by Jo Nesbo
“There’s one more thing,” Harry said, reaching out to switch on the overhead projector between the piles of paper on his desk. Magnus Skarre cursed and shielded his eyes as blurred writing suddenly appeared on his face. He moved, and Harry’s voice came from behind the projector.
“This letter landed in my mailbox exactly two months ago. No address, postmarked Oslo. Produced on a standard inkjet printer.”
Before Harry could ask, Katrine Bratt had pressed the light switch by the door, plunging the room into darkness. A square of light loomed up on the white wall.
They read in silence.
Soon the first snow will come. And then he will appear again. The snowman. And when the snow has gone, he will have taken someone else. What you should ask yourself is this: “Who made the snowman? Who makes snowmen? Who gave birth to the Murri?” For the snowman doesn’t know.
“Poetic,” mumbled Bjørn Holm.
“What’s the Murri?” Skarre asked.
The monotonous whir of the projector fan was the answer.
“The most interesting part is who the snowman is,” Katrine Bratt said.
“Obviously someone who needs his head examined,” Bjørn Holm said.
Skarre’s lone laughter was cut short.
“The Murri was the nickname of a person who is now dead,” Harry said from out of the darkness. “A Murri is an Aborigine from Queensland in Australia. While this Murri was alive he killed women all over Australia. No one knows for certain how many. His real name was Robin Toowoomba.”
The fan whirred and buzzed.
“Serial killer,” said Bjørn Holm. “The one you killed.”
Harry nodded.
“Does that mean you think we’re dealing with one now?”
“As a result of this letter, we can’t rule out the possibility.”
“Whoa there. Hold your horses!” Skarre raised his palms. “How many times have you cried wolf since you became a celeb because of the Aussie stuff, Harry?”
“Three times,” Harry said. “At least.”
“And still we haven’t seen a serial killer in Norway.” Skarre glanced at Bratt as if to make sure she was following. “Is it because of that FBI course you took on serial killers? Is that what’s making you see them everywhere?”
“Maybe,” Harry said.
“Let me remind you that apart from that nurse fellow who gave injections to a couple of old fogies who were at death’s door anyway, we haven’t had a single serial killer in Norway. Ever. Those guys exist in the U.S.A., but even there usually only in films.”
“Wrong,” said Katrine Bratt.
The others turned to face her. She stifled a yawn.
“Sweden, France, Belgium, Britain, Italy, Holland, Denmark, Russia and Finland. And we’re talking only solved cases here. No one utters a word about hidden statistics.”
Harry couldn’t see Skarre’s flushed face in the dark, just the profile of his chin jutting forward aggressively in Bratt’s direction.
“We haven’t even got a body, and I can show you a drawer full of letters like this one. People who are a lot nuttier than this … this … snowguy.”
“The difference,” Harry said, getting up and strolling over to the window, “is that this head case is thorough. The name Murri was never mentioned in the papers at the time. It was the nickname Robin Toowoomba used when he was a boxer with a traveling circus.”
The last of the daylight leaked out through a crack in the cloud cover. He looked at his watch. Oleg had insisted on going early so that they could take in Slayer as well.
“Where we gonna begin, then?” Bjørn Holm mumbled.
“Eh?” Skarre said.
“Where are we going to begin, then?” Holm repeated with exaggerated diction.
Harry went back to the desk.
“Holm goes over Becker’s house and yard as if it were a murder scene. Check the mobile phone and the scarf in particular. Skarre, you make a list of ex-murderers, rapists, suspects in—”
“—comparable cases and other scum on the loose,” Skarre said.
“Bratt, you go through the missing-persons reports and see if you can spot a pattern.”
Harry waited for the inevitable question: What type of pattern? But it was not forthcoming. Katrine Bratt just gave a brief nod.
“OK,” Harry said. “Get going.”
“And you?” Bratt asked.
“I’m going to a gig,” Harry said.
When the others had left the office, he looked down at his pad. At the only words he had jotted down. Hidden statistics.
Sylvia ran as fast as she could. She ran toward the trees where they were most dense, in the growing murk. She was running for her life.
She hadn’t tied up her boots, and now they were full of snow. She held the little hatchet in front of her as she burst through layer after layer of low, leafless branches. The blade was red and sleek with blood.
She knew the snow that had fallen yesterday had melted in town, but even though Sollihøgda was barely half an hour’s drive away, the snow could lie on the ground until spring up here. And right now she wished they had never moved to this godforsaken place, to this bit of wilderness by the town. She wished she were running on black pavement, in a city where the noise drowned out the sounds of escape and she could hide in the secure mass of humanity. But here she was completely alone.
No.
Not completely.
