The Snowman (56 page)

Harry pulled up in the doorway. Ståle Aune was sitting up in bed and had obviously just made a witticism because the head of Krimteknisk, Beate Lønn, was still laughing. On her lap sat a red-cheeked baby looking at Harry with big round eyes and an open mouth.

‘My friend!’ Ståle growled as he caught sight of the policeman.

Harry walked in, stooped, gave Beate a hug and offered Ståle Aune a hand.

‘You look better than when I saw you last,’ Harry said.

‘They say I’ll be discharged before Christmas,’ Aune said and turned Harry’s hand in his. ‘That’s some fiendish claw. What happened?’

Harry allowed him to study his right hand. ‘The middle finger was chopped off and couldn’t be saved. They sewed together the sinews in the index finger, and the nerve ends will grow a millimetre a month and try to find each other. Though the doctors say I’ll have to live with permanent paralysis on one side of it.’

‘A high price.’

‘No,’ Harry said. ‘Small beer.’

Aune nodded.

‘Any news about when the case is due to come up?’ asked Beate who had got to her feet to put the baby in the carrycot.

‘No,’ Harry said, watching the forensic officer’s efficient movements.

‘The defence will try to have Lund-Helgesen declared mad,’ Aune said, preferring the demotic form ‘mad’ which in his opinion was not only a suitable description but also poetic. ‘And not to achieve that would take an even worse psychologist than me.’

‘Oh yes, he’ll get life anyway,’ Beate said, angling her head and straightening the baby’s blanket.

‘Just a shame life isn’t life,’ Aune growled and put out a hand for the glass on his bedside table. ‘The more aged I become, the more I tend to the view that evil is evil, mental illness or no. We’re all more or less disposed to evil actions, but our disposition cannot exonerate us. For heaven’s sake, we’re all sick with personality disorders. And it’s our actions which define how sick we are. We’re equal before the law, we say, but it’s meaningless as long as no one is equal. During the Black Death seamen who coughed were immediately heaved overboard. Of course they were. For justice is a blunt knife, both as a philosophy and as a judge. All we have is fortunate or less fortunate medical prospects, my dears.’

‘Nevertheless,’ Harry said, staring down at the still bandaged stump of a middle finger, ‘in this case, it’ll be for life.’

‘Oh?’

‘Unfortunate medical prospects.’

The silence filled the room.

‘Did I say that I was offered a finger prosthesis?’ Harry announced waving his right hand. ‘But basically I like my hand as it is. Four fingers. Cartoon hand.’

‘What did you do with the finger that was there?’

‘Tried to donate it to the Anatomy Department, but they weren’t interested. So I’ll have it stuffed and put it on my desk, just like Hagen does with the Japanese little finger. Thought an upright middle finger might be a suitable Hole welcome.’

The other two laughed.

‘How are Oleg and Rakel doing?’ Beate asked.

‘Surprisingly well,’ Harry said. ‘Toughies.’

‘And Katrine Bratt?’

‘Better. I visited her last week. She starts work again in February. Going back to her old unit in Bergen.’

‘Really? Didn’t she almost shoot someone in her excitement?’

‘Wrong call. Turns out she was walking around with an empty revolver. That was why she dared to press the trigger so far back. And I should have known that.’

‘Oh?’

‘When you move from one police station to another you hand in your service revolver and get a new one with two boxes of ammo. There were two unopened boxes in her desk drawer.’

A moment of silence followed.

‘It’s good she’s well again,’ Beate said, stroking the baby’s hair.

‘Yes,’ Harry said absent-mindedly, and it occurred to him that it was true; she did seem to be getting better. When he had visited Katrine in her mother’s flat in Bergen she had just had a shower after a long run on Sandviken Mountain. Her hair had still been wet and her cheeks red as her mother had served tea and Katrine had talked about how her father’s case had become an obsession. And she had apologised for having dragged him into the matter. He hadn’t seen any regret in her eyes, though.

‘My psychiatrist says that I’m just a few notches more extreme than most people,’ she had laughed, and shrugged. ‘But now I’m done with all that. It’s pursued me from my childhood. Now he’s finally had his name cleared and I can move on with my life.’

‘Shuffling papers for the Sexual Offences Unit?’

‘We’ll start there, then we’ll see. Even top politicians make comebacks.’

Then her eyes had glided towards the window, across the fjord. Towards Finnøy perhaps. And as Harry had left he’d known the damage was there and always would be.

He looked down at his hand. Aune was right; if every baby was a perfect miracle, life was basically a process of degeneration.

