by Jo Nesbo
‘Come on, Harry. War on giant insects on a remote planet?’
‘Fear of foreigners.’
‘Anyway, I liked that seventies film of yours, the one about bugging …’
‘The Conversation,’ Harry said. ‘Coppola’s best.’
‘That’s the one. I agree that is underrated.’
‘It’s not underrated,’ Harry sighed. ‘Just forgotten. It was nominated for an Oscar for best film.’
‘I’m having dinner with some friends this evening. I can drop the film off on my way home. Will you be up at around midnight?’
‘Might be. Why not drop by on your way to the meal instead?’
‘Bit more stressful, but I can do it of course.’
Her answer had come fast. But not fast enough for Harry not to hear it.
‘Mm,’ he said. ‘I can’t sleep anyway. I’m inhaling fungus and I can’t catch my breath.’
‘You know what? I’ll pop it in the mailbox downstairs so you don’t have to get up. OK?’
‘OK.’
They rang off. Harry saw that his hand was trembling. Concluded it had to be down to lack of nicotine and made for the lift.
Katrine came out of her office door as if she knew it was him stomping along. ‘I spoke to Espen Lepsvik. We can have one of his guys for the job tonight.’
‘Great.’
‘Good news?’
‘What?’
‘You’re smiling.’
‘Am I? Must be happy then.’
‘About what?’
He patted his pocket. ‘Cigarette.’
Eli Kvale was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, looking out at the garden and listening to the comforting rumble of the dishwasher. The black telephone was on the worktop. The receiver had grown hot in her hands, from squeezing it so tight, but it had been a wrong number. Trygve had enjoyed the fish augratin – it was his favourite, he had said. But he said that about most things. He was a good boy. Outside, the grass was brown and lifeless; there were no signs of the snow that had fallen. And who knows? Perhaps she had just dreamt the whole thing?
She flicked aimlessly through a magazine. She had taken off the first few days that Trygve was at home so that they could have a bit of time together. Have a good chat, just the two of them. But now he was sitting with Andreas in the living room and they were doing what she had made space for. That was fine, they had more to talk about. They were so similar after all. And in fact she had always liked the idea of a good chat more than the reality. Because the conversation always had to stop somewhere. At the huge, insurmountable wall.
Of course, she had agreed to call the boy after Andreas’s father. At least let the boy take a name from Andreas’s side. She had been close to spilling the beans before she was due to give birth. About the empty car park, about the darkness, about the black prints in the snow. About the knife to her neck and the faceless breath against her cheek. On the way home, with his seed running into her knickers she had prayed to God that it would continue to run until it was all gone. But her prayers had not been answered.
Later she had often wondered how things would have been if Andreas had not been a priest and his view of abortion so uncompromising, and if she had not been such a coward. If Trygve had not been born. But by then the wall had already been built, an unshakeable wall of silence.
That Trygve and Andreas were so similar was a silver lining. It had even sparked a little hope, so she had gone to a doctor’s surgery where no one knew her, given them two strands of hair which she had taken from their pillows and which she had read were enough to find a code of something called DNA, a kind of genetic fingerprint. The surgery had sent the hairs to the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Rikshospitalet which was employing this new method in paternity cases. And after two months all doubt was gone. It had not been a dream: the car park, the black prints, the panting, the pain.
She looked at the telephone again. Of course it had been a wrong number. The breathing she had heard at the other end was the perplexed reaction to hearing an unexpected voice, indecision as to whether to put the receiver down or not. That was all.
* * *
Harry went into the hall and picked up the entryphone.
‘Hello?’ he shouted over Franz Ferdinand on the sitting-room stereo.
No answer, just a car whizzing past in Sofies gate.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi! It’s Rakel. Were you in bed?’
He could hear from her voice that she had been drinking. Not much but enough for her pitch to be half a tone higher, and her laughter, that beautifully deep laughter, rippled over her words.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Nice evening?’
‘Quite.’
‘It’s only eleven o’clock.’
‘The girls wanted an early night. It’s a workday and so on.’
‘Mm.’
Harry visualised her. The teasing look, the alcohol sheen in her eyes.
‘I’ve got the film,’ she said. ‘If I’m going to drop it in the mailbox, I think you might have to open up.’
‘Right.’
He raised his finger to press the bell to let her in. Waited. Knowing that this was a window of time. They had two seconds at their disposal. For the moment they had all the fallback positions. He liked fallback positions. And he knew very well that he didn’t want this to happen, it was too complicated, too painful to go through again. So why was his chest heaving as if he had two hearts? Why hadn’t he immediately pressed the button, so that she would have been in and out of the building and out of his head? Now, he thought, placing the tip of his finger against the hard plastic of the button.
‘Or,’ she said, ‘I could come up with it.’
Harry already knew before speaking that his voice was going to sound strange.
‘You don’t need to,’ he said. ‘My mailbox is the one without a name. Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight.’
He pressed the button. Went into the sitting room, turned up Franz Ferdinand, loud, tried to blast out his thoughts, forget the idiotic jangling of nerves, just absorb the sound, the jagged attack of guitars. Angry, frail and not especially well played. Scottish. But the feverish series of chords was joined by another sound.
