The Snowman

by Jo Nesbo

  30

  DAY 20

  Scapegoat

  Knut Müller-Nilsen had appeared on the quay under Puddefjord Bridge in person as Harry arrived in the cabin cruiser. He, two police officers and the duty psychiatrist joined him below deck, where Katrine Bratt lay handcuffed to the bed. She was given a shot of an anti-psychotic tranquilizer and transported to a waiting vehicle.

  Müller-Nilsen thanked Harry for agreeing to handle the matter with discretion.

  “Let’s try to keep this to ourselves,” Harry said, looking up at the leaking heavens. “Oslo will want to take control if this is made public.”

  “ ’Course.” Müller-Nilsen nodded.

  “Kjersti Rødsmoen,” said a voice that made them turn around. “The psychiatrist.”

  The woman peering up at Harry was in her forties, with light, tousled hair and a big bright red down jacket. She was holding a cigarette in her hand and didn’t appear to be bothered that the rain was drenching both her and the cigarette.

  “Was it dramatic?” she asked.

  “No,” Harry said, feeling Katrine’s revolver pressing against his skin under his waistband. “She surrendered without resistance.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not a word. What’s your diagnosis?”

  “Obviously a psychosis,” Rødsmoen said without hesitation. “Which does not imply in any way that she’s mad. It’s just the mind’s way of managing the unmanageable. Much the same as the brain choosing to faint when the pain is too great. I would conjecture that she’s been under extreme stress for a lengthy period. Could that be correct?”

  Harry nodded. “Will she be able to speak again?”

  “Yes,” Kjersti Rødsmoen said, gazing with disapproval at the wet, extinguished cigarette. “But I don’t know when. Right now she needs rest.”

  “Rest?” Müller-Nilsen snorted. “She’s a serial killer.”

  “And I’m a psychiatrist,” Rødsmoen said, dispensing with the cigarette and departing in the direction of a small red Honda that even in the pouring rain looked dusty.

  “What are you going to do?” Müller-Nilsen asked.

  “Catch the last plane home,” Harry said.

  “No way. You look like a skeleton. The station’s got a deal with the Rica travel hotel. We can drive you there and send on some dry clothes. They’ve got a restaurant, too.”

  Once Harry had checked in and was standing in front of the bathroom mirror in the cramped single room, he thought about what Müller-Nilsen had said about looking like a skeleton. And about how close he had been to death. Or had he? After taking a shower and eating in the empty restaurant he went back to his room and tried to sleep. He couldn’t and switched on the TV. Crap on all the channels except NRK2, which was showing Memento. He had seen the film before. The story was told from the point of view of a man with brain damage and the short-term memory of a goldfish. A woman had been killed. The protagonist had written the name of the killer on a Polaroid, as he knew he would forget. The question was whether he could trust what he had written. Harry kicked off the duvet. The minibar under the TV had a brown door and no lock.

  He should have caught the plane home.

  He was on his way out of bed when his mobile phone rang somewhere in the room. He put his hand in the pocket of the wet trousers hanging over a chair by the radiator. It was Rakel. She asked where he was. And said they had to talk. And not in his apartment, but somewhere public.

  Harry fell back on the bed with closed eyes.

  “You’re going to tell me we can’t keep meeting?” he asked.

  “I’m going to tell you we can’t keep meeting,” she said. “I can’t take it.”

  “It’s enough if you tell me on the phone, Rakel.”

  “No, it’s not. It won’t hurt enough.”

  Harry groaned. She was right.

  They agreed on eleven o’clock the next morning by Bygdøy’s Fram Museum, a tourist attraction where you could disappear in crowds of Germans and Japanese. She asked him what he was doing in Bergen. He told her and said she was to keep it to herself until she read about it in the papers after a couple of days.

