The Snowman

by Jo Nesbo

“That was what happened,” Harry said, peering out the window and thinking about Bjarne Møller’s path from idealism to corruption. About his good intentions. About the tragic errors. Which others would never know about. “What can you tell me about Gert Rafto?”

  My spiritual doppelgänger in Bergen, Harry thought, after receiving Müller-Nilsen’s description: unhealthy attitude toward alcohol, difficult temperament, lone wolf, unreliable, doubtful morality and very blemished record.

  “But he had exceptional powers of analysis and intuition,” Müller-Nilsen said. “And an iron will. He seemed to be driven by … something. I don’t know quite how to express it. Rafto was extreme. Well, that goes without saying now that we know what happened.”

  “And what did happen?” Harry asked, catching sight of an ashtray amid the piles of paper.

  “Rafto was violent. And we know he was in Onny Hetland’s apartment just before she disappeared, and that Hetland might have had information that would have revealed the identity of Laila Aasen’s killer. Furthermore, he disappeared immediately afterward. It’s not improbable that he drowned himself. Anyway, we saw no reason to implement a large-scale investigation.”

  “He couldn’t have fled abroad?”

  Müller-Nilsen smiled and shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “Let me say that in this case we had the advantage of knowing the suspect very well. Even though, in theory, he could well have left Bergen, he was not the type. Simple as that.”

  “And no relatives or friends have reported any signs of life?”

  Müller-Nilsen shook his head. “His parents are no longer with us, and he didn’t have many friends, Rafto. He had a strained relationship with his ex-wife, so he would hardly have contacted her anyway.”

  “What about his daughter?”

  “They were close. Nice girl, clever. Turned out well, considering the upbringing she had, of course.”

  Harry noticed the implied common knowledge. “Turned out well, of course,” a phrase typical of small police stations where you were expected to know most things about most things.

  “Rafto had a cabin on Finnøy, didn’t he?” Harry asked.

  “Yes, and that could of course be a natural place to take refuge. To mull things over and then …” Müller-Nilsen made a gesture with one of his huge hands across his larynx. “We went through the cabin, searched the island with dogs and dragged the waters. Nothing.”

  “Thought I would take a look out there.”

  “Not a lot to see. We have a cabin just opposite Iron Rafto’s, and unfortunately it’s in total disrepair. It’s a disgrace his wife doesn’t give it up. She’s never there.” Müller-Nilsen cast an eye at the clock. “I have a meeting, but one of the senior officers on the case will go through the reports with you.”

  “No need,” Harry said, looking at the photo on his lap. All of a sudden the face seemed strangely familiar, as if he had seen it not long ago. Someone in disguise? Someone he had passed in the street? Someone in a minor role he wouldn’t have noticed, one of the traffic wardens sneaking around on Sofies Gate or an assistant at the Vinmonopol? Harry gave up.

  “Not ‘Gert,’ then?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Müller-Nilsen said.

  “You said ‘Iron Rafto.’ You didn’t call him just ‘Gert,’ then?”

  Müller-Nilsen sent Harry a dubious look, ventured a chuckle, but then gave him only a wry smile. “No, I don’t think that would ever have occurred to us.”

  “OK. Thanks for your help.”

  On his way out Harry heard Müller-Nilsen call, and he turned. The POB was standing in his office doorway at the end of the corridor and the words cast a brief vibrating echo between the walls.

  “I don’t think Rafto would have liked it, either.”

  Outside the Police HQ, Harry stood looking at the people bent double as they forced their way through the wind and rain. The sensation would not leave him. The sensation that something or someone was there, nearby, on the inside, visible, if he could only see things the right way, in the right light.

  Katrine picked Harry up at the wharf, as arranged.

  “I borrowed this from a friend,” she said as she steered the twenty-one-foot so-called skerry jeep out of the narrow harbor mouth. As they rounded the Nordnes peninsula, a noise made Harry spin, and he caught sight of a totem pole. The wooden faces were screaming hoarsely at him with open mouths. A cold gust of wind swept across the boat.

  “Those are the seals in the aquarium,” Katrine said.

  Harry pulled his coat tighter around him.

