The Snowman (7 page)

Gert Rafto was guilty of the accusations; no one was in any doubt about that. But everyone knew that the inspector had been made a scapegoat for a culture that had permeated Bergen police for many years. Just because he had signed a number of reports on prisoners – most of them child molesters and dope dealers – who had fallen down the ancient iron stairs to the remand cells and bruised themselves here and there.

The newspapers had been remorseless. The nickname they had given him, Iron instead of Gert, was not exactly original, but nonetheless appropriate. A journalist had interviewed several of his long-standing enemies on both sides of the law and of course they had taken the opportunity to settle old scores. So when Rafto’s daughter came home crying from school, saying she was being teased, his wife had said enough was enough, he couldn’t expect her to sit and watch while he dragged the whole family through the mud. As so often before, he had lost his temper. Afterwards she had taken their daughter with her, and this time she didn’t return.

It had been a tough time, but he had never forgotten who he was. He was Iron Rafto. And when the quarantine period was over, he had gone for broke, worked day and night to regain lost ground. But no one was in forgiving mood, the wounds were too deep, and he noticed the internal resistance to letting him succeed. Of course they didn’t want him to shine again and remind them and the media of what they were so desperately trying to put behind them. Photographs of battered bodies in handcuffs. But he would show them. Show them that Gert Rafto was not a man to let himself be buried before his time. That the town below belonged to him, not to the social workers, to the cream puffs, to the smooth talkers sitting in their offices with tongues so long they could lick the limp arseholes of both the local politicians and the pinko journalists.

‘Take a few snaps and get me an ID,’ Rafto said to the technician with the camera.

‘And who’ll be able to identify this?’ The young man pointed.

Rafto didn’t care for his tone. ‘Someone has reported or will soon report this woman missing. Just get on with it, junior.’

Rafto went up to the peak and looked back across what Bergensians call
vidden
– the plateau. His gaze swept the countryside and stopped at a hill and what seemed to be a person on the summit. But, if so, they weren’t moving. Perhaps it was a cairn? Rafto pinched his eyes. He must have been there hundreds of times, walking with his wife and daughter, but he couldn’t recall seeing a cairn. He went down to the cable car, spoke to the operator and borrowed his binoculars. Fifteen seconds later he established that it wasn’t a cairn, just three large balls of snow that someone must have piled one on top of the other.

Rafto didn’t like the sloping district of Bergen known as Fjellsiden with its oh-so-picturesque, crooked, uninsulated timber houses with stairs and cellars, situated in narrow alleys where the sun never shone. Trendy children of rich parents frequently paid millions to own an authentic Bergen house, then did them up until there wasn’t an original splinter left. Here, you no longer heard the sound of children’s running feet on the cobbled stones; the prices had driven young Bergensian families into the suburbs on the other side of the mountains a long time ago. Yet here it was as quiet and deserted as a barren row of shops. Nonetheless he had the feeling he was being observed as he stood on the stone steps ringing the bell.

After a while the door opened and a pale, anxious woman’s face looked out at him with a startled expression.

‘Onny Hetland?’ Rafto queried, holding up his ID. ‘It’s about your friend, Laila Aasen.’

The apartment was tiny, and the layout baffling; the bathroom was located behind the kitchen and between the bedroom and living room. Amid the patterned burgundy wallpaper in the living room Onny Hetland had just managed to squeeze a sofa and a green-and-orange armchair, and on the little floor space that remained there was a pile of weekly magazines and heaps of books and CDs. Rafto stepped over an upturned dish of water and a cat to reach the sofa. Onny Hetland sat on the armchair fidgeting with her necklace. There was a black crack in the green stone in the pendant. Maybe a flaw. Or perhaps it was meant to be like that.

Onny Hetland had learned about her friend’s death early that morning, from Laila’s husband, Bastian. But still her face displayed several dramatic changes as Rafto mercilessly spelt out the details.

‘Dreadful,’ whispered Onny Hetland. ‘Bastian didn’t say anything about that.’

‘That’s because we didn’t want to publicise it,’ Rafto said. ‘Bastian told me you were Laila’s best friend.’

Onny nodded.

