The Snowman

by Jo Nesbo

  He breathed in and raised the bottle. Put it to his mouth, felt his body tense, steel itself for the shock. And then he drank. Greedily and desperately, as if to get it over and done with. The sound from his throat between swigs sounded like a sob.

  17

  DAY 14

  Good News

  Gunnar Hagen strode down the corridor at speed.

  It was Monday and four days since the Snowman case had been solved. They should have been four pleasant days. And there had been, it was true, congratulations, smiling bosses, positive comments in the press and even inquiries from foreign newspapers as to whether they could have the whole of the background story and the investigation from start to finish. And that was where the problem had started: The person who could have given Hagen the details of the success story had not been present. Four days had passed and no one had either seen or heard from Harry Hole. And the reason was obvious. Colleagues had seen him drinking at Fenris Bar. Hagen had kept this to himself, but the rumors had reached the ears of the chief superintendent. And Hagen had been summoned to his office that morning.

  “Gunnar, this won’t do anymore.”

  Gunnar Hagen had said there might be other explanations. Harry wasn’t always that prompt at letting them know he was working away from the office. There was a lot of investigating left to do on the Snowman case even though they had found the killer.

  But the chief superintendent had made up his mind. “Gunnar, we’ve come to the end of the road as far as Hole is concerned.”

  “He’s our best detective, Torleif.”

  “And the worst representative for our force. Do you want that kind of role model for our young officers, Gunnar? The man’s an alcoholic. Everyone in-house knows he was drinking at Fenris, and that he hasn’t turned up for work since. If we tolerate that, we’re setting a very low standard and the damage will be practically irreparable.”

  “But dismissal? Can’t we—”

  “No more warnings. The regulations regarding civil servants and alcohol abuse are abundantly clear.”

  This conversation was still reverberating in the POB’s head as he knocked on the chief superintendent’s door once again.

  “He’s been seen,” Hagen said.

  “Who?”

  “Hole. Li called me to say he’d seen him go into his office and close the door behind him.”

  “OK,” said the chief superintendent, getting to his feet. “Then let’s go and have a talk with him right away.”

  They stomped through the Crime Squad, the red zone on the sixth floor of the Police HQ. And staff, as though scenting something in the air, came to the doors of their offices, poked their heads out and watched the two men walking side by side with stern, closed faces.

  When they reached the door labeled 616, they stopped. Hagen took a deep breath.

  “Torleif …,” he began, but the chief superintendent had already gripped the door handle and thrust it open.

  They stood in the doorway, their eyes wide with disbelief.

  “Good God,” whispered the chief superintendent.

  Harry Hole, in a T-shirt, sat behind his desk with an elastic band tightened around his forearm, his head bent forward. A syringe hung from the skin directly under the elastic band. The contents were transparent, and even from the door they could see several red dots where the needle had punctured the milky-white arm.

  “What the hell are you doing, man?” hissed the chief superintendent, pushing Hagen in front of him and slamming the door behind them.

  Harry’s head bobbed up, and he looked at them from miles away. Hagen observed that Harry was holding a stopwatch. Suddenly Harry snatched out the syringe, looked at the remaining contents, threw aside the syringe and made notes on a piece of paper.

  “Th-this makes it easier, in fact, Hole,” the chief superintendent stammered. “Because we have bad news.”

  “I have bad news, gentlemen,” Harry said, tearing a piece of cotton padding from a bag and dabbing his arm. “Idar Vetlesen can’t possibly have committed suicide. And I presume you know what that means?”

  Gunnar Hagen felt a sudden urge to laugh. The whole situation appeared so absurd to him that his brain simply could not come up with any other satisfactory reaction. And he could see from the chief superintendent’s face that he didn’t know what to do, either.

  Harry looked at his watch and stood up. “Come to the meeting room in exactly one hour. Then you’ll find out why,” he said. “Right now I have a couple of other matters that need to be sorted out.”

