Mathias was sitting alone in his mother’s Toyota Corolla in front of a house in Kolloveien. He had no idea what his mother was doing inside the house. She had said it wouldn’t take long. But it had already taken a long time. She had left the key in the ignition and the car radio was playing ‘Under snø’, by the new girl group, Dollie. He kicked open the car door and went out. Because of the snow an almost unnatural silence had settled over the houses. He bent down, picked up a handful of the sticky white stuff and cupped it into a snowball.

Today they had thrown snowballs at him in the school playground and called him ‘Mathias No-Nips’, his so-called classmates in 7A. He hated secondary school, hated being thirteen years old. It had begun after the first gym lesson when they found out he didn’t have any nipples. According to the doctor, it could have been hereditary, and he had been tested for a number of illnesses. Mum had told him and Dad that her father, who died when Mum was small, didn’t have any nipples, either. But looking through one of his grandmother’s photo albums Mathias had found a picture of his grandfather during the mowing season in trousers and braces with a bare chest. And he definitely had nipples then.

Mathias packed the snowball harder between his hands. He wanted to throw it at someone. Hard. So hard that it hurt. But there was no one to launch it at. He could make someone to throw it at. He placed the packed snowball in the snow beside the garage. Started rolling it. The snow crystals hooked into each other. After doing a circuit of the lawn, it already reached his stomach, and left a trail of brown grass. He continued to roll it. When he couldn’t push it any further, he started a new one. It was big, too. He just managed to lift it up onto the first one. Then he made a head, climbed up and placed it on top. The snowman stood by one of the windows in the house. Sounds were coming out. He broke a couple of twigs off the apple tree and stuck them in the snowman’s sides. Dug up some gravel by the front steps, shinned up again and made two eyes and a line of pebbles for a smile. Then he placed his thighs around the snowman’s head, and sitting on the snowman’s shoulders looked through the window.

In the illuminated room stood a man with a bare chest thrusting his hips backwards and forwards with his eyes closed, as if he were dancing. From the bed in front of him protruded a pair of spread legs. Mathias couldn’t see, but he knew that it was Sara. That it was his mother. That they were bonking.

Mathias tightened his thighs around the snow head, felt the cold in his crotch. He was unable to breathe; a steel wire seemed to tauten around his throat.

Again and again the man’s hips banged against his mother. Mathias stared inside at the man’s chest as the cold numbness spread from his crotch to his stomach and up until it reached his head. The man was thrusting his willy inside her. As they did in the magazines. Soon the man would be spraying sperm inside his mother. And the man didn’t have any nipples.

Suddenly the man stopped. His eyes were open now. And they were looking at Mathias.

Mathias loosened his grip, slid down the back of the snowman, curled up and sat as quiet as a mouse, waiting. His mind was reeling. He was a smart boy, intelligent, he’d always been told that. Strange, but with excellent mental faculties, the teachers had said. Thus all his thoughts were falling into place now, like pieces of a jigsaw he had been doing for a long time. But the picture that emerged was still incomprehensible, intolerable. It couldn’t be right. It had to be right.

Mathias listened to his own breathless gasps.

It was right. He just knew it. Everything fitted. His mother’s coldness to his father. The conversations they thought he couldn’t hear; his father’s desperate threats and pleas for her to stay, not just for his sake but for Mathias’s sake, good God, they had a child together, didn’t they?! And his mother’s bitter laugh. Grandfather in the photo album and Mum’s lies. Of course, Mathias hadn’t believed it when Stian from his class had said that Mathias No-Nips’s mum had a lover living on the plateau, he said his aunt had told him. For Stian was just as stupid as the others and didn’t understand anything. Not even when, two days later, Stian found his cat hanging from the top of the school flagpole.

Dad didn’t know. Mathias could feel it in his whole body that Dad thought Mathias was . . . was his. And he must never know that he wasn’t. Never. It would kill him. Mathias would rather die himself. Yes, that was exactly what he wanted. He wanted to die, wanted to go, to go away from his mother and the school and Stian and . . . everything. He got up, kicked the snowman and ran to the car.

