The Snowman (21 page)

She radiated impatience. Harry assumed she was in the process of leaving for the day.

‘Bygdøy Curling Club?’

‘No, the private one. The one down from Gimle.’

‘Thanks. Have a good evening.’

Harry gave Katrine the phone back.

‘We’ll bring him in,’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘The specialist who has an assistant who’s never heard of the disease he specialises in.’

After asking the way, they found Villa Grande, a luxurious property that, during the Second World War, had belonged to a Norwegian whose name, unlike that of the raft sailor and the Arctic explorer, was also widely known outside Norway: Quisling, the traitor.

At the bottom of the slope to the south of the building there was a rectangular wooden house resembling an old military barracks. As soon as you entered the building you could feel the cold hit you. And inside the next door the temperature fell further.

There were four men on the ice. Their shouts bounced off the wooden walls, and none of them noticed Harry and Katrine come in. They were shouting at a shiny stone gliding down the rink. The twenty kilos of granite, the type known as ailsite, from the Scottish island of Ailsa Craig, stopped against the guard of three other stones on the front edge of two circles painted into the ice at the end of the sheet. The men slid around the rink balancing on one foot and kicking off with the other, discussing, supporting themselves on their brooms and preparing for the next stone.

‘Snob sport,’ Katrine whispered. ‘Look at them.’

Harry didn’t answer. He liked curling. The meditative element as you watched the stone’s slow passage, rotating in an apparently friction-free universe, like one of the spaceships in Kubrick’s odyssey, accompanied not by Strauss but by the stone’s quiet rumble and the furious sweeping of brooms.

The men had seen them now. And Harry recognised two of the faces from media circles. One was Arve Støp’s.

Idar Vetlesen skated towards him.

‘Joining us for a game, Hole?’

He shouted that from far away, as if it was meant for the other men, not Harry. And it was followed by seemingly jovial laughter. But the muscles outlined against the skin of his jaw betrayed the game he was playing. He stopped in front of them, and the breath coming from his mouth was white.

‘The game’s over,’ Harry said.

‘I don’t think so,’ Idar smiled.

Harry could already feel the cold from the ice creeping through the soles of his shoes and advancing up his legs.

‘We’d like you to come with us to Police HQ,’ Harry said. ‘Now.’

Idar Vetlesen’s smile evaporated. ‘Why?’

‘Because you’re lying to us. Among other things, you’re not a Fahr’s syndrome specialist.’

‘Says who?’ Idar asked, glancing at the other curling players to confirm that they were standing too far away to hear them.

‘Says your assistant. Since she’s clearly never even heard of the disease.’

‘Listen here,’ Idar said, and a new sound, the sound of despair, had crept into his voice. ‘You can’t just come here and take me away. Not here, not in front of . . .’

‘Your clients?’ Harry asked and peered over Idar’s shoulder. He could see Arve Støp sweeping ice off the bottom of a stone while studying Katrine.

‘I don’t know what you’re after,’ he heard Idar say. ‘I’m happy to cooperate with you, but not if you’re consciously setting out to humiliate and ruin me. These are my best friends.’

‘We’ll carry on then, Vetlesen . . .’ resounded a deep baritone voice. It was Arve Støp’s.

Harry eyed the unhappy surgeon. Wondered what he understood by ‘best’ friends. And thought that, if there was the tiniest chance of gaining anything by fulfilling Vetlesen’s wish, then it was worth their while.

‘OK,’ Harry said. ‘We’re off. But you have to be at Police HQ in Grønland in exactly one hour. If not, we’ll come looking for you with sirens and trumpet fanfares. And they’re easy to hear in Bygdøy, aren’t they.’

Vetlesen nodded and for a moment looked as though he would laugh from force of habit.

Oleg shut the door with a bang, kicked off his boots and ran upstairs. There was a fresh aroma of lemon and soap throughout the house. He stormed into his room and the mobile hanging from the ceiling chimed in alarm as he pulled off his jeans and put on his tracksuit bottoms. He ran out again, but as he grabbed the banister to take the stairs in two long strides, he heard his name from behind the open door of his mother’s bedroom.

He went in and found Rakel on her knees in front of the bed with a long-handled scrubbing brush.

‘I thought you did the cleaning at the weekend?’