  The inspector hurried past his two astonished superiors, opened the door and disappeared down the corridor with long, sinewy strides.

  One hour and four minutes later Gunnar Hagen trooped into a hushed K1 with the chief superintendent and the chief constable. The room was filled to the rafters with officers from Lepsvik’s and Hole’s investigation teams, and Harry Hole’s voice was the only thing to be heard. They found standing room at the back. Pictures of Idar Vetlesen were projected onto the screen, showing how he was found in the curling hall.

  “As you can see, Vetlesen has the syringe in his right hand,” Harry Hole said. “Not unnatural since he was right-handed. But it was his boots that triggered my curiosity. Look here.”

  Another picture showed a close-up of the boots.

  “These boots are the only real forensic evidence we have. But it’s enough. Because the print matches those we found in the snow at Sollihøgda. However, look at the laces.” Hole indicated with a pointer. “Yesterday I carried out some tests with my own boots. For the knot to lie like that, I would have to do up my laces back to front. As if I were left-handed. The alternative would be to stand in front of the boot as if I were doing it for someone else.”

  A ripple of unease went through the room.

  “I’m right-handed.” It was Espen Lepsvik’s voice. “And I tie my laces like that.”

  “Well, this may just be an oddity. However, it’s this sort of thing that arouses a certain”—Hole looked as if he were tasting the word before he chose it—“disquiet. A disquiet that forces you to ask other questions. Are they really Vetlesen’s boots? These boots are a cheap make. I visited Vetlesen’s mother yesterday and got permission to see his collection of shoes. They’re expensive, every pair, without exception. And, as I thought, he was no different from the rest of us—he sometimes kicked his shoes off without undoing the laces. That’s why I can say”—Hole banged the pointer on the image—“that I know Idar Vetlesen did not tie his shoelaces like this.”

  Hagen glanced across at the chief superintendent, whose forehead was lined with a deep furrow.

  “The question that emerges,” Hole said, “is whether someone could have put the boots on Vetlesen. The same ones that the individual in question wore in Sollihøgda. The motive would be to make it seem as if Vetlesen were the Snowman, of course.”

  “A shoelace and cheap boots?” shouted an inspector from Lepsvik’s team. “We have a sicko who wanted to buy the sexual favors of children, who knew both victims here in Oslo and whom we can place at the crime scene. All you have is speculation.”

  The tall policeman bowed his shorn skull. “That’s correct, as far as it goes. But now I’m coming to hard facts. On the face of it, Idar Vetlesen took his own life with carnadrioxide by inserting a syringe with a very fine point into a vein. According to the postmortem, the concentration of carnadrioxide was so great that he must have injected twenty milliliters into his arm. That stacks up with the residue inside the syringe, which showed that it had been full. Carnadrioxide, as we now know, is a paralyzing substance, and even small doses can kill as the heart and respiratory organs are instantly incapacitated. According to the pathologist, it would take at most three seconds for an adult to die if that dose was injected into a vein, as was the case with Idar Vetlesen. And that simply does not make sense.”

  Hole waved a piece of paper on which Hagen could see he had jotted down some numbers in pencil.

  “I�
��ve done some tests on myself with the same kind of syringe and needle that Vetlesen used. I injected a salt-water solution that matches carnadrioxide, in that all such solutions are at least ninety-five percent water. And I’ve kept track of the numbers. However hard I pressed, the narrow needle means that you can’t inject twenty milliliters in less than eight seconds. Ergo …” The inspector waited for the inescapable conclusion to sink in before continuing. “Vetlesen would have been paralyzed before injecting a third of the contents. In short, he can’t have injected everything. Not without help.”

  Hagen swallowed. This day was going to be even worse than he had anticipated.

  When the meeting was over, Hagen saw the chief constable whisper something into the chief superintendent’s ear, and the chief superintendent leaned over to Hagen.

  “Ask Hole and his team to meet in my office now. And put a muzzle on Lepsvik and his lot. Not one word of this must get out. Understand?”

