The Snowman

by Jo Nesbo

“And so they contacted you? A plastic surgeon?”

  “I happen to be a Fahr specialist.”

  “Happen to be?”

  “There are around eighteen thousand doctors in Norway. Do you know how many known diseases there are in the world?” Vetlesen motioned with his head to the wall of diplomas. “Fahr’s Syndrome happened to be part of a course I took in Switzerland about nerve channels. The little I learned was enough to make me a specialist in Norway.”

  “What can you tell us about Birte Becker and Sylvia Ottersen?”

  Vetlesen hunched his shoulders. “They came here with their children once a year. I examined them and was unable to determine any deterioration of their conditions, and, apart from that, I know nothing of their lives. Or for that matter”—he tossed back his hair—“their deaths.”

  “Do you believe him?” Harry asked as they drove past the deserted fields.

  “Not entirely,” Katrine said.

  “Nor I,” Harry said. “I think we should concentrate on this and drop Bergen for the time being.”

  “No,” said Katrine.

  “No?”

  “There’s a link here somewhere.”

  “Which is?”

  “I don’t know. It sounds wild, but perhaps there’s a link between Rafto and Vetlesen. Perhaps that’s how Rafto’s managed to hide all these years.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That he quite simply got himself a mask. An authentic mask. A face-lift.”

  “From Vetlesen?”

  “It could explain the coincidence of having two victims with the same doctor. Rafto could have seen Birte and Sylvia at the clinic and decided they would be his victims.”

  “You’re jumping the gun,” Harry said.

  “Jumping the gun?”

  “This kind of murder investigation is like doing a jigsaw puzzle. In the opening phase you collect the pieces, play with them, are patient. What you’re doing is trying to force the pieces into position. It’s too early.”

  “I’m just saying things out loud to someone. To see if they sound idiotic.”

  “They sound idiotic.”

  “This isn’t the way to the Police HQ,” she said.

  Harry could hear a curious quiver in her voice and glanced across at her, but her face gave nothing away.

  “I’d like to check out some of the things Vetlesen told us with someone I know,” he said. “And who knows Vetlesen.”

  Mathias was wearing a white coat and regulation yellow cleaning gloves when he received Harry and Katrine in the garage beneath Pre-clinical, the usual name for the brown building in the part of Gaustad Hospital that faces the Ring 3 highway.

  He directed their car into what turned out to be his own unused parking space.

  “I try to cycle as often as I can,” Mathias explained, using his swipe card to open the door leading from the garage into a basement corridor in the Anatomy Department. “This kind of access is practical for transporting bodies in and out. Would have liked to offer you coffee, but I’ve just finished with one group of students and the next will be here shortly.”

  “Sorry for the hassle. You must be tired today.”

  Mathias sent him a quizzical look.

  “Rakel and I were talking on the phone. She said you had to work late last night,” Harry added, cursing himself inside and hoping his face gave nothing away.

  “Rakel, yes.” Mathias shook his head. “She was out late herself. Out with the girls and has had to take the day off work. But when I called her she was in the midst of a big cleanup at home. Women, eh! What can you say?”

  Harry put on a stiff smile and wondered if there was a standard response to that question.

  A man in green hospital gear trundled a metal table toward the garage door.

  “Another delivery for the University of Tromsø?” Mathias asked.

  “Say bye-bye to Kjeldsen,” said the man in green with a smile. He had a cluster of small rings in one ear, a bit like a Masai woman’s neck rings, except that these rings gave his face an irritating asymmetry.

  “Kjeldsen?” Mathias exclaimed, and stopped. “Is that true?”

  “Thirty years of service. Now it’s Tromsø’s turn to dissect him.”

  Mathias lifted the blanket. Harry caught sight of the body. The skin over the cranium was taut, smoothing out the old man’s wrinkles into a genderless face, as white as a plaster mask. Harry knew that this was because the body had been preserved—that is, the arteries had been pumped full of a mixture of formalin, glycerin and alcohol to ensure that it did not decompose from inside. A metal tag with an engraved three-digit number had been attached to one ear. Mathias watched the assistant roll Kjeldsen toward the garage door. Then he seemed to wake up again.

