The Snowman: A Harry Hole Novel

by Jo Nesbo

  Harry pressed the doorbell once more, thinking it was like summer vacation when he was small and everyone had gone and he was the only boy left in Oppsal. When he had stood there ringing the bell at Øystein’s place or one of the others’, hoping by some miracle that someone would be at home and not with Grandma in Halden or in a cabin in Son or camping in Denmark. He had pressed the bells again and again until he knew that only one possibility remained. Tresko. Tresko, with whom Øystein and he never wanted to play, but who still hung around like a shadow waiting for them to change their minds, to bring him in from the cold, temporarily. He must have chosen Harry and Øystein because they weren’t the most popular, either, so he reckoned if he was going to be accepted into a club this was where his greatest hope lay. And now this was his opportunity because he was the only one left, and Harry knew that Tresko was always at home because his family could never afford to go anywhere and he had no other friends to play with.

  Harry heard slippers shuffling inside, and the door opened a crack. The woman’s face lit up. Just like Tresko’s mother’s face had lit up when she saw Harry. She never invited him in, just called Tresko, went to get him, gave him an earful, shoved him into his ugly parka and pushed him out onto the step, where he stood looking sulkily at Harry. And Harry knew Tresko knew. And felt his mute hatred as they walked down to the kiosk. But that was fine. It helped time pass.

  “I’m afraid Idar’s not here,” Fru Vetlesen said. “But won’t you come in and wait? He was just going out for a little drive, he said.”

  Harry shook his head, wondering if she could see the blue lights piercing the evening darkness of Bygdøy on the street behind him. He bet it was Skarre who had put them on, the numbskull.

  “When did he leave?”

  “Just before five.”

  “But that’s several hours ago,” Harry said. “Did he say where he was going?”

  She shook her head. “Never tells me anything. What do you think about that? Doesn’t even want to let his own mother know what he’s doing.”

  Harry thanked her and said he would be back later. Then he walked down the gravel path and the steps to the wicket gate. They hadn’t found Idar Vetlesen at his office or at Hotel Leon, and the curling club had been shut up and dark. Harry closed the gate behind him and walked over to the car. The uniformed officer rolled down the window.

  “Switch off the blue lights,” Harry said, turning to Skarre in the backseat. “She says he’s not at home, and she’s probably telling the truth. You’ll have to wait to see if he returns. Call the duty officer and tell him to mount a manhunt. Nothing over the police radio, OK?”

  On the way back to town Harry called the Telenor switchboard, where he was informed that his contact Torkildsen had gone home for the day and that inquiries regarding the location of Idar Vetlesen’s mobile phone would have to go through formal channels early the following morning. He hung up and turned up the volume of Slipknot’s “Vermilion,” but he wasn’t in the mood and pressed the eject button to change to a Gil Evans CD he had rediscovered at the back of the glove compartment. The NRK twenty-four-hour news was jabbering away on the radio as he fidgeted with the CD cover.

  “The police are searching for a male doctor in his thirties, a resident of Bygdøy. He is thought to be connected to the Snowman murders.”

  “Fuck!” Harry yelled, throwing Gil Evans at the windshield and showering the car with bits of plastic. The disc rolled into the foot well. In sheer frustration Harry stamped on the accelerator and passed a tanker, which was in the left lane. Twenty minutes. It had taken them twenty minutes. Why didn’t they just give the Police HQ a microphone and live airtime?

  The police cafeteria was closed and deserted for the evening, but that was where Harry found her, her and sandwiches at a table for two. Harry sat in the other chair.

  “Thank you for not telling anyone I lost it on Finnøy,” she said softly.

  Harry nodded. “What did you do?”

  “I checked out and caught the three o’clock flight. I just had to get away.” She looked down into her cup of tea. “I’m … sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” Harry said, regarding her slim, bent neck, pinned-up hair and the petite hand placed on the table. He saw her differently now. “When the tough nuts crack, they crack in style.”

  “Why?”