A nurse coughed by the door. ‘Time for a few jabs, Aune.’

‘Oh, please let me off, sister.’

‘No one is let off here.’

Ståle Aune sighed. ‘Sister, what is worse? Taking the life of a person who wants to live or taking death from a person who wants to die?’

Beate, the nurse and Ståle laughed, and no one noticed Harry twitch in his chair.

Harry walked up the steep hills from the hospital to Lake Sognsvann. There weren’t many people around, only the loyal throng of Sunday walkers doing their fixed circuit around the lake. Rakel waited for him by the roadblock.

They gave each other a hug and started the circuit in silence. The air was sharp and the sun matt in a pale blue sky. Dry leaves crackled and disintegrated beneath their heels.

‘I’ve been sleepwalking,’ Harry said.

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. And I’ve probably been doing it for a while.’

‘It’s not so easy to be fully present all the time,’ she said.

‘No, no.’ He shook his head. ‘Quite literally. I think I’ve been up and walking through the flat at night. God knows what I’ve been up to.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘The night after I came home from the hospital I was standing in the kitchen looking at the floor, at some wet footprints. And then I realised I hadn’t got a stitch on, except for my rubber boots, it was the middle of the night and I was holding a hammer in my hand.’

Rakel smiled and looked down. Skipped a pace so that they were walking in rhythm. ‘I started sleepwalking for a while. Right after I became pregnant.’

‘Aune told me adults sleepwalk at times of stress.’

They stopped at the water’s edge. Watched a pair of swans float past, immobile and noiseless, on the grey surface.

‘I knew from the very first moment who Oleg’s father was,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t know that he and I were having a child when he was informed that his girlfriend in Oslo was pregnant.’

Harry filled his lungs with the sharp air. Felt it bite. It tasted of winter. He closed his eyes to the sun and listened.

‘By the time I found out, he had already made his decision and left Moscow for Oslo. I had two options. To give the child a father in Moscow who would love and look after him as if he were his own – so long as he thought he
was
his own – or for the child to have no father. It was absurd. You know what I feel about lying. If someone had told me that I –
I
of all people – would one day choose to live the rest of my life based on a lie, I would of course have denied it vehemently. You think everything is simple when you’re young; you know nothing about the impossible decisions you may have to face. And if I’d only had myself to consider, this would have been a simple decision, too. But there were so many things to take into account. Not only whether I would crush Fjodor and affront his family, but also whether I would destroy things for the man who had gone to Oslo and his family. And then there was Oleg to take into account. Oleg came first.’

‘I understand,’ Harry said. ‘I understand everything.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand why I haven’t told you this before. With you there was no one else to take into account. You must think that I’ve tried to appear to be a better person than I am.’

‘I don’t think that,’ Harry said. ‘I don’t believe that you’re a better person than you are.’

She rested her head on his shoulder.

‘Do you believe it’s true what they say about swans?’ she asked. ‘That they’re faithful to each other until death do them part?’

‘I believe they’re faithful to the promises they’ve made,’ Harry said.

‘And what promises do swans make?’

‘None, I would assume.’

‘So you’re talking about yourself now? In fact, I liked you better when you made promises and broke them.’

‘Would you like more promises?’

She shook her head.

When they started walking again she hooked her arm under his.

‘I wish we could begin afresh,’ she sighed. ‘Pretend nothing had happened.’

‘I know.’

‘But you also know that that’s no good.’

Harry could hear that the intonation implied this was a statement; however, hidden somewhere there was still a tiny weeny question mark.

‘I’ve been thinking of going away,’ he said.

‘Oh yes? Where?’

‘I don’t know. Don’t come looking for me. Especially not in North Africa.’

‘North Africa?’

‘It’s a Marty Feldman line in a film. He wants to escape and be found at the same time.’

‘I see.’

A shadow flitted across them and over the grey-yellow, leached forest floor. They looked up. It was one of the swans.

‘How did it work out in the film?’ Rakel asked. ‘Did they find each other again?’

‘Of course.’

‘When are you coming back?’

‘Never,’ Harry replied. ‘I’m never coming back.’

In a cold cellar in a Tøyen high-rise two worried representatives of the residents’ committee were standing and looking at a man in a boiler suit wearing glasses with unusually thick lenses. The breath was coming out of the man’s mouth like white plaster dust as he spoke.

‘That’s the thing about mould. You can’t see it’s there.’

He paused. Pressed his middle finger against the wisp of hair that was stuck to his forehead.

‘But it is.’