The Snowman ( PDFDrive )

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 Police HQ, Harry stood looking at the people bent double as they forced their way through
the wind and rain. The sensation would not go. 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 off a friend,’ she said as she steered the twenty-one-foot so-called skerry jeep out
of the narrow harbour 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.
‘That’s 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 on the walls 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 mid-air.
‘The ex-wife liked me,’ Katrine said, inserting the key in the door.
There was a smell of mould and damp wood inside. Harry stared into the semi-darkness, 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 round. ‘The police pay.’
The cabin was twenty-five metres square and consisted of a sitting room-cum-kitchen-cumbedroom.
Empty beer bottles covered the worktop and sitting-room table. There was nothing
hanging on the walls, 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.