Harry turned down the music. Listened. He was going to turn up the volume again when he heard a sound. Like sandpaper on wood. Or shoes shuffling on the floor. He went into the hall and saw a figure behind the door’s wavy glass.
He opened up.
‘I rang the bell,’ Rakel said, looking up at him apologetically.
‘Oh?’
She waved a DVD box. ‘It wouldn’t go in the slot.’
He was going to say something, wanted to say something. But he had already thrust out his arm, caught her, pulled her to him, heard her gasp as he held her tight, saw her mouth opening and her tongue moving towards his, taunting and red. And basically there was nothing to say.
She snuggled up to him; soft and warm.
‘Goodness,’ she whispered.
He kissed her on the forehead.
The sweat was a thin layer that both separated and glued them together.
It had been exactly as he knew it would be. It had been like the first time, though without the nerves, the fumbling and the unspoken questions. It had been like the last time, without the sadness, without her sobbing afterwards. You can leave someone with whom you have good sex. But Katrine was right; you always go back. But Harry knew this was different, too. For Rakel this was an essential, final visit to old pastures, a goodbye to what they had both called the great love of their lives. Before she entered a new era. To a lesser love? Maybe, but to an endurable love.
She was making purring sounds as she stroked his stomach. He could still feel the tension in her body. He could make it difficult or easy for her. He decided on the latter.
‘Bad conscience?’ he asked and felt her flinch.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said.
He didn’t want to talk about it
, either. He wanted to lie quite still, listen to her breathing and feel her hand on his stomach. But he knew what she had to do, and he didn’t want any more postponements. ‘He’s waiting for you, Rakel.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He and the technician are preparing a body for an Anatomy Department lecture early tomorrow morning. And I told him he wasn’t coming near me after touching a corpse. He’ll sleep at his place.’
‘What about me?’ Harry smiled in the dark, thinking that she had planned this, known it would happen. ‘How do you know I haven’t touched a corpse?’
‘Have you?’
‘No,’ Harry said, thinking about the packet of cigarettes in the bedside-table drawer. ‘We don’t have any corpses.’
They fell silent. Her hand described ever larger circles on his stomach.
‘I have a feeling I’ve been infiltrated,’ he said out of the blue.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t quite know. I just have the feeling someone is watching me the whole time, that someone is watching me now. I’m part of someone’s plan. Do you understand?’
‘No.’ She snuggled up closer to him.
‘It’s this case I’m working on. It’s as though my person is involved in –’
‘Shh.’ She bit his ear. ‘You’re always involved, Harry. That’s your problem. Relax.’
Her hand placed itself on his flaccid member and he closed his eyes, listened to her whispers and felt his erection come.
At three o’clock she got out of bed. He saw her back in the light from the street lamps through the window. The arched back and the shadow of her spine. And he fell to thinking about something Katrine had said, that Sylvia Ottersen had had the Ethiopian flag tattooed on her back; he would have to remember to mention that in the briefing. And Rakel was right: he never stopped thinking about cases, he was always involved.
He accompanied her to the door. She kissed him quickly on the mouth and dashed down the stairs. There was nothing to say. He was going to close the door when he saw wet boot prints outside the door. He followed them to where they disappeared down into the darkness of the stairwell. They must have been left by Rakel when she came up earlier. And he thought about the Berhaus seals, about the female which finished mating with the male in the breeding period and never went back to him in the next breeding period. Because it wasn’t biologically rational. The Berhaus seals must be clever creatures.
13
DAY 8.
Paper.
IT WAS HALF PAST NINE AND THE SUN WAS SHINING ON A solitary car negotiating the roundabout on the Sjølyst overpass above the motorway. It turned up Bygdøyveien which led to the idyllic rural peninsula located a mere five minutes’ drive from the City Hall square. It was quiet, there was almost no traffic, no cows or horses in the Kongsgården estate; and the narrow pavements where people made pilgrimages to the beaches in summer were deserted.
Harry steered the car round the bends in the rolling terrain and listened to Katrine.
‘Snow,’ Katrine said.
‘Snow?’
‘I did as you said. I concentrated on the married women with children who had gone missing. And then I began to look at the dates. Most were in November and December. I isolated them and considered the geographical spread. Most were in Oslo; there were some in other parts of the country. Then it struck me, because of the letter you received. The bit about the snowman reappearing with the first snow. And the day we were in Hoffsveien was the first snow in Oslo.’
‘Really?’
‘I had the Meteorological Institute check the relevant dates and places. And do you know what?’
Harry knew what. And that he should have known long ago.
‘The first snow,’ he said. ‘He kills them the day the first snow falls.’
‘Exactly.’
Harry smacked the wheel. ‘Christ, we had it spelt out for us. How many missing women are we talking about?’
‘Eleven. One a year.’
‘And two this year. He’s broken the pattern.’
‘There was a murder and two disappearances when the first snow fell in Bergen in 1992. I think we should start there.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because the victim was a married woman with a child. And the woman who disappeared was her best friend. Thus we have one body, one crime scene and case files. As well as a suspect who vanished and has never been seen since.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘A policeman. Gert Rafto.’
