captive’s imagination: she asks herself why she thinks of one, reasons from its supposed nighttime hunting, and tries to infer an unseen presence through its imagined breathing. The narrative offers no sighting, physical trace, or confirmation that an animal is present. Its force comes instead from how neatly its stealth expresses her predicament, while the broader investigation withholds connections and motives until later. When Harry suddenly sees how the pieces fit together, the moment marks a shift in understanding; it does not, on the supplied evidence, turn the Leopard into a real participant in the crimes.