The Snowman (Harry Hole, #7)

by Jo Nesbø

Harry eased off a smile. So far he liked her, but of course he was open to changing his opinion. Harry was always willing to give people another chance to wind up on his blacklist.

changing opinion

He got out of bed and shuffled over to the window. The snow in the yard reflected enough light for him to make out the snowman down below. It looked alone. Someone should have given it a cap and scarf. And maybe a broomstick to hold. At that moment the moon slid from behind a cloud. The black row of teeth came into view. And the eyes. Jonas automatically sucked in his breath and recoiled two steps. The pebble-eyes were gleaming. And they were not staring into the house. They were looking up. Up here. Jonas drew the curtains and crept back into bed.

first look at the snowman

She chuckled, and the laughter had the same effect on him as the first swig of Jim Beam; he felt warm and relaxed.

warm and relaxed

“It wasn’t the long hours, Harry. You were obsessed. You are your job, and what drives you isn’t love or a sense of responsibility. It’s not even personal ambition. It’s anger. And the desire for revenge. And that’s not right, Harry—it shouldn’t be like that. You know what happened.”

obsession

Her suit seemed expensive. But when he looked at her a bit closer, there was a little flaw somewhere. A slight blemish he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

slight blemish

The darkness of the stairs lay there waiting for him, like a vast open void. Not a sound could be heard from down below. “Mommy!” He regretted shouting the moment he heard his own terror in the brief, harsh echo. For now it knew, too. The darkness. There was no answer. Jonas swallowed. Then he began to tiptoe down the stairs. On the third step down he felt something wet under his feet. The same on the sixth. And the eighth. As if someone had been walking with wet shoes. Or wet feet. In the living room the light was on, but there was no Mommy.

there was no mommy

“Sometimes you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it,” Harry answered. “It’s a methodology.”

methodology

back in April 1973 the father of the mobile phone, Martin Cooper, had the first conversation on one, with his wife at home. And, of course, he had no idea that this invention would become one of the most important ways in which we in the police force can find missing persons.

martin cooper

it smelled better than anything he knew, a mixture of imitation leather, metal, engine oil, sun-faded rear dash, Volvo factory and seats impregnated with “personality perspiration,” which Bjørn Holm explained was not common body perspiration but a select veneer of all the previous owners’ souls, karma, eating habits and lifestyles.

personality perspiration

And we’re talking only solved cases here. No one utters a word about hidden statistics.”

hidden statistics

She wished she were running on black pavement, in a city where the noise drowned out the sounds of escape and she could hide in the secure mass of humanity. But here she was completely alone.

hide in the secure mass of humanity

“I want you to eat snow until you piss yourself.” The figure stood slightly outside the radius of the steel wire, tilted its head and watched Sylvia. “Until your stomach is so frozen and full that it can’t melt the snow any longer. Until it’s ice inside. Until you’ve become your true self. Something that can’t feel.”

i want you to eat snow

When had the boy turned eleven and decided to like music about various stages of death, alienation, freezing and general doom? Perhaps it ought to have worried Harry, but it didn’t. It was a starting point, a curiosity that had to be satisfied, clothes the boy had to try on to see if they fit. Other things would come along. Better things. Worse things.

clothes to try on

“Recycled ideas and empty gestures.”

recycled ideas and empty gestured

cadaver dogs sniffed out places where dead bodies had been. They were not used for drugs, lost property or living people. They were used for deaths. Period.

cadaver dogs

“That big dog can’t be afraid of foxes.” “Perhaps it’s never seen a fox,” Harry said. “But it knows it can smell a predator. It’s rational to be afraid of what you don’t know. The dog that isn’t won’t live long.” Harry could feel his heart begin to quicken. And he knew why. The forest. The dark. The type of terror that was not rational. The type that had to be overcome.

rational to be afraid of what you don't know

And then a boot got stuck and he fell. Facedown and without anything to grab. Everything went dark, and his nose and mouth were filled with the taste of marsh, of death, decay and darkness. He could taste the darkness for the few seconds he was under. And then he came up again, and discovered that all the light had gone. Gone across the mountain towering above him in its silent, heavy majesty, whispering that he didn’t know where he was, that he hadn’t known for a long time. Unaware that he had lost a boot, he stood up and began to run.

he could taste the darkness

Being isolated from the dark in a bubble of light didn’t give him a sense of security. Quite the opposite. The certainty that he was the most visible object moving through the forest made him feel naked, vulnerable. The branches scraped at his face, like a blind man’s fingers trying to identify a stranger.

bubble of light

Evil is not a thing. It cannot take possession of you. It’s the opposite; it’s a void, an absence of goodness. The only thing you can be frightened of here is yourself.

closed his eyes. Waited for the ghosts, for the inevitable, just as long as he stayed away from the only medicine he knew for ghosts. Perhaps it would be a new acquaintance this time. He waited for her to come out of the forest, stumping along toward him on a huge white body without legs, a misshapen bowling ball with a head, black sockets with crows pecking at the remainder of her eyeballs, teeth bared after the foxes had helped themselves to the lips. Hard to know if she would come; the subconscious was unpredictable.

