by Jo Nesbo
He donned his coat and boots, was about to leave, then turned, fetched his Smith & Wesson service revolver from the top of the wardrobe and stuffed it in his coat pocket.
The lovemaking was still in his body like a quiver of well-being, a mild intoxication. He had reached the street door when a sound, a click, made him spin round and peer into the yard where the darkness was denser than in the street. He was intending to go on his way, and would have done. Had it not been for the prints. The boot prints on the lino. So he went into the yard. The yellow lights from the windows above him bounced off the remnants of snow that still lay where the sun could not quite reach. It stood by the entrance to the cellar storerooms. A crooked figure with its head at an angle, pebbles for eyes and a gravel grin laughing at him. Silent laughter reverberated between the brick walls and blended into a hysterical shriek he recognised as his own as he grabbed the snow shovel beside the cellar steps and swung it in violent fury. The sharp metal edge of the shovel struck below the head, lifting it off the body and sending the wet snow flying against the wall. The next hefty swipe sliced the snowman’s torso into two and the third scattered the remains across the black tarmac in the middle of the yard. Harry stood there gasping for breath when he heard another click behind him. Like the sound of a revolver being cocked. In one smooth movement he swirled round, dropped the shovel and drew the black revolver.
Muhammad and Salma stood by the wooden fence, underneath the old birch, mutely staring at their neighbour with big, frightened children’s eyes. In their hands they were holding dry branches. The branches looked as if they might have been elegant arms for a snowman had Salma not snapped hers in two, out of sheer terror.
‘Our … s-snowman,’ Muhammad stammered.
Harry returned the revolver to his coat pocket and closed his eyes. Cursing himself, he swallowed and instructed his brain to let go of the gunstock. Then he opened his eyes again. Tears were welling under Salma’s brown irises.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll help you to make another one.’
‘I want to go home,’ Salma whispered in a thick voice.
Muhammad took his little sister by the hand and accompanied her home, giving Harry a wide berth.
Harry felt the revolver grip against his hand. The click. He had thought it was the sound of the hammer being raised. But he was wrong, of course; this phase of the firing procedure is noiseless. What you hear is the sound of the hammer being cocked, the sound of the shot that has not been fired, the sound of being alive. He took out his service revolver again. Pointed it at the ground and pressed the trigger. The hammer still didn’t move. Only when he had forced the trigger a third of the way back and he was thinking that the gun could fire at any moment did the hammer begin to rise. He let go of the trigger. The hammer fell back into position with a metallic click. And again he heard the sound. And realised that anyone who pressed the trigger so far back that the hammer rose intended to shoot.
Harry looked up at the windows of his flat on the second floor. They were dark, and a thought struck him: he had no idea what went on behind them when he wasn’t there.
Erik Lossius sat listlessly staring out of the window in his office and musing. About how little he had known of what went on behind Birte’s brown eyes. About how it felt worse that she had been with other men than that she had disappeared and was perhaps dead. And wishing he had lost Camilla to a murderer than in this way. But mostly Erik Lossius was thinking that he must have loved Camilla. And still did. He had rung her parents, but they hadn’t heard from her, either. Perhaps she was living with one of those Oslo West girlfriends he knew about only from hearsay.
He gazed at the afternoon gloom slowly descending on Groruddalen as it became thicker and erased the detail. There was nothing more to do today, but he didn’t want to go home to the much too large and much too empty house. Not yet. There was a case of assorted spirits in the cupboard behind him, the so-called slush fund from various drinks cabinets in transit. But no mixers. He poured gin into his coffee cup and managed a little sip before the phone on the desk rang. He recognised the French international code on the display. The number wasn’t on the complaints list, so he took it.
He knew it was his wife from her breathing, even before she had spoken a word.
‘Where are you?’ he asked.
‘Where do you think?’ Her voice sounded a long way away.
‘And where are you ringing from?’
‘From Casper.’
That was the café three kilometres from their country house.
‘Camilla, the police are looking for you.’
