The Snowman (49 page)

Mathias was a good swimmer. He was good at a lot of things. So why didn’t they like him? A man waded out and dragged him ashore as he approached the riverbank. Mathias slumped into the snow. Not because he couldn’t stand but because instinctively he knew it was the smartest thing to do. He closed his eyes and heard an agitated voice by his ear ask whether there was anyone else in the car. If there was they might still be able to save them. Mathias slowly shook his head. The voice asked whether he was sure.

The police would later ascribe the accident to the slippery road conditions and the drowned woman’s head injuries to the impact from driving off the road and hitting the water. In fact the car was barely damaged, but in the end it was the only plausible explanation. Just as shock was the only possible explanation for the boy’s answer when those first on the scene asked him several times whether there was anyone else in the car and he said at length: ‘No, only me. I’m alone.’

‘No, only me,’ Mathias repeated six years later. ‘I’m alone.’

‘Thanks,’ said the boy standing in front of him and putting down his tray on the canteen table that until then Mathias had had to himself. Outside, the rain was drumming its welcome march on the medicine students in Bergen, a rhythmical march that would last until spring.

‘You new to medicine as well?’ the boy asked, and Mathias watched his knife cut the thick Wiener schnitzel.

He nodded.

‘You’ve got an Østland accent,’ the boy said. ‘Didn’t get in to Oslo?’

‘Didn’t want to go to Oslo,’ Mathias said.

‘Why not?’

‘Don’t know anyone there.’

‘Who do you know here then?’

‘No one.’

‘I don’t know anyone here, either. What’s your name?’

‘Mathias. Lund-Helgesen. And you?’

‘Idar Vetlesen. Have you been up Ulriken Mountain?’

‘No.’

But Mathias had been up Ulriken. And up Fløyen and Sandviksfjellet. He had been in the narrow alleyways, to Fisketorget, to Torgalmenningen – the main square, seen the penguins and the sea lions at the Aquarium, drunk beer in Wesselstuen, listened to an overrated new band in Garage and seen SK Brann lose a football match at Brann Stadium. Mathias had found time to do all these things that you should do with student friends. Alone.

He did the circuit with Idar again and pretended it was the first time.

Mathias soon discovered that Idar was a social suckerfish, and by fastening onto the suckerfish Mathias found himself at the heart of all the action.

‘Why did you choose to study medicine?’ Idar asked Mathias at a pre-ball warm-up in a flat belonging to a student with a traditional Bergensian name. It was the evening of the medical students’ annual autumn ball, and Idar had invited two nice Bergen girls in black dresses and with pinned-up hair, who were leaning forward to hear what the two of them were saying.

‘To make the world a better place,’ Mathias said, drinking up his lukewarm Hansa beer. ‘What about you?’

‘To earn money, stands to reason,’ Idar said, winking at the girls.

One of them sat down beside Mathias.

‘You’ve got a blood donor badge,’ she said. ‘What blood type are you?’

‘B negative. What do you do then?’

‘Let’s not talk about that. B negative? Isn’t that extremely rare?’

‘Yes. How did you know?’

‘I’m training as a nurse.’

‘Right,’ Mathias said. ‘Which year?’

‘Third.’

‘Have you thought about what you’re going to speciali—?’

‘Let’s not talk about that,’ she said and placed a hot little hand on his thigh.

She repeated the same sentence five hours later lying naked beneath him in his bed.

‘That’s never happened to me before,’ he said.

She smiled up at him and stroked his cheek. ‘So there’s nothing wrong with me then?’

‘What?’ he stammered. ‘No.’

She laughed. ‘I think you’re sweet. You’re nice and thoughtful. What happened to these by the way?’

She pinched his chest.

Mathias felt something black descend. Something nasty and black and wonderful.

‘I was born like that,’ he said.

‘Is it a disease?’

‘It comes with Raynaud’s phenomenon and scleroderma.’

‘What?’

‘A hereditary disease causing connective tissue in the body to thicken.’

‘Is it dangerous?’ She carefully stroked his chest with her fingers.

Mathias smiled and sensed an incipient erection. ‘Raynaud’s phenomenon just means that your toes and fingers go cold and white. Scleroderma is worse . . .’

