The Snowman (16 page)

She leaned over the freezer and felt the cold rise as a shadow passed her. And without looking up she knew it was the same one. The same shadow that had passed her when she was standing by the fresh-food counter, and in the car park when she was locking the car. It meant nothing. It was just the old stuff surfacing. She had come to terms with the fact that her fears would never quite let go, even though it was half a human life away now. At the checkout she chose the longest queue; her experience was that this was generally the quickest. Or at least she thought it was her experience. Andreas believed she was mistaken. Someone joined the queue behind her. So there were more mistaken people, she noted. She didn’t turn round, just thought the person must have been carrying a load of frozen goods: she could feel the cold on her back.

But when she did turn round, there was no longer anyone there. Her eyes wanted to scour the other queues. Don’t start, she thought. Don’t start this again.

Once outside, she forced herself to walk slowly to the car, not to look around, to unlock the car, put in the shopping, sit down and drive off. And as the Toyota slowly crawled up the long hills to the duplex flat in Nordberg, her mind was on Trygve and the dinner that had to be ready the moment they came in through the door.

Harry was listening to Espen Lepsvik on the telephone and gazing up at the photographs of dead colleagues. Lepsvik already had his group assembled and was asking Harry for access to all the relevant information.

‘You’ll get a password from our IT boss,’ Harry said. ‘Then you go into the folder labelled “The Snowman” on the Crime Squad network.’

‘The Snowman?’

‘Got to be called something.’

‘OK. Thanks, Hole. How often do you want reports from me?’

‘Just when you’ve got something. And, Lepsvik?’

‘Yes?’

‘Keep off our patch.’

‘And what exactly is your patch?’

‘You concentrate on tip-offs, witnesses and ex-cons who might be possible serial killers. That’s where the brunt of the work lies.’

Harry knew what the experienced Kripos detective was thinking: the shit jobs.

Lepsvik cleared his throat. ‘So we agree there is a connection between the disappearances?’

‘We don’t have to agree. You follow your instincts.’

‘Fine.’

Harry rang off and looked at the screen in front of him. He had gone on to the website Borghild had recommended and seen pictures of female beauties and male-model types with dotted lines on their faces and bodies suggesting where their perfect appearance could still – if desired – be adjusted. Idar Vetlesen himself was smiling at him from a photograph, indistinguishable from his male models.

Under the picture of Idar Vetlesen there was a résumé of diplomas and courses with long names in French and English which, for all Harry knew, could have been completed in two months, but still gave you the right to add new Latin abbreviations to your doctorate. He had googled Idar Vetlesen, and come up with a list of results from what he thought were curling competitions, as well as an old website from one of his previous employers, Marienlyst Clinic. It was when he saw the name beside Idar Vetlesen’s that he thought it was probably true what people said: Norway is such a small country that everyone is, at most, two acquaintances from knowing everyone else.

Katrine Bratt came in and plumped down onto the chair across from Harry with a deep sigh. She crossed her legs.

‘Do you think it’s true that beautiful people are more preoccupied with beauty than ugly people?’ Harry asked. ‘Is that why the good-looking are so fixated on their appearance?’

‘I don’t know,’ Katrine said. ‘But there’s a kind of logic to it, I suppose. People with high IQs are so fixated on IQs that they have founded their own club, haven’t they. I suppose you focus on what you have. I would guess you’re fairly proud of your investigative talent.’

‘You mean the rat-catching gene? The innate ability to lock up people with mental illnesses, addiction problems, well under average intellect and well above average childhood deprivation?’

‘So we’re just rat-catchers then?’

‘Yep. And that’s why we’re so happy when once in a blue moon a case like this lands on our table. A chance to go big-game hunting, to shoot a lion, an elephant, a fucking dinosaur.’

Katrine didn’t laugh. On the contrary, she nodded her head gravely.

‘What did Sylvia’s twin sister have to say?’

‘I was in danger of becoming her best friend,’ Katrine sighed, folding her hands over a stockinged knee.

‘Tell me.’