‘Are they?’
She sounded as if she was dozing on a sunbed. Bored, just going through the motions of being interested, with that polite but distant nonchalance he had fallen for all those years ago on the balcony in Blommenholm.
‘I …’ he began. But stopped. What could he really say?
‘I thought it was right to call you before our solicitor did,’ she said.
‘Our solicitor?’
‘My family’s,’ she said. ‘One of the best at this kind of thing, I’m afraid. He’ll go for a straightforward split down the middle as far as possessions and money are concerned. We’ll ask for the house, and we’ll get it, even though I’ll make no secret of the fact that I intend to sell it.’
Goes without saying, he thought.
‘I’ll be home in five days. By then I assume you’ll have moved out.’
‘That’s short notice,’ he said.
‘You can do it. I’ve heard no one works faster or cheaper than Rydd & Flytt.’
She pronounced the latter with such distaste that he shrank. The way he had shrunk ever since the conversation with Inspector Hole. He was a blanket that had been washed on too high a temperature, he had become too small for her, become unusable. And with the same certainty that he knew now, at this moment, that he loved her more than ever before, he knew that he had lost her irrevocably, that there would be no reconciliation. And when she had rung off he saw her squinting into the sunset on the French Riviera through a pair of sunglasses she had bought for twenty euros but on her they looked like three thousand kroners’ worth of Gucci or Dolce & Gabbana or … he had forgotten what the other brands were called.
Harry had driven to the top of the Holmenkollen Ridge on the west side of town. He had parked his car at the sports centre, in the large deserted car park, and walked up Holmenkollen. There he had stood on the viewing promontory beside the ski jump where he and a couple of out-of-season tourists were peering across at the grandstands grinning emptily on both sides of the landing slope, the pond at the bottom, which was drained in the winter, and the town stretching out to the fjord. A view gives perspective. They had no concrete evidence. The Snowman had been so close, it had felt as if all they had to do was reach out and arrest him. But then he had slipped from their grasp again, like a wily professional boxer. The inspector felt old, heavy and clumsy. One of the tourists was looking at him. The weight of his service revolver pulled his coat down on the right-hand side. And the bodies, where the hell were the bodies? Even buried corpses turned up again. Was he using acid?
Harry sensed the onset of resignation. No, he bloody didn’t! On the FBI course they had examined cases where it had taken more than ten years to catch the killer. As a rule, it had been one tiny random detail, it seemed, that had solved the case. However, what actually cracked it was the fact that they had never given up, they had gone all fifteen rounds and if the opponent was still standing they screamed for a return fight.
The afternoon darkness stole upwards from the town beneath, and the lights around him were slowly being switched on.
They had to start looking where there was light. It was a banal but important procedural rule. Begin wherever you have a clue. On this occasion it meant beginning with the least likely person you could imagine and the worst, the craziest idea he had ever had.
Harry sighed, took out his mobile phone and searched
back through the list of calls. There weren’t that many, so it was still there, the very short conversation at Hotel Leon. He pressed OK.
Bosse researcher Oda Paulsen replied at once with the happy, animated voice of someone who views all incoming calls as an exciting new opportunity. And this time, in a sense, she was right.
21
DAY 18.
The Waiting Room.
IT WAS THE HEEBIE-JEEBIES ROOM. PERHAPS THAT WAS WHY some people called it the ‘waiting room’, as if you were at the dentist’s. Or the ‘antechamber’, as if the heavy door between the two Studio 1 sofas led to something important or even holy. But on NRK’s floor plan for the state channel’s buildings in the Marienlyst district of Oslo, it was simply, and boringly, termed Lounge, Studio 1. Nevertheless, it was the most exciting room Oda Paulsen knew.
Most of the guests taking part in the evening’s edition of Bosse had arrived. As usual, it was the guests who were least known and who would be appearing for the shortest time who had got there first. Now they were sitting on one of the sofas, made up, their cheeks flushed with tension as they chatted, sipped tea or red wine, their eyes inevitably seeking the monitor which gave a full view of the studio on the other side of the door. There, the audience had been admitted and the TV floor manager was instructing them on how to clap, laugh and cheer. The screen also showed the host’s chair and four guests’ chairs, empty, waiting for people, content and entertainment.