Harry glanced over quickly. ‘Oh, that case, yes. Wasn’t he the one who nicked stuff from crime scenes?’
‘So it was rumoured. Witnesses had seen Rafto going into the flat of one of the women, Onny Hetland, a few hours before she disappeared. And extensive searches turned up nothing. He disappeared without trace.’
Harry stared at the road, at the leafless trees along Huk Aveny leading down to the sea and the museums for what Norwegians regarded as the nation’s greatest achievements: a voyage in a raft across the Pacific Ocean and a failed attempt to reach the North Pole.
‘And now you think it’s conceivable that he didn’t disappear after all?’ he said. ‘That he might reappear every year at the first sign of snow?’
Katrine hunched her shoulders. ‘I think it’s worth investing the time to find out what happened there.’
‘Mm. We’ll have to start by asking Bergen for assistance.’
‘I wouldn’t do that,’ she said quickly.
‘Oh?’
‘The Rafto case is still an extremely sensitive issue for the police in Bergen. The resources they put into that case were largely spent burying rather than investigating it. They were terrified of what they might unearth. And since the guy had disappeared all by himself …’ She drew a big X in the air.
‘I see. What do you suggest?’
‘That you and I go on a little trip to Bergen and do a bit of investigating on our own. After all, it’s part of an Oslo murder case now.’
Harry parked in front of the address, a four-storey brick building right down by the water surrounded by a mooring quay. He switched off the engine, but remained in his seat looking across Frognerkilen bay to Filipstad harbour.
‘How did the Rafto case get on to your list?’ he asked. ‘First of all, it’s further back than I asked you to check. Secondly, I believe it’s not a missing persons case but murder.’
He turned to look at Katrine. She met his gaze without blinking.
‘The Rafto case was pretty famous in Bergen,’ she said. ‘And there was a photo.’
‘A photo?’
‘Yes. All new trainees at Bergen Police Station are shown it. It was of the crime scene at the top of Ulriken Mountain and a kind of baptism of fire. I think most were so terrorised by the details in the foreground that they never looked at the background. Or maybe they had never been to the top of Ulriken. At any rate there was something there that didn’t make sense, a mound further back. When you magnify it, you can see quite clearly what it is.’
‘Oh?’
‘A snowman.’
Harry nodded slowly.
‘Speaking of photos,’ Katrine said, taking an A4 envelope from her bag and throwing it into Harry’s lap.
The clinic was on the second floor, and the waiting room had been immaculately designed at horrendous expense with Italian furniture, a coffee table as low off the ground as a Ferrari, glass sculptures by Nico Widerberg and an original Roy Lichtenstein print showing a smoking gun.
Instead of the obligatory reception area with glass partition, a woman sat by a beautiful old desk in the middle of the room. She was wearing an open white coat over a blue business suit and a welcoming smile. A smile which did not stiffen appreciably when Harry introduced himself, stated the purpose of their visit and his assumption that she was Borghild.
‘Would you mind waiting for a moment?’ she said, pointing to the sofas with the practised elegance of a stewardess pointing to the emergency exits. Harry refused the
offer of espresso, tea or water, and they took a seat.
Harry noticed that the magazines laid out were up to date; he opened a copy of Liberal and his attention was caught by the leader in which Arve Støp claimed that politicians’ willingness to appear on entertainment programmes to ‘flaunt themselves’ and assume the role of clown was the ultimate victory for government by the people – with the populus on the throne and the politician as the court jester.
Then the door marked Dr Idar Vetlesen opened and a woman strode quickly through the waiting room, said a brief ‘Bye’ to Borghild and was gone without so much as a glance left or right.
Katrine stared after her. ‘Wasn’t that the woman from TV2 news?’
At that moment Borghild announced that Vetlesen was ready to receive them, went to the door and held it open for them.
Idar Vetlesen’s office was Director General size with a view of Oslo fjord. Framed diplomas hung on the wall behind the desk.
‘Just a moment,’ Vetlesen said, typing without looking up from the computer screen. Then, with a triumphant expression, he pressed a final key, swivelled round in his chair and removed his glasses.
‘Facelift, Hole? Penis enlargement? Liposuction?’
‘Thank you for the offer,’ Harry said. ‘This is Police Officer Bratt. We’ve come once again to request your help with information about Ottersen and Becker.’
Idar Vetlesen sighed and began to clean his glasses with a handkerchief.
‘How can I explain this to you in a way that you can understand, Hole? Even for someone like me, who has a genuine, burning desire to help the police and basically couldn’t care less about principles, there are some things which are sacrosanct.’ He raised an index finger. ‘In all the years I’ve worked as a doctor I have never, ever –’ the finger wagged in time with his words – ‘broken my Hippocratic oath. And I do not intend to start now.’
A long silence ensued in which Vetlesen just looked at them, clearly satisfied with the effect he had created.
Harry cleared his throat.
‘Perhaps we can still fulfil your burning desire to help, Vetlesen. We’re investigating possible child prostitution at a so-called hotel in Oslo, known as Leon. Last night two of our officers were outside in a car taking photographs of people going in and out.’