He would take her with him. She would die, too.

When his mother came out and he unlocked the door, almost forty minutes had passed since she had gone into the house.

‘Is there anything wrong?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ Mathias said, moving on the back seat so that she could see him in the mirror. ‘I saw him.’

‘What do you mean?’ she said, putting the key in the ignition and turning.

‘The snowman . . .’

‘And what did the snowman look like?’ The engine started with a roar and she let the clutch go with such a jerk that he almost dropped the car jack he was clinging to.

‘Dad’s waiting for us,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to get a move on.’

She switched on the radio. Just a newsreader droning on about the American elections and Ronald Reagan. Nonetheless she turned up the volume. They drove over the crest of the hill, down towards the main road and the river. In the field ahead of them stiff, yellow straw poked through the snow.

‘We’re going to die,’ Mathias said.

‘What did you say?’

‘We’re going to die.’

She turned down the voice on the radio. He steeled himself. Leaned forward between the seats and raised his arm.

‘We’re going to die,’ he whispered.

Then he struck.

The jack hit the back of her head with a crunch. And his mother didn’t seem to react, just sort of stiffened in her seat, so he hit her again. And again. The car jumped as her foot slid off the clutch pedal, but still no sound came from her. Perhaps the talking thing in her brain had been smashed, Mathias thought. At the fourth blow he could feel her head give, it seemed to have gone soft. The car rolled forward and picked up speed, but he knew she was no longer conscious. His mother’s Toyota Corolla crossed the main road and continued across the field on the other side. The snow slowed the car but not enough for it to stop. Then it hit the water and glided out into the broad black river. It tilted and was motionless for a moment before the current caught it and spun it round. The water seeped in through the doors and the bodywork, through the handles and at the side of the windows as they gently floated downstream. Mathias looked out of the window, waved to a car on the main road, but they didn’t appear to have seen him. The water was rising in the Toyota. And suddenly he heard his mother mumble something. He watched her, saw the deep gashes under her bloodstained hair at the back of her head. She was moving under the safety belt. The water was rising quickly now; it was already up to Mathias’s knees. He felt his panic rising. He didn’t want to die. Not now, not like this. He smashed the jack into the side window. The glass shattered and the water poured in. He jumped up onto the seat and squeezed his way through the gap between the top of the window and the mass of water flooding in. One of his boots got snagged on the frame; he twisted his foot and felt the boot float away. Then he was free and began to swim ashore. He saw that a car had stopped on the main road and two people had got out and were on their way through the snow to the river.

Mathias was a good swimmer. He was good at a lot of things. So why didn’t they like him? A man waded out and dragged him ashore as he approached the riverbank. Mathias slumped into the snow. Not because he couldn’t stand but because instinctively he knew it was the smartest thing to do. He closed his eyes and heard an agitated voice by his ear ask whether there was anyone else in the car. If there was they might still be able to save them. Mathias slowly shook his head. The voice asked whether he was sure.

The police would later ascribe the accident to the slippery road conditions and the drowned woman’s head injuries to the impact from driving off the road and hitting the water. In fact the car was barely damaged, but in the end it was the only plausible explanation. Just as shock was the only possible explanation for the boy’s answer when those first on the scene asked him several times whether there was anyone else in the car and he said at length: ‘No, only me. I’m alone.’

‘Thanks,’ said the boy standing in front of him and putting down his tray on the canteen table that until then Mathias had had to himself. Outside, the rain was drumming its welcome march on the medicine students in Bergen, a rhythmical march that would last until spring.

‘You new to medicine as well?’ the boy asked, and Mathias watched his knife cut the thick Wiener schnitzel.

He nodded.

‘You’ve got an Østland accent,’ the boy said. ‘Didn’t get in to Oslo?’