‘Do you know what Laila was doing up on Ulriken? Her husband had no idea, you see. He and the children were with his mother in Florø yesterday.’

Onny shook her head. It was a firm shake. One that should not have left any doubt. It wasn’t the shake that was the problem. It was the hundredth of a second’s hesitation before it started. And this hundredth of a second was all Gert Rafto needed.

‘This is a murder case, frøken Hetland. I hope you appreciate the gravity and the risk you run by not telling me everything you know.’

She shot the policeman with the bulldog face a perplexed look. He smelt prey.

‘If you think you’re being considerate to her family, you have misunderstood. These things will come out whatever.’

She swallowed. She looked frightened, had already looked frightened when she opened the door. So he gave her the final nudge, this actually quite trifling threat that still worked so amazingly well on the innocent as well as the guilty.

‘You can tell me now or come to the station for questioning.’

Tears welled up in her eyes, and the barely audible voice came from somewhere at the back of her throat. ‘She was meeting someone there.’

‘Who?’

Onny Hetland inhaled with a tremble. ‘Laila told me only the first name and profession. And that it was a secret; no one was to know. Especially not Bastian.’

Rafto looked down into his notebook to hide his excitement. ‘And the first name and profession were?’

He noted down what Onny said. Peered at his pad. It was a relatively common name. And a relatively common profession. But since Bergen was a relatively small town, he thought this would be enough. He knew with the whole of his being that he was on the right track. And by ‘the whole of his being’ Gert Rafto meant thirty years of police work and a knowledge of humanity based on general misanthropy.

‘Promise me one thing,’ Rafto said. ‘Don’t tell what you have just told me to a soul. Not to anyone in the family. Not to the press. Not even to any other police officers you might talk to. Have you understood?’

‘Not to . . . police officers?’

‘Definitely not. I’m leading the investigation, and I must have full control over this information. Until I tell you anything different, you know nothing.’

At last, thought Rafto, standing outside on the step again. Glass glinted as a window swung open further along the alley, and again he had the feeling he was being watched. But then so what? Revenge was his. His alone. Gert Rafto buttoned up his coat, hardly noticing the pissing rain as, in silent triumph, he strode down the slippery streets to Bergen town centre.

It was five o’clock in the afternoon, and the rain trickled over Bergen from a sky with a blown gasket. On the desk in front of Gert Rafto was a list of names he had requested from the professional organisation. He had started looking for candidates with the right first name. Just three so far. It was only two hours since he had been with Onny Hetland, and Rafto was thinking that soon he would know who had killed Laila Aasen. Case solved in less than twelve hours. And no one could take that away from him, the honour was his, and his alone. Because he was going to inform the press in person. The country’s major media had flown in over the mountains and were already besieging Police HQ. The Chief Constable had given orders that no details about the body were to be released, but the vultures had already scented a bloodbath.

‘There must have been a leak,’ the Chief had said, looking at Rafto, who hadn’t answered, nor formed the grin that yearned to surface. For there they were sitting out there now, ready to make their reports. And soon Gert Rafto would be king of Bergen Police HQ again.

He turned down the radio from which Whitney Houston had insisted all autumn that she would always love you, but before he could lift the telephone, it rang.

‘Rafto,’ he said with irritation, impatient to get going.

‘It’s me you’re looking for.’

The voice was what immediately told the discredited detective that this was not just a hoax or a crank. It was cool and controlled with clear, businesslike diction, which excluded the usual nutters and drunks. But there was something else about the voice, too, which he couldn’t quite place.

Rafto coughed aloud, twice. Took his time, as if to show that he had not been taken aback. ‘Who am I talking to?’

‘You know.’

Rafto closed his eyes and cursed silently and roundly. Damn, damn, damn, the killer was going to give himself in. And that would not have anywhere near the same impact as if he, Rafto, arrested the perpetrator.

‘What makes you think I’m looking for you?’ the policeman asked between clenched teeth.

‘I just know,’ said the voice. ‘And if we can do this my way, you’ll get what you want.’

‘And what do I want?’

‘You want to arrest me. And you’ll be able to. Alone. Are you listening now, Rafto?’

