The Snowman: A Harry Hole Novel

by Jo Nesbo

  He thought about the letter. And the telephone call he had just received from Skarre about the signals transmitted by Birte’s missing phone. His heart was beating slower now, pumping blood and transmitting calm, regular signals to the brain that there was still life. Like a mobile phone to a base station. Heart, Harry thought. Signal. The letter. It was a sick thought. So why hadn’t he already dismissed it? Why was he already calculating how long it would take him to run to the car, drive to Hoff and check which of them was sicker?

  Rakel stood by the kitchen window looking across her property to the spruce trees blocking her view of the neighbors. At a local residents’ meeting she had suggested that some of the trees might be cut down to let in more light, but the unspoken absence of enthusiasm that greeted her was so obvious that she didn’t even ask for a vote. The spruce trees prevented people from looking in, and that was how they liked it on Holmenkollen Ridge. The snow still lay on the ground here, high above the town, where BMWs and Volvos gently threaded their way up through the bends on their way home to electric garage doors and dinners on tables, prepared by fitness-center-slim housewives taking their career breaks with just a little help from nannies.

  Even through the solid floors of the wooden house she had inherited from her father, Rakel could hear the music from Oleg’s room above. Led Zeppelin and the Who. When she was eleven years old, it would have been unthinkable to listen to music from her parents’ generation. But Oleg had been given these CDs by Harry and he played them with genuine love.

  She thought about how thin Harry had become, how he had shrunk. Just like her memory of him. It was almost frightening how someone you have been intimate with can fade and vanish. Or perhaps that was why; you had been so close to each other that afterward, when you no longer were, it seemed unreal, like a dream you soon forgot because it had happened only in your head. Perhaps that was why it had been a shock to see him again. To embrace him, to smell his aroma, to hear his voice, not on the telephone, but from a mouth with those strangely soft lips in that hard and ever more lined face of his. To look into those blue eyes with the gleam that varied in intensity as he talked. Just like before.

  Yet she was glad it was over, that she had put it behind her. That this man had become a person with whom she would not share her future, a person who would not bring his grubby reality into their lives.

  She was better now. Much better. She looked at her watch. He would be here soon. For, unlike Harry, he tended to be on time.

  Mathias had suddenly appeared one day. At a garden party under the auspices of the Holmenkollen Residents’ Association. He didn’t even live in the neighborhood—he had been invited by friends—and he and Rakel had sat talking almost the entire evening. Mostly about her, in fact. And he had listened attentively, a bit like doctors do, she had thought. But then he had called her two days later and asked her whether she would like to see an exhibition at the Henie Onstad Art Center in Høvikodden. Oleg was welcome to join them, because there was a children’s exhibition, too. The weather had been terrible, the art mediocre and Oleg fractious. But Mathias had managed to lift the mood with his good humor and acid comments about the artist’s talent. And afterward he had driven them home, apologized for his idea and promised with a smile never to take them anywhere ever again. Unless they asked him to, of course. After that Mathias had gone to Botswana for a week. And had called her the evening he came home to ask if they could go out again.

  She heard the sound of a car shifting down to tackle the steep driveway. He drove a Honda Accord of older vintage. She didn’t know why, but she liked the idea of that. He parked in front of the garage, never inside. And she liked that, too. She liked the fact that he brought a change of underwear and a toilet kit in an overnight bag he then took away with him the next morning. She liked him asking her when she wanted to see him again and taking nothing for granted. That might change now, of course, but she was ready for it.

  He stepped out of the car. He was tall, almost as tall as Harry, and smiled to the kitchen window with his open, boyish face, even though he must have been dead on his feet after the inhumanly long shift. Yes, she was ready for it. For a man who was present, who loved her and prioritized their little trio above everything else. She heard a key being turned in the front door. The key she had given him the previous week. Mathias had looked like one big question mark at first, like a child who had just received a ticket to a chocolate factory.

  The door opened, he was inside and she was in his arms. She thought even his woolen coat smelled good. The material was soft and autumn-cold against her cheek, but the secure warmth inside was already radiating out to her body.

  “What is it?” He laughed in her hair.

  “I’ve been waiting for this for so long,” she whispered.

  She closed her eyes, and they stood like that for a while.