‘Didn’t want to go to Oslo,’ Mathias said.

‘Why not?’

‘Don’t know anyone there.’

‘Who do you know here then?’

‘No one.’

‘I don’t know anyone here, either. What’s your name?’

‘Mathias. Lund-Helgesen. And you?’

‘Idar Vetlesen. Have you been up Ulriken Mountain?’

‘No.’

But Mathias had been up Ulriken. And up Fløyen and Sandviksfjellet. He had been in the narrow alleyways, to Fisketorget, to Torgalmenningen – the main square, seen the penguins and the sea lions at the Aquarium, drunk beer in Wesselstuen, listened to an overrated new band in Garage and seen SK Brann lose a football match at Brann Stadium. Mathias had found time to do all these things that you should do with student friends. Alone.

He did the circuit with Idar again and pretended it was the first time.

Mathias soon discovered that Idar was a social suckerfish, and by fastening onto the suckerfish Mathias found himself at the heart of all the action.

‘Why did you choose to study medicine?’ Idar asked Mathias at a pre-ball warm-up in a flat belonging to a student with a traditional Bergensian name. It was the evening of the medical students’ annual autumn ball, and Idar had invited two nice Bergen girls in black dresses and with pinned-up hair, who were leaning forward to hear what the two of them were saying.

‘To make the world a better place,’ Mathias said, drinking up his lukewarm Hansa beer. ‘What about you?’

‘To earn money, stands to reason,’ Idar said, winking at the girls.

One of them sat down beside Mathias.

‘You’ve got a blood donor badge,’ she said. ‘What blood type are you?’

‘B negative. What do you do then?’

‘Let’s not talk about that. B negative? Isn’t that extremely rare?’

‘Yes. How did you know?’

‘I’m training as a nurse.’

‘Right,’ Mathias said. ‘Which year?’

‘Third.’

‘Have you thought about what you’re going to speciali—?’

‘Let’s not talk about that,’ she said and placed a hot little hand on his thigh.

‘That’s never happened to me before,’ he said.

She smiled up at him and stroked his cheek. ‘So there’s nothing wrong with me then?’

‘What?’ he stammered. ‘No.’

She laughed. ‘I think you’re sweet. You’re nice and thoughtful. What happened to these by the way?’

She pinched his chest.

Mathias felt something black descend. Something nasty and black and wonderful.

‘I was born like that,’ he said.

‘Is it a disease?’

‘It comes with Raynaud’s phenomenon and scleroderma.’

‘What?’

‘A hereditary disease causing connective tissue in the body to thicken.’

‘Is it dangerous?’ She carefully stroked his chest with her fingers.

Mathias smiled and sensed an incipient erection. ‘Raynaud’s phenomenon just means that your toes and fingers go cold and white. Scleroderma is worse . . .’

‘Oh?’

‘The thickened connective tissue makes the skin tighten. Everything is smoothed out and wrinkles disappear.’

‘Isn’t that good?’

He was aware of her hand groping southwards. ‘The tightened skin begins to hinder facial expressions, you have fewer of them. It’s like your face stiffening into a mask.’

The hot little hand closed around his dick.

‘Your hands and, in time, your arms are bent and you can’t straighten them. In the end you’re left standing there, quite unable to move, as you’re suffocated by your own skin.’

She whispered breathlessly: ‘Sounds like a gruesome death.’

‘The best advice is to commit suicide before the pain drives you insane. Would you mind lying at the end of the bed? I’d like to stand and do it.’

‘That’s why you study medicine, isn’t it.’ she said. ‘To find out more. To find a way of living with it.’

‘All I want,’ he said, getting up and standing at the end of the bed with his erect penis swaying in the air, ‘. . . is to find out when it’s time to die.’