  “Sorry. It’s just that Kjeldsen has been with us for so long. He was a professor at the Anatomy Department when it was down in the center of town. A brilliant anatomist. With well-defined muscles. We’re going to miss him.”

  “We won’t hold you up for long,” Harry said. “We were wondering if you could tell us something about Idar’s relationships with women patients. And their children.”

  Mathias raised his head and looked with surprise at Harry, then Katrine, and back again.

  “Are you asking me what I think you’re asking me?”

  Harry nodded.

  Mathias led them through another locked door. They entered a room with eight metal tables and a blackboard at one end. The tables were equipped with lamps and sinks. On each of the tables lay something oblong wrapped in white hand towels. Judging by the shape and the size, Harry guessed that today’s theme was situated somewhere between hip and foot. There was a faint smell of bleach, but not nearly as pronounced as Harry was used to from the autopsy room at the Institute of Forensic Medicine. Mathias sank down onto one of the chairs and Harry sat on the edge of the lecturer’s desk. Katrine walked over to a table and scrutinized three brains; it was impossible to say whether they were models or real.

  Mathias thought a long time before answering. “Personally, I’ve never noticed or heard anyone suggest there was anything between Idar and any of his patients.”

  Something about the stress placed on patients brought Harry up short. “What about nonpatients?”

  “I don’t know Idar well enough to comment. But I know him well enough to prefer not to comment.” He flashed a tentative smile. “If that’s OK?”

  “Of course. There was something else I was wondering about. Fahr’s Syndrome—do you know what it is?”

  “Superficially. A terrible disease. And unfortunately very much a hereditary—”

  “Do you know of any Norwegian specialists in the disease?”

  Mathias reflected. “None that I can think of, off the top of my head.”

  Harry scratched his neck. “OK, thanks for your help, Mathias.”

  “Not at all, a pleasure. If you want to know more about Fahr’s Syndrome, you can call me tonight, when I have a few books around me.”

  Harry stood up. Walked over to Katrine, who had lifted the lid off one of the four large metal boxes by the wall, and peered over her shoulder. His tongue prickled and his whole body reacted. Not at the body parts immersed in the clear alcohol, looking like lumps of meat at the butcher’s. But at the smell of alcohol. Forty percent.

  “They start off more or less whole,” Mathias said. “Then we cut them up as and when we need individual body parts.”

  Harry observed Katrine’s face. She seemed totally unaffected. The door opened behind them. The first students came in and began to put on blue coats and white latex gloves.

  Mathias followed them back to the garage. At the door, Mathias caught Harry’s arm and held him back.

  “Just a tiny thing I should mention, Harry. Or shouldn’t mention. I’m not sure.”

  “Out with it,” Harry said, thinking that this was it—Mathias knew about him and Rakel.

  “I have a slight moral dilemma here. It’s about Idar.”

 
“Oh, yes?” Harry said, feeling disappointment rather than relief, to his surprise.

  “I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything, but it occurred to me that maybe it’s not up to me to decide. And that you can’t let loyalty take priority in such a terrible case. No matter what. Last year, when I was still working in the emergency room, a colleague who also knows Idar and I popped by Postcafeen to have breakfast after a night shift. It’s a café that opens at the crack of dawn and serves beer, so a lot of thirsty early birds gather there. And other poor souls.”

  “I know the place,” Harry said.

  “To our surprise we found Idar there. He was sitting at a table with a filthy young boy slurping soup. On seeing us, Idar jumped up from the table in shock and came up with some excuse or other. I didn’t think any more about it. That is, I believed I hadn’t thought any more about it. Until what you just said. And I remembered what I’d been thinking at the time. That maybe … well, you understand.”

  “I understand,” Harry said. And, seeing his interlocutor’s tormented expression, added: “You did the right thing.”

  “Thank you.” Mathias forced a smile. “But I feel like a Judas.”

