The Snowman ( PDFDrive )

‘Hello?’
‘Hi! It’s Rakel. Were you in bed?’
He could hear from her voice that she had been drinking. Not much but enough for her pitch to be
half a tone higher, and her laughter, that beautifully deep laughter, rippled over her words.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Nice evening?’
‘Quite.’
‘It’s only eleven o’clock.’
‘The girls wanted an early night. It’s a workday and so on.’
‘Mm.’
Harry visualised her. The teasing look, the alcohol sheen in her eyes.
‘I’ve got the film,’ she said. ‘If I’m going to drop it in the mailbox, I think you might have to open
up.’
‘Right.’
He raised his finger to press the bell to let her in. Waited. Knowing that this was a window of time.
They had two seconds at their disposal. For the moment they had all the fallback positions. He liked
fallback positions. And he knew very well that he didn’t want this to happen, it was too
complicated, too painful to go through again. So why was his chest heaving as if he had two hearts?
Why hadn’t he immediately pressed the button, so that she would have been in and out of the
building and out of his head? Now, he thought, placing the tip of his finger against the hard plastic
of the button.
‘Or,’ she said, ‘I could come up with it.’
Harry already knew before speaking that his voice was going to sound strange.
‘You don’t need to,’ he said. ‘My mailbox is the one without a name. Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight.’
He pressed the button. Went into the sitting room, turned up Franz Ferdinand, loud, tried to blast
out his thoughts, forget the idiotic jangling of nerves, just absorb the sound, the jagged attack of
guitars. Angry, frail and not especially well played. Scottish. But the feverish series of chords was
joined by another sound.
Harry turned down the music. Listened. He was going to turn up the volume again when he heard a
sound. Like sandpaper on wood. Or shoes shuffling on the floor. He went into the hall and saw a
figure behind the door’s wavy glass.
He opened up.
‘I rang the bell,’ Rakel said, looking up at him apologetically.