When the results came back Mathias was sitting at his desk and had to read them three times. And the same nasty and black and wonderful feeling surged to the surface again. The tests were negative. Both in the medical sense, Bekhterev’s disease could be eliminated as a cause of the afflictions, and in the more familiar sense, Herr Aasen could be eliminated as the girl’s father. And Mathias knew he didn’t know. But she knew; Laila Aasen knew. He had seen her face twitch when he asked for blood samples from all three of them. Was she still screwing the other man? What did he look like? Did he live in a detached house with a big front lawn? What secret flaws did he have? And how and when would the daughter find out that all her life she had been deceived by this lying whore?

Mathias looked down and realised he had knocked over his glass of water. A large wet stain was spreading across his crotch, and he felt the cold spread to his stomach and up towards his head.

He phoned Laila Aasen and informed her of the result. The medical result. She thanked him, audibly relieved, and they rang off. Mathias stared at the telephone for a long time. God, how he hated her. That night he lay unable to sleep on the narrow mattress in his bedsit where he had stayed after studying. He tried to read, but the letters danced in front of his eyes. He tried masturbating, which as a rule made him tired enough to sleep afterwards, but he couldn’t concentrate. He stuck a needle in the big toe that had gone completely white again, just to see if he had any sensation. In the end he huddled up under the duvet and cried until daybreak painted the night sky grey.

‘Well?’ growled the policeman as if Mathias were one of his subordinates.

‘First stages of neuropathy,’ Mathias replied. ‘The nerves under your feet are damaged. There is reduced sensation.’

‘Do you think that’s why I’ve started walking like a bloody dipso?’

‘Are you a dipso, Rafto?’

The policeman stopped buttoning up his shirt and a flush rose up his neck, like mercury up a thermometer. ‘What did you bloody say, you snot-nosed whelp?’

‘As a rule too much alcohol is the cause of polyneuropathy. If you continue to drink you risk permanent brain damage. Have you heard of Korsakoff, Rafto? You haven’t? Let’s hope you never do because if you hear his name it’s generally in connection with an extremely unpleasant syndrome named after him. When you look in the mirror and ask yourself if you’re a dipso, I don’t know what you answer, but I suggest that next time you ask an additional question: Do I want to die now or do I want some more time?’

Gert Rafto scrutinised the young man in the doctor’s coat. Then he swore under his breath, marched out and slammed the door behind him.

Four weeks later Rafto rang. He asked if Mathias could come and see him.

‘Drop in tomorrow,’ Mathias said.

‘I can’t. It’s urgent.’

‘Then get yourself to A&E.’

‘Listen to me, Lund-Helgesen. I’ve been in bed for three days without being able to move. You’re the only one who’s asked me straight out if I’m a dipso. Yes, I am a dipso. And no, I don’t want to die. Not yet.’

Gert Rafto’s flat stank of rubbish, empty beer bottles and him. But not of leftovers, for there was no food in the house.

‘This is a B1 vitamin supplement,’ Mathias said, holding the syringe to the light. ‘It will get you back on your feet.’

‘Thank you,’ Gert Rafto said. Five minutes later he was asleep.

Mathias walked around the flat. On the desk there was a photograph of Rafto with a dark-haired girl on his shoulders. Above the desk on the wall hung photographs of what must have been murder scenes. Many photographs. Mathias stared at them. Took a couple of them down and studied the details. Goodness, how sloppy they had been, the murderers. Their inefficiency was especially noticeable on the bodies with wounds from both sharp and blunt instruments. He opened drawers and looked for more photographs. He found reports, notes, a few valuables: rings, ladies’ watches, necklaces. And newspaper cuttings. He read them. Gert Rafto’s name ran right through them, often with quotes from press conferences at which he talked about the murderers’ stupidity and how he had caught them. Because it was clear he had caught them, every single one.

Six hours later, when Gert Rafto awoke, Mathias was still there. He was sitting by the bed with two murder reports in his lap.

‘Tell me,’ Mathias said. ‘How would you commit a murder if you didn’t want to get caught?’

‘Avoid my beat,’ Rafto said, looking round for something to drink. ‘If the detective’s good, you haven’t got a hope in hell anyway.’