‘Well,’ she began, and Harry noticed his ‘well’ in her mouth, ‘Ane told me that both Sylvia and Rolf thought that Rolf had been the lucky one when they got together. While everyone else thought the opposite. Rolf had just finished qualifying as an engineer at the Technical University in Bergen and had moved to Oslo and a job with Kværner Engineering. Sylvia was apparently the type who wakes up every morning with a new idea about what she’s going to do with in her life. She had taken half a dozen quite different foundation courses at university and had never been in the same job for more than six months. She was stubborn, hot-headed, spoilt, a declared socialist and attracted by ideologies that preached the obliteration of the ego. The few girlfriends she had manipulated, and the men she was involved with left her after a short while because they couldn’t take it. Her sister thought that Rolf was so deeply in love with her because she represented his absolute opposite. You see, he had followed in his father’s footsteps and become an engineer. He came from a family that believed in the unseen charitable hand of capitalism and middle-class happiness. Sylvia thought that we in the Western world were materialistic and corrupt as human beings, that we had lost touch with our real identity and the source of happiness. And that some king in Ethiopia was the reincarnated Messiah.’

‘Haile Selassie,’ Harry said. ‘Rastafarian beliefs.’

‘No flies on you.’

‘Bob Marley records. Well, that may explain the link with Africa.’

‘Maybe.’ Katrine shifted position in her chair, her left leg crossed her right now, and Harry directed his gaze elsewhere. ‘Anyway, Rolf and Sylvia took a year off and travelled around West Africa. It turned out to be a road to Damascus for them both. Rolf discovered that his vocation was to help Africa get back on its feet. Sylvia, who had a big Ethiopian flag tattooed on her back, discovered that everyone looked out for themselves, even in Africa. So they started up Taste of Africa. Rolf to help a poor continent, Sylvia because the combination of cheap imports and government support seemed like easy money. She had the same motive when she was caught with a rucksack full of marijuana at customs, returning from Lagos.’

‘There you go.’

‘Sylvia was given a short conditional sentence because she was able to sow seeds of doubt. She said she didn’t know what was in the rucksack, she had brought it with her as a family favour for a Nigerian living in Norway.’

‘Mm. What else?’

‘Ane likes Rolf. He’s kind, thoughtful and has boundless love for the children. But apparently he’s quite blind in all things Sylvia. Twice she fell in love with other men and left Rolf and the children. But the men left her and both times Rolf happily took her back.’

‘What was her hold over him, do you think?’

Katrine Bratt mounted a smile tinged with sadness and gazed into the air as her hand stroked the hem of her skirt. ‘The usual, I would guess. No one can leave someone they have good sex with. They can try, but they always go back. We’re simple souls like that, aren’t we.’

Harry nodded slowly. ‘And what about the men who left her and didn’t come back?’

‘Men are different. Over the course of time some of them suffer from performance angst.’

Harry eyed her. And decided not to pursue that subject.

‘Did you see Rolf Ottersen?’

‘Yes, he arrived ten minutes after you left,’ Katrine said. ‘And he looked better than last time. He’d never heard of the plastic surgery clinic in Bygdøy, but he signed the declaration of consent to waive doctor–patient confidentiality.’ She left the folded sheet on his desk.

An ice-cold wind blew over the low stands at Valle Hovin where Harry sat watching the ice skaters gliding round the circuit. Oleg’s technique had become more supple and effective in the last year. Every time his friend accelerated to pass him, Oleg sank lower, dug in harder and calmly sailed off.

Harry rang Espen Lepsvik and they caught up on each other’s news. Harry found out that a dark saloon car had been seen entering Hoffsveien late on the night Birte disappeared. And it had returned the same way not long afterwards.

‘Dark saloon,’ Harry repeated with a grim shiver. ‘Sometime late that night.’

‘Yes, I know it’s not a lot to go on,’ Lepsvik sighed.

Harry was stuffing the phone in his jacket pocket when he sensed that something was obscuring one of the floodlights.

‘Sorry I’m a bit late.’

He looked up into the jovial, smiling face of Mathias Lund-Helgesen.

Rakel’s envoy took a seat. ‘Are you a winter sportsman, Harry?’

Harry noticed that Mathias had this direct way of looking at you with an expression that was so intense it gave you the feeling he was listening even when he was talking.

‘Not really. Bit of skating. And you?’