8
DAY 3
Swan Neck
Sylvia ran into the forest. Night was on the way. Usually she hated the way November evenings drew in so early, but today she thought the night couldn’t come soon enough. She sought the darkness in the depths of the forest, the darkness that could erase her footprints in the snow and conceal her. She knew her way around here; she could find her bearings so that she didn’t run back to the farm or straight into … into its arms. The problem was that the snow had changed the landscape overnight, covered the paths, the familiar rocks, and leveled out all the contours. And the dusk … everything was distorted and disfigured by the blackness. And by her own panic.
She stopped to listen. Her heaving, rasping breathlessness rent the tranquillity; it sounded as if she were tearing the waxed paper wrapped around her daughters’ packed lunches. She managed to bring her breathing under control. All she could hear was the blood pounding in her ears and the low gurgle of a stream. The stream! They usually followed the stream when they were picking berries, setting traps or searching for chickens that in their heart of hearts they knew the fox had taken. The stream led down to a gravel road, and there, sooner or later, a car would pass.
She no longer heard any footsteps. No twigs cracking, no crunching of snow. Perhaps she had escaped? With her body hunched over, she moved swiftly toward the gurgling sounds.
The stream looked as though it were flowing over a white bedsheet.
Sylvia trampled straight in. The water, which reached mid-ankle, soon penetrated her boots. It was so cold that it froze her leg muscles. Then she began to run again. In the same direction as the water flowed. She made loud splashes as she lifted her legs for long, ground-gaining strides. No tracks, she thought triumphantly. And her pulse slowed, even though she was running.
That had to be a result of the hours she had spent on the treadmill at the fitness center last year. She had lost fifteen pounds and ventured to maintain that her body was in better shape than those of most thirty-five-year-olds. That was what he said, anyway, Yngve, whom she had first met at the so-called inspiration seminar last year. Where she had been all too inspired. My God, if only she could turn back the clock. Back ten years. All the things she would have done differently! She wouldn’t have married Rolf. And she wouldn’t have had an abortion. Yes, of course, it was an impossible thought now that the twins had come into the world. But before they were born, before she had seen Emma and Olga, it would have been possible, and she wouldn’t have been in this prison that she had constructed around herself with such car
e.
She swept away the branches overhanging the stream, and from the corner of her eye she saw something, an animal, react with a startled movement and disappear into the gray gloom of the forest.
It went through her mind that she would have to be careful swinging her arms so that she didn’t hit her leg with the hatchet. Minutes had passed, but it felt like an eternity since she had been standing in the barn slaughtering chickens. She had cut off two heads and had been about to cut off a third when she heard the barn door creak behind her. Of course she had been alarmed; she was alone and hadn’t been aware of either footsteps or a car in the yard. The first thing she had noticed was the strange apparatus, a thin metal loop attached to a handle. It looked like the snares they used to catch foxes. And when the holder of this instrument began to talk, it slowly dawned on her that she was the prey, she was the one who was going to die.
She had been told why.
And she had listened to the sick but limpid logic as the blood slowed in her veins, as if it were already coagulating. Then she had been told how. In detail. And the loop had begun to glow, first red, then white. That was when she had swung her arm in horror, felt the recently sharpened hatchet blade cut through the material under the raised arm, seen the jacket and sweater open as if she had unzipped them and seen the steel slice a red line through the bare skin. As the figure had staggered backward and fallen onto the floorboards slippery with chickens’ blood, she had raced to the door at the back of the barn. The one leading into the forest. Into the darkness.
The numbness had spread over her knees, and her clothes were soaked up to her navel. But she knew she would soon be on the gravel road. And from there it was no more than fifteen minutes to the nearest farm if she stayed at a run. The stream turned. Her left foot kicked something protruding from the water. There was a crack, as if someone had grabbed her foot, and the next moment Sylvia Ottersen was falling headlong. She landed on her stomach, swallowed water tasting of earth and rotten leaves, then pushed herself into a kneeling position. Once she knew she was still alone, and the first panic had passed, she discovered that her foot was trapped. She groped with her hand under the water, expecting to find entwined tree roots around her foot, but instead her fingers felt something smooth and hard. Metal. A metal ring. Sylvia’s gaze scoured around for what she had kicked. And there on the snowy bank she saw it. It had eyes, feathers and a pale red cockscomb. She felt her terror mounting again. It was a severed chicken’s head. Not one of the heads she had just cut off, but one of the ones Rolf used. As bait. After writing to the local council that a fox had killed sixteen chickens last year, they had been given permission to set a limited number of fox traps—so-called swan necks—at a certain radius around the farm, well off the beaten track. The best place to hide traps was underwater with the bait sticking up. After the fox had taken the bait, the trap snapped shut, breaking the neck of the animal and killing it instantly. At least in theory. She felt with her hand. When they had bought the traps at Jaktdepotet in Drammen, they had been told the springs were so strong that the jaws could break the leg of an adult, but she couldn’t feel any pain in her frozen foot. Her fingers found the thin steel wire attached to the swan neck. She wouldn’t be able to force open the trap without the lever, which was in the farm toolshed, and anyway they usually tied the swan neck to a tree with steel wire so that a half-dead fox, or anything else, would not be able to run off with the expensive equipment. Her hand traced the wire through the water and up onto the bank. There was the metal sign bearing their names, as per regulations.
