The Snowman ( PDFDrive )

Harry walked to the front door and rang the bell. Filip Becker opened up. His hair was dishevelled
and his tie askew. He blinked hard several times as though he had been sleeping.
‘Yes,’ he answered to Harry’s question. ‘That’s the kind of phone she’s got.’
‘Could I ask you to ring her number?’
Filip Becker disappeared into the house and Harry waited. Suddenly Jonas poked his face out of the
porch doorway. Harry was about to say ‘Hi’, but at that moment the red phone began to play a
children’s tune: ‘Blåmann, blåmann, bukken min.’ And Harry remembered the next line from his
school songbook: Tenk på vesle gutten din. Think about your little boy.
And he saw Jonas’s face light up. Saw the inexorable process of reasoning in the boy’s brain, the
immediate bewilderment and then the joy of hearing his mother’s ringtone fade into intense, naked
fear. Harry swallowed. It was a fear he knew all too well.
As Harry let himself into his flat he could smell the plaster and the sawdust. The plasterboard
forming the corridor walls had been taken down and lay piled up on the floor. There were some
light stains on the brick wall behind. Harry ran a finger over the white coating that had drifted onto
the parquet floor. He put a fingertip into his mouth. It tasted of salt. Did mould taste like that? Or
was it just salt bloom, the structure sweating? Harry flicked a lighter and leaned over to the wall.
Nothing to smell, nothing to see.
When he had gone to bed and was lying staring into the room’s hermetically sealed blackness, he
thought about Jonas. And his own mother. About the smell of illness and her face slowly fading into
the pillow’s whiteness. For days and weeks he had played with Sis, and Dad had gone quiet and
everyone had tried to act as if nothing was happening. He thought he could hear a faint rustle
outside in the hall. As if the invisible puppet strings were multiplying, lengthening and sneaking
around as they consumed the darkness and formed a faint shimmering light which quivered and
shook.
7
DAY 3.
Hidden Statistics.
THE FRAIL MORNING LIGHT SEEPED THROUGH THE BLINDS in the POB’s office, coating
the two men’s faces in grey. POB Hagen was listening to Harry with a pensive furrow over bushy
black eyebrows that met in the middle. On the huge desk stood a small plinth bearing a white
knuckle bone which, according to the inscription, had belonged to the Japanese battalion
commander, Yoshito Yasuda. In his years at the military academy, Hagen had lectured about this
little finger that Yasuda had cut off in desperation in front of his men during the retreat from Burma
in 1944. It was just a year since Hagen had been brought back to his old employer, the police, to
head Crime Squad, and, as a lot of water had passed under the bridge in the meantime, he listened
with relative patience to his veteran inspector holding forth on the theme of ‘missing persons’.
‘In Oslo alone, over six hundred people are reported missing every year. After a couple of hours
only a handful of these are not found. As good as none remain missing for more than a couple of
days.’