The Snowman ( PDFDrive )

She studied him suspiciously. ‘Not true,’ she said at length.
‘Why not?’
‘Because Doctor is a nice man. He helps us.’
Harry asked how Doctor helped them. And now he was the one to sit and listen as the black woman
told him that every Monday and Thursday Doctor sat in this room with his bag, talked to them, sent
them to the toilet to provide urine samples, took blood samples and tested them for venereal
diseases. He gave them pills and treatment if they had any of the usual sexual diseases. And the
address of the hospital if they had the other one, the Plague. If there was anything else wrong with
them, he gave them pills for that, too. He never took payment, and the only thing they had to do was
promise that they wouldn’t tell anyone apart from their colleagues on the street. Some of the girls
had brought their children when they were ill, but the hotel owner had stopped them.
Harry smoked a cigarette as he listened. Was this Vetlesen’s indulgence? The counterpoint to evil,
the necessary balance. Or did it just accentuate the evil, set it into relief? Dr Mengele was said to
have been very fond of children.
His tongue kept growing in his mouth; it would suffocate him if he didn’t have a drink soon.
The woman had stopped talking. She was fingering the two-hundred-krone note.
‘Will Doctor come back?’ she asked finally.
Harry opened his mouth to answer her, but his tongue was in the way. His mobile phone rang and
he took the call.
‘Hole speaking.’
‘Harry? This is Oda Paulsen. Do you remember me?’
He didn’t remember her; anyway, she sounded too young.
‘From NRK,’ she said. ‘I invited you to Bosse last time.
The researcher. The honeytrap.
‘We were wondering whether you would like to join us again, tomorrow. We’d like to hear about
this Snowman triumph. Yes, we know he’s dead, but nevertheless. About what goes through the
head of this sort of person. If he can be called that –’
‘No,’ Harry said.
‘What?’
‘I don’t want to join you.’
‘It’s Bosse,’ Oda Paulsen said with genuine bewilderment in her voice. ‘On NRK TV.’
‘No.’