The Snowman ( PDFDrive )

‘I thought she wasn’t talking to the police.’
Katrine winked at him with a sly grin.
From the hotel reception Harry managed to borrow an umbrella which turned inside out in the gusts
before he had got to Fisketorget – the harbour fish market – and looked like a tangled bat by the
time he had jogged, head down, to the entrance of Police HQ.
While Harry was standing in reception, waiting for POB Knut Müller-Nilsen, Katrine rang him to
say that the the cabin on Finnøy was still in the Rafto family’s hands.
‘But his wife hasn’t set foot there since the case. Nor her daughter, she thought.’
‘We’ll go there,’ Harry said. ‘I’ll be done here by one o’clock.’
‘OK, I’ll get us a boat. Meet me at Zacharias wharf.’
Knut Müller-Nilsen was a chuckling teddy bear with smiling eyes and hands the size of tennis
rackets. The tall stacks of paper made him look as if he were snowed in at his desk, with his rackets
folded behind his head.
‘Rafto, hmm,’ Müller-Nilsen said, after explaining that it didn’t rain in Bergen as much as eastern
Norwegians made out.
‘Seems like policemen have a tendency to slip through your fingers,’ Harry said, holding up the
photo of Gert Rafto that came with the reports in his lap.
‘Oh yes?’ Müller-Nilsen queried, looking at Harry, who had found a spindle-back chair in the one
paper-free corner of the office.
‘Bjarne Møller,’ Harry said.
‘Right,’ said Müller-Nilsen, but the tentative delivery gave him away.
‘The officer who disappeared from Fløyen,’ Harry said.
‘Of course!’ Müller-Nilsen slapped his forehead. ‘Tragic business. He had only been here such a
short time so I didn’t manage to The assumption was that he got lost, wasn’t it?’
‘That was what happened,’ Harry said, peering out of the window and thinking about Bjarne
Møller’s path from idealism to corruption. About his good intentions. About the tragic errors.
Which others would never know about. ‘What can you tell me about Gert Rafto?’
My spiritual doppelgänger in Bergen, Harry thought, after receiving Müller-Nilsen’s description:
unhealthy attitude to alcohol, difficult temperament, lone wolf, unreliable, doubtful morality and
very blemished record.
‘But he had exceptional powers of analysis and intuition,’ Müller-Nilsen said. ‘And an iron will. He
seemed to be driven by something. I don’t know quite how to express it. Rafto was extreme. Well,
that goes without saying now that we know what happened.’
‘And what did happen?’ Harry asked, catching sight of an ashtray amid the piles of paper.