The Snowman (22 page)

‘Well, thank you anyway,’ Harry said. ‘Have a good day.’

‘
He
wasn’t a customer,’ Flesch said. ‘
I
was.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. He brought me bits and bobs. Silver lighters, gold pens. That sort of thing. Sometimes I bought them off him. Yes, that was before I realised where they came from . . .’

‘And where did they come from?’

‘Don’t you know? He stole them from crime scenes he worked on.’

‘But he never bought anything?’

‘Rafto didn’t have any need for the sort of thing that we had.’

‘But paper? Everyone needs paper, don’t they?’

‘Hm. Just a moment and I’ll have a word with the wife.’

A hand was placed over the receiver, but Harry could hear shouting, then a slightly lower conversation. Afterwards the hand was removed and Flesch trumpeted in elated Bergensian: ‘She thinks Rafto took the rest of the paper when we stopped selling it. For a broken silver penholder, she thinks. Helluva memory on the wife, you know.’

Harry put down the telephone knowing he was on his way to Bergen. Back to Bergen.

At nine o’clock that evening night lights were still burning on the first floor of Brynsalléen 6 in Oslo. From the outside, the six-storey building looked like any commercial complex, with its modern red brick and grey steel facade. And for that matter inside too, as most of the more than four hundred employees had jobs as engineers, IT specialists, social scientists, lab technicians, photographers and so on. But this was nevertheless ‘the national unit for the combating of organised and other serious crime’, generally referred to by its old name of
Kriminalpolitisentralen
, or in its abbreviated form, Kripos.

Espen Lepsvik had just dismissed his men after reviewing progress on the murder investigation. Only two people were left in the bare, harshly illuminated meeting room.

‘That was a bit thin,’ Harry Hole said.

‘Nice way of saying
zilch
,’ Espen Lepsvik said, massaging his eyelids with thumb and first finger. ‘Shall we go and have a beer while you tell me what you’ve unearthed?’

Harry told him while Espen Lepsvik drove them to the centre and Kafé Justisen, which was on the way home for both men. They sat at the table at the back of the busy licensed café frequented by everyone from beer-thirsty students to even thirstier solicitors and policemen.

‘I’m considering taking Katrine Bratt instead of Skarre to Bergen,’ Harry said, sipping from the bottle of carbonated water. ‘I checked her employment record before coming here. She’s pretty green, but her file says that she worked on two murder inquiries in Bergen that I seem to remember you were sent over to lead.’

‘Bratt, yes, I remember her.’ Espen Lepsvik, grinned and raised his index finger for another beer.’

‘Happy with her?’

‘Extremely happy. She’s . . . extremely . . . competent.’ Lepsvik winked at Harry, who saw that the other man already had that glassy look of a tired detective with three beers inside him. ‘And if both of us hadn’t been married, I think I’d have had a bloody crack at her.’

He drained his glass.

‘I was wondering more if you thought she was stable,’ Harry said.

‘Stable?’

‘Yes, there’s something about her . . . I don’t know quite how to explain it. Something intense.’

‘I know what you mean.’ Espen Lepsvik nodded slowly as his eyes tried to focus on Harry’s face. ‘Her record’s unblemished. But between you and me I heard one of the lads over there say something about her and her husband.’

Lepsvik searched for some encouragement in Harry’s face, found none, but continued anyway.

‘Something . . . you know . . . likes leather and rubber. S&M. Apparently went to that kind of club. Bit pervy.’

‘That’s not my concern,’ Harry said.

‘No, no, no, mine neither!’ Lepsvik exclaimed, raising his hands in defence. ‘It’s just a rumour. And do you know what?’ Lepsvik sniggered, leaning forward across the table so that Harry could smell his beery breath. ‘She can dominate me any day.’

Harry realised that there must have been something in his eyes because Lepsvik immediately seemed to regret his openness and beat a quick retreat to his side of the table. And carried on in a more businesslike tone.

‘She’s a professional. Clever. Intense and committed. Insisted with a bit too much vehemence that I should help her with a couple of cold cases, I remember. But not at all unstable, more the opposite. She’s more the closed, sullen type. But there are lots like that. Yes, in fact I think you two could be a perfect team.’

Harry smiled at the sarcasm and stood up. ‘Thanks for the tip, Lepsvik.’

‘What about a tip for me? Have you and she . . . got something going?’

‘My tip,’ Harry said, throwing a hundred-krone note on the table, ‘is that you leave your car here.’

14

DAY 9.

Bergen.

A
T PRECISELY 08.26, THE WHEELS OF
DY
604 TOUCHED
down on the wet tarmac at Flesland Airport, Bergen. So hard that Harry was suddenly wide awake.

‘Sleep well?’ Katrine asked.

Harry nodded, rubbed his eyes and stared out at the rain-heavy dawn.

‘You were talking in your sleep,’ she smiled.

‘Mm.’ Harry didn’t want to ask about what. Instead he quickly went back over what he had been dreaming. Not about Rakel. He hadn’t dreamt about her for nights. He had banished her. Between them they had banished her. But he had dreamt about Bjarne Møller, his old boss and mentor, who had walked onto the Bergensian plateaus and been found in Lake Revurtjern two weeks later. It was a decision Møller had taken because he – just like Zenon with the sore big toe – didn’t think life was worth living any longer. Had Gert Rafto come to the same conclusion? Or was he really still out there somewhere?