‘Yes, but not well enough,’ his mother said, getting up and wiping a hand across her forehead. ‘Where are you going?’

‘To the stadium. I’m going skating. Karsten’s waiting outside. Be back home for tea.’ He pushed off from the door and slid across the floor on stockinged feet, gravity low, the way Erik V, one of the skating veterans at Valle Hovin, had taught him.

‘Wait a minute, young man. Talking of skates . . .’

Oleg stopped. Oh no, he thought. She’s found the skates.

She stood in the doorway, tilted her head and clocked him. ‘What about homework?’

‘Haven’t got much,’ he said with a relieved smile. ‘I’ll do it after tea.’

He saw her hesitate and added quickly: ‘You look so nice in that dress, Mum.’

She lowered her eyes, at the old sky-blue dress with the white flowers. And even though she gave him an admonitory look, a smile was playing at the corners of her mouth. ‘Watch it, Oleg. Now you’re sounding like your father.’

‘Oh? I thought he only spoke Russian.’

He hadn’t meant anything with that comment, but something happened to his mother, a shock seemed to run through her.

He tiptoed. ‘Can I go now?’

‘Yes, you can go?’ Katrine Bratt’s voice lashed the fitness-room walls in the basement at Police HQ. ‘Did you really say that? That Idar Vetlesen could just go?’

Harry stared up at her face bent over the bench he was lying on. The dome-shaped ceiling light formed a shining yellow halo round her head. He was breathing heavily because an iron bar was lying across his chest. He had been about to perform a bench press of ninety-five kilos and had just lifted the bar off the stand when Katrine had marched in and ruined his attempt.

‘I had to,’ Harry said, managing to push the bar a bit higher so that it was on his breastbone. ‘He had his solicitor with him. Johan Krohn.’

‘So what?’

‘Well, Krohn started by asking what sort of methods we employed to blackmail his client. Then he said the buying and selling of sexual services in Norway is legal, and that our methods for forcing a respected doctor to break his Hippocratic oath would also be worth a headline.’

‘But bloody hell!’ Katrine shouted in a voice that was shaking with fury. ‘This is a murder case!’

Harry hadn’t seen her lose control before and answered in his gentlest voice.

‘Listen, we can’t link the murders to the illness or even make the connection seem a possibility. And Krohn knows that. And so I can’t hold him.’

‘No, but you can’t just . . . lie there . . . and do nothing!’

Harry could feel his breastbone aching and it struck him that she was absolutely right.

She put both hands to her face. ‘I . . . I . . . I’m sorry. I just thought . . . It’s been a strange day.’

‘Fine,’ Harry groaned. ‘Could you help me with this bar? I’m almost –’

‘The other end!’ she exclaimed, removing her hands from her face. ‘We’ll have to begin at the other end. In Bergen!’

‘No,’ Harry whispered with the last air he had left in his lungs. ‘Bergen’s not an end. Could you . . . ?’

He looked up at her. Saw her dark eyes fill with tears.

‘It’s my period,’ she whispered. Then she smiled. It happened so fast that it was like another person standing above him, a person with an odd sheen to her eyes and a voice under complete control. ‘And you can just die.’

In amazement, he heard the sound of her footsteps fading away, heard his own skeleton crack and red dots begin to dance in front of his eyes. He cursed, wrapped his hands around the iron bar and, with a roar, pushed. The bar wouldn’t budge.

She was right; he could in fact die like that. He could choose. Funny, but true.

He wriggled, tipped the bar to one side until he heard the weights slide off and hit the floor with a deafening clang. Then the bar hit the floor on the other side. He sat up and watched the weights careering around the room.

Harry showered, dressed and went upstairs to the sixth floor. Fell into the swivel chair, already feeling the sweet ache of his muscles, which told him that he was going to be stiff in the morning.

There was a message on his voicemail from Bjørn Holm telling him to call back
asap
.

Holm picked up and there was the sound of heart-rending sobs accompanied by the slide tones of a pedal steel guitar.

‘What is it?’ Harry asked.

‘Dwight Yoakam,’ Holm said, turning down the music. ‘Sexy bastard, ain’t he?’

‘I mean, what’s the call about?’

‘We’ve got the results for the Snowman letter.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing special as far as the writing’s concerned. Standard laser printer.’

Harry waited. He knew Holm had something.