‘And if I still wanted to do it on the beat of a good detective?’

‘Then I would cosy up to the detective before committing the murder,’ Gert Rafto said. ‘And then, after the murder, I would kill him, too.’

‘Funny,’ Mathias said. ‘That’s just what I was thinking.’

And by the time late autumn came to Bergen with even shorter days and even longer showers Mathias had his plan ready.

One morning he called Laila Aasen at home.

He gave his name, and she listened in silence as he explained the reason for his call. The daughter’s blood sample had thrown up new findings and he now knew that Bastian Aasen was not the child’s biological father. It was important that he be given a blood sample by the real father. This would of necessity mean that the daughter and Bastian would be apprised of the relationship. Would she give her consent?

Mathias waited, allowing this to sink in.

Then he said that if she considered it important that the matter remained behind closed doors, he would still like to help, but it would have to be done ‘off the record’.

‘Off the record?’ she repeated with the apathy of someone in shock.

‘As a doctor I’m bound to observe ethical rules regarding candour to the patient, here, your daughter. But I’m researching syndromes and am therefore particularly interested in following up her case. If, with the utmost discretion, you could meet me this afternoon . . .’

‘Yes,’ she whispered in a tremulous voice. ‘Yes, please.’

‘Good. Catch the last cable car of the day to the top of Ulriken. There we will be undisturbed and can walk back down. I hope you appreciate what I’m risking, and please don’t mention this meeting to a living soul.’

‘Of course not! Trust me.’

He was still holding the receiver to his ear after she had rung off. With his lips to the grey plastic, he whispered: ‘And why should anyone trust you, you little whore?’

‘Why did you say anything at all?’

‘To tease her,’ Laila howled. ‘She’s so nosy.’

He pressed the thin steel harder against her skin and Laila sobbed her friend’s name and address. After which she said no more.

When, two days later, Mathias was reading about the murder of Laila Aasen and the disappearances of Onny Hetland and Gert Rafto in the newspaper, he had mixed feelings. First of all, he was displeased with the murder of Laila Aasen. It had not gone as he had planned; he had lost control in a frenzy of fury and panic. Hence there had been too much mess, too much to clear up, too much that reminded him of the photographs in Rafto’s flat. And too little time to enjoy the revenge, the justice of it.

The murder of Onny Hetland had been even worse, nigh on a catastrophe. Twice his courage had failed him as he was about to ring her doorbell, and he had walked away. The third time he had realised he was too late. Someone was already there ringing the bell. Gert Rafto. After Rafto had left he had rung and introduced himself as Rafto’s assistant and had been let in. But Onny had said she wouldn’t tell him what she had told Rafto; she had given a promise that the matter would stay strictly between them. Only when he had made an incision in her hand with the scalpel did she talk.

Mathias gleaned from what she said that Gert Rafto had decided to solve the case under his own steam. He wanted to rebuild his reputation, the fool!

There had been nothing to criticise about the disposal of Onny Hetland, however. Very little noise, very little blood. And the carving up of her body in the shower had been efficient and quick. He had packed all the parts in plastic and placed them in the large rucksack and bag he had brought along for the purpose. On his visits to Rafto, Mathias had been told that one of the first things the police check in murder cases is cars observed in the vicinity and registered taxi rides. So he walked the whole way back to his flat.

All that remained now was the last part of Gert Rafto’s instructions for the perfect murder: kill the detective.

Strangely enough this was the best of the three murders. Strange because Mathias had no feelings for Rafto, none of the hatred that he had felt for Laila Aasen. It was more about him getting close, for the first time, to the aesthetics he had envisaged, to the idea he had of how the murder should be executed. His experience of the very act itself was above all as gruesome and heart-rending as he had hoped it would be. He could still hear Rafto’s screams echoing round the deserted island. And the strangest thing of all: on the way back he discovered that his toes were no longer white and numb; it was as if the gradual freezing process of his extremities had been halted for a moment, as if he had thawed.

