The Snowman (25 page)

‘I mean that if Rafto had in fact been on his trail, then that was planned too.’

‘Katrine . . .’

‘Wait. Rafto was the best detective in Bergen. You’re the best in Oslo. He could predict that it would be you who would investigate these murders, Harry. That was why you received the letter. I’m merely saying you should be careful.’

‘Are you trying to put the frighteners on me?’

She shrugged. ‘If you’re frightened, do you know what that means?’

‘No?’

Katrine opened the car door. ‘That you should find yourself another job.’

Harry unlocked his flat, took off his boots and stopped at the threshold to the sitting room. The room was completely dismantled now, like a building kit in reverse. The moonlight fell on something white on the bare red wall. He went in. It was a number eight, drawn in chalk. He stretched out his hand and touched it. It must have been done by the mould man, but what did it mean? Perhaps a code to tell him which liquid to apply there.

For the rest of the night wild nightmares racked Harry’s body, turning him this way and that. He dreamt that something was forced into his mouth and he had to breathe through some kind of opening so as not to die from suffocation. It tasted of oil, metal and gunpowder, and in the end there was no more air left inside, just a vacuum. Then he spat the thing out and discovered it was not the barrel of a gun, but a figure eight he had been breathing through. An eight with a large circle below, a smaller one above. The big circle at the bottom, the little one at the top. Gradually the figure eight acquired a third, a smaller circle on top. A head. Sylvia Ottersen’s head. She tried to scream, tried to tell him what had happened, but she couldn’t. Her lips were sewn together.

When he awoke, his eyes were gummed up, he had a headache and there was a coating on his lips which tasted of chalk and bile.

16

DAY 10.

Curling.

I
T WAS A CHILLY MORNING IN
B
YGDØY AS
A
STA
J
OHANNSEN
unlocked the curling club at eight, as usual. The soon to be seventy-year-old widow cleaned there twice a week, which was more than sufficient as the private little hall was not used by more than a handful of men and, moreover, it didn’t have any showers. She switched on the light. From the cog-jointed timber walls hung trophies, diplomas, pennants adorned with Latin phrases and old black-and-white photographs of men wearing beards, tweeds and worthy expressions. Asta thought they looked comical, like those fox-hunters in English TV series about the upper classes. She entered the door to the curling hall and knew from the cold inside that they had forgotten to turn up the thermostat for the ice, which they usually did to save electricity. Asta Johannsen flicked on the light switch and as the neon tubes blinked and wrestled to decide whether they wanted to work, she put on her glasses and saw that the thermostat for the cooling cables was indeed too low and she turned it up.

The light shone on the grey surface of ice. Through her reading glasses she glimpsed something at the other end of the hall, so she removed them. Slowly things came into focus. A person? She wanted to walk across the ice, but hesitated. Asta Johannsen was not at all the jittery type but she feared that one day she would break her thigh on the ice and have to stay there until the fox-hunters found her. She gripped one of the brooms leaning against the walls, used it as a walking stick and, taking tiny steps, teetered across the ice.

The lifeless man lay at the end of the sheet with his head in the centre of the rings. The blue-white gleam from the neon tubes fell on the face stiffened in a grimace. There was something familiar about his face. Was he a celebrity? The glazed eyes seemed to be looking for something behind her, beyond what was here. The cramped right hand held an empty plastic syringe containing a residue of red contents.

Asta Johannsen calmly concluded that there was nothing she could do for him and concentrated on making her way back over the ice to the nearest telephone.

After she had called the police and they had come, she went home and drank her morning coffee.

It was only when she picked up the
Aftenposten
newspaper that she realised who it was she had found.

Harry was sitting in a crouch examining Idar Vetlesen’s boots.

‘What does our pathologist say about the time of death?’ he asked Bjørn Holm, who was standing beside him in a denim jacket lined with white teddy-bear fur. His snakeskin boots made almost no noise as he stamped them on the ice. Barely an hour had passed since Asta Johannsen had made her call, but the reporters were already assembled outside the red police cordon by the curling club.