  Finnøy was a tiny island. Apart from heather, there was no vegetation on the rain-lashed chunk of land, but it did have a quay, where Katrine expertly moored the boat. The residential area consisted of sixty wooden cabins in all, of doll’s-house proportions, and reminded Harry of the miners’ shacks he had seen in Soweto.

  Katrine led Harry down the gravel path between the cabins and then walked up to one of them. It stood out because the paint was peeling. One of the windows was cracked. Katrine stretched up on tiptoes, grabbed the bulkhead light over the door and unscrewed it. A scraping sound came from inside as she rotated the dome and dead insects fluttered out. Plus a key, which she caught in midair.

  “The ex-wife liked me,” Katrine said, inserting the key in the door.

  There was a smell of mold and damp wood inside. Harry stared into the semidarkness and heard the flick of a switch, and the light came on.

  “She’s got electricity, then, even if she doesn’t use the cabin,” he said.

  “Communal,” Katrine said, taking a slow look around. “The police pay.”

  The cabin was three hundred square feet and consisted of a sitting room-cum-kitchen-cum-bedroom. Empty beer bottles covered the countertop and sitting-room table. There was nothing hanging on the walls and there were no ornaments on the windowsills or books on the shelves.

  “There’s a cellar, too,” Katrine said, pointing to a trapdoor in the floor. “This is your area. What do we do now?”

  “We search,” Harry said.

  “What for?”

  “That’s the last of our thoughts.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s easy to miss something important if you’re searching for something else. Clear your mind. You’ll know what you’re searching for when you see it.”

  “OK,” Katrine said with exaggerated slowness.

  “You start up here,” Harry said, going to the trapdoor and pulling at the inset iron ring. A narrow staircase led down into the gloom. He hoped she didn’t see his hesitation.

  Dry cobwebs from long-dead spiders stuck to his face as he descended into the damp murk, which smelled of soil and rotten boards. The whole of the cellar was underground. He found a switch by the bottom of the staircase and pressed it, but nothing happened. The only light was the red eye at the top of a freezer by the side wall. He flicked on his flashlight, and the cone of light fell on a storeroom door.

  The hinges screamed as he opened it. It was a carpenter’s cubbyhole, full of tools. For a man with ambitions to do something meaningful, Harry thought. Besides catching murderers.

  But the tools didn’t look as if they had been used much, so maybe Rafto had realized that in the end he was no good at anything else; he wasn’t the kind to make things, he was the kind to clear up afterward. A sudden noise made Harry whirl around. And he breathed out with relief when he saw that the freezer thermostat had activated the fan. Harry went into a second storeroom. A blanket had been spread over everything. He pulled it off, and the smell of damp and mildew hit him. The flashlight beam revealed a rotting parasol, a plastic table, a pile of freezer drawers, discolored plastic chairs and a croquet set. There was nothing else in the cellar. He heard Katrine rummaging around upstairs and was on the verge of closing the storeroom door. But one of the freezer drawers had slipped down into the doorway when he removed the blanket. He was about to nudge it back with his foot when he stopped and look
ed at it. In the light he could see the raised lettering on the side. ELECTROLUX. He walked over to the wall, where the fan on the freezer was still humming. It was an Electrolux. He grabbed the handle and pulled, but the door didn’t budge. Beneath the handle he noticed a lock and realized that the freezer was simply locked. He went into the tool room to fetch a crowbar. As he returned, Katrine came down the stairs.

  “Nothing up top,” she said. “I think we should just go. What are you doing?”

  “Breaking and entering,” Harry said, with the tip of the crowbar inserted in the freezer door just above the lock. He put all his weight against the other end. It didn’t give. He readjusted his grip, put one foot against the staircase and pushed.

  “Goddamn—”