‘I’ve rung Rafto’s ex-wife,’ Katrine said as they were walking through the arrivals hall. ‘Neither she nor the daughter want to talk to the police again, they don’t want to reopen old wounds. And that’s fine. The reports from that time are more than adequate.’

They got into a taxi outside the terminal.

‘Lovely to be home?’ Harry asked in a loud voice over the drumming of the rain and the rhythmical swish of the windscreen wipers.

Katrine, indifferent, shrugged. ‘I always hated the rain. And I hated Bergensians who maintained it didn’t rain here as much as eastern Norwegians made out.’

They passed Danmarksplass, and Harry looked up at the top of Ulriken. It was covered with snow, and he could see the cable cars in motion. Then they drove through the viper’s nest of slip roads by Store Lungegårdsvann bay and reached the centre, which for visitors was always a welcome surprise after the drab approach.

They entered the SAS hotel by Bryggen on the harbour front. Harry had enquired whether she would stay with her parents, but Katrine had answered that for one night it would be too much stress, they would go to too much trouble, and in fact she hadn’t even told them she was here.

They were given key cards for their rooms, and in the lift they were silent. Katrine looked at Harry and smiled as though silence in lifts was an implicit joke. Harry looked down, hoping his body wasn’t sending false signals. Or real ones.

The lift doors finally slid open, and her hips sashayed down the corridor.

‘Reception in five,’ Harry said.

‘What’s the timetable?’ he asked when they were sitting in the lobby six minutes later.

Katrine leaned forward from the deep armchair and flicked through her leather-bound diary. She had changed into an elegant grey suit, which meant she immediately blended in with the hotel’s business clientele.

‘You meet Knut Müller-Nilsen, the head of the Missing Persons and Violent Crime Unit.’

‘You’re not coming with me?’

‘I’d have to say hello and chat to everyone, and the whole day would be wasted. In fact, it would be good if you didn’t mention my name at all. They’d just be pissed off I hadn’t dropped by. I’m heading for Øyjordsveien to have a word with the last witness to see Rafto.’

‘Mm. And where was that?’

‘By the docks. The witness saw him leave his car and walk into Nordnes Park. No one returned for the car, and the area was gone through with a fine-tooth comb without yielding a thing.’

‘Then what do we do?’ Harry ran his thumb and middle finger along his jaw, thinking he should have shaved before making a trip out of town.

‘You go through the old reports with the detectives who were on the case and are still at the station. Get up to speed. Try to see it from a different angle.’

‘No,’ Harry said.

Katrine looked up from her diary.

‘The detectives at the time drew their own conclusions and will just defend them,’ Harry explained. ‘I prefer to read the reports in peace and quiet in Oslo. And to spend my time here getting to know Gert Rafto a bit better. Can we see his possessions anywhere?’

Katrine shook her head. ‘His family gave everything he owned to the Salvation Army. It wasn’t a great deal apparently. Some furniture and clothes.’

‘What about where he lived or stayed?’

‘He lived alone in a flat in Sandviken after his divorce, but it was sold ages ago.’

‘Mm. And there’s no childhood home, country cottage or cabin that’s still in the family?’

Katrine hesitated. ‘The reports mentioned a little cabin in the police summer-house quarter, on the island of Finnøy in Fedje. The cabins stay in the family in such cases, so maybe we can see it. I’ve got Rafto’s wife’s telephone number. I’ll give her a ring.’

‘I thought she wasn’t talking to the police.’

Katrine winked at him with a sly grin.

From the hotel reception Harry managed to borrow an umbrella which turned inside out in the gusts before he had got to Fisketorget – the harbour fish market – and looked like a tangled bat by the time he had jogged, head down, to the entrance of Police HQ.

While Harry was standing in reception, waiting for POB Knut Müller-Nilsen, Katrine rang him to say that the the cabin on Finnøy was still in the Rafto family’s hands.

‘But his wife hasn’t set foot there since the case. Nor her daughter, she thought.’

‘We’ll go there,’ Harry said. ‘I’ll be done here by one o’clock.’

‘OK, I’ll get us a boat. Meet me at Zacharias wharf.’

Knut Müller-Nilsen was a chuckling teddy bear with smiling eyes and hands the size of tennis rackets. The tall stacks of paper made him look as if he were snowed in at his desk, with his rackets folded behind his head.

‘Rafto, hmm,’ Müller-Nilsen said, after explaining that it didn’t rain in Bergen as much as eastern Norwegians made out.

‘Seems like policemen have a tendency to slip through your fingers,’ Harry said, holding up the photo of Gert Rafto that came with the reports in his lap.

‘Oh yes?’ Müller-Nilsen queried, looking at Harry, who had found a spindle-back chair in the one paper-free corner of the office.

‘Bjarne Møller,’ Harry said.

‘Right,’ said Müller-Nilsen, but the tentative delivery gave him away.

‘The officer who disappeared from Fløyen,’ Harry said.

‘Of course!’ Müller-Nilsen slapped his forehead. ‘Tragic business. He had only been here such a short time so I didn’t manage to . . . The assumption was that he got lost, wasn’t it?’

‘That was what happened,’ Harry said, peering out of 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 to 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 flat 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 afterwards. It’s not improbable that he drowned himself. Any road, 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 have a peep 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.’