  She released him and looked up into his smiling face. He was a good-looking man. Better-looking than Harry.

  He freed himself, unbuttoned his coat, hung it up and walked over to the slop sink, where he washed his hands. He always did that when he came from the Anatomy Department, where they handled real bodies during the lectures. As indeed Harry always had when he came straight from murder cases. Mathias opened the cupboard under the sink, emptied potatoes from the bag into the kitchen sink and turned on the tap.

  “How was your day, darling?”

  She thought that most men would have asked about the previous night; after all, he knew she had met Harry. And she liked him for that, too. She talked while looking out the window. Her gaze ran across the spruce trees to the town beneath them, where lights had started to twinkle. He was down there somewhere now. On a hopeless hunt for something he had never found and never would. She felt sorry for him. Sympathy was all that was left. In truth, there had been a moment last night when they were both silent and their eyes had held each other, unable to free themselves right away. It had felt like an electric shock, but it had been over in an instant. Completely over. No lasting magic. She had made her decision. She stood behind Mathias, put her arms around him and rested her head on his broad back.

  She could feel muscles and sinews at work under his shirt as he peeled the potatoes and put them in the saucepan.

  “We could do with a couple more,” he said.

  She became aware of a movement by the kitchen door and turned.

  Oleg was standing there looking at them.

  “Could you fetch some more potatoes from the cellar?” she said and saw Oleg’s eyes darken.

  Mathias turned. Oleg was still there.

  “I can go,” Mathias said, taking the empty bucket from under the sink.

  “No,” said Oleg, stepping forward two paces. “I’ll go.”

  He took the bucket from Mathias, turned and went out the door.

  “What was that about?” Mathias asked.

  “He’s just a bit frightened of the dark,” Rakel sighed.

  “I thought so, but why did he go anyway?”

  “Because Harry said he should.”

  “Should do what?”

  Rakel shook her head. “The things he’s frightened of. And doesn’t want to be frightened of. When Harry was here, he used to send Oleg down to the cellar all the time.”

  Mathias frowned.

  Rakel put on a sad smile. “Harry’s not exactly a child psychiatrist. And Oleg wouldn’t listen to me if Harry had given his opinion first. On the other hand, there are no monsters down there.”

  Mathias turned a knob on the stove and said in a low voice, “How can you be so sure of that?”

  “Mathias?” Rakel laughed. “Were you afraid of the dark?”

  “Who’s talking about was?” Mathias grinned mischievously.

  Yes, she liked him. This was better. A better life. She liked him, yes she did, she did like him.

  Harry pulled up in front of the Beckers’ house. He sat in the car staring at the yellow light from the windows spilling onto the yard. The snowman had shr
unk to a dwarf. But its shadow still extended to the trees and right over to the picket fence.

  Harry got out of the car. The lament of the iron gate made him wince. He knew he ought to have called first; a yard was as much private property as a house was. But he had neither the patience nor the inclination to discuss anything with Professor Becker.

  The wet ground was springy. He crouched down. The light reflected off the snowman as if it were matte glass. The thaw during the day had made the tiny snow crystals hook together into larger crystals, but now that the temperature had fallen again, the water vapor had condensed and frozen onto other crystals. The result was that the snow, which had been so fine, white and light this morning, was now coarse, grayish white and packed.

  Harry raised his right hand. Clenched his fist. And punched.

  The snowman’s crushed head rolled off its shoulders and down onto the brown grass.

  Harry punched again, this time from above and down through the neck. His fingers formed a claw and bored their way through the snow and found what they were searching for.

  He pulled out his hand and held it up triumphantly in front of the snowman, the way Bruce Lee did, to show his adversary the heart he had just torn out of his chest.

  It was a red and silver Nokia mobile phone. It was still switched on.

  But the feeling of triumph had faded. For he already knew that this was not a breakthrough in the investigation, just a minor scene in a puppet show with someone else pulling invisible strings. It had been too simple. They had been meant to find it.

  Harry walked to the front door and rang the bell. Filip Becker opened up. His hair was disheveled and his tie askew. He blinked hard several times as though he had been sleeping.

  “Yes,” he answered to Harry’s question. “That’s the kind of phone she’s got.”

  “Could I ask you to call her number?”