  With a dry snap the door swung open and Harry fell headlong. He heard the flashlight hit the brick floor and felt the cold hit him, like the breath of a glacier. He was fumbling for the light behind him when he heard Katrine. It was a sound that chilled to the marrow, a deep-throated scream that passed into hysterical sobs, sounding like laughter. Then it went quiet for a couple of seconds as she drew breath, before it started again, the same scream, long and drawn out, like the methodical, ritual song of pain of a woman giving birth. But by then Harry had seen everything and knew why. She was screaming because after twelve years the freezer was still functioning perfectly and its internal light revealed something crammed inside, its arms to the fore, its knees bent and the head forced against one side. The body was covered with white ice crystals, as if a layer of white fungus had been feeding on it; and the distorted form was the visual representation of Katrine’s screams. But that was not what had made Harry’s stomach turn. Moments after the freezer broke open the body fell forward and the forehead hit the edge of the door, causing ice crystals to fall from the face and shower the cellar floor. That was how Harry could tell it was Gert Rafto grinning at them. However, the grin was not formed by the mouth, which was sewn up with coarse, hemplike thread zigzagging in and out of the lips. The grin traversed the chin and arced up to the cheeks and was drawn with a line of black nails that could only have been hammered in. What caught Harry’s attention was the nose. He forced down the rising bile out of sheer defiance. The nasal bone and cartilage would have been removed first. The cold had sucked all the color from the carrot. The snowman was complete.

  15

  DAY 9

  Number Eight

  It was eight o’clock in the evening, yet people walking down Grønlandsleiret could see that lights were burning on the whole of the sixth floor of the Police HQ.

  In K1, Holm, Skarre, Espen Lepsvik, Gunnar Hagen and the chief superintendent sat in front of Harry. Six and a half hours had passed since they had found Gert Rafto on Finnøy, and four since Harry had called from Bergen to arrange a meeting for when he returned.

  Harry had reported back on the discovery of the body, and even the chief superintendent had quailed in his chair when Harry showed the crime scene photos that the Bergen Police had e-mailed over.

  “The autopsy report isn’t ready yet,” Harry said. “But the cause of death is fairly obvious. A firearm in the mouth and a bullet through the palate and out the back of the head. That happened at the crime scene; the Bergen guys found the bullet in the storeroom wall.”

  “Blood and cerebral matter?” Skarre asked.

  “No,” Harry said.

  “Not after so many years,” Lepsvik said. “Rats, insects …”

  “There might have been residual traces,” Harry said. “But I spoke to the pathologist and we agreed: Rafto probably helped so that it wouldn’t be so messy.”

  “Eh?” Skarre said.

  “Ugh,” Lepsvik said with feeling.

  Reality seemed to dawn on Skarre and his face crumpled in horror. “Oh, hell …”

  “Sorry,” Hagen said. “Can anyone explain to me what you’re talking about?”

  “This is something we occasionally experience with suicides,” Harry said. “The poor soul sucks the air out of the barrel before shooting himself. The vacuum causes there to be less”—he searched for the word—“soiling. What happened here is probably that Rafto was ordered to suck out the air.”

  Lepsvik shook his head. “And a policeman like Rafto must have known exactly why.”

  Hagen paled. “But how … how on earth do you make a man suck …”

  “Perhaps he was given a choice,” Harry suggested. “There are worse ways of dying than shooting yourself through the mouth.” A stunned silence fell over them. And Harry let it fill the void for a few seconds before going on.

  “So far we’ve never found the bodies. Rafto was also hidden, but he would have been found quickly enough, had it not been for relatives shunning the cabin. This leads me to believe that Rafto was not part of the killer’s project.”

  “And you believe this is a serial killer?” There was no defiance in the chief superintendent’s tone, just a wish to have this confirmed.

  Harry nodded.

  “If Rafto is not part of this so-called project, what could the motive be?”

  “We don’t know, but when a detective is killed it’s natural to think that he’s come to represent a threat for the killer.”

  Espen Lepsvik coughed. “Sometimes the way bodies are treated can tell us something about the motive. In this case, for example, the nose has been replaced with a carrot. In other words, he’s thumbing his nose at us.”

  “Making fun of us?” Hagen asked.

  “Perhaps he’s telling us not to stick our noses in?” Holm suggested tentatively.

  “Exactly!” Hagen exclaimed. “A warning to others to keep their distance.”

  The chief superintendent lowered his head and looked at Harry from the corner of his eye. “What about the stitched-up mouth?”

  “A message: Keep your mouth shut,” Skarre crowed.

  “Right!” Hagen exclaimed. “If Rafto was a rotten apple he and the killer were probably in cahoots in some way, and Rafto was threatening to expose him.”

  They all looked at Harry, who had not responded to any of the suggestions.

  “Well?” growled the chief superintendent.

