by Jo Nesbo
‘I have the best contacts,’ he said. ‘In Switzerland. No one will ever know.’
‘This is my opportunity to become a mother, Arve. The doctor says it’s a miracle that may never be repeated.’
‘Then I want to see neither you nor any children you may have again. Do you hear me?’
‘The child needs a father, Arve. And a secure home.’
‘And you won’t find either here. I’m the carrier of an awful inherited disease. Do you understand?’
Birte Becker understood. And since she was a simple but quickwitted girl with a drunkard of a father and a nervous wreck of a mother, accustomed from early years to coping on her own, she did what she had to do. She found her child a father and a secure home.
Filip Becker could not believe it when this beautiful woman he had wooed with such determination, yet to no avail, suddenly surrendered and set her heart on becoming his. And since he could not believe it, the seeds of suspicion were already sown. At the moment she announced that he had made her pregnant – only a week after she had given herself to him – the seeds were still well entrenched.
When Birte rang Arve to say that Jonas had been born and was the spitting image of him, Arve stood with his ear against the receiver staring into the air. Then he asked her for a photograph. It arrived in the post and two weeks later she was sitting, as arranged, in a coffee bar with Jonas on her lap and a wedding ring on her finger while Arve sat at another table pretending to read a paper.
That night he tossed and turned between the sheets, restlessly brooding over the disease.
It had to be handled with discretion, a doctor he could trust to keep his mouth shut. In short, it would have to be the feeble, obsequious prat of a surgeon at the curling club: Idar Vetlesen.
He contacted Vetlesen who was working at Marienlyst Clinic. The prat said yes to the job, yes to the money and at Støp’s expense travelled to Geneva where the foremost Fahr’s syndrome experts in Europe gathered every year to hold a course and present the latest discouraging findings from their research.
The first tests Jonas underwent revealed nothing wrong, but even though Vetlesen repeated that the symptoms usually came to light in adulthood – Arve Støp had himself been symptom-free until he was forty – Støp insisted that the boy should be examined once a year.
Two years had passed since he had seen his seed running down Sylvia Ottersen’s leg as she walked out of the shop and out of Arve Støp’s life. He had quite simply never contacted her again, nor she him. Until now. When she rang he said immediately that he was on his way to an emergency meeting, but she kept the message brief. In four sentences she told him that obviously not all his seed had dribbled out, she now had twins, her husband thought they were his and they needed a kindly disposed investor to keep Taste of Africa afloat.
‘I think I’ve injected enough into that shop,’ said Arve Støp, who often reacted to bad news with witticisms.
‘I could, on the other hand, raise the money by going to Se og Hør. They love these the-father-of-my-child’s-a-celeb etc., etc. stories, don’t they.’
‘Poor bluff,’ he said. ‘You’ve got too much to lose by doing that.’
‘Things have changed,’ she said. ‘I’m going to leave Rolf if I can scrape together enough cash to buy him out of the shop. The problem with the shop is its location, so I will make it a condition that Se og Hør publishes pictures of the place to get it some decent publicity. Do you know how many people read the rag?’
Arve Støp knew. Every sixth Norwegian adult. He had never objected to a nice glitzy scandal every once in a while, but to be made to look like a slippery Lothario exploiting his celebrity status with an innocent married woman in such a craven way? The public image of Arve Støp as upright and fearless would be smashed, and Liberal’s morally indignant outbursts would be cast in a hypocritical light. And she wasn’t even attractive. This was not good. Not good at all.
‘What sort of money are we talking?’ he asked.
Upon reaching agreement, he called Idar Vetlesen at Marienlyst Clinic and explained that he had two new patients. They arranged to do the same as with Jonas, first make the twins take DNA tests, send them to the Institute of Forensic Medicine to confirm paternity and then start checking for symptoms of the unmentionable disease.
After ringing off, Arve Støp leaned back in the high leather chair and saw the sun shining on the treetops in Bygdøy and on Snarøya peninsula, knowing he should feel deeply depressed. But he didn’t. He felt excited. Yes, almost happy.
