The Snowman ( PDFDrive )

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 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 flat, but somewhere public.
Harry fell back on the bed with closed eyes.
‘To tell me we cannot keep meeting?’ he asked.
‘To tell you we cannot 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 the Fram Museum in Bygdøy, 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 rang off, 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 any more
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 be the way things had been shaping up
after all. And which was still there. But now the hope 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 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 ship floor, the ceiling with the spotlights, the walls with painted portraits of former club
chairmen who had owned the premises, the ten-square-metre 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 –