The Snowman ( PDFDrive )

‘A missing persons case,’ Harry said. ‘But one which bears a certain similarity to other recent
cases.’
‘Housewives who one day in late autumn suddenly up sticks?’ asked Bjørn Holm with remnants of
the rural Toten dialect he had added to the goods he had removed from the village of Skreia, along
with an LP collection consisting of Elvis, hardcore hillbilly, the Sex Pistols, Jason & the Scorchers,
three hand-sewn suits from Nashville, an American Bible, a slightly undersized sofa bed and a
dining-room suite that had outlived three generations of Holms. All piled up on a trailer and towed
to the capital by the last Amazon to roll off the 1970 Volvo assembly line. Bjørn Holm had bought
the Amazon for 1,200 kroner, but even at that time no one knew how many kilometres it had done
because the clock only went up to 100,000. However, the car expressed everything Bjørn Holm was
and believed in; it smelt better than anything he knew, a mixture of imitation leather, metal, engine
oil, sun-faded rear ledge, Volvo factory and seats impregnated with ‘personality perspiration’,
which Bjørn Holm explained was not common body perspiration but a select veneer of all the
previous owners’ souls, karma, eating habits and lifestyles. The furry dice hanging from the mirror
were original Fuzzy Dice, which expressed the right mix of genuine affection for and ironical
distance from a bygone American culture and aesthetic that perfectly suited a Norwegian farmer’s
son who had grown up with Jim Reeves in one ear, the Ramones in the other, and loved both. Now
he was sitting in Harry’s office with a Rasta hat that made him look more like an undercover drugs
cop than a forensics officer. Two immense, fire-engine red, cutlet-shaped sideburns framing Bjørn
Holm’s plump, round face emerged from the hat, and he had a pair of slightly protruding eyes,
which gave him a fishlike expression of constant wonderment. He was the only person Harry had
insisted on having in his small investigation team.
‘There’s one more thing,’ Harry said, reaching out to switch on the overhead projector between the
piles of paper on his desk. Magnus Skarre cursed and shielded his eyes as blurred writing suddenly
appeared on his face. He moved, and Harry’s voice came from behind the projector.
‘This letter landed in my mailbox exactly two months ago. No address, postmarked Oslo. Produced
on a standard inkjet printer.’
Before Harry could ask, Katrine Bratt had pressed the light switch by the door, plunging the room
into darkness. A square of light loomed up on the white wall.
They read in silence.
Soon the first snow will come. And then he will appear again. The snowman. And when the snow
has gone, he will have taken someone else. What you should ask yourself is this: ‘Who made the
snowman? who makes snowmen? who gave birth to the Murri? For the snowman doesn’t know.’
‘Poetic,’ mumbled Bjørn Holm.
‘What’s the Murri?’ Skarre asked.
The monotonous whirr of the projector fan was the answer.
‘The most interesting part is who the snowman is,’ Katrine Bratt said.
‘Obviously someone who needs his head testing,’ Bjørn Holm said.
Skarre’s lone laughter was cut short.