The distant memory of this happiness was the first thing that went through Arve Støp’s mind when Idar Vetlesen phoned to tell him that the newspapers were alleging that the decapitated woman in Sollihøgda was Sylvia Ottersen.
‘First Jonas Becker’s mother goes missing,’ Vetlesen said. ‘And then they find the mother of the twins killed. I’m no whizz at the calculus of probability, but we have to go to the police, Arve. They’re keen to find connections.’
In recent years Vetlesen had made a lucrative career out of embellishing the appearance of celebrities, but in Arve Støp’s eyes he was nevertheless – or perhaps as a consequence – a prat.
‘No, we’re not going to the police,’ Arve said.
‘Oh? Then you’ll have to give me a good reason.’
‘Fine. What sort of money are we talking?’
‘My God, Arve, I’m not trying to blackmail you. I just can’t –’
‘How much?’
‘Stop it. Have you got an alibi or haven’t you?’
‘I haven’t got an alibi, but I do have an awful lot of money. Tell me how many zeros and I’ll think about it.’
‘Arve, if you have nothing to hide –’
‘Of course I’ve got something to hide, you twat! Do you think I want to be publicly exposed as a wife-porker and murder suspect? We’ll have to meet and talk this through.’
‘And did you meet?’ Harry Hole asked.
Arve Støp shook his head. Outside the bedroom window he could see the heralding of dawn, but the fjord was still black.
‘We didn’t get that far before he died.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me any of this when I came here the first time?’
‘Isn’t it obvious? I don’t know anything that may be of value to the police, so why should I interfere? Don’t forget, I have a brand to attend to, and that is my name. This label is in fact Liberal‘s only capital.’
‘I seem to remember you said the only capital was your personal integrity.’
Støp shrugged his shoulders with displeasure. ‘Integrity. Label. It’s the same thing.’
‘So if something looks like integrity, then it’s integrity?’
Støp stared at Harry, aloof. ‘That’s what sells Liberal. If people feel they’re given the truth, they’re satisfied.’
‘Mm.’ Harry glanced at his watch. ‘And do you think I’m satisfied now?’
Arve Støp didn’t answer.
28
DAY 20.
Disease.
BJØRN HOLM DROVE HARRY FROM AKER BRYGGE TO POLICE HQ. The inspector had put on his wet clothes, and the artificial leather squelched as he shifted position.
‘Delta raided her flat twenty minutes ago,’ Bjørn said. ‘She wasn’t there. They’ve left three guards on the door.’
‘She won’t be back,’ Harry said.
In his office on the sixth floor Harry changed into the police uniform hanging on the coat stand; he hadn’t worn it since Jack Halvorsen’s funeral. He scrutinised himself in the mirror. The jacket hung off him.
Gunnar Hagen had been alerted and had come to the office at short notice. He sat behind his desk listening to Harry’s debrief. It was so dramatic that he forgot to be irritated by the inspector’s creased uniform.
‘The Snowman’s Katrine Bratt,’ Hagen repeated slowly, as if saying it aloud made it more comprehensible.
Harry nodded.
‘And do you believe Støp?’
‘Yes,’ Harry said.
‘Can anyone corroborate his story?’
‘They’re all dead. Birte, Sylvia, Idar Vetlesen. He could have been the Snowman. That was what Katrine Bratt wanted to find out.’
‘Katrine? But you’re saying she’s the Snowman. Why would she …?’
‘I’m saying that she wanted to find out if he could be the Snowman. She wanted to set up a scapegoat. Støp says that when he said that he had no alibi for the times of the murders she said “Good” and told him he had just been appointed the Snowman. Then she started to strangle him. Until she heard the car crash into the front door, realised we were on the way and fled. The plan was probably that we should find Støp dead in the apartment and that it would look as if he had hanged himself. And we would relax in the belief that we had found the guilty party. Just as she killed Idar Vetlesen. And when she tried to shoot Filip Becker during his arrest.’
‘What? She tried …?’
‘She had her revolver pointed at him with the hammer cocked. I heard her release the hammer as I positioned myself in the firing line.’
