The Snowman (44 page)

‘Back off, if you would be so kind,’ she said.

She came up the stairs and it was only now that Harry could see the gleam in her eyes, the very same he had seen when they arrested Becker, the very same he had seen in Fenris Bar. But sparks were flying from the quivering irises. Harry retreated until he felt the seat at the stern against his legs.

‘Sit down,’ Katrine said, switching off the motor.

Harry slumped back, sat on the fishing rod and felt the water on the plastic seat soak through his trousers.

‘How did you find me?’ she asked.

Harry shrugged.

‘Come on,’ she said, raising the gun. ‘Satisfy my curiosity, Harry.’

‘Well,’ Harry replied, trying to read her pale, drawn face. But this was unknown territory; the face of this woman did not belong to the Katrine Bratt he knew. Thought he knew.

‘Everyone has a pattern of behaviour,’ he heard himself say. ‘A game plan.’

‘I see. And what’s mine?’

‘Pointing one way and running the other.’

‘Oh?’

Harry sensed the weight of the revolver in his right jacket pocket. He raised his backside and moved the fishing rod leaving his right hand on the seat.

‘You write a letter which you sign the Snowman, send it to me, and several weeks later stroll into Police HQ. The first thing you do is to tell me Hagen has said I should take care of you. Hagen never said that.’

‘All correct so far. Anything else?’

‘You threw your coat into the canal in front of Støp’s apartment and fled in the opposite direction, over the roof. The pattern, therefore, is that when you plant your mobile phone on an eastbound train, you flee west.’

‘Bravo. And how did I flee?’

‘Not by plane, of course. You knew that Gardemoen would be under surveillance. My guess is that you planted the phone in Oslo Central Station well before the train was due to depart, crossed over to the bus terminal and caught an early bus west. I would guess you split the journey into various legs. Kept changing buses.’

‘The Notodden express,’ Katrine said. ‘The Bergen bus from there. Got off in Voss and bought clothes. Bus to Ytre Arna. Local bus from there to Bergen. Paid a fisherman at Zacharias wharf to bring me here. Not bad guesswork, Harry.’

‘It wasn’t so difficult. We’re pretty similar, you and me.’

Katrine tilted her head. ‘If you were so sure why did you come alone?’

‘I’m not alone. Müller-Nilsen and his people are on their way by boat now.’

Katrine laughed. Harry shifted his hand closer to his jacket pocket.

‘I agree we’re similar, Harry. But when it comes to lying, I’m better than you.’

Harry swallowed. His hand was cold. Fingers had to obey. ‘Yes, I’m sure that comes easier to you,’ Harry said. ‘Like murder.’

‘Oh? You look as if you could murder me now. Your hand is getting alarmingly close to your jacket pocket. Stand up and remove your jacket. Slowly. And throw it here.’

Harry swore inwardly, but did as she said. His coat landed on the deck in front of Katrine with a thud. Without taking her eyes off Harry, she grabbed it and slung it overboard.

‘It was time you got yourself a new one anyway,’ she said.

‘Mm,’ Harry said. ‘You mean one to match the carrot in the middle of my face?’

Katrine blinked twice and Harry saw what appeared to be confusion in her eyes.

‘Listen, Katrine. I’ve come here to help you. You need help. You’re sick, Katrine. It was the illness that made you kill them.’

Katrine had started to shake her head slowly. She pointed to land.

‘I’ve been sitting in the boathouse for two hours waiting for you, Harry. Because I knew you would come. I’ve studied you, Harry. You always find what you’re looking for. That was why I chose you.’

‘Chose me?’

‘Chose you. To find the Snowman for me. That was why I sent you the letter.’

‘Why couldn’t you find the Snowman yourself? You didn’t exactly have to go far.’

She shook her head. ‘I’ve tried, Harry. I’ve tried for many years. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it on my own. It had to be you. You’re the only person who’s succeeded in catching a serial killer. I needed Harry Hole.’ She gave a sad smile. ‘A last question, Harry. How did you twig that I had deceived you?’