  “You may well be right, of course,” Harry said. “But I believe the only message he wanted to send was that the Snowman had been there. And he likes making snowmen. Period.”

  The detectives exchanged quick glances, but no one objected.

  “We have another problem,” Harry said. “The Bergen Police have released a statement saying that a person has been found dead on Finnøy, that’s all. And I’ve asked them to withhold further details for the time being so that we have a couple of days to hunt for clues without the Snowman knowing the body has been found. Unfortunately two days is not so realistic. No police station is that watertight.”

  “The press have Rafto’s name for release early tomorrow,” said Espen Lepsvik. “I know the people on Bergens Tidende and Bergensavisen.”

  “Wrong,” they heard behind them. “It’ll be on the TV2 late news tonight. Not just the name but details of the crime scene and the link with the Snowman.”

  They turned around. In the doorway stood Katrine Bratt. She was still pale, though not as ashen as when Harry had watched her drive the boat from Finnøy, leaving him to wait for the police.

  “So you know the TV2 people, do you?” asked Espen Lepsvik with a crooked grin.

  “No,” Katrine said, sitting down. “I know the Bergen Police Station.”

  “Where have you been, Bratt?” Hagen was asking. “You’ve been gone for several hours.”

  Katrine glanced at Harry, who sent her an imperceptible nod and cleared his throat. “Katrine’s been doing a couple of jobs I gave her.”

  “Must have been important. Let’s hear, Bratt.”

  “We don’t need to go into it now,” Harry said.

  “I’m just curious,” Hagen teased.

  Mr. goddamn Armchair General, Harry thought. Mr. Punctuality, Mr. Debrief, can’t you leave her alo
ne, can’t you see the girl’s still in shock? You blanched yourself when you saw the pictures. She ran home, ducked everything. So what? She’s back now. Give her a pat on the back rather than humiliate her in front of her colleagues. This went through Harry’s mind, in loud, clear tones, as he tried to catch Hagen’s eye and make him understand.

  “Well, Bratt?” Hagen said.

  “I’ve been checking a few things,” Katrine said, raising her chin.

  “I see. Such as …”

  “Such as Idar Vetlesen being a medical student when Laila Aasen was murdered and Onny Hetland and Rafto disappeared.”

  “Is that relevant?” asked the chief superintendent.

  “It’s relevant,” Katrine said. “Because he studied at the University of Bergen.”

  K1 went quiet.

  “A medical student?” The chief looked at Harry.

  “Why not?” Harry said. “He took up plastic surgery later, and he says he likes shaping faces.”

  “I checked the places where he trained as an intern and later worked,” Katrine said. “They don’t coincide with the disappearances of the women we believe the Snowman has killed. But as a young doctor you quite often travel. Conferences, short, temporary posts.”

  “Damn shame Krohn won’t let us talk to the guy,” Skarre said.

  “Forget it,” Harry said. “We’ll arrest Vetlesen.”

  “What for?” Hagen said. “Studying in Bergen?”

  “For trying to buy sex from minors.”

  “On what basis?” asked the chief superintendent.

  “We have a witness. The owner of the Leon. And we have photos connecting Vetlesen with the place.”

  “I hate to say this,” said Espen Lepsvik, “but I know the Leon guy, and he will never testify. The case won’t stick; you’ll have to release Vetlesen within twenty-four hours, no question.”

  “I know,” Harry said, looking at his watch. He was working out how long it would take to drive to Bygdøy. “And it’s incredible what people can find to say in that space of time.”

  Harry pressed the doorbell once more, thinking it was like summer vacation when he was small and everyone had gone and he was the only boy left in Oppsal. When he had stood there ringing the bell at Øystein’s place or one of the others’, hoping by some miracle that someone would be at home and not with Grandma in Halden or in a cabin in Son or camping in Denmark. He had pressed the bells again and again until he knew that only one possibility remained. Tresko. Tresko, with whom Øystein and he never wanted to play, but who still hung around like a shadow waiting for them to change their minds, to bring him in from the cold, temporarily. He must have chosen Harry and Øystein because they weren’t the most popular, either, so he reckoned if he was going to be accepted into a club this was where his greatest hope lay. And now this was his opportunity because he was the only one left, and Harry knew that Tresko was always at home because his family could never afford to go anywhere and he had no other friends to play with.