Blood on Snow Read Free Page A

What worried me more was what was bound to happen afterwards. When I was the guy who had fixed Daniel Hoffmann’s wife. The man who knew everything and had the power to determine Daniel Hoffmann’s future once the police started their investigation. Power over someone who wasn’t capable of subordination. And a man Hoffmann owed five times the usual fee. Why had he offered that for a job that was less complicated than normal?
    I felt like I was sitting at a poker table with four heavily armed, innately suspicious bad losers. And I’d just managed to get a hand of four aces. Sometimes good news is so improbably good that it’s bad.
    Okay, so what a smart poker player would do here is get rid of the cards, soak up the loss and hope for better—and more appropriate—luck in the next round. My problem was that it was far too late to fold. I knew Hoffmann was going tobe behind the murder of his wife, regardless of whether it was me or someone else who did it.
    I realised where my steps had taken me, and stared into the light.
    She had her hair pulled up in a bun, the way my mum used to. She was nodding and smiling at customers who spoke to her. Most of them probably knew she was deaf and dumb. Wishing her “Happy Christmas,” thanking her. The typical pleasantries that people say to each other.
    Five times the usual fee. A never-ending Christmas holiday.

CHAPTER 3
    I rented a room in a small hotel right opposite the Hoffmanns’ apartment in Bygdøy Allé. The plan was to watch what the wife did for a couple of days, see if she went anywhere while her husband was at work, or if she had any visitors. Not that I was interested in finding out who her lover was. My aim was simply to work out the best, least risky time to strike, when she was on her own at home and wasn’t likely to be disturbed.
    The room turned out to be the perfect vantage point not only to watch Corina Hoffmann coming and going, but also to see what she got up to inside the apartment. Evidently they never bothered to close the curtains. Most people don’t, in acity where there’s no sun to shut out, and people outside are more interested in getting into the warm somewhere than they are in standing and staring.
    For the first few hours I didn’t see anyone in there. Just a living room bathed in light. The Hoffmanns weren’t exactly sparing with the electricity. The furniture wasn’t English; it looked more French, especially the strange sofa in the middle of the room that only had a back at one end. Presumably it was what the French call a
chaise longue
which—unless my French teacher was having me on—means “long chair.” Ornate, asymmetrical carving, with some sort of nature-inspired upholstery. Rococo, according to my mum’s art history books, but it could just as well have been knocked together by a local craftsman and painted in the traditional style out in the Norwegian countryside for all I knew. Either way, it wasn’t the sort of furniture someone young would choose, so I guess it was Hoffmann’s ex-wife’s. Pine had said Hoffmann threw her out the year she turned fifty.
Because
she’d turned fifty. And because their son had movedout and she no longer filled any function in his home. And—according to Pine—he had said all this to her face, and she had accepted it. Along with a flat by the sea and a cheque for one and a half million kroner.
    To pass the time I took out the sheets of paper I’d been writing on. It was really just a form of scribbling. Well, that’s not quite true, I suppose it was more of a letter. A letter to someone whose identity I didn’t know. Actually, maybe I did. But I’m not exactly much good at writing, so there were a lot of mistakes, a lot that had to be cut. To be honest, a lot of paper and ink had gone into every word that I’d kept. And things went so slowly this time that I eventually just put the paper down, lit a cigarette and did some daydreaming instead.
    Like I said, I’d never seen any