Gunnar Hagen closed his eyes and massaged his temples with the tips of his fingers. ‘I hear you. But for the moment all this is just speculation, Harry.’
‘And then there’s the letter,’ Harry said.
‘The letter?’
‘From the Snowman. I found the document on her computer at home, dated before any of us knew anything about the Snowman. And the paper in the printer.’
‘Christ!’ Hagen banged his elbows down hard on the desk and buried his face in his hands. ‘We employed the woman here! Do you know what that means, Harry?’
‘Well, an almighty scandal. Lack of confidence in the whole police force. Heads will roll in the upper echelons.’
A crack opened between Hagen’s fingers and he squinted at Harry. ‘Thank you for being so explicit.’
‘My pleasure.’
‘I’ll summon the Chief Superintendent and the Chief Constable. In the meantime I want you and Bjørn Holm to keep this under your hats. What about Arve Støp? Will he blab?’
‘Hardly, boss.’ Harry smirked. ‘He’s run out.’
‘Run out of what?’
‘Integrity.’
It was ten o’clock and from his office window Harry watched the pale, almost hesitant daylight settle on the rooftops and a Sunday-still Grønland. More than six hours had passed since Katrine Bratt had vanished from Støp’s apartment, and so far the search had borne no fruit. Of course she could still be in Oslo, but if she had been prepared for a strategic withdrawal she could well be over the hills and far away. Harry had no doubt that she had made preparations.
Just as he had no doubt now that she was the Snowman.
First of all, there was the evidence: the letter and the murder attempts. And all his instincts were confirmed: the feeling that he was being observed from close range, the feeling that someone had infiltrated his life. The newspaper cuttings on the wall, the reports. Katrine had got to know him so well that she could predict his next moves, could use him in her game. And now she was a virus in his bloodstream, a spy inside his head.
He heard someone come in, but didn’t turn round.
‘We’ve traced her mobile phone,’ Skarre’s voice said. ‘She’s in Sweden.’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘Telenor Operations Centre says that the signals are moving south. The location and speed match the Copenhagen train that departed from Oslo Central Station at five past seven. I’ve spoken to the police in Helsingborg; they need a formal application to make an arrest. The train’s due to arrive in half an hour. What shall we do?’
Harry nodded slowly, as though to himself. A seagull sailed past on stiff wings before suddenly changing direction and swooping down to the trees in the park. Perhaps it had spotted something. Or just changed its mind. The way humans do. Oslo Station at seven o’clock in the morning.
‘Harry? She might make it to Denmark unless we –’
‘Ask Hagen to talk to Helsingborg,’ Harry said, swivelling and grabbing his jacket from the coat stand in one quick movement.
Skarre watched in amazement as the inspector hurried down the corridor with long, purposeful strides.
Officer Orø in the Stores at Police HQ looked at the shaven-headed inspector with undisguised astonishment and repeated: ‘CS? Gas, that is?’
‘Two canisters,’ Harry said. ‘And a box of ammo for the revolver.’
The officer limped to the stores, mouthing imprecations. This Hole guy was a complete fruitcake, everyone knew that, but tear gas? If it had been anyone else at the station, he would have guessed that it was for a stag night with the pals. But from what he heard, Hole had no pals, at least not on the force.
The inspector coughed as Orø returned. ‘Has Katrine Bratt in Crime Squad requested any weapons here?’
‘The woman from Bergen Police Station? Only the one stipulated in the rule book.’
‘And what does the rule book say?’
‘Return all weapons and unused ammo to the old police station upon departure and request a new revolver and two boxes of bullets from the new station.’
‘So she has nothing heavier than a revolver?’
Orø shook his head, mystified.
‘Thank you,’ Hole said, putting the boxes of ammunition in a black bag beside the green cylindrical canisters containing the pepper-reeking tear gas that Corso and Stoughton had concocted in 1928.
The officer didn’t answer, not until he had received Hole’s signature for the delivery, then he mumbled, ‘Have a peaceful Sunday.’