  Harry tried to find something sensible to say, but all he could do was proffer his hand and mumble a “thanks.” And shiver as he pressed Mathias’s cold cleaning glove.

  Judas. The Judas kiss. As they drove down Slemdalsveien, Harry thought about Rakel’s hungry tongue in his mouth, her gentle sigh and loud groan, the pains in his pelvis as it banged against Rakel’s, her cries of frustration when he stopped because he wanted it to last longer. For she wasn’t there to make it last longer. She was there to exorcise demons, to purify her body so that she could go home and purify her soul. And wash every floor in the house. The sooner the better.

  “Call the clinic,” Harry said.

  He heard Katrine’s quick fingers and tiny beeps. Then she passed him the mobile phone.

  Borghild answered with a studied mixture of gentleness and efficiency.

  “This is Harry Hole speaking. Tell me, who should I see if I have Fahr’s Syndrome?”

  Silence.

  “It depends,” answered Borghild hesitantly.

  “On what?”

  “On the syndrome your father has, I suppose.”

  “Right. Is Dr. Vetlesen in?”

  “He’s gone for today.”

  “Already?”

  “They’ve got a curling match. Try again tomorrow.”

  She radiated impatience. Harry assumed she was in the process of leaving for the day.

  “Bygdøy Curling Club?”

  “No, the private one. The one down from Gimle.”

  “Thanks. Have a good evening.”

  Harry gave Katrine the phone back.

  “We’ll bring him in,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “The specialist who has an assistant who’s never heard of the disease he specializes in.”

  · · ·

  After asking the way, they found Villa Grande, a luxurious property that, during the Second World War, had belonged to a Norwegian whose name, unlike those of the raft sailor and the Arctic explorer, was also widely known outside Norway: Quisling, the traitor.

  At the bottom of the slope to the south of the building there was a rectangular wooden house resembling an old military barracks. As soon as you entered the building you could feel the cold hit you. And inside the next door the temperature fell further.

  There were four men on the ice. Their shouts bounced off the wooden walls, and none of them noticed Harry and Katrine come in. They were shouting at a shiny stone gliding down the rink. The fifty pounds of granite, the type known as ailsite, from the Scottish island of Ailsa Craig, stopped against the guard of three other stones on the front edge of two circles painted into the ice. The men slid around the rink, balancing on one foot and kicking off with the other, discussing, supporting themselves on their brooms and preparing for the next stone.

  “Snob sport,” Katrine whispered. “Look at them.”

  Harry didn’t answer. He liked curling. The meditative element as you watched the stone’s slow passage, rotating in an apparently friction-free universe, like one of the spaceships in Kubrick’s odyssey, accompanied not by Strauss but by the stone’s quiet rumble and the furious sweeping of brooms.

  The men had seen them now. And Harry recognized two of the faces from media circles. One was Arve Støp’s.

  Idar Vetlesen skated toward him.

  “Joining us for a game, Hole?”

  He shouted that from far away, as if it was meant for the other men, not Harry. And it was followed by seemingly jovial laughter. But the muscles outlined against the skin of his jaw betrayed the game he was playing. He stopped in front of them, and the breath coming from his mouth was white.

  “The game’s over,” Harry said.

  “I don’t think so.” Idar smiled.

  Harry could already feel the cold from the ice creeping through the soles of his shoes and advancing up his legs.

  “We’d like you to come with us to the Police HQ,” Harry said. “Now.”

  Idar Vetlesen’s smile evaporated. “Why?”

  “Because you’re lying to us. Among other things, you’re not a Fahr’s Syndrome specialist.”

  “Says who?” Idar asked, glancing at the other curling players to confirm that they were standing too far away to hear them.

  “Says your assistant. Since she’s clearly never even heard of the disease.”

  “Listen here,” Idar said, and a new sound, that of despair, had crept into his voice. “You can’t just come here and take me away. Not here, not in front of …”

  “Your clients?” Harry asked and peered over Idar’s shoulder. He could see Arve Støp sweeping ice off the bottom of a stone while studying Katrine.