‘He says it’s difficult to tell,’ Holm said. ‘He can only guess how fast the temperature of a body lying on ice in a much warmer room might fall.’

‘But he
has
made a guess?’

‘Somewhere between five and seven yesterday evening.’

‘Mm. Before the TV news announcement about him. You saw the lock, did you?’

Holm nodded. ‘Standard Yale. It was locked when the cleaning lady arrived. I saw you looking at the boots. I’ve checked the prints. I’m pretty sure they’re identical to the prints we’ve got from Sollihøgda.’

Harry studied the pattern on the sole. ‘So you think this is our man, do you?’

‘I would reckon so, yes.’

Harry nodded, deep in thought. ‘Do you know if Vetlesen was left-handed?’

‘Would doubt it. As you can see, he’s holding the syringe in his right hand.’

Harry nodded. ‘So he is. Check anyway.’

Harry had never really managed to experience a sense of pleasure when, one day, cases he was working on reached a conclusion, were solved, were over. For as long as the case was under investigation this was his aim, but once it was achieved, he only knew that he hadn’t arrived at his journey’s end. Or that this was not the end he had imagined. Or that it had shifted, he had changed or Christ knows what. The thing was, he felt empty, success did not taste as promised, catching the guilty party always came loaded with the question: So what?

It was seven in the evening, witnesses had been questioned, forensic evidence collected, a press conference held and in the Crime Squad corridors there was a burgeoning party atmosphere. Hagen had ordered cakes and beer and summoned Lepsvik’s and Harry’s teams to some self-congratulation in K1.

Harry sat in a chair eyeing a huge piece of cake someone had placed in his lap. He listened to Hagen speaking, the laughter and the applause. Someone nudged him in the back as they passed, but most left him in peace. There a buzz of conversation around him.

‘The bastard was a bad loser. Chickened out when he knew we had him.’

‘Cheated us.’

‘Us? Do you mean that you Lepsvik lot—?’

‘If we’d caught him alive, the court would have declared him insane and –’

‘We should be happy. After all, we didn’t have any conclusive evidence, just circumstantial.’

Espen Lepsvik’s voice boomed from the other side of the room. ‘OK, folks, shut up! A motion has been put forward, and passed, that we meet at Fenris Bar at eight to get seriously drunk. And that’s an order. OK?’

Loud cheering.

Harry put the cake down and was standing up when he felt a light hand on his shoulder. It was Holm.

‘I checked. It’s as I said – Vetlesen was right-handed.’

Carbon dioxide fizzed from a beer being opened, and an already tipsy Skarre put his arm around Holm’s shoulder.

‘They say that life expectancy is higher for right-handed people than for left-handed. Didn’t apply to Vetlesen, though, did it? Ha ha ha!’

Skarre left to share his nugget of wisdom with others, and Holm asked Harry: ‘Are you off?’

‘Going for a walk. Might see you at Fenris.’

Harry had almost reached the door when Hagen grabbed his arm.

‘Nice if no one left quite yet,’ he said quietly. ‘The Chief Constable said he would come down and say a few words.’

Harry looked at Hagen and realised that there must have been something in his eyes because Hagen let go of his arm as though he had been burned.

‘Just going to the toilet,’ Harry said.

Hagen gave a quick smile and nodded.

Harry went to his office, got his jacket and walked slowly downstairs, out of Police HQ and down to Grønlandsleiret. There were a few flakes of snow in the air, lights twinkled on Ekeberg Ridge, a siren rose and fell like the distant song of a whale. Two Pakistanis were having a good-natured argument outside Harry’s local shops as the snow settled on their oranges, and a swaying drunk was singing a sea shanty in Grønlands torg. Harry could sense the creatures of the night sniffing the air, wondering if it was safe to come out. God, how he loved this town.

‘You in here?’

Eli Kvale looked in surprise at her son Trygve, who was sitting at the kitchen table reading a magazine. The radio was droning away in the background.

She was going to ask why he didn’t sit in the living room with his father, but it struck her that it should be equally natural for him to want to talk to her. Except that it wasn’t. She poured herself a cup of tea, sat down and watched him in silence. He was so good-looking. She had always believed she would find him ugly, but she had been wrong.