  “Perhaps because they haven’t had enough practice at losing control.”

  Katrine nodded, still staring at the teacup with the police sports team logo.

  “You’re a control freak, too, Harry. Don’t you ever lose it?”

  She raised her eyes, and Harry thought it must have been the intense light in her irises that lent her whites a bluish shimmer. He groped for his cigarettes. “I’ve had masses of practice at it. I’ve hardly trained at anything else except freaking out. I’ve got a black belt in losing control.”

  She gave a faint smile by way of response.

  “They’ve measured the brain activity of experienced boxers,” he said. “Did you know that they lose consciousness several times in the course of a fight? A fraction of a second here, a fraction of a second there. But somehow they still manage to stay on their feet. As if the body knows it’s temporary, assumes control and holds them up for as long as it takes them to regain consciousness.” Harry tapped out a cigarette. “I also lost it at the cabin. The difference is that, after all these years, my body knows that control will return.”

  “But what do you do,” Katrine asked, stroking a wisp of hair from her face, “not to be knocked out by the first blow?”

  “Do what boxers do, sway with the punches. Don’t resist. If any of what happens at work gets to you, just let it. You won’t be able to shut it out in the long term anyway. Take it bit by bit, release it like a dam, don’t let it collect until the wall develops cracks.”

  He poked the unlit cigarette between his lips.

  “Yes, I know. The police psychologist told you all this when you were a cadet. My point is this: Even when you release it into real life you have to feel what it’s doing to you, feel if it’s destroying you.”

  “OK,” Katrine said. “And what do you do if you feel it’s destroying you?”

  “Then you get yourself another job.”

  She gave him a long stare.

  “And what did you do, Harry? What did you do when you felt it was destroying you?”

  Harry bit lightly into the filter, feeling its soft, dry fiber rub against his teeth. Thinking she could have been his sister or daughter—they were made of the same stern stuff. Solid, heavy, ungiving building material with big cracks.

  “I forgot to look for another job,” he said.

  She beamed. “Do you know what?” she whispered.

  “What?”

  She stretched out her hand, grabbed the cigarette from his mouth and leaned across the table.

  “I think—”

  The cafeteria door burst open. It was Holm.

  “TV2,” he said. “It’s on the news now. Names and photos of Rafto and Vetlesen.”

  And with that came the chaos. Even though it was eleven o’clock at night, within half an hour the foyer of the Police HQ was full of journalists and photographers. They were all waiting for the Kripos head, Espen Lepsvik, or Hagen, the head of the Crime Squad, the chief superintendent, the chief constable, or basically anyone, to come down and say something. Mumbling among themselves that the police had to acknowledge their responsibility to keep the general public informed about such a serious, shocking and circulation-increasing matter.

  Harry stood by the banister in the atrium looking down at them. They were circling like restless sharks, consulting one another, duping one another, helping one another, bluffing and scenting tidbits. Had anyone heard anything? Would there be a press conference tonight? Or at least an impromptu briefing? Was Vetlesen already on his way to Thailand? The deadline was looming; something had to happen.

  Harry had read that the word deadline originated from the battlefields o
f the American Civil War, when, for lack of anything material to lock prisoners behind, the captors gathered together the prisoners and a line was drawn around them in the dirt. Which became known as the “dead line,” and anyone who strayed beyond it was shot. And that was precisely what they were, the news warriors down there in the foyer: prisoners of war restrained by a deadline.

  Harry was on his way to the meeting room with the others when his mobile phone rang. It was Mathias.

  “Have you listened to the voice mail I left you?” he asked.

  “Haven’t had the chance—things are heating up here,” Harry said. “Can we talk about it later?”

  “Of course,” Mathias said. “But it’s about Idar. I saw on the news that he was a wanted man.”

  Harry shifted the phone to his other hand. “Tell me now, then.”

  “Idar called me earlier today. He was asking about carnadrioxide. He often calls me to ask about medicines—pharmacy’s not Idar’s strong suit—so I didn’t think too much about it at the time. I’m calling because carnadrioxide is an extremely dangerous medicine. Just thought you would want to know.”