Or, to be more precise, that he was suffering from a serious personality disorder. All the specialist literature he had read certainly pointed to that. The ritual nature of the murders, their having to take place on the day the first snow of the year came, his having to build a snowman. And, not least, his growing sadism.

But this insight in no way prevented him from continuing. For time was short; Raynaud’s phenomenon was already appearing with increasing frequency, and he thought he could detect the first symptoms of scleroderma: a stiffness in the face that would eventually give him the revolting pointed nose and the pursed carp mouth with which the worst afflicted were ultimately burdened.

He had moved to Oslo to continue his work on immunology and water channels in the brain, as the research centre for this was the Anatomy Department in Gaustad. Alongside his research he was working at Marienlyst Clinic where Idar was employed and had recommended him. Mathias also did night shifts at A&E since he couldn’t sleep anyway.

It was not difficult to find victims. Initially it was the patients’ blood samples which in many cases ruled out paternity, and then there were the DNA tests by the Paternity Unit at the Insititute of Forensic Medicine. Idar, who had fairly limited competence, even for a general practitioner, covertly took advice on all cases concerning hereditary illness and syndromes. And, if the patients were young people, Mathias’s advice was invariably the same.

‘Get both parents to appear at the first consultation, take mouth swabs from everyone, say it’s just to check the bacterial flora and send the samples to the Paternity Unit so that we at least know we’re working from an accurate starting point.’

And Idar, the idiot, did as he was told. Which meant that Mathias soon had a little file on women with children who were sailing under a false flag, so to speak. And best of all was that there was no link between him and these women as the mouth swabs were submitted under Idar’s name.

The method for luring them into the trap was the same as the one applied with such success to Laila Aasen. A telephone call and an agreement to meet at a secret location unknown to anyone. Only once had it happened that the appointed victim broke down on the phone and went to her husband to tell all. And that had ended with the family splitting up, so she had received her just deserts anyway.

He had read about it in an anatomy journal where a French anatomist recommended this veterinary device for use on bodies which had started to decompose, because the loop cut through soft, rotting tissue with the same precise efficiency as through bone, and because it could be used on several bodies at the same time without any danger of transmitting bacteria. He had realised straight away that with a loop to cut up the victims, transportation would be radically simplified. Consequently he contacted the manufacturer, flew to Rouen and had the tool demonstrated, in halting English, one misty morning inside a whitewashed cowshed in northern France. The loop consisted of a plain handle shaped like – and the approximate size of – a banana furnished with a metal shield to protect your hand against burns. The wire itself was as thin as fishing line and ran into both ends of the banana from which it could be tightened or slackened with a button. There was also an on-off switch which activated the battery-driven heating element and made the garrotte-like wire glow white in seconds. Mathias was elated; this tool would be useful for more than carving up bodies. When he heard the price he almost burst out laughing. The loop cost Mathias less than the flight. Batteries included.

The publication of the Swedish study concluding that somewhere between 15 and 20 per cent of all children had a different biological father from the one they thought reflected Mathias’s own experiences. He was not alone. And nor was he alone in having to die a cruel, premature death because of his mother’s whoring with tainted genes. But he would be alone in this: the act of cleansing, the fight against disease, the crusade. He doubted that anyone would thank or honour him. This he did know, however: they would all remember him, long after his death. For he had finally found what was to be his fame for all posterity, the masterpiece, the final flourish of his sword.

It was chance that set the ball rolling.

He saw him on TV. The policeman. Harry Hole. Hole was being interviewed because he had hunted down a serial killer in Australia. And Mathias was reminded of Gert Rafto’s advice: ‘Not on my beat.’ He also recalled, however, the satisfaction of having taken the life of the hunter. The feeling of supremacy. The feeling of power. Nothing later had quite compared with the murder of the police officer. And this Herostratically famous Hole appeared to have something of Rafto about him, some of the same offhandedness and anger.