‘What’s special is the paper he used. No one at the lab here has seen this type before, that’s why it’s taken a bit of time. It’s made with mitsumata, Japanese papyrus-like bast fibres. You can probably tell mitsumata by the smell. They use the bark to make the paper by hand and this particular sheet is extremely exclusive. It’s called Kono.’

‘Kono?’

‘You have to go to specialist shops to buy it, the sort of place that sells fountain pens for ten thousand kroner, fine inks and leather-bound notebooks. You know . . .’

‘I don’t, in fact.’

‘Me neither,’ Holm conceded. ‘But anyway, there is one shop in Gamle Drammensveien which sells Kono writing paper. I spoke to them and was told they rarely sold such things now, so it was unlikely they would reorder. People don’t have a sense of quality the way they used to, he reckoned.’

‘Does that mean . . .?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid that means he couldn’t remember when he last sold any Kono paper.’

‘Mm. And this is the only dealer?’

‘Yes,’ Holm said. ‘There was one in Bergen, but they stopped selling a few years ago.’

Holm waited for an answer – or, to be more precise, questions – as Dwight Yoakam, at low volume, yodelled the love of his life into her grave. But none came.

‘Harry?’

‘Yes. I’m thinking.’

‘Excellent!’ said Holm.

It was this slow inland humour that could make Harry chuckle long afterwards, and even then without knowing why. But not at this moment. Harry cleared his throat.

‘I think it’s very odd that paper like this would be put into the hands of a murder investigator if you didn’t want it to be traced back to you. You don’t need to have seen many crime shows to know that we would check.’

‘Perhaps he didn’t know it was rare?’ Holm suggested. ‘Perhaps he hadn’t bought it?’

‘Of course that’s a possibility, but something tells me that the Snowman wouldn’t slip up like that.’

‘But he has done.’

‘I mean I don’t think it’s a slip,’ Harry said.

‘You mean . . .’

‘Yes, I think he wants us to trace him.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s classic. The narcissistic serial killer staging a game, with himself in the principal role as the invincible, the all-powerful conqueror who triumphs in the end.’

‘Triumphs over what?’

‘Well,’ Harry said, and said it for the first time aloud, ‘at the risk of sounding narcissistic myself, me.’

‘You? Why?’

‘I have no idea. Perhaps because he knows I’m the only policeman in Norway who has caught a serial killer, he sees me as a challenge. The letter would suggest that – he refers to Toowoomba. I don’t know, Holm. By the way, have you got the name of the shop in Bergen?’

‘Flab speaking!’

Or so it sounded. The word – flæsk – was articulated with Bergensian tones and gravity. That is, with a soft
l
, a long
æ
with a dip in the middle and a faint
s
. Peter Flesch, who voluntarily pronounced his name like the word for flab, was out of breath, loud and obliging. He was happy to chat away; yes, he sold all types of antiques so long as they were small, but he had specialised in pipes, lighters, pens, leather briefcases and stationery. Some used; some new. Most of his customers were regulars with an average age in line with his own.

To Harry’s questions about Kono writing paper he answered, with regret in his voice, that he no longer had any such paper. Indeed, it was several years since he had stocked it.

‘This might be asking a bit too much,’ Harry said. ‘But since you have regular customers for the most part, is it possible that you might remember some of the ones who bought Kono paper?’

‘Some maybe. Møller. And old Kikkusæn from Møllaren. We don’t keep records, but the wife’s got a good memory.’

‘Perhaps you could write down the full names, rough age and the address of those you can remember and email them –’

Harry was interrupted by tut-tutting. ‘We don’t have email, son. Not going to get it, either. You’d better give me a fax number.’

Harry gave the Police HQ number. He hesitated. It was a sudden inspiration. But inspiration never came without a reason.

‘You wouldn’t by any chance have had a customer a few years back,’ Harry said, ‘by the name of Gert Rafto, would you?’

‘Iron Rafto?’ Peter Flesch laughed.

‘You’ve heard of him?’

‘The whole town knew who Rafto was. No, he wasn’t a customer here.’

POB Møller always used to say that in order to isolate what was possible, you had to eliminate everything that was impossible. And that was why a detective should not despair, but be glad whenever he could discount a clue that did not lead to the solution. Besides, it had just been an idea.