Harry was wondering how this would end. A bullet to the forehead? The electric cutting loop? A trip out to sea and then death by drowning? He swallowed. He ought to have been afraid. So frightened that he would be unable to think, so frightened that he would fall sobbing to the deck and implore her to let him live. Why wasn’t he? It couldn’t be pride; he had swallowed that with whiskey and spat it out again several times. It could of course be his rational brain working, knowing that being frightened wouldn’t help; on the contrary, it would only shorten his life further. He concluded, however, it was the tiredness that did it. A profound, all-encompassing exhaustion that made him feel as if he just wanted was to get it over and done with.

‘Deep down I’ve always known that this all started a long time ago,’ Harry said, noting that he no longer felt the cold. ‘It was planned and the person behind it had managed to get into my head. There are not so many people to choose from, Katrine. And when I saw the newspaper cuttings in your flat, I knew it was you.’

Harry saw her blinking, disorientated. And he felt a wedge of doubt being driven into his line of thought, into the logic he had seen so clearly. Or had he? Hadn’t the doubt always been there? The steady drizzle gave way to a deluge; the water hammered down on the deck. He saw her mouth open and her finger curl around the trigger. He grabbed the fishing rod beside him and stared down the gun barrel. This was how it would end, in a boat on the western coast, without witnesses, without evidence. An image sprang into his mind. Of Oleg. Alone.

He swung the rod in front of him, at Katrine. It was a last desperate lunge, a pathetic attempt to turn the tables, to divert fate. The soft tip hit Katrine’s cheek, not hard, she could hardly have felt it, and the blow neither hurt nor unbalanced her. In retrospect, Harry couldn’t remember if what happened was intentional, half thought through or sheer unadulterated luck: the accelerated movement of the spinner caused the twenty-centimetre-long stretch of line to wrap itself around her head in such a way that the spinner continued round and struck the front teeth in her open mouth. And when Harry pulled hard at the rod the tip of the hook did what it was designed to do: it found flesh. It dug into the right-hand corner of Katrine Bratt’s mouth. And Harry’s despairing pull was so violent that, in consequence, Katrine Bratt’s head was wrenched back and round to the right with such power that for a moment he had the impression that he was unscrewing the head off her body. After an infinitesimal lag her body followed the head’s rotation, first to the right, then she was propelled towards Harry. Her body was still spinning when she fell onto the deck in front of him.

Harry dropped onto her, knees first. They hit her on either side of the collarbone, and he knew he had rendered her arms immobile.

He twisted the revolver out of the paralysed hand and pushed the barrel into one of her dilated eyes. The weapon felt light and he could see the iron pressing against her soft eyeball, but she didn’t blink. Quite the opposite. She was grinning. A broad grin. From the ripped corner of her mouth and bloodstained teeth which the rain was trying to wash clean.

30

DAY 20.

Scapegoat.

K
NUT
M
ÜLLER
-N
ILSEN HAD APPEARED ON THE QUAY UNDER
Puddefjord Bridge in person as Harry arrived in the cabin cruiser. He, two police officers and the duty psychiatrist joined him below deck where Katrine Bratt lay handcuffed to the bed. She was given a shot of an anti-psychotic tranquilliser and transported to a waiting vehicle.

Müller-Nilsen thanked Harry for agreeing to handle the matter with discretion.

‘Let’s try and keep this to ourselves,’ Harry said, looking up at the leaking heavens. ‘Oslo will want to take control if this is made public.’

‘Course,’ nodded Müller-Nilsen.

‘Kjersti Rødsmoen,’ said a voice that made them turn round. ‘The psychiatrist.’

The woman peering up at Harry was in her forties, with light, tousled hair and a big, bright red down jacket. She was holding a cigarette in her hand and didn’t appear to be bothered that the rain was drenching both her and the cigarette.

‘Was it dramatic?’ she asked.

‘No,’ Harry said, feeling Katrine’s revolver pressing against his skin under his waistband. ‘She surrendered without resistance.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Not a word. What’s your diagnosis?’

‘Obviously a psychosis,’ Rødsmoen said without hesitation. ‘Which does not imply in any way that she’s mad. It’s just the mind’s way of managing the unmanageable. Much the same as the brain choosing to faint when the pain is too great. I would conjecture that she’s been under extreme stress for a lengthy period. Could that be correct?’

Harry nodded. ‘Will she be able to speak again?

‘Yes,’ Kjersti Rødsmoen said, gazing with disapproval at the wet, extinguished cigarette. ‘But I don’t know when. Right now she needs rest.’