‘Oh?’

‘The thickened connective tissue makes the skin tighten. Everything is smoothed out and wrinkles disappear.’

‘Isn’t that good?’

He was aware of her hand groping southwards. ‘The tightened skin begins to hinder facial expressions, you have fewer of them. It’s like your face stiffening into a mask.’

The hot little hand closed around his dick.

‘Your hands and, in time, your arms are bent and you can’t straighten them. In the end you’re left standing there, quite unable to move, as you’re suffocated by your own skin.’

She whispered breathlessly: ‘Sounds like a gruesome death.’

‘The best advice is to commit suicide before the pain drives you insane. Would you mind lying at the end of the bed? I’d like to stand and do it.’

‘That’s why you study medicine, isn’t it.’ she said. ‘To find out more. To find a way of living with it.’

‘All I want,’ he said, getting up and standing at the end of the bed with his erect penis swaying in the air, ‘. . . is to find out when it’s time to die.’

The newly qualified Dr Mathias Lund-Helgesen was a popular man in the Neurology Department of Bergen’s Haukeland Hospital. Both colleagues and patients described him as a competent, thoughtful person and, not least, a good listener. The latter was a great help as he often received patients with a variety of syndromes, generally inherited and often without much prospect of a cure, only some relief. And when on rare occasions they saw patients suffering from the dreadful condition of scleroderma they were always referred to the friendly young doctor who was beginning to consider specialising in immunology. It was early autumn when Laila Aasen and her husband came to him with their daughter. The daughter’s joints had stiffened and she was in pain; Mathias’s first thought was that it could be Bekhterev’s disease. Both Laila Aasen and her husband confirmed that there had been rheumatic illnesses on their side of the family, so Mathias took blood samples from them as well as from the daughter.

When the results came back Mathias was sitting at his desk and had to read them three times. And the same nasty and black and wonderful feeling surged to the surface again. The tests were negative. Both in the medical sense, Bekhterev’s disease could be eliminated as a cause of the afflictions, and in the more familiar sense, Herr Aasen could be eliminated as the girl’s father. And Mathias knew he didn’t know. But she knew; Laila Aasen knew. He had seen her face twitch when he asked for blood samples from all three of them. Was she still screwing the other man? What did he look like? Did he live in a detached house with a big front lawn? What secret flaws did he have? And how and when would the daughter find out that all her life she had been deceived by this lying whore?

Mathias looked down and realised he had knocked over his glass of water. A large wet stain was spreading across his crotch, and he felt the cold spread to his stomach and up towards his head.

He phoned Laila Aasen and informed her of the result. The medical result. She thanked him, audibly relieved, and they rang off. Mathias stared at the telephone for a long time. God, how he hated her. That night he lay unable to sleep on the narrow mattress in his bedsit where he had stayed after studying. He tried to read, but the letters danced in front of his eyes. He tried masturbating, which as a rule made him tired enough to sleep afterwards, but he couldn’t concentrate. He stuck a needle in the big toe that had gone completely white again, just to see if he had any sensation. In the end he huddled up under the duvet and cried until daybreak painted the night sky grey.

Mathias was also responsible for more general neurological cases and one of them was an officer from Bergen Police Station. After the examination, the middle-aged policeman stood up and dressed. The combination of body odour and boozy breath was numbing.

‘Well?’ growled the policeman as if Mathias were one of his subordinates.

‘First stages of neuropathy,’ Mathias replied. ‘The nerves under your feet are damaged. There is reduced sensation.’

‘Do you think that’s why I’ve started walking like a bloody dipso?’

‘Are you a dipso, Rafto?’

The policeman stopped buttoning up his shirt and a flush rose up his neck, like mercury up a thermometer. ‘What did you bloody say, you snot-nosed whelp?’

‘As a rule too much alcohol is the cause of polyneuropathy. If you continue to drink you risk permanent brain damage. Have you heard of Korsakoff, Rafto? You haven’t? Let’s hope you never do because if you hear his name it’s generally in connection with an extremely unpleasant syndrome named after him. When you look in the mirror and ask yourself if you’re a dipso, I don’t know what you answer, but I suggest that next time you ask an additional question: Do I want to die now or do I want some more time?’