  They hung up, and Harry lay staring at the minibar as Memento continued its course in reverse chronological order. He had almost been killed, the love of his life didn’t want to see him anymore and he had concluded the worst case in his experience. Or had he? He hadn’t answered when Müller-Nilsen asked why he had chosen to hunt for Bratt on his own, but now he knew. It was the doubt. Or the hope. This desperate hope that it would not end up the way it seemed to be going. Hope that was still there. But now it had to be extinguished, drowned. Come on, he had three good reasons and a pack of dogs in the pit of his stomach all barking as though possessed. So why not just open the minibar anyhow?

  Harry got to his feet, went to the bathroom, turned on the tap and drank, letting the jet of water gush over his face. He straightened up and looked into the mirror. Like a skeleton. Why won’t the skeleton drink? Aloud, he spat out the answer to his face: “Because then it won’t hurt enough.”

  Gunnar Hagen was tired. Tired down to his soul. He looked around. It was almost midnight and he was in a conference room at the top of one of Oslo’s central buildings. Everything here was shiny brown: the wood floor, the ceiling with the spotlights, the walls with painted portraits of former club chairmen who had owned the premises, the thirty-square-foot mahogany table and the leather blotting pad in front of each of the twelve men around it. Hagen had been phoned by the chief superintendent an hour earlier and summoned to this address. Some of the people in the room—such as the chief constable—he knew, others he had seen in newspaper photographs, but he had no idea who most of them were. The chief superintendent brought them up to date. The Snowman was a policewoman from Bergen who had been operating for a while from her post in the Crime Squad in Grønland. She had pulled the wool over their eyes, and now that she was caught, they would soon have to go public with the scandal.

  When he had finished, the silence lay as thick as the cigar smoke.

  The smoke was filtering upward from the end of the table, where a white-haired man leaned back in his chair, his face hidden in shadow. For the first time, he made a sound. Just a tiny sigh. And Gunnar Hagen realized that everyone who had spoken so far had turned to this man.

  “Damned tedious, Torleif,” said the white-haired man in a surprisingly high-pitched, effeminate voice. “Extremely damaging. Confidence in the system. We are at the top. And that means”—the whole room seemed to be holding its breath as the man puffed on his cigar—“heads will have to roll. The question is whose.”

  The chief constable cleared his throat. “Do you have any suggestions?”

  “Not yet,” said the white-hair. “But I believe you and Torleif do. Go ahead.”

  “In our view, specific mistakes have been made in the appointment and follow-up phases. Human blunders and not systemic flaws. Hence this is not directly a management problem. Therefore we propose that we make a distinction between responsibility and guilt. Management takes the responsibility, is humble and—”

  “Skip the basics,” said the white-hair. “Who’s your scapegoat?”

  The chief superintendent adjusted his collar. Gunnar Hagen could see that he was extremely ill at ease.

  “Inspector Harry Hole,” said the chief superintendent.

  Again there was silence as the white-haired man lit his cigar anew. The lighter clicked and clicked. Then sucking noises issued from the shadows and the smoke rose again.

  “Not a bad idea,” said the high-pitched voice. “Had it been anyone other than Hole I’d have said you would have to find your scapegoat higher up in the system. An inspector is not fat enough as a sacrificial lamb. Indeed, I might have asked you to consider yourself, Torleif. But Hole is an officer with a profile; he’s been on that talk show. A popular figure with a certain reputation as a detective. Yes, that wo
uld be perceived as fair game. But would he be cooperative?”

  “Leave that to us,” said the chief superintendent. “Eh, Gunnar?”

  Gunnar Hagen gulped. His mind turned—of all things—to his wife. To the sacrifices she had made so that he could have a career. When they’d got married she had broken off her studies and moved with him to wherever the Special Forces, and later the police force, had sent him. She was a wise, intelligent woman, an equal to him in most areas, his superior in some. It was to her he went with both career and moral issues. And she always imparted good advice. Nevertheless, he had perhaps not succeeded in achieving the illustrious career for which they had both hoped. But now things were looking rosier. It was in the cards that his position as Crime Squad supremo would lead onward and upward. It was just a question of not putting a foot wrong. That needn’t be so difficult.

  “Eh, Gunnar?” repeated the chief superintendent.

