The Snowman

by Jo Nesbo

  “I’m not coming back,” she said with a pout.

  It was almost midnight when Rakel left Harry’s apartment. Silent, fine drizzle made the pavement shine under the streetlamps. She turned onto Stensberggata, where she had parked the car. She got inside and was about to start the engine when she spotted a handwritten note placed under the windshield wiper. Opening the door a crack, she grabbed it and tried to read the writing that the rain had nearly washed away.

  We’re going to die, whore.

  Rakel flinched. Looked around. But she was alone. All she could see on the street were other parked cars. Were there notes on them, too? She couldn’t see any. It had to be chance; no one could have known where her car was. She rolled down the window, held the note between two fingers and let it go, started the engine and pulled out onto the road.

  Just before the end of Ullevålsveien she suddenly had a feeling someone was sitting in the backseat staring at her. She looked and saw a boy’s face. Not Oleg, but another boy’s unfamiliar face. She slammed on the brakes and the rubber screamed on the pavement. Then came the angry sound of a car horn. Three times. She stared into her mirror as her chest heaved. And saw the face of the terrified young man in the car right behind her. Trembling, she put the car back into gear.

  Eli Kvale stood in the hallway as if rooted to the floor. In her hand she was still holding the telephone receiver. She had not been imagining things, not at all.

  Only when Andreas had said her name twice did she come to.

  “Who was it?” he said.

  “No one,” she said. “Wrong number.”

  When they were in bed, she wanted to snuggle up to him. But she couldn’t. Couldn’t bring herself to do it. She was impure.

  “We’re going to die,” the voice on the phone had said. “We’re going to die, whore.”

  19

  DAY 16

  TV

  By the time the investigation team was assembled the following morning they had checked out six of the seven names on Katrine Bratt’s list. There was just one remaining.

  “Arve Støp?” Bjørn Holm and Magnus Skarre queried in unison.

  Katrine Bratt said nothing.

  “OK,” Harry said. “I’ve spoken to Krohn on the phone. He made it quite clear that Støp does not wish to answer the question of whether he has an alibi. Or any other questions. We can arrest Støp, but he is perfectly within his rights not to make a statement. The only thing we’ll achieve by doing this is to announce to the world that the Snowman is still out there. The point at issue is whether Støp is telling the truth or this is all an act.”

  “But an A-list celebrity as a murderer,” Skarre said with a grimace. “Who’s ever heard of that?”

  “O. J. Simpson,” Holm said. “Phil Spector. Marvin Gaye’s father.”

  “Who the hell’s Phil Spector?”

  “It’d be better if you all told me what you think,” Harry said. “Straight from the hip, spontaneous. Has Støp got anything to hide? Holm?”

  Bjørn Holm rubbed his cutlet-shaped sideburns. “It’s suspicious that he doesn’t wanna answer a question as specific as where he was when Vetlesen died.”

  “Bratt?”

  “I think Støp just finds being under suspicion amusing. And as far as his magazine is concerned, it doesn’t mean a thing. The opposite, in fact. It reinforces its outsider image. The great martyr standing firm against the current of opinion, as it were.”

  “Agreed,” Holm said. “I’m changing sides. He wouldn’t have taken this risk if he’d been guilty. He’d have gone for a scoop.”

  “Skarre?” Harry asked.

  “He’s bluffing. This is just bullshit. Did anyone actually understand the stuff about the press and principles?”

  None of the others answered.

  “OK,” Harry said. “Assuming the majority is right and he’s telling the truth, then we should eliminate him as quickly as possible and move on. Is there anyone we can think of who might have been with him at the time of Vetlesen’s death?”

  “Hardly,” Katrine said. “I called a girl I know at Liberal. She said that outside working hours Støp isn’t particularly sociable. By and large he keeps to himself in his apartment in Aker Brygge. Ladies excepted, that is.”

  Harry looked at Katrine. She reminded him of the overzealous student who is always a term ahead of the lecturer.

  “Ladies in the plural?” Skarre asked.