waited for the ghosts

he was formulating words that Harry was receiving on a badly tuned frequency.

badly tuned frequency

“Free thinking functions best in small groups,” Harry added.

free thinking functions best in small groups

“Normal investigation teams fight to stay afloat in the stream of information. And that’s when it’s a standard case.

stream of information

There’s a strong social urge in man to be needed. That’s why generals in the Pentagon paint the blackest scenario as soon as a firecracker goes off anywhere in the world.

social urge to be needed

this was the phase when everyone was supposed to say what he or she thought without fear of contradiction. In his experience, the best ideas originated from flights of fancy, half-baked guesswork and erroneous snap judgments.

flights of fancy

the Great Obsession. Which was everything at once: love and intoxication, blindness and clear-sightedness, meaning and madness. Colleagues spoke now and then about excitement, but this was something else, something special. He had never told anyone about the Obsession or made any attempt to analyze it. He hadn’t dared. All he knew was that it helped him, drove him, fueled the job he was appointed to perform. He didn’t want to know any more. He really didn’t.

obsession

“We don’t have to agree. You follow your instincts.”

follow instincts

I suppose you focus on what you have.

focus on what you have

To a lesser love? Maybe, but to an endurable love.

lesser endurable love

in order to isolate what was possible, you had to eliminate everything that was impossible. And that was why a detective should not despair, but be glad whenever he could discount a clue that did not lead to the solution. Besides, it had just been an idea.

eliminante the impossible

Katrine looked at Harry and smiled as though silence in elevators were an implicit joke. Harry looked down, hoping his body wasn’t sending false signals. Or real ones.

silence in elevators

The sensation would not leave him. The sensation that something or someone was there, nearby, on the inside, visible, if he could only see things the right way, in the right light.

see thing the right way, the right light

What do we do now?” “We search,” Harry said. “What for?” “That’s the last of our thoughts.” “Why?” “Because it’s easy to miss something important if you’re searching for something else. Clear your mind. You’ll know what you’re searching for when you see it.”

you know when you see it

residual traces,”

residual traces

“When the tough nuts crack, they crack in style.” “Why?” “Perhaps because they haven’t had enough practice at losing control.”

tough nut cracks

“They’ve measured the brain activity of experienced boxers,” he said. “Did you know that they lose consciousness several times in the course of a fight? A fraction of a second here, a fraction of a second there. But somehow they still manage to stay on their feet. As if the body knows it’s temporary, assumes control and holds them up for as long as it takes them to regain consciousness.” Harry tapped out a cigarette. “I also lost it at the cabin. The difference is that, after all these years, my body knows that control will return.”

body control

success did not taste as promised, catching the guilty party always came loaded with the question So what?

so what

Harry wondered why men who lived off others’ urges always seemed to wear this glistening film of sweat, like a veneer of false shame at their unscrupulousness.

a veneer of false shame

whether madness and evil are two different entities, or whether when we no longer understand the purpose of destruction we simply term it madness.

madness and evil

“Well, this may just be an oddity. However, it’s this sort of thing that arouses a certain”—Hole looked as if he were tasting the word before he chose it—“disquiet. A disquiet that forces you to ask other questions.

arouses a certain disquiet

riveted to the TV screen. Since Birte had been reported missing the boy had sat for hours like this every single afternoon. As though it were a window into a better world.

a window into a better world

“You’re running kind of an a priori investigation, I understand?” Støp said, flopping into the smallest item of furniture, a single molded plastic chair. “I beg your pardon?” Harry said, sitting on the sofa. “You’re starting with the solution and working backward to find out how it happened.” “Is that what ‘a priori’ means?” “God knows—I just like the sound of Latin.”

a priori

A view gives perspective.”

a view gives perspective

Harry’s childhood friend Tresko had once explained that the poker player who bases his game on his ability to intuit a bluff is bound to lose. It’s true that we all give ourselves away with superficial mannerisms when lying; however, you have no chance of exposing a good bluffer unless you coldly and calculatedly chart all these mannerisms against each individual, in Tresko’s opinion.

game of bluff

her fusiform gyrus, the part of the brain that stores and identifies human faces, was so highly developed and sensitive that she was a walking index file of criminals.

fusiform gyrus

Over time there is a price to pay with all risks.

there is a price to pay

I think you believe you want me, but you wish you wanted him.”

you wish you wanted him

“Good stories are never about a string of successes but about spectacular defeats,”

spectacular defeats

“The press has never hindered or helped me in solving a single case. The press is crucial only for individuals who want to be in the limelight. The people you report to are just concerned with having concrete results that will give them good press. Or prevent bad press.

the press

you’re forgetting one thing. Even if your life has no meaning for you, it has meaning for others.

life has meaning for others