  It was just that he was so tired. So tired down to the soul. This is for you, he thought. This is what you would have done, darling.

  31

  DAY 21

  The South Pole

  Harry and Rakel stood at the bow of the wooden ship Fram in the museum, observing a group of Japanese tourists taking pictures of the ropes and masts as, with smiles and nods, they ignored the guide, who was explaining that this simple vessel had transported both Fridtjof Nansen on his failed attempt to be the first to the North Pole in 1893 and Roald Amundsen, when he beat Scott to the South Pole in 1911.

  “I left my watch on your table,” Rakel said.

  “That’s an old trick,” Harry said. “It means you’ll have to come back for it.”

  She laid a hand over his on the railing and shook her head. “Mathias gave it to me for my birthday.”

  Which I forgot, Harry thought.

  “We’re going out and he’s going to ask, if I’m not wearing it. And you know what I’m like about lying. Could you …?”

  “I’ll drop it off before four,” he said.

  “Thanks. I’ll be working, but just put it in the birdhouse on the wall by the door. That’s …”

  She didn’t need to say any more. That was where she had always put the house key when he got there after she had gone to bed. Harry slapped the railing with his hand. “According to Arve Støp, Roald Amundsen’s problem was that he won. He thinks all the best stories are about losers.”

  Rakel didn’t answer.

  “I suppose it’s a kind of consolation,” Harry said. “Shall we go?”

  Outside it was snowing.

  “So it’s over now?” she said. “Until next time?”

  He shot her a quick glance to assure himself she was talking about the Snowman and not them.

  “We don’t know where the bodies are,” he said. “I was with her in her cell this morning before going to the airport, but she won’t say anything. Just stares into the air as if there’s someone there.”

  “Did you tell anyone you were going to Bergen alone?” she asked out of the blue.

  Harry shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “Well,” Harry said, “I might have been wrong. Then I could have returned quietly without losing face.”

  “That wasn’t why,” she said.

  Harry glanced at her again. She looked more fed up than he did.

  “To be frank, I have no idea,” he said. “I suppose I hoped it wouldn’t be her after all.”

  “Because she’s like you? Because it could have been you?”

  Harry couldn’t even remember telling her they were similar.

  “She looked so alone and frightened,” Harry said as the snowflakes stung his eyes. “Like someone who’d got lost in the twilight.”

  Fuck, fuck, fuck! He blinked and felt the tears, like a clenched fist, trying to force their way up his windpipe. Was he having a breakdown? He froze as Rakel’s warm hand caressed his neck.

  “You’re not her, Harry. You’re different.”

  “Am I?” He smiled thinly, removing her hand.

  “You don’t kill innocent people, Harry.”

  Harry turned down Rakel’s offer of a lift and caught the bus. He stared at the flakes falling and the fjord beyond the window, thinking how Rakel had inserted the word innocent only at the last minute.

  Harry was about to open his front door on Sofies Gate when he remembered he didn’t have any instant coffee, and walked the fifty yards to Niazi, the corner shop.

  “Unusual to see you at this time of day,” Ali said, taking the money.

  “Day off,” Harry said.

  “What weather, eh? They say there’s going to be a foot and a half of snow over the next twenty-four hours.”

  Harry fidgeted with the coffee jar. “I happened to frighten Salma and Muhammad in the yard the other day.”

  “Yes, I heard.”

  “I’m sorry. I was a bit stressed, that’s all.”

  “That’s OK. I was just afraid you’d started drinking again.”

  Harry shook his head and gave a weak smile. He liked the Pakistani’s direct approach.

  “Good,” said Ali, counting out the change. “How’s the redecorating going?”

  “Redecorating?” Harry took his change. “Do you mean the mold man?”

  “The mold man?”

  “Yes, the guy who’s checking the cellar for fungus. Stormann or something like that.”

  “Fungus in the cellar?” Ali looked horrified.

  “Didn’t you know?” Harry said. “You’re the chairman of the residents’ committee. I’d have thought he would have spoken to you.”