* * *
Harry was sitting in the waiting room at Ullevål Hospital with the black bag beside him. There was a smell of alcohol, old people and slow death. A female patient had taken a seat opposite him and was staring at him as though trying to locate someone who was not there: a person she had known, a lover who had never materialised, a son she thought she recognised.
Harry sighed, glanced at his watch and visualised the police storming the train in Helsingborg. The train driver who was instructed by the stationmaster to stop the train a kilometre before the station. The armed police dispersed along both sides of the track, standing by with dogs. The efficient inspection of the carriages, the compartments, the toilets. The terrified passengers reacting to the sight of armed police, still an unusual sight here in Scandinavian dreamland. The trembling, groping hands of women requested to present ID. The hunched shoulders of the police, the nervousness, but also the anticipation. Their impatience, doubt, irritation and ultimately their disappointment and despair that they didn’t find what they were looking for. And, at the end, if they were lucky and competent, the loud curses when they found the source of the signals the base stations had picked up: Katrine Bratt’s mobile phone in a toilet bin.
A smiling face appeared before him. ‘You can see him now.’
Harry followed the clatter of clogs and broad, energetic hips in white trousers. She pushed open the door. ‘But don’t stay too long. He needs rest.’
Ståle Aune lay on the bed in a private room. His round, red-veined face was sunken and so pale it almost blended in with the pillowcase. Thin hair, like a child’s, lay on the chubby sixty-year-old’s forehead. Had it not been for the same sharp-eyed, jovial eyes, Harry would have believed he was looking at the corpse of the Crime Squad’s resident psychologist and Harry’s personal spiritual adviser.
‘Goodness me, Harry,’ Ståle Aune said. ‘You look like a skeleton. Aren’t you well?’
Harry had to smile. Aune sat up with a grimace.
‘Sorry not to have visited you before,’ Harry said, dragging and scraping a chair along the floor to the bed. ‘It’s just that the hospital … it … I don’t know.’
‘The hospital reminds you of your mother when you were a boy. That’s fine.’
Harry nodded and dropped his gaze to his hands. ‘Are they treating you well?’
‘That’s what you ask when you�
�re visiting folk in prison, Harry, not in a hospital.’
Harry nodded again.
Ståle Aune sighed. ‘I know you’re concerned about me, Harry. But I know you too well, so I know this is not a courtesy visit. Come on, spit it out.’
‘It can wait. They said you weren’t well.’
‘Being well is a relative thing. And, relatively speaking, I’m tremendously well. You should have seen me yesterday. By which I mean, you should not have seen me yesterday.’
Harry smiled at his hands.
‘Is it the Snowman?’ Aune asked.
Harry nodded.
‘At long last,’ Aune said. ‘I’ve been bored to death in here. Out with it.’
Harry breathed in. Then he gave a résumé of all that had happened in the case. Trying to trim the tedious, irrelevant information without losing the essential details. Aune interrupted him only a few times with pithy questions, otherwise he listened in silence with a concentrated, quasi-entranced expression on his face. And when Harry had finished the sick man appeared to have perked up; there was colour in his cheeks and he was sitting up straighter in bed.
‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘But you already know who the guilty person is, so why come to me?’
‘This woman is insane, isn’t she?’
‘People who commit such crimes are without exception insane. Though not necessarily in a criminal sense.’
‘Nevertheless, there are one or two things I don’t understand about her,’ Harry said.
‘Goodness me – there are only one or two things I do understand about people, so in that case you’re a better psychologist than me.’
‘She was just nineteen years old when she killed the two women in Bergen and Gert Rafto. How can a person who is that crazy get through the psychological tests for Police College and function in a job for all these years with no one being any the wiser?’
‘Good question. Perhaps she’s a cocktail case.’
‘Cocktail case?’
‘Someone with a bit of everything. Schizophrenic enough to hear voices, but capable of concealing her illness from those around her. Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder mixed with a dash of paranoia, which creates delusions about the situation she is in and what she has to do to escape, but which to the outside world is simply perceived as a certain reticence. The bestial fury that emerges during the murders you describe tallies with a borderline personality, though one which can control its fury.’