The Snowman

by Jo Nesbo

  “I don’t know. It depends on Oleg.”

  “Right. We’ll see, then. Anyway, it was nice to meet you.”

  Again he shook her hand. Then left, knowing he had won the first round.

  He drove to his apartment in Torshov and read an interesting article about water channels in the brain. When he returned at eight she was sitting under one of the umbrellas, wearing a big white hat. She smiled as he sat down beside her.

  “Saved any lives?” she asked.

  “Mostly scrapes and grazes,” Mathias said. “An appendicitis. The high point was a boy who’d got a lemonade bottle stuck up his nose. I told his mother he was probably too young to sniff Coke. Sad to say, people in that type of situation don’t have much of a sense of humor …”

  She laughed. That refined, trilled laugh, which almost made him wish the whole thing were for real.

  Mathias had already observed the thickening of his skin in various areas, but in the autumn of 2004 he noticed the first signs that the disease was entering the next phase. The phase he did not want to be a part of. The tightening of his face. His plan had been that Eli Kvale would be the victim of the year, then the whores Birte Becker and Sylvia Ottersen in the years that followed. The interesting part would be to see whether the police would pick up on the connections between the latter two victims and the lecher Arve Støp. But, as it turned out, his plans would have to be pushed forward. He had always promised himself that he would call it a day once the pain came, he wouldn’t wait. And now it was here. He decided to take all three of them. As well as the grand finale: Rakel and the policeman.

  Previously he had worked undercover, and now it was time to exhibit his life’s work. To do that he would have to leave clear clues, show them the connections, give them the bigger picture.

  He started with Birte. They agreed to talk about Jonas at her house after her husband had gone to Bergen in the evening. Mathias arrived at the appointed time and she took his coat on the porch and turned to put it in the closet. It was rare for him to improvise, but a pink scarf was hanging on one peg and he grabbed it as if by instinct. He wound it twice before going up behind her and placing it around her neck. He lifted the little woman up and positioned her in front of the mirror so that he could see her eyes. They were bulging; she was like a fish that had been hauled up from the deep.

  After depositing her in the car, he went onto the lawn to the snowman he had made the night before. He pressed the mobile phone into its chest, filled the cavity and knotted the scarf around its neck. It was past midnight by the time he arrived at the garage of the Anatomy Department, injected fixative into Birte’s body, stamped the metal tags, tied them on and put her on an unoccupied ledge in one of the tanks.

  Then it was Sylvia’s turn. He called her and rattled off the usual spiel, and they arranged to meet in the forest behind the Holmenkollen ski jump, a place he had used on previous occasions. But this time there were people nearby and he wouldn’t take the risk. He explained to her that Idar Vetlesen, unlike himself, was not exactly a specialist in Fahr’s Syndrome, and they would have to meet again. She suggested he call her the following evening, when she would be at home on her own.

  The next evening he drove out, found her in the barn and set on her on the spot.

  But it had almost gone wrong.

  The crazy woman had swung her hatchet at him, hit him in the side, cut open his jacket and shirt and severed an artery, with the result that his blood had gushed out all over the barn floor. B-negative blood. Two people in a hundred’s blood. So after he had killed her in the forest and left her head on top of the snowman, he returned, slaughtered a chicken and sprayed its blood over the floor to cover up his own.

  It was a stressful twenty-four hours, but the strange thing was that he felt no pain that night. And over the subsequent days he followed the case in the newspapers, quietly triumphant. The Snowman. That was the name they had given him. A name that would be remembered. He would never have guessed that a few printed words in a newspaper could afford such a feeling of power and influence. He almost regretted having operated clandestinely for so many years. And it was so easy! There he was going around thinking that what Gert Rafto said was true, that a good detective would always find the murderer. But he had met Harry Hole and had seen the frustration in the policeman’s frazzled face. It was the face of someone who comprehended nothing.