She stiffened. Wasn’t that a twig she heard breaking in the distance? She felt her heart pounding again as she stared into the dense murk.
Numb fingers followed the wire through the snow as she crawled up onto the bank of the stream. The wire was fastened around the trunk of a solid young birch tree. She searched for and found the knot under the snow. The metal had frozen into a stiff, unyielding lump. She had to open it, had to get away.
Another twig cracked. Closer this time.
She leaned against the trunk, on the opposite side to where she had heard the sound. Told herself not to panic, that the knot would come loose after she had yanked at it for a while, that her leg was intact, that the sounds she heard coming closer were made by a deer. She tried pulling at one end of the knot and didn’t feel the pain when a fingernail broke down the middle. But it was no use. She bent over and her teeth crunched as she bit into the steel. Shit! She could hear light, quiet footsteps in the snow and held her breath. The steps paused somewhere on the other side of the tree. She might have been imagining things, but she thought she could hear it scenting the air, inhaling the smell. She sat utterly motionless. Then it began to move again. The sounds were softer. It was going away.
She took a deep, quivering breath. Now she would have to free herself. Her clothes were soaked and she would certainly freeze to death at night if no one found her. At that moment she remembered. The hatchet! She had forgotten the hatchet. The wire was thin. Put it on a stone, a couple of well-aimed blows and she would be free. The hatchet must have fallen in the stream. She crawled back into the black water, put her hands down and searched the stony bottom.
Nothing.
In despair, she sank to her knees, scanning the snow on both banks. And then she caught sight of the blade poking up out of the water six feet in front of her. And already she knew, before she felt the wire jerk, before she lay down flat in the water with the melted snow gurgling over her, so cold that she thought her heart would stop, stretching like a desperate beggar for the hatchet, already she knew that it was a foot too far. Her fingers curled around air a foot and a half from the handle. Tears came, but she forced them back; she could cry afterward.
“Is this what you’re looking for?”
She had neither seen nor heard a thing. But in front of her sat a figure, crouched down. It. Sylvia scrambled back, but the figure followed with the hatchet held out to her.
“Just take it.”
Sylvia got to her knees and took the hatchet.
“What are you going to do with it?” the voice asked.
Sylvia felt the fury surge up inside her, the fury that always accompanies fear, and the result was ferocious. She lunged forward with the hatchet raised and swung low with an outstretched arm. But the wire tugged at her; the hatchet just sliced the darkness and the next moment she was lying in the water again.
The voice chuckled.
Sylvia fell onto her side. “Go away,” she groaned, spitting pebbles.
“I want you to eat snow,” the voice said, getting up and briefly holding the side where the jacket had been slashed open.
“What?” Sylvia exclaimed, in spite of herself.
“I want you to eat snow until you piss yourself.” The figure stood slightly outside the radius of the steel wire, tilted its head and watched Sylvia. “Until your stomach is so frozen and full that it can’t melt the snow any longer. Until it’s ice inside. Until you’ve become your true self. Something that can’t feel.”
Sylvia’s brain perceived the words, but could not absorb the meaning. “Never!” she screamed.
A sound came from the figure and blended into the gurgle of the stream. “Now’s the time to scream, dear Sylvia. For no one will hear you again. Ever.”
Sylvia saw it raise something. Which lit up. A loop formed the outline of a red, glowing raindrop against the dark. It hissed and smoked as it came into contact with the surface of the stream. “You’ll choose to eat snow. Believe me.”
Sylvia realized with a paralyzing certainty that her final hour had come. There was only one possibility left. In the past minutes night had fallen quickly, but she tried to focus her gaze on the figure between the trees as she weighed the hatchet in her hand. The blood tingled in her fingers as it streamed back, seeming to know that this was the last chance. They had practiced this, she and the twins. On the barn wall. And every time she had thrown and one of them had pulled the hatchet out
of the fox-shaped target, they had cheered with jubilation: “You killed the beast, Mommy! You killed the beast!” Sylvia put one foot slightly in front of the other. A one-step run-up, that was the optimum to get the right combination of power and accuracy.
“You’re crazy,” she whispered.
“Of that,” the figure said, and Sylvia thought she could discern a little smile, “there is little doubt.”
The hatchet whirled through the thick, almost tangible darkness with a low hum. Sylvia stood perfectly balanced with her right arm pointed forward and watched the lethal weapon. Watched it whistle through the trees. Heard it cut off a thin branch. Watched it disappear into the darkness and heard the dull thud as the hatchet buried itself in the snow somewhere deep in the forest.
She leaned back against the tree trunk and slowly slumped to the ground. Felt the tears come without attempting to stop them this time. Because now she knew. There would be no afterward.