The officer nodded before he could gather himself to say yes.

‘Meet me by the totem pole in Nordnes Park,’ the voice said. ‘In exactly ten minutes.’

Rafto tried to think. Nordnes Park was by the Aquarium; he could get there in under ten minutes. But why meet there of all places, in a park at the end of a headland?

‘So that I can see if you come alone,’ the voice said, as if in answer to his thoughts. ‘If I see any other police or you’re late, I’ll be gone. For ever.’

Rafto’s brain processed, calculated and drew a conclusion. He would not be able to organise an arrest team in time. He would have to explain in his written report why he had been forced to undertake the arrest on his own. It was perfect.

‘OK,’ said Rafto. ‘What happens now?’

‘I’ll tell you everything and give you the conditions for my surrender.’

‘What sort of conditions?’

‘I don’t want to wear handcuffs at the trial. The press will not be allowed in. And I serve my time somewhere where I don’t have to mix with other prisoners.’

Rafto almost choked. ‘OK,’ he said, looking at his watch.

‘Wait, there are more conditions. TV in my room, all the books I might wish for.’

‘We’ll arrange that,’ Rafto said.

‘When you’ve signed the deal with my conditions, I’ll go with you.’

‘What about—?’ Rafto began, but an accelerated beep beep beep told him that the other person had rung off.

Rafto parked his car by Bergen shipyard. It wasn’t the shortest route, but it meant he would have a better view of Nordnes when he went in. The big park was on undulating terrain with well-trodden paths and hillocks of yellow, withered grass. The trees pointed with black gnarled fingers to heavy clouds sweeping in from the sea behind the island of Askøy. A man hurried away behind a nervy Rottweiler on a taut lead. Rafto felt the Smith & Wesson revolver in his coat pocket as he strode past Nordnes seawater pool: the empty white basin looked like an oversized bath by the water’s edge.

Beyond the bend he could make out the ten-metre-high totem pole, a two-ton gift from Seattle on the occasion of Bergen’s nine hundredth anniversary. He could hear his own breathing and the squelch of wet leaves beneath his shoes. It started to rain. Small, pin-like droplets drove into his face.

A solitary figure stood by the totem pole facing Rafto as if the person had known that Rafto would come from that direction and not the other end.

Rafto squeezed the revolver as he walked the last few steps. Two metres away, he stopped. Pinched his eyes against the rain. It could not be true.

‘Surprised?’ said the voice he could place only now.

Rafto didn’t answer. His brain had started processing again.

‘You thought you knew me,’ the voice said. ‘But it was just me who knew you. That was how I guessed you would try to do this alone.’

Rafto stared.

‘It’s a game,’ the voice said.

Rafto cleared his throat. ‘A game?’

‘Yes. You like playing games.’

Rafto closed his hand around the stock of the revolver, held it in such a way he could be sure it would not snag on his pocket if he had to draw quickly.

‘Why me particularly?’ he asked.

‘Because you were the best. I only play against the best.’

‘You’re crazy,’ Rafto whispered, regretting it immediately.

‘Of that,’ the other said with a tiny smile, ‘there is little doubt. But you’re also crazy, my man. We’re all crazy. We’re restless spirits that cannot find their way home. It’s always been like that. Do you know why the Indians made these?’

The person in front of Rafto banged the knuckle of a begloved index finger against the tree; the carved figures perched on top of each other stared across the fjord with large, blind, black eyes.

‘To watch over the souls,’ the person continued. ‘So that they don’t get lost. But a totem pole rots. And it should rot, that’s part of the point. And when it’s gone, the soul has to find a new home. Perhaps in a mask. Perhaps in a mirror. Or perhaps in a newborn child.’

The sound of hoarse cries came from the penguin run at the Aquarium.

‘Will you tell me why you killed her?’ Rafto said and noticed that he too had gone hoarse.

‘Shame the game’s over, Rafto. It’s been fun.’

‘And how did you find out that I was on your trail?’

The other person raised a hand, and Rafto automatically stepped back a pace. There was something hanging from it. A necklace. At the end there was a green, tear-shaped stone with a black crack. Rafto felt his heart pounding.