  But then, while Mathias was preparing his final moves, it came like a bolt from the blue. Idar Vetlesen. He called to say that Hole had visited him asking questions about Arve Støp and pressing him for the connection. And Idar himself wondered what was going on; after all, it was unlikely that the selection of the victims was arbitrary. And, apart from himself and Støp, Mathias was the only person who knew about the paternities, since Mathias, as usual, had helped him with the diagnosis.

  Idar was rattled, of course, but fortunately Mathias managed to calm him down. He told Idar not to say a word to anyone and to meet him in a safe place where no one could see them.

  Mathias was nearby laughing as he said it; it was practically word for word what he told his female victims. He supposed it must have been the tension.

  Idar proposed the curling club. Mathias hung up and pondered his options.

  It struck him that he could make it seem as if Idar were the Snowman and at the same time procure himself some downtime.

  The next hour he spent sketching out the details of Idar’s suicide. And even though he appreciated his friend in many ways, it was an oddly stimulating, indeed inspiring, process. As the planning of the great project had been. The last snowman. She would have to sit—as he had on the first day of snow so many years ago—on the snowman’s shoulders, feel the cold through her thighs and watch through the window, watch the treachery, the man who would be her death: Harry Hole. He closed his eyes and visualized the noose over her head. It glinted and glowed. Like a fake halo.

  34

  DAY 21

  Sirens

  Harry got into the car in the garage at the Anatomy Department. Closed the doors and his eyes, and tried to think clearly. The first thing to do was find out where Mathias was.

  He had deleted Mathias from his mobile phone and now called directory assistance, which gave him the number and the address. He tapped in the number, noticed while he was waiting that his breathing was accelerated and excited, and tried to calm down.

  “Hi, Harry.” Mathias’s voice was low, but sounded pleasantly surprised, as usual.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Harry said.

  “Not at all, Harry.”

  “Ah, OK. Where are you now?”

  “I’m at home. I’m on my way down to see Rakel and Oleg.”

  “Great. I was wondering if you could deliver the something to Oleg for me.”

  There was a pause. Harry clenched his jaw, making his teeth crack.

  “Of course,” Mathias said. “But Oleg’s at home now, so you can—”

  “Rakel,” Harry interrupted. “We … I don’t feel like seeing her today. Could I pop over to your place for a moment?”

  Another pause. Harry pressed the receiver against his ear and listened hard, as if to pick up what his interlocutor was thinking. But all he could hear was breathing and fragile background music, minimalist Japanese glockenspiel or something like that. He visualized Mathias in an austere, equally minimalist apartment. Not that big, maybe, but tidy—that was obvious—nothing left to chance. And now he had put on a neutral light-blue shirt and a fresh bandage on the wound in his side. Because, when he had been standing on the steps in front of Harry, he hadn’t held his crossed arms high to hide his missing nipples. It had been to hide the hatchet wound.

  “Of course,” Mathias said.

  Harry was unable to decide whether his voice sounded natural. The background music had stopped.

  “Thank you,” Harry said. “I’ll be quick, but promise me that you’ll wait.”

  “I promise,” Mathias said. “But, Harry …”
>
  “Yes?” Harry took a deep breath.

  “Do you know what my address is?”

  “Rakel told me.”

  Harry cursed inside. Why hadn’t he said he got it from directory assistance? There was nothing suspicious about that.

  “Did she?” Mathias asked.

  “Yes.”

  “OK,” Mathias said. “Come right in. The door’s unlocked.”

  Harry hung up and stared at the telephone. He could find no rational explanation for his foreboding that time was short and that he had to run for his life before darkness fell. So he resolved that he was imagining things. That it didn’t help, this type of fear, the terror that comes with the onset of night, when you can’t see your grandparents’ farm.

  He punched in another number.

  “Yes,” Hagen answered. The voice was toneless, lifeless. The resignation-writing voice, Harry presumed.

  “Drop the paperwork,” Harry said. “You’ve got to call the chief constable. I need a firearms authorization. Arrest of suspected murderer on Åsengata 12, Torshov.”

