The Snowman ( PDFDrive )

which tasted of chalk and bile.
16
DAY 10.
Curling.
IT WAS A CHILLY MORNING IN B YGDØY AS A STA J OHANNSEN unlocked the curling
club at eight, as usual. The soon to be seventy-year-old widow cleaned there twice a week, which
was more than sufficient as the private little hall was not used by more than a handful of men and,
moreover, it didn’t have any showers. She switched on the light. From the cog-jointed timber walls
hung trophies, diplomas, pennants adorned with Latin phrases and old black-and-white photographs
of men wearing beards, tweeds and worthy expressions. Asta thought they looked comical, like
those fox-hunters in English TV series about the upper classes. She entered the door to the curling
hall and knew from the cold inside that they had forgotten to turn up the thermostat for the ice,
which they usually did to save electricity. Asta Johannsen flicked on the light switch and as the
neon tubes blinked and wrestled to decide whether they wanted to work, she put on her glasses and
saw that the thermostat for the cooling cables was indeed too low and she turned it up.
The light shone on the grey surface of ice. Through her reading glasses she glimpsed something at
the other end of the hall, so she removed them. Slowly things came into focus. A person? She
wanted to walk across the ice, but hesitated. Asta Johannsen was not at all the jittery type but she
feared that one day she would break her thigh on the ice and have to stay there until the fox-hunters
found her. She gripped one of the brooms leaning against the walls, used it as a walking stick and,
taking tiny steps, teetered across the ice.
The lifeless man lay at the end of the sheet with his head in the centre of the rings. The blue-white
gleam from the neon tubes fell on the face stiffened in a grimace. There was something familiar
about his face. Was he a celebrity? The glazed eyes seemed to be looking for something behind her,
beyond what was here. The cramped right hand held an empty plastic syringe containing a residue
of red contents.
Asta Johannsen calmly concluded that there was nothing she could do for him and concentrated on
making her way back over the ice to the nearest telephone.
After she had called the police and they had come, she went home and drank her morning coffee.
It was only when she picked up the Aftenposten newspaper that she realised who it was she had
found.
Harry was sitting in a crouch examining Idar Vetlesen’s boots.
‘What does our pathologist say about the time of death?’ he asked Bjørn Holm, who was standing
beside him in a denim jacket lined with white teddy-bear fur. His snakeskin boots made almost no
noise as he stamped them on the ice. Barely an hour had passed since Asta Johannsen had made her
call, but the reporters were already assembled outside the red police cordon by the curling club.
‘He says it’s difficult to tell,’ Holm said. ‘He can only guess how fast the temperature of a body
lying on ice in a much warmer room might fall.’