The Snowman ( PDFDrive )

‘And you won’t find either here. I’m the carrier of an awful inherited disease. Do you understand?’
Birte Becker understood. And since she was a simple but quick- witted girl with a drunkard of a
father and a nervous wreck of a mother, accustomed from early years to coping on her own, she did
what she had to do. She found her child a father and a secure home.
Filip Becker could not believe it when this beautiful woman he had wooed with such determination,
yet to no avail, suddenly surrendered and set her heart on becoming his. And since he could not
believe it, the seeds of suspicion were already sown. At the moment she announced that he had
made her pregnant – only a week after she had given herself to him – the seeds were still well
entrenched.
When Birte rang Arve to say that Jonas had been born and was the spitting image of him, Arve
stood with his ear against the receiver staring into the air. Then he asked her for a photograph. It
arrived in the post and two weeks later she was sitting, as arranged, in a coffee bar with Jonas on
her lap and a wedding ring on her finger while Arve sat at another table pretending to read a paper.
That night he tossed and turned between the sheets, restlessly brooding over the disease.
It had to be handled with discretion, a doctor he could trust to keep his mouth shut. In short, it
would have to be the feeble, obsequious prat of a surgeon at the curling club: Idar Vetlesen.
He contacted Vetlesen who was working at Marienlyst Clinic. The prat said yes to the job, yes to
the money and at Støp’s expense travelled to Geneva where the foremost Fahr’s syndrome experts
in Europe gathered every year to hold a course and present the latest discouraging findings from
their research.
The first tests Jonas underwent revealed nothing wrong, but even though Vetlesen repeated that the
symptoms usually came to light in adulthood – Arve Støp had himself been symptom-free until he
was forty – Støp insisted that the boy should be examined once a year.
Two years had passed since he had seen his seed running down Sylvia Ottersen’s leg as she walked
out of the shop and out of Arve Støp’s life. He had quite simply never contacted her again, nor she
him. Until now. When she rang he said immediately that he was on his way to an emergency
meeting, but she kept the message brief. In four sentences she told him that obviously not all his
seed had dribbled out, she now had twins, her husband thought they were his and they needed a
kindly disposed investor to keep Taste of Africa afloat.
‘I think I’ve injected enough into that shop,’ said Arve Støp, who often reacted to bad news with
witticisms.
‘I could, on the other hand, raise the money by going to Se og Hør. They love these the-father-ofmy-child’s-a-celeb
etc., etc. stories, don’t they.’
‘Poor bluff,’ he said. ‘You’ve got too much to lose by doing that.’
‘Things have changed,’ she said. ‘I’m going to leave Rolf if I can scrape together enough cash to
buy him out of the shop. The problem with the shop is its location, so I will make it a condition that
Se og Hør publishes pictures of the place to get it some decent publicity. Do you know how many
people read the rag?’