  “Harry—”

  “Listen. The remains of Sylvia Ottersen are in a tank at the Anatomy Department. Katrine is not the Snowman. Do you understand?”

  Silence.

  “No,” Hagen confessed.

  “The Snowman is a lecturer at the department. Mathias Lund-Helgesen.”

  “Lund-Helgesen? Well, I’ll be damned. Do you mean the—”

  “Yes, the doctor who was so helpful in focusing our attention on Idar Vetlesen.”

  Life had returned to Hagen’s voice. “The chief is going to ask if it’s likely that the man’s armed.”

  “Well,” Harry said, “as far as we know, he hasn’t used a firearm on any of the people he’s killed.”

  A couple of seconds passed before Hagen caught the sarcasm. “I’ll phone him now,” he said.

  Harry hung up and turned the key in the ignition while calling Magnus Skarre with his other hand. Skarre and the engine responded in unison.

  “Still in Tryvann?” Harry shouted above the roar.

  “Yes.”

  “Drop everything and get yourself in a car. Meet me at the intersection of Åsengata and Vogts Gate. It’s a bust.”

  “All hell’s broken loose?”

  “Yeah,” Harry said. The rubber screamed on the concrete as he let the clutch go.

  He thought of Jonas. For some reason he thought of Jonas.

  One of the six patrol cars Harry had asked the Incident Room for was already at Åsengata as Harry came down Vogts Gate from Storo. Harry drove up onto the pavement, jumped out and went over to them. They rolled down the window and passed Harry the walkie-talkie he had requested.

  “Switch off the blender,” Harry ordered, pointing to the rotating blue light. He pressed the TALK button and told the patrol cars to turn off the sirens well before they got to the scene.

  Four minutes later six patrol cars were assembled at the intersection. The police officers, among them Skarre and Ola Li from Crime Squad, had crowded around Harry’s car, where he sat with a street map in his lap, pointing.

  “Li, you take three cars to cut off any possible escape routes. Here, here and here.”

  Li leaned over the map, nodding.

  Harry turned to Skarre. “The caretaker?”

  Skarre raised the phone. “Talking to him now. He’s on his way over to the main door with keys.”

  “OK. You take six men and position yourselves by the entrance, back stairs and, if possible, on the roof. And you bring up the rear, OK? Has the Delta car arrived?”

  “Here.” Two of the officers, identical to the others from the outside, signaled that they were driving the regular vehicle for Delta, the Special Forces Unit trained particularly for this kind of operation.

  “OK, I want you in front of the main entrance now. Are you all armed?”

  The officers nodded. Some of them were armed with MP5 machine guns. The others had only service revolvers. It was a fiscal matter, as the chief constable had once explained.

  “The caretaker says Lund-Helgesen lives on the second floor,” Skarre said, slipping the mobile phone into his jacket pocket. “There’s just one apartment on each floor. No exits to the roof. To reach the rear staircase he’d have to go up to the third and through a locked attic.”

  “Good,” Harry said. “Send two men up the rear stairs and tell them to wait in the attic.”

  “OK.”

  Harry took with him the two uniformed officers from the car that had arrived first. An older officer and a young, pimply kid, both of whom had worked with Skarre before. Instead of going into Åsengata 12, they crossed the street and went into the building opposite.

  Both young boys from the Stigson family stared wide-eyed at the two uniformed men while their father listened to Harry explaining why they had to use their second-floor apartment for a short while. Harry entered the sitting room, pushed the sofa away from the window and took a closer look at the apartment on the other side of the street.

  “Light’s on in the living room,” he said.

  “Someone’s sitting there,” said the older officer, who had taken up a position behind him.

  “I’ve heard your eyesight deteriorates by thirty percent after you hit fifty,” Harry said.

  “I’m not blind. In the big chair there you can see the top of his head and the hand on the armrest.”

  Harry squinted. Shit, did he need glasses? Well, if the old guy thought he saw someone, then he must be right.

  “You stay here and radio if he moves. All right?”