Oda loved these intense, nervous minutes before they went live. Every Friday, for forty minutes, this was as close to the centre of the world as it was possible to get in Norway. Between 20 and 25 per cent of the country’s population saw the programme, an insanely high viewing percentage for a talk show. Those working here were not only where it happened, they were what happened. This was celebrity’s magnetic North Pole which attracted everything and everyone. And because celebrity is an addictive drug and there is only one compass point from the North Pole – south, downwards – everyone clung onto their jobs. A freelancer like Oda had to deliver in order to be on the team next season, and that was why she was so happy, on her own behalf, to have received the call late yesterday afternoon, just before the editorial meeting. Bosse Eggen himself had smiled at her and said this was a scoop. Her scoop.
The evening’s theme was to be adult games. It was a typical Bosse theme, suitably serious without being too weighty. Something about which all the guests could express a semi-qualified opinion. Among the guests was a woman psychologist who had written a thesis on the topic, but the main guest was Arve Støp who would be celebrating Liberal’s twenty-fifth anniversary the following day. Støp hadn’t objected to the angle of the playful adult, the playboy, when Oda had had a preparatory meeting with him in his flat. He had just laughed when she had drawn a parallel with an ageing Hugh Hefner wearing a dressing gown and smoking a pipe at an eternal bachelors’ party in his mansion. She had felt his eyes on her, inspecting, curious, right up to the moment she had asked him whether he regretted not having a child, an heir to the kingdom.
‘Have you got any children?’ he had asked.
And when she had replied in the negative he had, to her astonishment, suddenly seemed to lose interest in both her and their conversation. She had therefore quickly rounded off by giving him the usual information: arrival and make-up times, preferably no striped clothing, themes and guests could change at short notice since this was a topical programme, and so on.
And now here was Arve Støp in Lounge, Studio 1, straight from make-up, with his intense blue eyes and thick grey hair which was groomed, but just long enough for the tips to bob up and down in suitably rebellious style. He was wearing a plain grey suit which everyone knew cost an arm and a leg, though no one could say how they knew. A tanned hand was already out to greet the psychologist who was sitting on a sofa with peanuts and a glass of red wine.
‘I didn’t know psychologists could be so beautiful,’ he said to the woman. ‘Hope people can listen to what you say as well.’
Oda watched the psychologist hesitate before beaming. And even though the woman clearly knew that Støp’s compliment was a joke, Oda saw from the sparkle in her eyes that it had hit home.
‘Hi, everyone, thank you all for coming!’ This was Bosse Eggen sweeping into the room. He started with the guests on the left, shook hands, looked them in the eye, declared how happy he was to have them on board, told them that they could interrupt with questions for the other guests or make comments; it would enliven the conversation.
Gubbe, the producer, signalled that Støp and Bosse should withdraw into a side room to have a chat about the structure of the main interview and the intro to the programme. Oda checked her watch. Eight and a half minutes until they were live. She was just beginning to be concerned and wondered whether to phone reception to find out if he was waiting there: the real main guest. The scoop. But as she raised her eyes, there he was in front of her with one of the assistants, and Oda felt her heart skip a beat. He wasn’t exactly good-looking, perhaps he was even ugly, but she was not ashamed to confess that she felt a certain attraction. And this attraction had something to do with the fact that he was the guest all TV channels in Scandinavia wanted to get their hands on right now. For he was the man who had caught the Snowman, the biggest crime story in Norway for many years.
‘I said I would be late,’ Harry Hole got in before she could utter a word.
She sniffed his breath. The last time he had been on the show he had been visibly drunk and had annoyed a whole nation. Or at least between 20 and 25 per cent of it.