  “I don’t know what you’re after,” he heard Idar say. “I’m happy to cooperate with you, but not if you’re consciously setting out to humiliate and ruin me. These are my best friends.”

  “We’ll keep going, Vetlesen …,” resounded a deep baritone voice. It was Arve Støp’s.

  Harry eyed the unhappy surgeon. Wondered what he understood by “best” friends. And thought that if there was the tiniest chance of gaining anything by fulfilling Vetlesen’s wish, then it was worth their while.

  “OK,” Harry said. “We’re off. But you have to be at the Police HQ in Grønland in exactly one hour. If not, we’ll come looking for you with sirens and trumpet fanfares. And they’re easy to hear in Bygdøy, aren’t they?”

  Vetlesen nodded and for a moment looked as though he would laugh from force of habit.

  Oleg shut the door with a bang, kicked off his boots and ran upstairs. There was a fresh aroma of lemon and soap throughout the house. He stormed into his room, and the mobile hanging from the ceiling chimed in alarm as he pulled off his jeans and put on his sweatsuit bottoms. He ran out again, but as he grabbed the banister to take the stairs in two long strides, he heard his name from behind the open door of his mother’s bedroom.

  He went in and found Rakel on her knees in front of the bed with a long-handled scrubbing brush.

  “I thought you did the cleaning over the weekend.”

  “Yes, but not well enough,” his mother said, getting up and wiping a hand across her forehead. “Where are you going?”

  “To the stadium. I’m going skating. Karsten’s waiting outside. Be back home for dinner.” He pushed off from the door and slid across the floor on stockinged feet, gravity low, the way Erik V, one of the skating veterans at Valle Hovin, had taught him.

  “Wait a minute, young man. Speaking of skates …”

  Oleg stopped. Oh, no, he thought. She’s found the skates.

  She stood in the doorway, tilted her head and scrutinized him. “What about homework?”

  “Haven’t got much,” he said with a relieved smile. “I’ll do it after dinner.”

  He saw her hesitate and added quickly: “You look so ni
ce in that dress, Mom.”

  She lowered her eyes at the old sky-blue dress with the white flowers. And even though she gave him an admonitory look, a smile was playing at the corners of her mouth. “Watch it, Oleg. Now you’re sounding like your father.”

  “Oh? I thought he only spoke Russian.”

  He hadn’t meant anything with that comment, but something happened to his mother—a shock seemed to run through her.

  He tiptoed. “Can I go now?”

  “Yes, you can go?” Katrine Bratt’s voice lashed the fitness-room walls in the basement at the Police HQ. “Did you really say that? That Idar Vetlesen could just go?”

  Harry stared up at her face, which was bent over the bench he was lying on. The dome-shaped ceiling light formed a shining yellow halo around her head. He was breathing heavily because an iron bar was lying across his chest. He had been about to perform a bench press of two hundred pounds and had just lifted the bar off the stand when Katrine had marched in and ruined his attempt.

  “I had to,” Harry said, managing to push the bar a bit higher so that it was on his breastbone. “He had his lawyer with him. Johan Krohn.”

  “So what?”

  “Well, Krohn started by asking what sort of methods we employed to blackmail his client. Then he said the buying and selling of sexual services in Norway is legal, and that our methods for forcing a respected doctor to break his Hippocratic oath would also be worth a headline.”

  “But damn it!” Katrine shouted in a voice that was shaking with fury. “This is a murder case!”

  Harry hadn’t seen her lose control before and answered in his gentlest voice.

  “Listen, we can’t link the murders to the illness or even make the connection seem a possibility. And Krohn knows that. And so I can’t hold him.”

  “No, but you can’t just … lie there … and do nothing!”

  Harry could feel his breastbone aching, and it struck him that she was absolutely right.

  She put both hands to her face. “I … I … I’m sorry. I just thought … It’s been a strange day.”

  “Fine.” Harry groaned. “Could you help me with this bar? I’m almost—”

  “The other end!” she exclaimed, removing her hands from her face. “We’ll have to begin at the other end. In Bergen!”