  “To quote my friend, Støp is notorious for buzzing around the honeypot. Right after she had rejected one of his advances, he told her in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t living up to his expectations as a journalist and ought to think about grazing in new pastures.”

  “The two-faced bastard,” Skarre said, snorting.

  “A conclusion you and she share,” Katrine said. “But the fact is she’s a crappy journalist.”

  Holm and Harry burst into laughter.

  “Ask your friend if she can name any of the lovers,” Harry said, getting up. “And afterward call the rest of the staff at the magazine and ask them the same. I want him to feel us breathing down his neck. So let’s get going.”

  “And what about you?” said Katrine, who had not moved.

  “Me?”

  “You didn’t tell us if you think Støp is bluffing.”

  “Well.” Harry smiled. “He’s definitely not telling the whole truth.”

  The other three looked at him.

  “He said he didn’t remember what he and Vetlesen had been talking about during their last telephone conversation.”

  “And?”

  “If you found out that a man you’d just been talking to was a wanted serial killer who’d now committed suicide, wouldn’t you have instantly remembered the conversation, gone over it in great detail, asking yourself if you should have picked up anything?”

  Katrine nodded slowly.

  “The other thing I’m wondering,” Harry said, “is why the Snowman would contact me to tell me to look for him. And when I get close, as he should have anticipated, why does he become desperate and try to make it look as if Vetlesen were the Snowman?”

  “Perhaps that was the idea the whole time,” Katrine said. “Perhaps he had a motive for pointing the finger at Vetlesen, some unsettled score between them. He led you that way right from the word go.”

  “Or perhaps that was how he was going to beat you,” Holm suggested. “To force you to make mistakes. And then quietly enjoy the victory.”

  “Come on,” Skarre said. “You’re making this sound as if it’s something personal between the Snowman and Harry Hole.”

  The other three eyed the detective in silence.

  Skarre frowned. “Is it?”

  Harry took his jacket from the coatrack. “Katrine, I want you to visit Borghild again. Say that we’ve got a warrant entitling us to look at patients’ medical records. I’ll take the rap if it comes. Then see what you can dig up on Arve Støp. Anything else before I go?”

  “This woman in Tveita,” Holm said. “Camilla Lossius. She’s still missing.”

  “You go take a look, Holm.”

  “What are you going to do?” Skarre asked.

  Harry gave a thin smile. “Learn to play poker.”

  Standing outside Tresko’s door on the sixth floor of the only apartment building in Frogner Plass, Harry had that same feeling he had when he was small and everyone else in Oppsal was on vacation. This was the last resort, his last desperate action, having rung the doorbells at all the other houses. Tresko—or Asbjørn Treschow, which was his real name—opened up and stared sullenly at Harry. Because he knew now, just as he had then. Last resort.

  The front door led straight into a three-hundred-square-foot living space one might call, charitably, a lounge with an open-plan kitchen, and uncharitably, an SRO. The stench was breathtaking. It was the smell of bacteria vegetating on damp feet and stale air, hence the vernacular but accurate Norwegian term tåfis, or toe-fart. Tresko had inherited his sweaty feet from his
father. Just as he had inherited the sobriquet tresko, clogs, this dubious footwear he always wore in the belief that the wood absorbed the smell.

  The only positive thing you could say about Tresko junior’s foot odor was that it masked the smell of the dishes piled up in the sink, the overflowing ashtrays and the sweat-impregnated T-shirts drying over chair backs. It occurred to Harry that in all probability Tresko’s sweaty feet had driven his opponents to the edge of sanity on his passage through to the semifinals of the world poker championship in Las Vegas.

  “Been a long while,” Tresko said.

  “Yes. Great that you had some time for me.”

  Tresko laughed as if Harry had told him a joke. And Harry, who had no desire to spend any longer than necessary in the place, got straight to the point.

  “So why is poker just about being able to see when your opponent is lying?”

  Tresko didn’t seem to mind skipping the social niceties.