Mathias shook his head. ‘But I’ve decided that the day my life’s work is done and I’m so ill I no longer want to live, I’ll take the lift up to the top of the ski-jump tower on that hill there.’

He jerked his thumb over his shoulder and Harry did not need to turn. Holmenkollen, Oslo’s dearest monument and worst ski jump, could be seen from everywhere in town.

‘And then I’ll jump. Not on skis but from the tower.’

‘Dramatic,’ Harry said.

Mathias smiled. ‘Forty metres free fall. Over in seconds.’

‘Not imminent, I trust.’

‘With the level of anti-Scl 70 in my blood, you never know,’ Mathias laughed grimly.

‘Anti-Scl 70?’

‘Yes, antibodies are a good thing, but you should always be suspicious when they appear. They’re there for a reason.’

‘Mm. I thought suicide was a heretical notion for a doctor.’

‘No one knows better than doctors what diseases involve. I agree with the stoic Zenon who considered suicide a worthy action when death was more attractive than life. When he was ninety-eight years old he dislocated his big toe. This upset him so much that he went home and hanged himself.’

‘So why not hang yourself instead of going to all the trouble of climbing to the top of Holmenkollen ski jump?’

‘Well, death should be a sort of homage to life. Anyway, I have to confess that I like the idea of the publicity that would come in its wake. My research attracts very little attention, I’m afraid.’ Mathias’s jolly laughter was slashed to pieces by the sound of swift-moving skate blades. ‘By the way, I’m sorry I bought new speed skates for Oleg. Rakel didn’t tell me hat you had planned to buy a pair for his birthday until afterwards.’

‘No problem.’

‘He would have preferred to have them off you, you know.’

Harry didn’t answer.

‘I envy you, Harry. You can sit here and read the paper, make a call on your phone, talk to other people, for him it’s good enough that you’re just
here
. When I cheer and shout and encourage him and do everything the manual says a good father should do, he just gets irritated. Did you know that he polishes his skates every day because he knows that you used to do that? And until Rakel demanded that skates had to be kept indoors, he insisted on leaving them outside on the steps because you once said that skate steel should always be kept cold. You’re his role model, Harry.’

Harry shuddered at the thought. But somewhere deep inside – no, not even that far – he was pleased to hear this. Because he was a jealous bastard who would have liked to imprecate a mild curse on Mathias’s attempts to win over Oleg.

Mathias fidgeted with a coat button. ‘It’s strange in these divorce-ridden times with children and their deep awareness of their origins. The way a new father can never replace the real one.’

‘Oleg’s real father lives in Russia,’ Harry said.

‘On paper, yes,’ Mathias said with a crooked smile. ‘But not in reality, Harry.’

Oleg sped past and waved to the two of them. Mathias waved back.

‘You’ve worked with a doctor called Idar Vetlesen,’ Harry said.

Mathias eyed him with surprise. ‘Idar, yes. At Marienlyst Clinic. Goodness, do you know Idar?’

‘No, I was googling his name and found an old website listing doctors employed at the clinic. And your name was there.’

‘That’s a few years ago now, but we had a lot of fun at Marienlyst. The clinic was started at a time when everyone believed that private health enterprises were bound to make a lot of money. And closed down when we saw things were not like that of course.’

‘You went bust?’

‘I think
downsized
was the term used. Are you a patient of Idar?’

‘No, his name came up in connection with a case. Can you tell me what kind of person he is?’

‘Idar Vetlesen?’ Mathias laughed. ‘Yes, I can say quite a bit about him. We studied together and hung around in the same crowd for many years.’

‘Does that mean you no longer have any contact?’

Mathias shrugged. ‘I suppose we were quite different, Idar and I. Most people in our crowd saw medicine as . . . well, as a calling. Apart from Idar. He made no bones about it. He was studying medicine because it was the profession that commanded most respect. At any rate, I admire his honesty.’

‘So Idar Vetlesen was preoccupied with earning respect?’

‘There was money too, of course. No one was surprised when Idar took up plastic surgery. Or that he ended up at a clinic for a select clientele comprising the rich and famous. He had always been attracted by that sort of person. He wants to be like them, to move in their circles. The problem is that Idar tries a bit too hard. I can imagine that these celebrities smile to his face, but behind his back they call him a clinging, pretentious jackass.’