  “Sure, sure,” Harry said, rummaging through his pockets until he found a half-chewed pencil and a tram ticket. “Carna …?”

  “Carnadrioxide. It contains venom from the cone snail and is used as a painkiller for cancer and HIV patients. It’s a thousand times stronger than morphine and just a tiny overdose will paralyze muscles with immediate effect. The respiratory organs and heart will stop and you will die instantly.”

  Harry made notes. “OK. What else did he say?”

  “Nothing. He sounded stressed. Thanked me and hung up.”

  “Any idea where he was calling from?”

  “No, but there was something odd about the acoustics. He certainly wasn’t calling from his consulting room. It sounded as if he were in a church or a cave—do you understand what I mean?”

  “I understand. Thank you, Mathias. We’ll call you back if we need to know any more.”

  “Just happy to—”

  Harry didn’t catch the rest as he pressed the end-call button and the line went dead.

  Inside K1, the whole of the small investigation team was sitting with cups of coffee—a fresh pot was simmering on the machine—and jackets were hanging from chairs. Skarre had just returned from Bygdøy. He reported back on the conversations he had had with Idar Vetlesen’s mother, who had repeated that she didn’t know anything and the whole thing must be an enormous misunderstanding.

  Katrine had phoned his assistant, Borghild Moen, who had expressed the same sentiments.

  “We’ll question them tomorrow if need be,” Harry said. “Now, I’m afraid, we have a more pressing problem.”

  The three others looked at Harry as he summarized the conversation with Mathias. Reading from the back of a tram ticket. Carnadrioxide.

  “Do you think he murdered them?” Holm asked. “With paralyzing medicine?”

  “There we have it,” Skarre interrupted. “That’s why he has to hide the bodies. So that the medicine isn’t discovered at the autopsy and traced back to him.”

  “The only thing we know,” Harry said, “is that Idar Vetlesen is out of control. And if he’s the Snowman, he’s breaking the pattern.”

  “The question,” Katrine said, “is who he’s after now. Someone’s definitely going to die from that stuff soon.”

  Harry rubbed his neck. “Did you get a printout of Vetlesen’s phone calls, Katrine?”

  “Yes, I was given names for the numbers and went through them with Borghild. Most were patients. And there were two conversations with Krohn, his lawyer, and the one you just summarized with Lund-Helgesen. In addition, there was a number registered under Popper Publishing.”

  “We haven’t got much to work on,” Harry said. “We can sit here and drink coffee and scratch our stupid heads. Or we can go home and return with the same stupid, but not quite so exhausted, heads tomorrow.”

  The others just stared at him.

  “I’m not joking,” he said. “Get the hell home.”

  Harry offered to drop Katrine off in the former workers’ district of Grünerløkka, where, following her instructions, he stopped outside an old four-story building on Seilduksgata.

  “Which apartment?” he asked, leaning forward.

  “Second floor, on the right.”

  He peered up. All the windows were dark. He didn’t see any curtains. “Doesn’t look like your husband’s at home. Or perhaps he’s gone to bed.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, not making a move. “Harry?”

  He looked at her quizzically.

  “When I said the question was who the Snowman was after now, did you know who I meant?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “What we found on Finnøy was not the random murder of someone who knew too much. It had been planned long before then.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that if Rafto had in fact been on his trail, then that was planned, too.”

  “Katrine …”

  “Wait. Rafto was the best detective in Bergen. You’re the best in Oslo. He could predict that it would be you who would investigate these murders, Harry. That was why you received the letter. I’m merely saying you should be careful.”

  “Are you trying to frighten me?”

  She shrugged. “If you’re frightened, do you know what that means?”

  “No.”

  Katrine opened the car door. “That you should find yourself another job.”