  “People think poker’s about statistics, odds and probability. But if you play at the highest level all the players know the odds by heart, so that’s not where the battle takes place. What separates the best from the rest is their ability to read others. Before I went to Vegas I knew I was going to be up against the best. And I could see the best playing on the Gamblers’ Channel, which I received on satellite TV. I recorded it and studied every single one of the guys when they were bluffing. Ran it in slow motion, logged what went on in their faces down to the tiniest detail, what they said and did, every repeated action. And after I’d worked at it for long enough there was always something, some recurrent mannerism. One scratched his right nostril; another stroked the back of the cards. Leaving Norway, I was sure I was going to win. Sadly it turned out I had even more telltale tics.”

  Tresko’s grim laughter sounded more like a kind of sobbing and caused his amorphous frame to shake.

  “So if I bring a man in for questioning, you can see whether he’s lying or not?”

  Tresko shook his head. “It’s not that simple. First of all, I need to have a recording. Second, I must have seen the cards so that I know when he’s been bluffing. Then I can rewind and analyze what he does differently. It’s like when you calibrate a lie detector, isn’t it? Before you run the test, you get the guy to say something that is obviously true, such as his name. And then something that is obviously a lie. And afterward you read the printout so that you have points of reference.”

  “An obvious truth,” Harry mumbled. “And an obvious lie. On a film clip.”

  “But, as I said on the phone, I can’t guarantee anything.”

  Harry found Beate Lønn in the House of Pain, the room where she had spent most of her time when she had been working in the Robberies Unit. The House of Pain was a windowless office packed with equipment for watching and editing closed-circuit TV footage, blowing up images and identifying people in grainy shots or voices on fuzzy telephone recordings. But now she was head of the Forensics Unit, in Brynsalléen, and furthermore just back from maternity leave.

  The machines were buzzing, and the dry heat had put roses in her almost transparent, pale cheeks.

  “Hi,” Harry said, letting the iron door close behind him.

  The small, agile woman got up and they hugged, both feeling a bit awkward.

  “You’re thin,” she said.

  Harry shrugged. “How’s … everything going?”

  “Greger sleeps when he has to, eats what he has to and hardly ever cries.” She smiled. “And for me that’s everything now.”

  He thought he should say something about Halvorsen. Something to show that he hadn’t forgotten. But the right words wouldn’t come. And instead, seeming to understand, she asked how he was.

  “Fine,” he said, dropping into a chair. “Not bad. Absolutely dreadful. Depends on when you ask.”

  “And today?” She turned to the TV monitor and pressed a button, and people on the screen started running backward into the Storo Mall.

  “I’m paranoid,” Harry said. “I have the feeling I’m hunting someone who is manipulating me, that everything is chaotic and he is making me do exactly what he wants. Do you know the feeling?”

  “Yes,” Beate said. “I call him Greger.” She stopped rewinding. “Do you want to see what I’ve found?”

  Harry pushed his chair closer. It was no myth that Beate Lønn had special gifts, that her fusiform gyrus, the part of the brain that stores and identifies human faces, was so highly developed and sensitive that she was a walking index file of criminals.

  “I went through the shots you have of those involved in the case,” she said. “Husbands, children, witnesses and so on. I know what our old friends look like, of course.”

  She moved the images frame by frame. “There,” she said, stopping.

  The image was frozen and jumped on the screen, showing a selection of people in grainy black and white, out of focus.

  “Where?” Harry said, feeling as witless as he usually did when he was studying pictures with Beate Lønn.

  “There. It’s the same person in this picture.” She took out one of the photos from her file.

  “Could this be the person who is tailing you, Harry?”

  Harry stared at the photo in astonishment. Then he nodded slowly and grabbed his phone. Katrine Bratt answered after two seconds.

  “Get your coat and meet me down in the garage,” Harry said. “We’re going for a drive.”

  Harry drove along Uranienborgveien and Majorstuveien to avoid the traffic lights on Bogstadveien.