  Hagen did understand. Five minutes later they were sitting in the chief superintendent’s large, cheerless office.

  Katrine Bratt closed the door and was the last person to sit down. Harry Hole had slid into his chair, and his outstretched legs rested directly in front of the chief superintendent’s desk.

  “Let me be brief,” the chief superintendent said, running a hand across his face as if to erase what he saw: an investigation team back at square one. “Have you any good news, Hole? To sweeten the bitter fact that in your mysterious absence we have told the press that the Snowman is dead as a result of our unflagging toil?”

  “Well, we can assume that Idar Vetlesen knew something he should not have known, and that the killer discovered we were on his trail and therefore eliminated the possibility that he might be unmasked. If that’s correct, it’s still true that Vetlesen died as a result of our unflagging toil.”

  The chief superintendent’s cheeks had gone rosy with the stress. “That’s not what I mean by good news, Hole.”

  “No, the good news is that we’re getting warmer. If not, the Snowman wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to make it seem as if Vetlesen were the man we were hunting. He wants us to call off the investigation, believing we have solved the case. In short, he’s under pressure. And that’s when killers like the Snowman begin to make mistakes. In addition, it suggests that he dare not resume the bloodbath.”

  The chief superintendent sucked at his teeth and ruminated. “So that’s what you think, is it, Hole? Or is it just what you hope?”

  “Well,” said Harry Hole, scratching his knee through the tear in his jeans, “you were the one who asked for good news, boss.”

  Hagen groaned. He looked out the window. It had clouded over. Snow was forecast.

  Filip Becker gazed down at Jonas, who was sitting on the living-room floor with his eyes riveted to the TV screen. Since Birte had been reported missing the boy had sat for hours like this every single afternoon. As though it were a window into a better world. A world in which he could find her if only he looked hard enough.

  “Jonas.”

  The boy glanced up at him obediently, but without interest. His face stiffened with horror when he spotted the knife.

  “Are you going to cut me?” the boy asked.

  The expression on his face and the reedy voice were so amusing that Filip Becker almost burst into laughter. The light from the lamp over the coffee table glinted on the steel. He had bought the knife from a hardware store in Storo Mall. Right after he had phoned Idar Vetlesen.

  “Just a tiny bit, Jonas. Just a tiny bit.”

  Then he made an incision.

  18

  DAY 15

  View

  At two o’clock Camilla Lossius was driving home from the gym. She had, as usual, driven across town, to Oslo West, and the Colosseum Park fitness center. Not because they had different equipment from the gym near their house in Tveita, but because the people at Colosseum were more like her. They were West End types. Moving to Tveita had been part of the marriage deal with Erik. And she had needed to consider it as a whole package. She turned into the street where they lived. Saw the lights in the windows of the neighbors she had greeted, but with whom she had never really spoken. They were Erik’s people. She braked. They weren’t the only ones to have a two-car garage in this street in Tveita, but it was the only one with electric doors. Erik was obsessed by these things; she couldn’t give a damn. She pressed the remote, the door tipped and rose and she depressed the clutch and slid in. As expected, Erik’s car was not there; he was at work. She leaned over to the passenger seat, grabbed her gym bag and the groceries from ICA supermarket, snatched a customary glance at herself in the rearview mirror before getting out. She looked good, her friends said. Not yet thirty and a detached house, second car and country retreat outside Nice, they said. And they asked what it was like living in the East End. And how her parents were after the bankruptcy. Strange how their brains automatically linked the two questions.

  Camilla looked in the mirror again. They were right. She did look good. She thought she saw something else, a movement at the edge of the mirror. No, it was just the door tipping back into position. She got out of the car and was searching for her house keys when she realized her mobile phone was still in the hands-free holder in the car.

  Camilla turned and uttered a short scream.

