The Snowman ( PDFDrive )

thin layer of snow there was tarmac.
He felt something cold against his fingertips.
An iron bar.
Got two fingers round the bar. Three. Then the other hand. Let his aching legs swing free, dangled
and hurriedly found a boothold to relieve the pressure on his arms. At last he could see into the
bedroom. And he saw. His brain struggled to absorb the sight while it knew immediately what it
was looking at: the finished work of art, the prototype of which he had already seen.
Rakel’s eyes were wide open and black. She was wearing a dress. Crimson. Like Campari. She was
‘cochineal’. Her head strained towards the ceiling as though she were standing by a fence trying to
see over, and from this position she stared down and out at him. Her shoulders were pulled back and
her arms hidden. Harry assumed her hands were tied behind her back. Her cheeks bulged as though
she had a sock or a cloth in her mouth. She sat astride the shoulders of an enormous snowman. Her
bare legs were crossed in front of the snowman’s chest, and he could see her tensed leg muscles
quivering. She mustn’t fall. She couldn’t. For around her neck there was not a grey, lifeless wire, as
with Eli Kvale, but a white glowing circle, like an absurd imitation of an old toothpaste
advertisement promising a ring of confidence, good fortune in love and a long and happy life. A
wire ran from the black handle of the cutting loop to a hook in the ceiling above Rakel’s head. The
wire continued to the other end of the room, to the door. To the door handle. The wire was not
thick, but long enough to have provided noticeably more resistance when Harry had begun to press
the handle. If he had opened the door, indeed if he had even pressed the handle right down, the
white glowing metal would have cut into her throat, right under her chin.
Rakel was staring back at Harry without blinking. The muscles in her face were twitching,
alternating between fury and naked fear. The loop was too narrow for her to remove her head
unscathed; instead she held her head down so that it did not touch the death-bringing glow that hung
almost vertically around her neck.
She looked at Harry, down at the floor and back to Harry. And Harry understood.
Grey clumps of snow were already lying in the water covering the floor. The snowman was melting.
Fast.
Harry got a good foothold and shook the bars as hard as he could. They didn’t budge, didn’t even
offer a hopeful creak. The iron was thin but firmly attached to the timber.
The figure inside was swaying.
‘Hold on!’ Harry shouted. ‘I’ll be there soon!’
Lies. He wouldn’t even be able to bend the bars with an iron lever. And he didn’t have time to start
sawing them off. Fuck her father, the mad bastard! His arms were aching. He heard the ear-piercing
siren of the first car turning into the drive. He looked round. It was one of Delta’s special vehicles, a
large, armoured beast of a Land Rover. A man dressed in a green flak jacket jumped out of the
passenger seat, took cover behind the vehicle and held up a walkie-talkie. Harry’s handset crackled.
‘Hello!’ Harry shouted.
The man, taken aback, looked left and right.