  “Was she really sure it was him?” Katrine said. “The picture quality on surveillance cameras—”

  “Believe me,” Harry said. “If Beate Lønn says it’s him, it’s him. Call directory assistance and get his home number.”

  “I saved it on my mobile,” Katrine said, bringing it up.

  “Saved?” Harry glanced at her. “Do you do that with everyone you encounter?”

  “Yep. Put them in a group. And then I delete the group when the case is over. You should try it. It’s a wonderful feeling when you press delete. Really … tangible.”

  Harry stopped across from the yellow house in Hoff.

  All the windows were dark.

  “Filip Becker,” Katrine said. “Fancy that.”

  “Remember, we’re just having a talk with him. He might have had quite understandable reasons for calling Vetlesen.”

  “From a pay phone in Storo Mall?”

  Harry eyed Katrine. The pulse in the thin skin on her neck was visibly throbbing. He looked away and at the living-room window of the house.

  “Come on,” he said. The moment he seized the car-door handle his mobile rang. “Yes?”

  The voice at the other end sounded excited, but still reported in short, concise sentences. Harry interrupted the stream with two Mms, a surprised What? and a When?

  Then, at last, the other end went quiet.

  “Call the Incident Room,” Harry said. “Ask them to send the two nearest patrol cars to Hoffsveien. No sirens and tell them to stop at each end of the residential block … What? … Because there’s a boy inside and we don’t want to make Becker any more nervous than we have to. OK?”

  Evidently it was OK.

  “That was Holm.” Harry leaned in front of Katrine, opened the glove compartment, rummaged through it and took out a pair of handcuffs. “His people have found quite a few fingerprints on the car in the Lossiuses’ garage. They checked them against the other prints we have in the case.”

  Harry took the bunch of keys from the ignition, bent forward and produced a metal box from under the seat. Inserted a key in the lock, opened the box and lifted out a black short-barreled Smith & Wesson. “One off the windshield matched.”

  Katrine shaped her mouth into a mute O and inquired with a nod of her head if it was the yellow house.

  “Yup,” Harry responded. “Professor Filip Becker.”

  He saw Katrine Bratt’s eyes widen. But her voice was as calm as before.
“I have a feeling I’ll soon be pressing delete.”

  “Maybe,” Harry said, flipping open the cylinder of the revolver and checking that there were bullets in all the chambers.

  “There can’t be two men who kidnap women in this way.” She tilted her head from side to side as if warming up for a boxing contest.

  “A reasonable assumption.”

  “We should’ve known the first time we came here.”

  Harry observed her, wondering why he didn’t share her excitement. What had happened to the intoxicating pleasure of making an arrest? Was it because he knew it would soon be replaced by the empty sensation of having arrived too late, of being a fireman sifting through the ruins? Yes, but it wasn’t that. It was something else—he could sense it now. He had a nagging doubt. The fingerprints and the recordings from Storo Mall would go a long way in a court case, but it had been too easy. This killer wasn’t like that; he didn’t make such banal errors. This was not the same person who had placed Sylvia Ottersen’s head on top of a snowman, who had frozen a policeman in his own freezer, who had sent Harry a letter saying, What you should ask yourself is this: “Who made the snowman?”

  “What should we do?” Katrine asked. “Should we arrest him ourselves?”

  Harry couldn’t hear from the intonation whether this was a question or not.

  “For the time being we wait,” Harry said. “Until backup is in position. Then we’ll ring the bell.”

  “And if he isn’t at home?”

  “He’s at home.”

  “Oh? How do—”

  “Look at the living-room window. Keep your eyes focused.”

  She watched. And when the white light changed behind the large panoramic window he could see she understood. The light came from a TV.

  They waited in silence. There were no sounds. A crow screeched. Then it was quiet again. Harry’s phone rang.

  Their backup was in position.

  Harry briefed them quickly. He didn’t want to see any uniforms until they were summoned, except perhaps if they heard shots or shouting.

  “Put it on vibrate,” Katrine said after he had hung up.