Blood on Snow by Jo Nesbø

someone. That he was a murderer. Jean Valjean was a good man, so the person he had killed must have deserved it. Yes, that was it. Jean Valjean had killed someone who had done something bad,and had to pay for it. The business about stealing bread just annoyed me. So I rewrote the story. I made it better.
    So: Jean Valjean was a deadly killer who was wanted throughout France. And he was in love with Fantine, the poor prostitute. So in love that he was willing to do anything for her. Everything he did for her, he did out of love, madness, devotion, not to save his own immortal soul or out of love for his fellow man. He submitted to beauty. Yes, that’s what he did. Submitted to and obeyed the beauty of this ruined, sick, dying prostitute with no teeth or hair. He saw beauty where no one could imagine it. And for that reason it was his alone. And he was its.
    It took ten days for the fever to start to ease. For me it had felt like one day, and when I came back Mum sat on the edge of the bed, stroked my forehead, sobbed gently and told me how close it had been.
    I told her I had been to a place that I wanted to go back to.
    “No, you mustn’t say that, Olav, darling!”
    I could see what she was thinking. Because she had a place that she always wanted to go back to, where she would travel in a bottle.
    “But I don’t want to die, Mummy. I just want to make up stories.”

CHAPTER 18
    I was up on my knees, both hands on the pistol.
    I saw Pine and Hoffmann spin round, almost in slow motion.
    I shot Pine in the back, speeding up his pirouette. Two shots. White feathers leaped from his brown jacket, dancing in the air like snow. He had pulled his pistol free of his jacket and fired, but didn’t manage to raise his arm. The bullets hit the floor and walls and ricocheted noisily around the stone room. From the corner of my eye I saw that Klein had got the lid off the coffin next to me, but hadn’t yet climbed out. Perhaps he wasn’t keen on the hail of bullets. The Dane had emerged from his coffin and had taken aimat Hoffmann, but because they’d put his coffin at the end of the crypt I was in his line of fire right behind Hoffmann. I jerked back at the same time as I swung my pistol towards Hoffmann. But he was surprisingly quick. He threw himself over the coffin, right at the young girl, and took her down with him as he landed by the long wall of the crypt, behind the rest of his family who were standing there like pillars of salt, mouths agape.
    Pine was lying on the floor under the table Benjamin Hoffmann’s coffin was on, his pistol hand sticking stiffly away from his body, like a dipstick he’d lost control of. It swung round, firing out bullets at random. Blood and spinal fluid on the concrete floor. A Glock pistol. Plenty of bullets. Just a matter of time before one of them hit someone. I put another bullet in Pine. And kicked at Klein’s coffin as I raised the pistol towards Hoffmann again. I got him in the sights. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall and the young girl in his lap, holding her tight with one arm around her skinny ribcage. With the other hand he was aiming a pistol directly at her temple. She was sitting completelystill, just looking at me with big brown eyes, not blinking.
    “Erik…” It was the sister. She was looking at her brother, but talking to her husband.
    And the man with the half bald head finally reacted. He took an unsteady step towards his brother-in-law.
    “Don’t come any closer, Erik,” Hoffmann said. “These men aren’t after you.”
    But Erik didn’t stop, he carried on stumbling forward, like a zombie.
    “Fuck!” the Dane yelled, shaking and hitting his pistol. Obviously not working. A bullet had probably jammed. Bloody amateur.
    “Erik!” Hoffmann repeated, aiming the pistol at his brother-in-law.
    The father held out his arms towards his daughter. Moistened his lips. “Bettine…”
    Hoffmann fired. The brother-in-law staggered back. Hit in