The Snowman by Jo Nesbø, Don Bartlett Page B

resistance to letting him succeed. Of course they didn’t want him to shine again and remind them and the media of what they were so desperately trying to put behind them. Photographs of battered bodies in handcuffs. But he would show them. Show them that Gert Rafto was not a man to let himself be buried before his time. That the town below belonged to him, not to the social workers, to the cream puffs, to the smooth talkers sitting in their offices with tongues so long they could lick the limp arseholes of both the local politicians and the pinko journalists.
    ‘Take a few snaps and get me an ID,’ Rafto said to the technician with the camera.
    ‘And who’ll be able to identify this?’ The young man pointed.
    Rafto didn’t care for his tone. ‘Someone has reported or will soon report this woman missing. Just get on with it, junior.’
    Rafto went up to the peak and looked back across what Bergensians call vidden – the plateau. His gaze swept the countryside and stopped at a hill and what seemed to be a person on the summit. But, if so, they weren’t moving. Perhaps it was a cairn? Rafto pinched his eyes. He must have been there hundreds of times, walking with his wife and daughter, but he couldn’t recall seeing a cairn. He went down to the cable car, spoke to the operator and borrowed his binoculars. Fifteen seconds later he established that it wasn’t a cairn, just three large balls of snow that someone must have piled one on top of the other.
    Rafto didn’t like the sloping district of Bergen known as Fjellsiden with its oh-so-picturesque, crooked, uninsulated timber houses with stairs and cellars, situated in narrow alleys where the sun never shone. Trendy children of rich parents frequently paid millions to own an authentic Bergen house, then did them up until there wasn’t an original splinter left. Here, you no longer heard the sound of children’s running feet on the cobbled stones; the prices had driven young Bergensian families into the suburbs on the other side of the mountains a long time ago. Yet here it was as quiet and deserted as a barren row of shops. Nonetheless he had the feeling he was being observed as he stood on the stone steps ringing the bell.
    After a while the door opened and a pale, anxious woman’s face looked out at him with a startled expression.
    ‘Onny Hetland?’ Rafto queried, holding up his ID. ‘It’s about your friend, Laila Aasen.’
    The apartment was tiny, and the layout baffling; the bathroom was located behind the kitchen and between the bedroom and living room. Amid the patterned burgundy wallpaper in the living room Onny Hetland had just managed to squeeze a sofa and a green-and-orange armchair, and on the little floor space that remained there was a pile of weekly magazines and heaps of books and CDs. Rafto stepped over an upturned dish of water and a cat to reach the sofa. Onny Hetland sat on the armchair fidgeting with her necklace. There was a black crack in the green stone in the pendant. Maybe a flaw. Or perhaps it was meant to be like that.
    Onny Hetland had learned about her friend’s death early that morning, from Laila’s husband, Bastian. But still her face displayed several dramatic changes as Rafto mercilessly spelt out the details.
    ‘Dreadful,’ whispered Onny Hetland. ‘Bastian didn’t say anything about that.’
    ‘That’s because we didn’t want to publicise it,’ Rafto said. ‘Bastian told me you were Laila’s best friend.’
    Onny nodded.
    ‘Do you know what Laila was doing up on Ulriken? Her husband had no idea, you see. He and the children were with his mother in Florø yesterday.’
    Onny shook her head. It was a firm shake. One that should not have left any doubt. It wasn’t the shake that was the problem. It was the hundredth of a second’s hesitation before it started. And this hundredth of a second was all Gert Rafto needed.
    ‘This is a murder case, frøken Hetland. I hope you appreciate the gravity and the risk you