  “All right.” The older man smiled.

  Harry took the kid along with him.

  “Who’s sitting inside?” the young officer said in a loud voice over the clatter of their feet as they raced downstairs.

  “Heard of the Snowman?”

  “Oh, crap.”

  “That’s right.”

  They sprinted across the street to the other building. The caretaker, Skarre and five uniformed policemen stood ready by the front door.

  “I haven’t got a key for the apartments,” the caretaker said. “Only for this door.”

  “That’s fine,” Harry said. “Everyone got their weapons ready? We make as little noise as possible, OK? Delta, you stay with me …”

  Harry took out Katrine’s Smith & Wesson and signaled to the caretaker, who turned the key in the lock.

  Harry and the two Delta men, both armed with MP5’s, strode soundlessly up the stairs, three steps at a time.

  They stopped on the second floor outside an unmarked blue door. One officer laid his ear against the door, faced Harry and shook his head. Harry had lowered the volume of the walkie-talkie to the very minimum, and now he raised it to his mouth.

  “Alpha to”—Harry had not allocated call names and couldn’t remember first names—“the window post by the sofa. Has the target moved? Over.”

  He let go of the button and there was a low crackle. Then came the voice:

  “He’s still sitting in the chair.”

  “Roger. We’re going in. Over and out.”

  One officer nodded and produced a crowbar while the other backed away and braced himself.

  Harry had seen the technique used before; one man prizes open the door so that the other can charge in. Not because they couldn’t have broken it open, but because it is the effect of the loud bang, the power and speed, that paralyzes the target and in nine cases out of ten causes him to freeze on the chair, sofa or bed.

  But Harry held up a restraining hand. He pressed the door handle and pushed.

  Mathias hadn’t lied; it was unlocked.

  The door slid open without a sound. Harry pointed to his chest to say he would go first.

  The apartment was not minimalist in the way that Harry had imagined.

  It was minimalist in the sense that there was nothing there: no shoes in the hall, no furniture, no pictures. Only bare walls begging for new wallpaper or a lick of paint
. It looked as if it had been abandoned for a substantial amount of time.

  The living-room door was ajar, and through the gap Harry could see the arm of the chair, a hand on top. A small hand with a watch. He held his breath, took two long strides, gripped the revolver with both hands and nudged the door open with his foot.

  He sensed the other two—who had moved into the edge of his vision—stiffen.

  And heard a barely audible whisper. “Jesus Christ …”

  A large illuminated chandelier hung above the armchair and lit up the person sitting there and staring straight at him. The neck bore bruising from strangulation, the face was pale and beautiful, the hair black and the dress sky blue with tiny white flowers. The same dress as in the photo on his kitchen calendar. Harry felt his heart explode in his chest as the rest of his body turned to stone. He tried to move, but could not tear himself away from her glazed eyes. The accusatory, glazed eyes. Which accused him of not having acted; he had known nothing of this, but he should have acted, he should have stopped this happening, he should have saved her.

  She was as white as his mother had been on her deathbed.

  “Check the rest of the apartment,” Harry said in a thick voice, lowering his revolver.

  He took an unsteady step toward the body and held her wrist in his hand. It was ice-cold and lifeless, like marble. Yet he could feel a ticking, a weak pulse, and for one absurd moment he thought she had only been made up to look dead. Then he looked down and saw it was the watch that was ticking.

  “There’s no one else here,” he heard one of the officers behind him say. Then a cough. “Do you know who she is?”

  “Yes,” Harry said, running a finger over the watch face. The same watch he had been holding in his own hand a mere few hours ago. The watch that had been left in his bedroom. That he had put in the birdhouse because Rakel’s boyfriend was taking her out this evening. To a party. To celebrate that from now on the two of them would be as one.

  Again Harry looked at the eyes, her accusing eyes.

  Yes, he thought. Guilty on all counts.

  Skarre had come into the apartment and was standing behind Harry, staring over his shoulder at the dead woman in the chair. Beside him stood the two Delta officers.