Gert Rafto scrutinised the young man in the doctor’s coat. Then he swore under his breath, marched out and slammed the door behind him.

Four weeks later Rafto rang. He asked if Mathias could come and see him.

‘Drop in tomorrow,’ Mathias said.

‘I can’t. It’s urgent.’

‘Then get yourself to A&E.’

‘Listen to me, Lund-Helgesen. I’ve been in bed for three days without being able to move. You’re the only one who’s asked me straight out if I’m a dipso. Yes, I am a dipso. And no, I don’t want to die. Not yet.’

Gert Rafto’s flat stank of rubbish, empty beer bottles and him. But not of leftovers, for there was no food in the house.

‘This is a B1 vitamin supplement,’ Mathias said, holding the syringe to the light. ‘It will get you back on your feet.’

‘Thank you,’ Gert Rafto said. Five minutes later he was asleep.

Mathias walked around the flat. On the desk there was a photograph of Rafto with a dark-haired girl on his shoulders. Above the desk on the wall hung photographs of what must have been murder scenes. Many photographs. Mathias stared at them. Took a couple of them down and studied the details. Goodness, how sloppy they had been, the murderers. Their inefficiency was especially noticeable on the bodies with wounds from both sharp and blunt instruments. He opened drawers and looked for more photographs. He found reports, notes, a few valuables: rings, ladies’ watches, necklaces. And newspaper cuttings. He read them. Gert Rafto’s name ran right through them, often with quotes from press conferences at which he talked about the murderers’ stupidity and how he had caught them. Because it was clear he had caught them, every single one.

Six hours later, when Gert Rafto awoke, Mathias was still there. He was sitting by the bed with two murder reports in his lap.

‘Tell me,’ Mathias said. ‘How would you commit a murder if you didn’t want to get caught?’

‘Avoid my beat,’ Rafto said, looking round for something to drink. ‘If the detective’s good, you haven’t got a hope in hell anyway.’

‘And if I still wanted to do it on the beat of a good detective?’

‘Then I would cosy up to the detective before committing the murder,’ Gert Rafto said. ‘And then, after the murder, I would kill him, too.’

‘Funny,’ Mathias said. ‘That’s just what I was thinking.’

In the weeks that followed, Mathias made quite a few house calls to Gert Rafto. He recovered quickly and they talked often and at length about illness, lifestyle and death, and about the only two things Gert Rafto loved on this earth: his daughter Katrine who, incomprehensibly, returned his love, and the little cabin on Finnøy which was the one place he could be sure of finding peace. Mostly, though, they talked about the murder cases Gert Rafto had solved. About the triumphs. And Mathias encouraged him, told him the fight against alcohol could be won, he could celebrate new triumphs so long as he kept off the bottle.

And by the time late autumn came to Bergen with even shorter days and even longer showers Mathias had his plan ready.

One morning he called Laila Aasen at home.

He gave his name, and she listened in silence as he explained the reason for his call. The daughter’s blood sample had thrown up new findings and he now knew that Bastian Aasen was not the child’s biological father. It was important that he be given a blood sample by the real father. This would of necessity mean that the daughter and Bastian would be apprised of the relationship. Would she give her consent?

Mathias waited, allowing this to sink in.

Then he said that if she considered it important that the matter remained behind closed doors, he would still like to help, but it would have to be done ‘off the record’.

‘Off the record?’ she repeated with the apathy of someone in shock.

‘As a doctor I’m bound to observe ethical rules regarding candour to the patient, here, your daughter. But I’m researching syndromes and am therefore particularly interested in following up her case. If, with the utmost discretion, you could meet me this afternoon . . .’

‘Yes,’ she whispered in a tremulous voice. ‘Yes, please.’

‘Good. Catch the last cable car of the day to the top of Ulriken. There we will be undisturbed and can walk back down. I hope you appreciate what I’m risking, and please don’t mention this meeting to a living soul.’

‘Of course not! Trust me.’

He was still holding the receiver to his ear after she had rung off. With his lips to the grey plastic, he whispered: ‘And why should anyone trust you, you little whore?’