Free The Snowman by Jo Nesbø, Don Bartlett Page B

at the edge of the forest by Ekeberg restaurant. The functionalist restaurant built between the wars had once been Oslo’s pride and joy, towering above the town on the precipitous ridge face in the east. But customers had stopped taking the long trip up from the city centre to the forest, the place had become unprofitable, it had declined and become a peeling shack for superannuated dance fiends, middle-aged drinkers and lonely souls on the lookout for other lonely souls. In the end, they had closed the restaurant. Harry had always liked driving up here above the town’s layer of yellow exhaust fumes and running along the network of paths on the steep terrain that provided a challenge and caused the lactic acid to burn in his muscles. He had liked to stop by the crumbling beauty of a restaurant, sitting on the rain-wet, overgrown terrace overlooking the town that had once been his, but which was now emotionally bankrupt, all assets transferred, an ex-lover with transferred affections.
    The town lay below in a hollow with ridges on all sides and a sole retreat via the fjord. Geologists said that Oslo was a dead volcanic crater. And on evenings like this Harry could imagine that the town’s lights were perforations in the earth’s surface with the glowing lava shining through. From Holmenkollen ski jump, which lay like an illuminated white comma on the ridge on the opposite side of the town, he tried to work out where Rakel’s house was.
    He thought about the letter. And the telephone call he had just received from Skarre about the signals transmitted by Birte’s missing phone. His heart was beating slower now, pumping blood and transmitting calm, regular signals to the brain that there was still life. Like a mobile phone to a base station. Heart, Harry thought. Signal. The letter. It was a sick thought. So why hadn’t he already dismissed it? Why was he already calculating how long it would take him to run to the car, drive to Hoff and check which of them was sicker?
    Rakel stood by the kitchen window looking across her property to the spruce trees blocking her view of the neighbours. At a local residents’ meeting she had suggested that some of the trees might be cut down to let in more light, but the unspoken absence of enthusiasm that greeted her was so obvious that she didn’t even ask for a vote. The spruce trees prevented people from looking in and that was how they liked it on Holmenkollen Ridge. The snow still lay on the ground high above the town where BMWs and Volvos gently threaded their way up through the bends on their way home to electric garage doors and dinners on tables, prepared by fitness-centre-slim housewives taking their career breaks with just a little help from nannies.
    Even through the solid floors of the wooden house she had inherited from her father, Rakel could hear the music from Oleg’s room on the first floor. Led Zeppelin and the Who. When she had been eleven years old, it would have been unthinkable to listen to music from her parents’ generation. But Oleg had been given these CDs by Harry and he played them with genuine love.
    She thought about how thin Harry had become, how he had shrunk. Just like her memory of him. It was almost frightening how someone you have been intimate with can fade and vanish. Or perhaps that was why; you had been so close to each other that afterwards, when you no longer were, it seemed unreal, like a dream you soon forget because it had happened only in your head. Perhaps that was why it had been a shock to see him again. To embrace him, to smell his aroma, to hear his voice, not on the telephone, but from a mouth with those strangely soft lips in that hard and ever more lined face of his. To look into those blue eyes with the gleam that varied in intensity as he talked. Just like before.
    Yet she was glad it was over, that she had put it behind her. That this man had become a person with whom she would not share her future, a person who would not