The Snowman (35 page)

‘Nothing,’ Harry said, sinking half the glass in one big gulp and placing a hundred-krone note on the table. ‘Have a nice evening, boss.’

Hagen sat at the table until Harry had left the restaurant. Only then did he notice that there were no carbon dioxide bubbles rising in the half-empty glass. He stole a few sidelong glances and put the glass cautiously to his lips. It tasted tart. Non-alcoholic cider.

Harry walked home through silent streets. The windows of the old, low blocks shone like cats’ eyes in the night. He felt an urge to speak to Tresko to find out how things were going, but decided to let him have the night as agreed. He rounded the corner to Sofies gate. Deserted. He was heading for his block when he caught a movement and a tiny glint. Light reflecting off a pair of glasses. Someone standing by the line of vehicles parked along the pavement, apparently struggling to open a car door. Harry knew which cars generally parked at this end of the street. And this car, a blue Volvo C70, was not one of them.

It was too dark for Harry to see the face clearly, but he could tell from the way the person was holding his head that he was keeping an eye out for Harry. A journalist? Harry passed the car. In the wing mirror of another, he glimpsed a shadow flit between the cars and approach from behind. Without any undue haste Harry slipped his hand inside his coat. Heard the footsteps coming. And his anger. He counted to three, then turned round. The person behind him froze to the tarmac.

‘Is it me you’re after?’ Harry growled, stepping forward with gun raised. He collared the man, dragged him sideways, knocking him off balance, and launched himself at him, sending both of them over the bonnet of a car. Harry pressed his forearm against the man’s throat and thrust the barrel into one lens of his glasses.

‘Is it me you want?’ Harry hissed.

The man’s answer was drowned by the car alarm going off. The sound filled the whole street. The man tried to free himself, but Harry had him in a tight grip and he gave up. His head hit the bonnet with a soft thud and the light from the street lamp fell on the man’s face. Then Harry let go. The man doubled up, coughing.

‘Come on,’ Harry shouted over the relentless howl, grabbed the man under the arm and dragged him over the road. He unlocked the front door and shoved the man inside.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Harry said. ‘And how do you know where I live?’

‘I’ve been trying to ring the number you gave me all evening. In the end I rang directory enquiries and got your address.’

Harry observed the man. That is, he observed the ghost of the man. Even in the remand cell there had been more of Professor Filip Becker left.

‘I had to switch off my mobile,’ Harry said.

Harry walked ahead of Becker up to his flat, opened the door, kicked off his boots, went into the kitchen and switched on the kettle.

‘I saw you on
Bosse
this evening,’ Becker said. He had come into the kitchen, still wearing his coat and shoes. His face was ashen, lifeless. ‘You were brave. So I thought I should be brave too. I owe you that.’

‘Owe me?’

‘You believed me when no one else did. You saved me from public humiliation.’

‘Mm.’ Harry pulled up a chair for the professor, but he shook his head.

‘I’ll be off in a minute, but I’ll tell you something no one else must know. I’m not sure if it has anything to do with the case, but it’s about Jonas.’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘I took some blood from him the night I visited Camilla Lossius.’

Harry remembered the plaster on Jonas’s forearm.

‘Plus a mouth swab. Sent it to the paternity section of the Institute of Forensic Medicine for DNA testing.’

‘Uh-huh? I thought you had to go through a solicitor.’

‘You did before. Now anyone can buy the test. Two thousand eight hundred kroner per person. Bit more if you want a quick answer. Which I did. And the answer came today. Jonas . . .’ Becker paused and took a deep breath. ‘Jonas is not my son.’

Harry nodded slowly.

Becker rocked back on his heels as if about to start a run-up.

‘I asked them to match him against all the data in the data bank. They found a perfect match.’

‘Perfect? So Jonas was in the bank?’

‘Yes.’

Harry pondered. It was starting to dawn on him what he meant.

‘In other words, someone had already sent in a sample for Jonas’s DNA profile,’ Becker said. ‘I was informed that the previous sample was seven years old.’

‘And they confirmed it was Jonas?’

‘No, it was anonymous. But they had the name of the client who had ordered the test.’

‘And that was?’

‘A medical centre that no longer exists.’ Harry knew the answer before Becker said it. ‘Marienlyst Clinic.’