  The man had been standing behind her. Terrified, she took a step back with a hand over her mouth. She was about to apologize with a smile, not because there was anything to apologize for, but because he looked entirely innocuous. But then she caught sight of the gun in his hand. It was pointed at her. The first thing she thought was that it looked like a toy.

  “My name’s Filip Becker,” he said. “I called. There was no one at home.”

  “What do you want?” she asked, trying to control the quiver in her voice as her instinct told her she must not show her fear. “What’s this about?”

  He flashed a quick smirk. “Whoring.”

  In silence, Harry watched Hagen, who had interrupted the team meeting in Harry’s office to repeat the chief superintendent’s order that the “theory” of Vetlesen’s murder was not to be leaked under any circumstances, not even to partners, marital or otherwise. At length, Hagen caught Harry’s eye.

  “Well, that was all I wanted to say,” he concluded quickly and left the room.

  “Go on,” Harry said to Bjørn Holm, who had been summarizing their findings at the curling-hall crime scene. Or, to be more accurate, the lack of findings.

  “We’d only just got going when it was determined it was a suicide. We didn’t find any forensic evidence, and now the crime scene’s contaminated. I looked this morning and there’s not a lot to see, I’m afraid.”

  “Mm,” Harry said. “Katrine?”

  Katrine looked down at her notes. “Yes, well, your theory is that Vetlesen and the killer met at the curling club and this must have been prearranged. The obvious conclusion to draw is that they were in phone contact. You asked me to check the list of calls.”

  “Yes,” said Harry, stifling a yawn.

  She flicked through. “I got lists from Telenor for Vetlesen’s clinic phone and mobile. I took them to Borghild’s house.”

  “House?” Skarre queried.

  “Of course—she doesn’t have a job to go to anymore. She told me that Idar Vetlesen didn’t have any visitors except for patients during the last two days. Here’s a list of them.”

  She took a piece of paper from a file and placed it on the table between them.

  “As I had presumed, Borghild has a good knowledge of Vetlesen’s professional and social contacts. She helped me to identify practically all of the people on the call list. We divided them in two: professional contacts and social contacts. Both show phone numbers, the time and date of the call, whether it was incoming or outgoing and how long it lasted.”

  The other three put their heads together and studied the lists. Katrine’s hand touched Harry’s. He didn’t detect any sign
s of embarrassment in her. Perhaps he had dreamed it all, the suggestion she had made at Fenris Bar. The thing was, though, that Harry didn’t dream when he was drinking. That was the whole point of drinking. Nevertheless, he had woken up the next day with an idea that must have been conceived somewhere between the systematic emptying of the whiskey bottle and the pitiless moment of awakening. The idea of cochineal and of Vetlesen’s full syringe. And that was the idea that had saved him from running straight to the liquor store on Thereses Gate, and instead propelled him back into work. One drug for another.

  “Whose number is that?” Harry asked.

  “Which one?” Katrine asked, leaning forward.

  Harry pointed to a number on the list of social contacts.

  “What makes you ask about that number in particular?” Katrine asked, peering up at him with curiosity.

  “Because it’s the social contact who called him, and not vice versa. We have to believe it’s the killer who’s stage-managing here, therefore he’s the one who called.”

  Katrine checked the number against the list of names. “Sorry, but that person is on both lists, a patient as well.”

  “OK, but we have to start somewhere. Who is it? Man or woman?”

  Katrine gave a wry grin. “Definitely a man.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Manly. As in macho. Arve Støp.”

  “Arve Støp?” Holm burst out. “The Arve Støp?”

  “Put him at the top of our visiting list,” Harry said.

  When they had finished, they had a list of seven calls to investigate. They had the names to match all seven numbers except for one: a pay phone in Storo Mall the morning of Idar’s murder.

  “We’ve got the exact time,” Harry said. “Is there a surveillance camera by the phone?”

  “I don’t think so,” Skarre said. “But I know there’s a camera at each entrance. I can check with the security firms whether they’ve got a recording.”

  “Monitor all the faces half an hour before and after,” Harry said.