  Harry unlocked his apartment door, took off his boots and stopped at the threshold to the sitting room. The room was completely dismantled now, like a building kit in reverse. The moonlight fell on something white on the bare red wall. He went in. It was a number eight, drawn in chalk. He stretched out his hand and touched it. It must have been done by the mold man, but what did it mean? Perhaps a code to tell him which liquid to apply there.

  For the rest of the night wild nightmares racked Harry’s body, turning him this way and that. He dreamed that something was forced into his mouth and he had to breathe through some kind of opening so as not to die from suffocation. It tasted of oil, metal and gunpowder, and in the end there was no more air left inside, just a vacuum. Then he spat the thing out and discovered it was not the barrel of a gun, but a figure eight he had been breathing through. An eight with a large circle below, a smaller one above. The big circle at the bottom, the little one at the top. Gradually the figure eight acquired a third, a smaller circle on top. A head. Sylvia Ottersen’s head. She tried to scream, tried to tell him what had happened, but she couldn’t. Her lips were sewn together.

  When he awoke, his eyes were gummed up, he had a headache and there was a coating on his lips that tasted of chalk and bile.

  16

  DAY 10

  Curling

  It was a chilly morning in Bygdøy as Asta Johannsen unlocked the curling club at eight, as usual. The soon-to-be seventy-year-old widow cleaned there twice a week, which was more than sufficient, as the private little hall was not used by more than a handful of men and, moreover, it didn’t have any showers. She switched on the light. From the cog-jointed timber walls hung trophies, diplomas, pennants adorned with Latin phrases and old black-and-white photographs of men wearing beards, tweeds and worthy expressions. Asta thought they looked comical, like those foxhunters in English TV series about the upper classes. She went through the door to the curling hall and knew from the cold inside that they had forgotten to turn up the thermostat for the ice, which they usually did to save electricity. Asta Johannsen flicked on the light switch and, as the neon tubes blinked and wrestled to decide whether they wanted to work, she put on her glasses and saw that the thermostat for the cooling cables was indeed too low, and she turned it up.

  The light shone on the gray surface of ice. Through her reading glasses she glimpsed something at the other end of the hall, so she removed them. Slowly things came into focus. A person? S
he wanted to walk across the ice, but hesitated. Asta Johannsen was not at all the jittery type but she feared that one day she would break her thigh on the ice and have to stay there until the foxhunters found her. She gripped one of the brooms leaning against the walls, used it as a walking stick and, taking tiny steps, teetered across the ice.

  The lifeless man lay at the end of the sheet with his head in the center of the rings. The blue-white gleam from the neon tubes fell on the face stiffened in a grimace. There was something familiar about his face. Was he a celebrity? The glazed eyes seemed to be looking for something behind her, beyond what was here. The cramped right hand held an empty plastic syringe containing a residue of red contents.

  Asta Johannsen calmly concluded that there was nothing she could do for him and concentrated on making her way back over the ice to the nearest telephone.

  After she had called the police and they had come, she went home and drank her morning coffee.

  It was only when she picked up the Aftenposten newspaper that she realized who it was she had found.

  Harry was in a crouch, examining Idar Vetlesen’s boots.

  “What does our pathologist say about the time of death?” he asked Bjørn Holm, who was standing beside him in a denim jacket lined with white teddy-bear fur. His snakeskin boots made almost no noise as he stamped them on the ice. Barely an hour had passed since Asta Johannsen had made her call, but the reporters were already assembled outside the red police cordon by the curling club.

  “He says it’s difficult to tell,” Holm said. “He can only guess how fast the temperature of a body lying on ice in a much warmer room might fall.”

  “But he has made a guess?”

  “Somewhere between five and seven yesterday evening.”

  “Mm. Before the TV news announcement about him. You saw the lock, did you?”

  Holm nodded. “Standard Yale. It was locked when the cleaning lady arrived. I saw you looking at the boots. I’ve checked the prints. I’m pretty sure they’re identical to the prints we’ve got from Sollihøgda.”

  Harry studied the pattern on the sole. “So you think this is our man, do you?”