‘Idar Vetlesen,’ Harry said, angling his head as though studying a picture to see if it was hanging straight.

‘Right,’ Becker said, clapping his hands together and smiling weakly. ‘That was it. All I wanted to say was that . . . I have no son.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Actually I’ve had that feeling for a long time.’

‘Mm. Why the hurry to come here and tell me?’

‘I don’t know,’ Becker said.

Harry waited.

‘I . . . I had to do something tonight. Like this. If I hadn’t I don’t know what I would’ve done. I . . .’ The professor hesitated before going on. ‘I’m alone now. My life no longer has much meaning. If the gun had been real . . .’

‘Don’t,’ Harry said. ‘Don’t even think it. The thought will only become more tempting the more you caress it. And you’re forgetting one thing. Even if your life has no meaning for you, it has meaning for others. For Jonas, for example.’

‘Jonas?’ Becker snorted with a bitter laugh. ‘The cuckoo? “Don’t caress the thought” – is that what they teach you at Police College?’

‘No,’ Harry said.

They eyed each other.

‘Whatever,’ Becker said. ‘Now you know.’

‘Thank you,’ Harry said.

After Becker had left, Harry was still sitting there, trying to decide if the picture was hanging straight, not noticing that the water had boiled, the kettle had switched itself off and the little red eye under the on button was slowly dying.

23

DAY 19.

Mosaic.

T
HE THICK, FLUFFY CLOUDS CONCEALED THE DAWN AS
Harry entered the corridor on the sixth floor of the high-rise in Frogner. Tresko had left his bedsit door ajar, and when Harry entered, Tresko had his feet up on the coffee table, his arse on the sofa and the remote control in his left hand. The images that flicked backwards across the screen dissolved into digital mosaic.

‘Don’t want a beer then?’ Tresko repeated, lifting his half-empty bottle. ‘It’s Saturday.’

Harry thought he could discern bacterial gases in the air. Both ashtrays were full of cigarette ends.

‘No thanks,’ Harry said, taking a seat. ‘Well?’

‘Well, I’ve just had one night on it,’ Tresko said, stopping the DVD player. ‘It usually takes me a couple of days.’

‘This person’s not a pro poker player,’ Harry said.

‘Don’t be too sure,’ Tresko said and took a swig from the bottle. ‘He bluffs a lot better than most card players. This is the place where you ask him the question you reckoned he would answer with a lie, isn’t it.’

Tresko pressed play and Harry saw himself in the TV studio. He was wearing a pinstriped suit jacket, a Swedish brand, slightly too tight. A black T-shirt that was a present from Rakel. Diesel jeans and Dr Martens boots. He was sitting in a strangely uncomfortable position, as if the chair had nails at the back. The question sounded hollow through the TV speakers. ‘Do you invite her for a bit of extra-curricular in your hotel room?’

‘No, I don’t think I would do that,’ Støp answered, but froze as Tresko pressed the pause button.

‘And there you know he’s lying?’ Tresko asked.

‘Yup,’ Harry answered. ‘He fucked a friend of Rakel’s. Women don’t usually like to boast. What can you see?’

‘If I ran this on the computer I could enlarge the eyes, but I don’t need to. You can see the pupils have dilated.’ Tresko pointed an index finger with a chewed nail at the screen. ‘That’s the classic sign of stress. And look at the nostrils. Can you see they’ve flared a tiny bit? We do that when we’re stressed and the brain needs more oxygen. But that doesn’t mean he’s lying; many people get stressed even when they’re telling the truth. Or don’t get stressed when lying. You can see, for example, that his hands are still.’

Harry noticed that Tresko’s voice had undergone a transformation; the jarring sounds were gone and it had become soft, almost pleasant. Harry looked at the screen, at Støp’s hands which lay still in his lap, the left hand over the right.

‘I’m afraid there are no immutable signs,’ Tresko continued. ‘All poker players are different, so what you have to do is spot the differences. Find out what’s different in a person from when he’s lying and when he’s telling the truth. It’s like triangulation, you need two fixed points.’

‘A lie and an honest answer. Sounds easy.’

‘S
ounds
is right. If we assume he’s telling the truth when he’s talking about the founding of his magazine and why he hates politicians we have the second point.’ Tresko rewound the clip and played it. ‘Look.’