Nonetheless, he might have forgotten all about Harry Hole had it not been for one of the gynaecologists at Marienlyst Clinic mentioning in the canteen the next day that he had heard this, to all outward appearances, solid detective off the TV was an alkie and a nutcase. Gabriella, a paediatrician, added that she had the son of Hole’s girlfriend as a patient. Oleg, a nice boy.

‘He’ll be an alkie then, as well,’ said the gynaecologist. ‘It’s in the bloody genes, you know.’

‘Hole’s not the father,’ Gabriella countered. ‘But what’s interesting is that the man who’s registered as the father, some professor or other in Moscow, is also an alcoholic.’

‘Hey, I didn’t hear that!’ shouted Idar Vetlesen over the laughter. ‘Don’t forget client confidentiality, folks!’

Lunch carried on, but Mathias was unable to forget what Gabriella had said. Or, rather, the way she had expressed herself: ‘the man who’s registered as the father’.

Accordingly, after lunch, Mathias followed the paediatrician to her office, went in behind her and closed the door.

‘May I ask you something, Gabriella?’

‘Oh, hello,’ she said, and a flush of anticipation spread up her cheeks. Mathias knew she liked him, he supposed she thought he was handsome, friendly, funny and a good listener. She had even, indirectly, asked him out on a couple of occasions, but he had declined.

‘As you may know I’m allowed to use some of the clinic’s blood samples for my research,’ he said. ‘And in fact I found something interesting in the sample of the boy you were talking about. The son of Hole’s girlfriend.’

‘My understanding is that their relationship is now a thing of the past.’

‘You don’t say? There was something in the blood sample, so I was wondering if there was anything in the family . . .’

Mathias thought he could discern a certain disappointment in her face. As for himself, he was far from disappointed by what she had to tell him.

‘Thank you,’ he said, standing up and exiting. He could feel his heart pumping eager, life-giving blood, his feet propelling him forward without consuming any energy, his pleasure making him glow like a cutting loop. For he knew this was the beginning. The beginning of the end.

She lowered her glasses, scrutinised him quizzically and he established that the photograph had lied after all. She was much more beautiful. So beautiful that for a moment he thought plan A had a weakness: it was not a foregone conclusion that she would want him; a woman like Rakel – single mother or not – had alternatives. Plan B had, to be sure, the same result as A, but would not be anywhere near as satisfying.

‘Socially timid,’ he said, raising a plastic beaker in an embarrassed gesture of greeting. ‘I was invited here by a chum living nearby, and he hasn’t showed up. And everyone else looks as if they know each other here. I promise to decamp the second he appears.’

She laughed. He liked her laugh. And knew that the critical first three seconds had gone in his favour.

‘I just saw a boy score a fantastic goal on the gravel pitch down there,’ Mathias said. ‘I wouldn’t mind betting you’re related to him.’

‘Oh? That might have been Oleg, my son.’

She succeeded in hiding it, but Mathias knew from countless sessions with patients that no woman can resist praise of her child.

‘Nice party,’ he said. ‘Nice neighbours.’

‘You like parties with other people’s neighbours?’

‘I think my friends are worried I’m spending too much time on my own,’ he said. ‘So they try to cheer me up. With their successful neighbours, for example.’ He took a sip from the plastic glass. ‘And with the very sweet house wine. What’s your name?’

‘Rakel. Fauke.’

‘Hello, Rakel. Mathias.’

He shook her hand. Small, warm.

‘You haven’t got anything to drink,’ he said. ‘Allow me. House sweet?’

On his return, and after passing her the glass, he took out his pager and looked at it with a concerned expression.

‘Do you know what, Rakel? I’d love to stay and get to know you better, but A&E is short-staffed and needs an extra man sharpish. So I’ll put on my Superman outfit and make my way into town.’

‘Shame,’ she said.

‘You think so? It’s only for a few hours. Are you going to be here long?’