‘Rest?’ snorted Müller-Nilsen. ‘She’s a serial killer.’

‘And I’m a psychiatrist,’ Rødsmoen said, dispensing with the cigarette and departing in the direction of a small red Honda that even in the pouring rain looked dusty.

‘What are you going to do?’ Müller-Nilsen asked.

‘Catch the last plane home,’ Harry said.

‘No shit. You look like a skeleton. The station’s got a deal with Rica Travel Hotel. We can drive you there and send on some dry clothes. They’ve got a restaurant, too.’

Once Harry had checked in and was standing in front of the bathroom mirror in the cramped single room, he thought about what Müller-Nilsen had said. About looking like a skeleton. And about how close he had been to death. Or had he? After taking a shower and eating in the empty restaurant he went back to his room and tried to sleep. He couldn’t and switched on the TV. Crap on all the channels except NRK2, which was showing
Memento
. He had seen the film before. The story was told from the point of view of a man with brain damage and the short-term memory of a goldfish. A woman had been killed. The protagonist had written the name of the killer on a Polaroid, as he knew he would forget. The question was whether he could trust what he had written. Harry kicked off the duvet. The minibar under the TV had a brown door and no lock.

He should have caught the plane home.

He was on his way out of bed when his mobile rang somewhere in the room. He put his hand in the pocket of the wet trousers hanging over a chair by the radiator. It was Rakel. She asked where he was. And said they had to talk. And not in his flat, but somewhere public.

Harry fell back on the bed with closed eyes.

‘To tell me we cannot keep meeting?’ he asked.

‘To tell you we cannot keep meeting,’ she said. ‘I can’t take it.’

‘It’s enough if you tell me on the phone, Rakel.’

‘No, it’s not. It won’t hurt enough.’

Harry groaned. She was right.

They agreed on eleven o’clock the next morning by the Fram Museum in Bygdøy, a tourist attraction where you could disappear in crowds of Germans and Japanese. She asked him what he was doing in Bergen. He told her and said she was to keep it to herself until she read about it in the papers after a couple of days.

They rang off, and Harry lay staring at the minibar as
Memento
continued its course in reverse chronological order. He had almost been killed, the love of his life didn’t want to see him any more and he had concluded the worst case in his experience. Or had he? He hadn’t answered when Müller-Nilsen asked why he had chosen to hunt for Bratt on his own, but now he knew. It was the doubt. Or the hope. This desperate hope that it would not be the way things had been shaping up after all. And which was still there. But now the hope had to be extinguished, drowned. Come on, he had three good reasons and a pack of dogs in the pit of his stomach all barking as though possessed. So why not just open the minibar anyhow?

Harry got to his feet, went to the bathroom, turned on the tap and drank, letting the jet of water gush over his face. He straightened up and looked into the mirror. Like a skeleton. Why won’t the skeleton drink? Aloud, he spat out the answer to his face: ‘Because then it won’t hurt enough.’

Gunnar Hagen was tired. Tired to his soul. He looked around. It was almost midnight and he was in a conference room at the top of one of Oslo’s central buildings. Everything here was shiny brown: the ship floor, the ceiling with the spotlights, the walls with painted portraits of former club chairmen who had owned the premises, the ten-square-metre mahogany table and the leather blotting pad in front of each of the twelve men around it. Hagen had been phoned by the Chief Superintendent an hour earlier and summoned to this address. Some of the people in the room – such as the Chief Constable – he knew, others he had seen in newspaper photographs but he had no idea who most of them were. The Chief Superintendent brought them up to date with events. The Snowman was a policewoman from Bergen who had been operating for a while from her post in Crime Squad in Grønland. She had pulled the wool over their eyes, and now that she was caught, they would soon have to go public with the scandal.

When he had finished, the silence lay as thick as the cigar smoke.

The smoke was filtering upwards from the end of the table where a white-haired man leaned back in his chair, his face hidden in shadow. For the first time, he made a sound. Just a tiny sigh. And Gunnar Hagen realised that everyone who had spoken so far had turned to this man.

‘Damned tedious, Torleif,’ said the white-haired man in a surprisingly high-pitched, effeminate voice. ‘Extremely damaging. Confidence in the system. We are at the top. And that means . . .’ the whole room seemed to be holding its breath as the man puffed on his cigar, ‘heads will have to roll. The question is whose.’