  Filip Becker disappeared into the house and Harry waited. Suddenly Jonas poked his face out of the porch doorway. Harry was about to say hi, but at that moment the red phone began to play a children’s tune: “Blåmann, blåmann, bukken min.” And Harry remembered the next line from his school songbook: Tenk på vesle gutten din. Think about your little boy.

  And he saw Jonas’s face light up. Saw the inexorable process of reasoning in the boy’s brain, the immediate bewilderment and then the joy of hearing his mother’s ringtone fade into intense, naked fear. Harry swallowed. It was a fear he knew all too well.

  As Harry let himself into his apartment he could smell the plaster and the sawdust. The plasterboard forming the corridor walls had been taken down and lay piled up on the floor. There were some light stains on the brick wall behind. Harry ran a finger over the white coating that had drifted onto the parquet floor. He put a fingertip into his mouth. It tasted salty. Did mold taste like that? Or was it just salt bloom, the structure sweating? Harry flicked a lighter and leaned over to the wall. Nothing to smell, nothing to see.

  When he had gone to bed and was staring into the room’s hermetically sealed blackness, he thought about Jonas. And his own mother. About the smell of illness and her face slowly fading into the pillow’s whiteness. For days and weeks he had played with Sis, and Dad had gone quiet and everyone had tried to act as if nothing were happening. He thought he could hear a faint rustle outside in the hall. As if the invisible puppet strings were multiplying, lengthening and sneaking around as they consumed the darkness and formed a faint shimmering light that quivered and shook.

  7

  DAY 3

  Hidden Statistics

  The frail morning light seeped through the blinds in the POB’s office, coating the two men’s faces in gray. POB Hagen was listening to Harry with a pensive furrow over bushy black eyebrows that met in the middle. On the huge desk stood a small plinth bearing a white knuckle bone that, according to the inscription, had belonged to the Japanese battalion commander Yoshito Yasuda. In his years at the military academy, Hagen had lectured about this little finger, which Yasuda had cut off in desperation in front of his men during the retreat from Burma in 1944.

  It was just a year since Hagen had been brought back to his old employer, the police, to head the Crime Squad, and, as a lot of water had passed under the bridge in the meantime, he listened with relative patience to his veteran inspector holding forth on the theme of missing persons.

  “In Oslo alone, more than six hundred people are reported missing every year. After a couple of hours only a handful of these are not found. As good as none remain missing for more than a couple of days.”

  Hagen stroked a finger over the hairs on the bridge of his nose. He had to prepare for the budget meeting in the chief constable’s office. The theme was cutbacks.

  “Most missing persons are escapees from mental institutions or elderly people suffering from dementia,” Harry continued. “But even the relatively compos mentis who have run off to Copenhagen or committed suicide are found. Their names appear on passenger lists, they withdraw cash from an ATM or wash up on a beach.”

  “What’s your point?” Gunnar Hagen said, looking at his watch.

  “This,” Harry said, tossing a yellow file that landed on the POB’s desk with a smack.

  Hagen leaned forward and flicked through the stapled documents. “My goodness, Harry. You’re not normally the report-writing type.”

  “This is Skarre’s work,” Harry said, wasting no words. “But the conclusion is mine, and I’ll give it to you now, orally.”

  “Make it brief, please.”

  Harry stared down at his hands, which he had placed in his lap. His long legs were stretched out in front of the chair. He took a deep breath. He knew that once he had said this out loud, there was no going back.

  “Too many people have disappeared,” Harry said.

  The right half of Hagen’s eyebrow shot into the air. “Explain.”

  “You’ll find it on page six. A list of missing women aged between twenty-five and fifty from 1994 until today. Women who in the last ten years have never been found. I’ve been talking to the Missing Persons Unit, and they agree. It’s simply too many.”

  “Too many in relation to what?”

  “In relation to before. In relation to Denmark and Sweden. And in relation to other demographic groups. Married and cohabiting women are hugely overrepresented.”

  “Women are more independent than they used to be,” Hagen said. “Some go their own way, break with the family, go abroad with a man, maybe. That has some bearing on statistics. So?”

  “They’ve become more independent in Denmark and Sweden, too. But they find them again there.”

  Hagen sighed. “If the figures are so divergent from the norm, as you claim, why has no one discovered this before?”