‘We’re just happy you’re here,’ she twittered. ‘You’ll be on second. Then you sit in for the rest of the show; the others will take their turns.’
‘Fine,’ he said.
‘Take him to make-up,’ Oda said to the assistant. ‘Use Guri.’
Guri wasn’t just efficient, she knew how to make a worn face presentable for a TV audience with some simple, and some less simple, tricks.
They went off and Oda took a deep breath. She loved, loved the last edgy minutes when everything seemed to be chaos but still fell into place.
Bosse and Støp returned from the side room. She gave Bosse the thumbs up. She heard the audience clapping as the studio door slid shut. On the monitor she saw Bosse taking his seat and knew that the floor manager had started the countdown. Then the signature tune began, and they were on air.
Oda realised something was amiss. The programme had run like clockwork so far. Arve Støp had been brilliant and Bosse was revelling in it. Arve Støp had said he was perceived as elitist because he was elitist. And that he wouldn’t be remembered unless he suffered a real failure or two.
‘Good stories are never about a string of successes but spectacular defeats,’ Støp had said. ‘Even though Roald Amundsen won the race to the South Pole, it’s Robert Scott the world outside Norway remembers. None of Napoleon’s victories is remembered like the defeat at Waterloo. Serbia’s national pride is based on the battle against the Turks at Kosovo Polje in 1389, a battle the Serbs lost resoundingly. And look at Jesus! The symbol of the man who is claimed to have triumphed over death ought to be a man standing outside the tomb with his hands in the air. Instead, throughout time Christians have preferred the spectacular defeat: when he was hanging on the cross and close to giving up. Because it’s always the story of the defeat that moves us most.’
‘And you’re thinking of doing a Jesus?’
‘No,’ Støp had answered, looking down and smiling as the audience laughed. ‘I’m a coward. I’m going for forgettable success.’
Støp had shown an unexpectedly likeable, indeed, even humble side of himself, instead of his notorious arrogance. Bosse asked him whether he, as a single man of many years’ standing, didn’t long for a woman at his side. And when Støp answered yes, Oda knew there would be an avalanche of marriage proposals heading his way. The audience responded with a long round of warm applause. Then Bosse dramatically announced: ‘Ever on the h
unt, the lone wolf of Oslo Police, Inspector Harry Hole,’ and Oda thought she caught an expression of astonishment as the camera rested on Støp for a second.
Bosse had evidently enjoyed the response he had received to the question of a regular woman, because he tried to maintain the thread by asking Harry – since he knew he was also single – if he didn’t long for a woman? Harry smirked and shook his head. But Bosse wouldn’t let it drop and asked if there was perhaps someone special he was kicking his heels waiting for.
‘No,’ Harry answered, short and sweet.
Usually this kind of rejection spurred Bosse to press further, but he knew he shouldn’t spoil the party. The Snowman. So he asked Harry if he could tell them about the case all Norway was talking about, the nation’s first real serial killer. Harry wriggled in his chair as if it were too small for his long body while summarising the chain of events in short, sculpted sentences. In recent years there had been some missing persons cases with obvious similarities. All the missing women had been in relationships, had children and there was no trace of a body.
Bosse assumed the grave expression which informed all and sundry that this was a flippancy-free zone.
‘This year Birte Becker disappeared from her home in Hoff, here in Oslo, under similar circumstances,’ Harry said. ‘And soon afterwards Silvia Ottersen was found dead in Sollihøgda outside Oslo. That was the first time we had found a body. Or at least parts of it.’
‘Yes, because you found her head, didn’t you?’ Bosse interjected. Warily informative for those not in the know, and blood and tabloid for those who were. He was so professional that Oda immediately swelled with satisfaction.
‘And then we found the body of a missing police officer outside Bergen.’ Harry ploughed on. ‘He’d been missing for twelve years.’
‘Iron Rafto,’ Bosse said.
‘Gert Rafto,’ Harry amended. ‘A few days ago we found the body of Idar Vetlesen in Bygdøy. Those are the only bodies we have.’