The Snowman ( PDFDrive )

‘To tease her,’ Laila howled. ‘She’s so nosy.’
He pressed the thin steel harder against her skin and Laila sobbed her friend’s name and address.
After which she said no more.
When, two days later, Mathias was reading about the murder of Laila Aasen and the disappearances
of Onny Hetland and Gert Rafto in the newspaper, he had mixed feelings. First of all, he was
displeased with the murder of Laila Aasen. It had not gone as he had planned; he had lost control in
a frenzy of fury and panic. Hence there had been too much mess, too much to clear up, too much
that reminded him of the photographs in Rafto’s flat. And too little time to enjoy the revenge, the
justice of it.
The murder of Onny Hetland had been even worse, nigh on a catastrophe. Twice his courage had
failed him as he was about to ring her doorbell, and he had walked away. The third time he had
realised he was too late. Someone was already there ringing the bell. Gert Rafto. After Rafto had
left he had rung and introduced himself as Rafto’s assistant and had been let in. But Onny had said
she wouldn’t tell him what she had told Rafto; she had given a promise that the matter would stay
strictly between them. Only when he had made an incision in her hand with the scalpel did she talk.
Mathias gleaned from what she said that Gert Rafto had decided to solve the case under his own
steam. He wanted to rebuild his reputation, the fool!
There had been nothing to criticise about the disposal of Onny Hetland, however. Very little noise,
very little blood. And the carving up of her body in the shower had been efficient and quick. He had
packed all the parts in plastic and placed them in the large rucksack and bag he had brought along
for the purpose. On his visits to Rafto, Mathias had been told that one of the first things the police
check in murder cases is cars observed in the vicinity and registered taxi rides. So he walked the
whole way back to his flat.
All that remained now was the last part of Gert Rafto’s instructions for the perfect murder: kill the
detective.
Strangely enough this was the best of the three murders. Strange because Mathias had no feelings
for Rafto, none of the hatred that he had felt for Laila Aasen. It was more about him getting close,
for the first time, to the aesthetics he had envisaged, to the idea he had of how the murder should be
executed. His experience of the very act itself was above all as gruesome and heart-rending as he
had hoped it would be. He could still hear Rafto’s screams echoing round the deserted island. And
the strangest thing of all: on the way back he discovered that his toes were no longer white and
numb; it was as if the gradual freezing process of his extremities had been halted for a moment, as if
he had thawed.
Four years later, after Mathias had killed a further four women, and he could see that all the
murders were an attempt to reconstruct the murder of his mother, he concluded that he was mad.
Or, to be more precise, that he was suffering from a serious personality disorder. All the specialist
literature he had read certainly pointed to that. The ritual nature of the murders, their having to take
place on the day the first snow of the year came, his having to build a snowman. And, not least, his
growing sadism.
But this insight in no way prevented him from continuing. For time was short; Raynaud’s
phenomenon was already appearing with increasing frequency, and he thought he could detect the
first symptoms of scleroderma: a stiffness in the face that would eventually give him the revolting