  “Because Skarre’s figures are valid for the whole country, and usually the police look only at those missing in their own district. There is a national missing-persons register at Kripos that has eighteen hundred names, but it’s for the last fifty years and includes shipwrecks and disasters like the Alexander Kielland oil rig. The point is that no one has looked at countrywide patterns. Not until now.”

  “Fine, but our responsibility is not for the country, Harry. It’s for the Oslo Police District.” Hagen smacked both palms down to indicate that the audience was over.

  “The problem,” Harry said, rubbing his chin, “is that it’s come to Oslo.”

  “What it?”

  “Last night I found Birte Becker’s mobile phone in a snowman. I don’t know quite what it is, boss. But I think we need to find out. Quickly.”

  “These statistics are interesting,” Hagen said, absentmindedly taking Battalion Commander Yasuda’s little finger and pressing his thumb into it. “And I also appreciate that this latest disappearance is grounds for concern. But it’s not enough. So tell me: What was it that actually made you ask Skarre to write this report?”

  Harry looked at Hagen. Then he pulled a dog-eared envelope from his inside pocket and passed it to Hag
en.

  “This was in my mailbox after I did the TV show at the beginning of September. Until now I had thought it was a madman’s work.”

  Hagen took out the letter, and after reading the six sentences, shook his head at Harry. “The snowman? And what is/are the Murri?”

  “That’s exactly the point,” Harry said. “I’m afraid this is the it.”

  The POB looked nonplussed.

  “I hope I’m wrong,” Harry said, “but I think we have some hellishly dark days ahead of us.”

  Hagen sighed. “What do you want, Harry?”

  “I want an investigation team.”

  Hagen studied Harry. Like most other officers at the Police HQ, he regarded Harry as a self-willed, arrogant, argumentative, unstable alcoholic. Nevertheless, he was glad they were on the same side and that he wouldn’t have this man snapping at his heels.

  “How many?” he asked at length. “And for how long?”

  “Ten detectives. Two months.”

  “Two weeks?” said Magnus Skarre. “And four people? Is that supposed to be a murder investigation?”

  He looked around with disapproval at the other three squeezed into Harry’s office: Katrine Bratt, Harry Hole and Bjørn Holm from Krimteknisk, the Forensics Unit.

  “That’s what Hagen’s given me,” Harry said, tipping back on his chair. “And this is not a murder investigation. For the moment.”

  “What is it, actually?” Katrine Bratt asked. “For the moment?”

  “A missing-persons case,” Harry said. “But one that bears a certain similarity to other recent cases.”

  “Housewives who one day in late autumn suddenly up and run?” asked Bjørn Holm with remnants of the rural Toten dialect he had added to the goods he had removed from the village of Skreia, along with an LP collection consisting of Elvis, hard-core hillbilly, the Sex Pistols, Jason & the Scorchers, three hand-sewn suits from Nashville, an American Bible, a slightly undersize sofa bed and a dining-room suite that had outlived three generations of Holms. All piled up on a trailer and towed to the capital by the last Amazon to roll off the 1970 Volvo assembly line. Bjørn Holm had bought the Amazon for 1,200 kroner, but even at that time no one knew how many miles it had gone because the odometer went up only to 100,000. However, the car expressed everything Bjørn Holm was and believed in; it smelled better than anything he knew, a mixture of imitation leather, metal, engine oil, sun-faded rear dash, Volvo factory and seats impregnated with “personality perspiration,” which Bjørn Holm explained was not common body perspiration but a select veneer of all the previous owners’ souls, karma, eating habits and lifestyles. The furry dice hanging from the mirror were original Fuzzy Dice, which expressed the right mix of genuine affection for and ironical distance from a bygone American culture and aesthetic that perfectly suited a Norwegian farmer’s son who had grown up with Jim Reeves in one ear and the Ramones in the other, and loved both. Now he was sitting in Harry’s office with a Rasta hat that made him look more like an undercover narcotics cop than a forensics officer. Two immense fire-engine-red cutlet-shaped sideburns framing Bjørn Holm’s plump, round face emerged from the hat, and his slightly protruding eyes gave him a fishlike expression of constant wonderment. He was the only person Harry had insisted on having on his small investigation team.