  Ali shook his head slowly. “Perhaps he spoke to Bjørn.”

  “Who’s Bjørn?”

  “Bjørn Asbjørnsen, who’s lived on the ground floor for thirteen years,” Ali said, giving Harry a reproving look. “And has been the vice chair for just as long.”

  “Oh, right, Bjørn,” Harry said, pretending to note the name.

  “I’ll check that out,” Ali said.

  Upstairs in his apartment, Harry pulled off his boots, headed straight for the bedroom and fell asleep. He had hardly slept at the hotel in Bergen. When he awoke his mouth was dry and he had stomach pains. He got up to drink some water and came to a sudden halt when he entered the hall.

  He hadn’t noticed when he got in, but the walls were back.

  He walked from room to room. Magic. It had been done to such perfection that he could swear they hadn’t been touched. No old nail holes visible, no lines askew. He touched the sitting-room wall as if to assure himself that this was not a hallucination.

  On the sitting-room table, in front of the wing chair, there was a yellow piece of paper. A handwritten message. The letters were neat and strangely attractive.

  It’s gone. You won’t see me anymore. Stormann.

  P.S. Had to turn one of the boards in the wall since I cut myself and blood got onto it. When blood gets into untreated wood it’s impossible to wash off. The alternative would have been to paint the wall red.

  Harry fell into the wing chair and studied the smooth walls.

  It was only when he went into the kitchen that he discovered the miracle was not complete. The calendar with Rakel and Oleg was gone. The sky-blue dress. He swore aloud and feverishly ransacked the wastepaper baskets and even the plastic garbage can in the yard before concluding that the happiest time of his life had been eradicated along with the fungus.

  It was definitely a different workday for psychiatrist Kjersti Rødsmoen. And not just because the sun had made a rare appearance in the Bergen sky and was at this moment shining through the windows as she hurried along a corridor in Haukeland University Hospital’s psychiatric department, in Sandviken. The department had changed its name so many times that very few Bergensians knew that the current official name was Sandviken Hospital. However, a closed ward was, until further notice, a closed ward, while Bergen waited for someone to claim that the terminology was misleading or at any rate stigmatizing.

&nb
sp; She was both dreading and looking forward to the imminent session with the patient who was confined under the strictest security measures she could ever remember. They had reached agreement on the ethical boundaries and procedures with Espen Lepsvik from Kripos and Knut Müller-Nilsen from the Bergen Police. The patient was psychotic and could therefore not undergo a police interview. Kjersti was a psychiatrist and entitled to talk to the patient, but with the patient’s best interests at heart, not in a way that might be construed as police questioning. And ultimately there was the issue of client confidentiality. Kjersti Rødsmoen would have to assess for herself whether any information that emerged from the conversation could have such great significance for the police that she should take it further. And this information would have no validity in a court of law anyway, since it came from a psychotic person. In short, they were moving in a legal and ethical minefield where even the slightest slip might have catastrophic consequences, since everything she did would be scrutinized by the judicial system and the media.

  A nurse and a uniformed policeman stood outside the door of the consulting room. Kjersti pointed to the ID card pinned to her white medical coat, and the officer opened the door.

  The agreement was that the nurse would keep an eye on what was happening in the room and sound the alarm if necessary.

  Kjersti Rødsmoen sat down on the chair and observed the patient. It was hard to imagine that she represented any danger, this small woman with hair hanging over her face, black stitches where her torn mouth had been sewn up and wide-open eyes that seemed to be staring with unfathomable horror at something Kjersti Rødsmoen could not see. Quite the contrary. The woman appeared so incapable of any action that you had the feeling she would be blown over if you so much as breathed on her. The fact that this woman had killed people in cold blood was quite simply inconceivable. But it always was.

  “Hello,” said the psychiatrist. “I’m Kjersti.”

  No response.

  “What do you think your problem is?” she asked.

  The question came straight from the manual governing conversations with psychotics. The alternative was: How do you think I can help you?