‘I don’t know. It depends on Oleg.’

‘Right. We’ll see then. Anyway, it was nice to meet you.’

Again he shook her hand. Then left, knowing he had won the first round.

He drove to his flat in Torshov and read an interesting article about water channels in the brain. When he returned at eight she was sitting under one of the umbrellas, wearing a big white hat. She smiled as he sat down beside her.

‘Saved any lives?’ she asked.

‘Mostly scrapes and grazes,’ Mathias said. ‘An appendicitis. The high point was a boy who’d got a Lemonade bottle stuck up his nose. I told his mother he was probably too young to sniff Coke. Sad to say, people in that type of situation don’t have much of a sense of humour . . .’

She laughed. That refined trilled laugh which almost made him wish the whole thing was for real.

Hitherto he had worked under cover, and now it was time to exhibit his life’s work. To do that he would have to leave clear clues, show them the connections, give them the bigger picture.

He started with Birte. They agreed to talk about Jonas’s complaint at her house after her husband had gone to Bergen in the evening. Mathias arrived at the appointed time and she took his coat in the porch and turned to put it in the cupboard. It was rare for him to improvise, but a pink scarf was hanging on one peg and he grabbed it as if by instinct. He wound it twice before going up behind her and placing it around her neck. He lifted the little woman up and positioned her in front of the mirror so that he could see her eyes. They were bulging, she was like a fish that had been hauled up from the deep.

After depositing her in the car he went into the garden to the snowman he had made the night before. He pressed the mobile phone into its chest, filled the cavity and knotted the scarf around its neck. It was past midnight by the time he arrived at the garage of the Anatomy Department, injected fixative into Birte’s body, stamped the metal tags, tied them on and put her on an unoccupied ledge in one of the tanks.

Then it was Sylvia’s turn. He rang her, rattled off the usual spiel and they arranged to meet in the forest behind Holmenkollen ski jump, a place he had used on previous occasions. But this time there were people nearby and he wouldn’t take the risk. He explained to her that Idar Vetlesen, unlike himself, was not exactly a specialist in Fahr’s syndrome, and they would have to meet again. She suggested he rang her the following evening when she would be at home on her own.

The next evening he drove out, found her in the barn and set about her on the spot.

But it had almost gone wrong.

The crazy woman had swung her hatchet at him, hit him in the side, cut open his jacket and shirt and severed an artery with the result that his blood had gushed out all over the barn floor. B negative blood. Two people in a hundred’s blood. So after he had killed her in the forest and left her head on top of the snowman he returned, slaughtered a chicken and sprayed its blood over the floor to cover up his own blood.

But then, while Mathias was preparing his final moves, it came like a bolt from the blue. Idar Vetlesen. He rang to say that Hole had visited him asking questions about Arve Støp and pressing him for the connection. And Idar himself wondered what was going on; after all, it was unlikely that the selection of the victims was arbitrary. And, apart from himself and Støp, Mathias was the only person who knew about the paternities since Mathias, as usual, had helped him with the diagnosis.

Idar was rattled, of course, but fortunately Mathias managed to calm him down. He told Idar not to say a word to anyone and to meet him in a safe place where no one could see them.

Mathias was on the point of laughing as he said it; it was practically word for word what he told his female victims. He supposed it must have been the tension.

Idar proposed the curling club. Mathias rang off and pondered his options.

It struck him that he could make it seem as if Idar was the Snowman and at the same time procure himself some downtime.

The next hour he spent elaborating the details of Idar’s suicide. And even though he appreciated his friend in many ways it was an oddly stimulating, indeed inspiring, process. As the planning of the great project had been. The last snowman. She would have to sit – as he had done on the first day of snow so many years ago – on the snowman’s shoulders, feel the cold through her thighs and watch through the window, watch the treachery, the man who would be her death: Harry Hole. He closed his eyes and visualised the noose over her head. It glinted and glowed. Like a fake halo.