The Snowman by Jo Nesbø, Don Bartlett

said.
    ‘Why not? There were no signs of violence.’
    ‘Because it was well planned.’
    ‘And who’s the guilty party? The husband? It’s always the husband, isn’t it?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Harry, aware his mind was wandering. ‘It’s always the husband.’
    ‘Except that this one had gone to Bergen.’
    ‘Looks like it, yes.’
    ‘On the last plane, so he couldn’t have come back and still managed to catch the first lecture.’ Katrine accelerated and raced across the Majorstuen crossroads on amber. ‘Had Filip Becker been guilty he would have taken the bait you set for him anyway.’
    ‘Bait?’
    ‘Yes. The bit about her mood swings. You suggested to Becker that you suspected suicide.’
    ‘And so?’
    She laughed. ‘Come on, Harry. Everyone, including Becker, knows that the police don’t commit resources to a case resembling suicide. In a nutshell, you gave him the chance to espouse a theory which, if he’d been guilty, would have solved most of his problems. However, he replied that she was as happy as a lark.’
    ‘Mm. So you think the question was a test?’
    ‘You test people all the time, Harry. Including me.’
    Harry didn’t answer until they were well down Bogstadveien.
    ‘People are often smarter than you think,’ he said, and then said nothing until they were in the Police HQ car park.
    ‘I have to work on my own for the rest of the day.’
    And he said that because he had been thinking about the pink scarf and come to a conclusion. That he urgently needed to go through Skarre’s missing persons report and he urgently needed to have his nagging suspicion confirmed. And if it was what he feared, he would have to go to POB Gunnar Hagen with the letter. That sodding letter.

5
    4 NOVEMBER 1992.
    The Totem Pole.
    W HEN W ILLIAM J EFFERSON B LYTHE III CAME INTO THE world on 19 August 1946 in the little town of Hope, Arkansas, exactly three months had passed since the death of his father in a traffic accident. Four years later William’s mother remarried and William took his the new father’s surname. And on a November night forty-six years later, in 1992, white confetti fell like snow onto the streets of Hope in celebration of their own hope and home-town boy, William – or just Bill – Clinton, after he had been elected the USA’s forty-second President. The snow falling on Bergen that same night did not reach the streets but melted in the air, as usual, and turned to rain over the town, which had been happening since mid-September. But as the following morning unfolded there was a nice sprinkling of sugar on the top of the seven peaks guarding this beautiful town. And Inspector Gert Rafto had already arrived on the highest of them, Ulriken. He was breathing in the mountain air with a shiver, hunching up his shoulders around his broad head, his face so covered with folds of skin that it seemed to have been punctured.
    The yellow cable car that had brought him and three crime scene officers from Bergen Police HQ up the 642 metres above the town was swaying gently from the solid steel wires, waiting. The service had been discontinued as soon as the first tourists who had dismounted onto the popular mountain top that morning had sounded the alarm.
    ‘Out and about,’ one of the crime scene officers let slip.
    The town’s tourism slogan had become such a parody of Bergen Norwegian that Bergensians had almost stopped using it. But in situations where fear prevails, your innermost lexicon takes over.
    ‘Yes, out and about,’ Rafto repeated sarcastically, his eyes shining from behind the pancake batter of skin folds.
    The body lying in the snow had been cut into so many pieces that it was only thanks to a naked breast that they had been able to determine the gender. The rest reminded Rafto of a traffic accident in Eidsvågneset the year before, when a lorry coming round a bend too fast had lost its load of aluminium sheeting and had literally sliced up an oncoming car.
    ‘The killer has