Harry looked. But obviously not where he was supposed to. He shook his head.

‘The hands,’ Tresko said. ‘Look at his hands.’

Harry looked at Støp’s tanned hands resting on the chair arms.

‘They’re not moving,’ Harry said.

‘Yes, but he isn’t hiding them,’ Tresko said. ‘A classic sign of bad poker players with poor cards is all the effort they make to hide them behind their hands. And when they bluff they like to place an apparently pensive hand over their mouth to hide their expression. We call them hiders. Others exaggerate the bluff by sitting upright in the chair or leaning back to appear bigger than they are. They’re the bluffers. Støp is a hider.’

Harry leaned forward. ‘Did you . . . ?’

‘Yes, I did,’ Tresko said. ‘And it runs all the way through. He takes his hands off the arms of the chair and hides the right one – I would guess he’s right-handed – when he’s lying.’

‘What does he do when I ask him if he makes snowmen?’ Harry made no attempt to conceal his eagerness.

‘He’s lying,’ Tresko said.

‘Which bit? The bit about making snowmen or making them on his roof terrace?’

Tresko uttered a short grunt which Harry realised was meant to be laughter.

‘This is not an exact science,’ Tresko said. ‘As I said, he’s not a bad card player. In the first seconds after you asked the question he has his hands on the arms as if he’s considering telling the truth. At the same time his nostrils flare as though he’s becoming stressed. But then he changes his mind, hides his right hand and comes up with a lie.’

‘Exactly,’ Harry said. ‘And that means he has something to hide, doesn’t it?’

Tresko pressed his lips together to show this was a tricky one. ‘It may also mean he’s choosing to tell a lie he knows will be sussed. To hide the fact that he could easily have told the truth.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘When pro card players have good hands, sometimes, instead of trying to bump up the pot, they bid high first time and give tiny signals that they’re bluffing. Just enough to hook inexperienced players into believing they’ve spotted a bluff and to get them to join the bidding. That’s basically what this looks like. A bluffed bluff.’

Harry nodded slowly. ‘You mean he wants me to believe that he has something to hide?’

Tresko looked at the empty beer bottle, looked at the fridge, made a half-hearted attempt to lever his huge body off the sofa and sighed.

‘As I said, this is not an exact science,’ he said. ‘Would you mind . . . ?’

Harry got up and went over to the fridge. Cursing inside. When he had rung Oda at
Bosse
he had known they would accept his offer to appear. And he had also known that he would be able to ask Støp direct questions unhindered, that was the format of the programme. And that the camera would film the person answering, with close-ups or so-called medium shots, that is, the upper half of the body. All of this had been perfect for Tresko’s analysis. And yet they had failed. This had been the last ray of hope, the last place to look where there was some light. The rest was darkness. And perhaps ten years of fumbling and praying for luck, serendipity, a slip-up.

Harry stared at the neatly stacked rows of Ringnes beer bottles in the fridge, a comical contrast to the chaos reigning in the bedsit. He hesitated. Then he took two bottles. They were so cold that they burned his palms. The fridge door was swinging shut.

‘The only place where I can say with certainty that Støp is lying’, Tresko said from the sofa, ‘is when he answers that there isn’t any madness or hereditary illness in his family.’

Harry managed to catch the fridge door with his foot. The light from the crack was reflected in the black, curtainless window.

‘Repeat,’ he said.

Tresko repeated.

Twenty-five seconds later Harry was halfway down the stairs and Tresko halfway down the beer Harry had chucked him.

‘Yes, there was one more thing, Harry,’ Tresko mumbled to himself. ‘Bosse asked you if there was someone special you were kicking your heels waiting for, and you answered no.’ He belched. ‘Don’t take up poker, Harry.’

Harry rang from his car.

There was an answer before he could introduce himself. ‘Hi, Harry.’

The thought that Mathias Lund-Helgesen either recognised his number or had his number listed made Harry shudder. He could hear Rakel and Oleg’s voices in the background. Weekend. Family.

‘I have a question about Marienlyst Clinic. Are there still any patient records from there?’

‘I doubt it,’ Mathias said. ‘I think the rules say that sort of thing has to be destroyed if no one takes over the practice. But if it’s important I’ll check of course.’