The voice on the radio said men were no longer the cause of women’s inability to get into Norwegian boardrooms; companies were struggling to reach the legally determined quota of women because the majority seemed to have a chronic aversion to posts where they might be exposed to criticism, find themselves professionally challenged or have no one to hide behind.

‘They’re like kids who cry and cry to have a pistachio, but spit it out when they finally get it,’ the voice said. ‘Bloody irritating to see. It’s about time women took some responsibility and showed some guts.’

Yes, thought Eli. It is about time.

‘Someone came up to me in ICA today,’ Trygve said.

‘Oh yes?’ Eli said, her heart in her throat.

‘Asked me if I was your son, yours and Dad’s.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Eli said softly, all too softly, feeling giddy. ‘And what did you answer?’

‘What did I answer?’ Trygve looked up from his magazine. ‘I answered yes, of course.’

‘And who was the man who asked?’

‘What’s the matter, Mum?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re so pale.’

‘Nothing, my love. Who was he?’

Trygve went back to his magazine. ‘I didn’t say it was a man, did I?’

Eli got to her feet, turned down the radio as a woman’s voice was thanking the Minister of Industry and Arve Støp for the debate. She stared into the dark as a couple of snowflakes swirled hither and thither, aimless, unaffected by gravity and their own will apparently. They would land wherever chance dictated. And then they would melt and vanish. There was some comfort in that.

She coughed.

‘What?’ Trygve said.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I think I’m getting a cold.’

Harry drifted aimlessly, without any will of his own, through the streets of Oslo. It was only when he was standing outside Hotel Leon that he realised that was where he had been heading. The prostitutes and the dope dealers had already taken up their positions in the neighbouring streets. It was rush hour. Customers preferred to deal in sex and dope before midnight.

Harry walked into reception and saw from Børre Hansen’s horrified expression that he had been recognised.

‘We had a deal!’ squealed the hotel owner, wiping the sweat from his brow.

Harry wondered why men who lived off others’ urges always seemed to wear this glistening film of sweat, like a veneer of false shame at their unscrupulousness.

‘Give me the key to the doctor’s room,’ Harry said. ‘He’s not coming tonight.’

Three of the hotel-room walls had seventies wallpaper with psychedelic patterns of brown and orange while the main bathroom wall was painted black and shot through with grey cracks and blotches where the plaster had fallen off. The double bed sagged in the middle. The needle-felt carpet was hard. Water and semen repellent, Harry assumed. He removed a threadbare hand towel from the chair at the foot of the bed and sat down. Listened to the rumbles of expectant excitement in the town and sensed that the dogs were back. They snapped and barked, pulled at the iron chains, shouting: just one drink, just a shot so that we can leave you in peace and lie at your feet. Harry was not in a laughing mood, but laughed anyway. Demons had to be exorcised, and pain drowned. He lit a cigarette. The smoke curled up to the rice-paper lamp.

What demons had Idar Vetlesen been grappling with? Had he brought them here, or was this the sanctuary, the refuge? Perhaps he had discovered some answers, but not all of them. Never all of them. Like whether madness and evil are two different entities, or whether when we no longer understand the purpose of destruction we simply term it madness. We’re capable of understanding that someone has to drop an atomic bomb on a town of innocent civilians, but not that others have to cut up prostitutes who spread disease and moral depravity in the slums of London. Hence we call the former realism and the latter madness.

Christ, how he needed a drink. Just one to take the edge off the pain, off this day, off this night.

There was a knock at the door.

‘Yes,’ Harry yelled and started at the sound of his own anger.

The door opened and a black face came into view. Harry looked her over. Beneath the beautiful, strong head and neck she wore a short jacket, so short that the rolls of fat bulging the over top of her tight trousers could be seen.

‘Doctor?’ she asked in English. The stress on the second syllable gave the word a French timbre.

He shook his head. She looked at him. Then the door was closed and she was gone.

A couple of seconds passed before Harry got off his chair and went to the door. The woman had reached the end of the corridor.