Fear Not

Christmas 2008

The Invisible Child

It was the twentieth night of December.

One of those Saturday nights that promise more than they can deliver had imperceptibly slipped into the last Sunday of Advent. People were still moving from bar to bar and from pub to pub as they cursed the heavy snow that had moved in across Oslo without warning just a few hours earlier. The temperature had then crept up to three degrees above zero, and all that remained of the festive atmosphere was grey slush on top of the mounds of snow, and lakes of dirty water as it melted.

A child was standing motionless in the middle of Stortingsgate.

She was barefoot.

‘When the nights grow long,’ she sang quietly, ‘and the cold sets in…’

Her nightdress was pale lemon with embroidered ladybirds on the yoke. The legs beneath the nightdress were as thin as chopsticks, and her feet seemed to be planted in the slush. The skinny, half-naked child was so out of place in the image of the city at night that no one had noticed her yet. The Christmas party season was approaching its climax, and everybody was preoccupied with their own affairs. A half-naked, singing child on one of the city streets in the middle of the night became completely invisible, just like in one of the books the little girl had at home, where exciting animals from Africa were cunningly hidden in drawings of Norwegian landscapes, concealed among bark and foliage, almost impossible to spot because they didn’t belong there.

‘… then the little mummy mouse says…’

Everyone was out to have a good time, and a few actually were enjoying themselves. Outside Langgaard’s jewellers a woman was leaning against the security grille over the window as she stared at her own vomit. Undigested, deep red raspberry jam oozed among the remains of spare ribs and fried beef, slush and sand. A gang of young lads whooped at her and sang dirty songs from the other side of the street, their voices off-key. They were dragging a wasted mate with them past the National Theatre, ignoring the fact that he had lost a shoe. Outside every bar smokers stood huddled against the cold. A salty wind from the fjord blew along the streets, blending with the smell of tobacco smoke, alcohol and cheap perfume; the smell of a Norwegian city night just before Christmas.

But nobody noticed the girl singing so quietly on the street, right in the middle of two shining silver tramlines.

‘And the mummy mouse… and the mummy mouse… and the mummy mouse…’

She couldn’t get any further.

The Number 19 tram set off from the stop further up towards the Palace. Like a sleigh as heavy as lead, full of people who didn’t really know where they were going, it accelerated slowly down the gentle slope towards the Hotel Continental. Some people hardly even knew where they had been. They were asleep. Others were rambling about going on somewhere, having a few more drinks, chatting up a few more girls before it was too late. Others simply stared blankly out into the thick warmth that settled on the windows like a damp, grey veil.

A man by the entrance to the Theatre Café looked up from the expensive shoes he had chosen for the evening in the hope that the snow wouldn’t come just yet. His feet were soaked, and the marks left by the road salt would be difficult to get rid of when his shoes had finally dried out.

He was the first to see the child.

His mouth opened to shout a warning. Before he had chance to take a breath, he was pushed hard in the back, and it was all he could do to stay on his feet.

‘Kristiane! Kristiane!’

A woman in national costume stumbled in her full skirt. Instinctively she grabbed at the man with the ruined Enzo Poli shoes. He hadn’t properly regained his balance, and both of them fell over.

‘Kristiane,’ the woman sobbed, trying to get up.

The warning bell on the tram was clanging frantically.

The driver, who was coming to the end of an exhausting double shift, had finally spotted the girl. There was a screech of metal on metal as he slammed the brakes on as hard as he could on the wet, icy rails.

‘… and the little mummy mouse says to all her babies,’ sang Kristiane.

The tram was only six metres away from her and travelling at the same speed when the mother finally managed to get to her feet. She hurled herself into the road with her skirt half ripped off, stumbled but managed to stay upright, and screamed again:

‘Kristiane!’

Afterwards someone would say that the man who appeared from nowhere resembled Batman. In which case it was due to his wide coat. He was, in fact, both short and slightly overweight, and bald into the bargain. Since everyone’s eyes were on the child and the despairing mother, no one really saw how the man darted in front of the screeching tram with surprising agility. Without slowing down he scooped up the child with one arm. He had just cleared the line when the tram slid over the almost invisible footprints left by the child and stopped. A torn-off scrap of the dark coat flapped gently in the breeze, caught on the tram’s front bumper.

The city let out a sigh of relief.

No cars could be heard; screams and laughter died away. The bell on the tram stopped clanging. The tram driver sat motionless, his hands on his head and his eyes staring. Even the little girl’s mother stood there frozen to the spot a metre or so away from her, her party outfit ruined, her arms dangling helplessly by her sides.

‘… if nobody gets caught in the trap,’ Kristiane continued to warble, without looking at the man carrying her.

Someone tentatively began to applaud. Others joined in. The applause grew, and it was as if the woman in national costume suddenly woke up.

‘Sweetheart!’ she screamed. She dashed up to her daughter, grabbed her and clutched her to her breast. ‘You must never do anything like that again! You must promise me that you’ll never, ever do anything like that again!’

Johanne Vik raised one arm without thinking and without slackening her grip on her child. The man’s expression didn’t change as her hand struck his cheek. Without paying any attention to the livid red marks left by her fingers, he gave a wry smile, inclined his head in a slow, deep, old-fashioned bow, then turned away and disappeared.

‘… but steady as you go, soon everyone will be celebrating Christmas,’ the child sang.

‘Is it all right? Is everything OK?’

More and more people were pouring out of the Hotel Continental, all talking at the same time. Everyone realized that something had happened, but only a few knew what it was. Some were talking about someone being run over, others about an attempt to kidnap little Kristiane, the bride’s sister’s unusual child.

‘Oh, sweetheart,’ her mother wept. ‘You mustn’t do this kind of thing!’

‘The lady was dead,’ said Kristiane. ‘I’m cold.’

‘Of course you are!’

The mother set off towards the hotel, taking small, tentative steps to avoid slipping. The bride was standing in the doorway. Her strapless bodice was strewn with shimmering white sequins. Heavy silk fell in luxurious folds over her slender hips and down to her feet, where a pair of beaded shoes were still equally white and shimmering. The main focus of the evening was, as she should be, beautiful and perfectly made up, with her hair just as elegantly swept up as it had been when the reception started several hours earlier. The glow on the skin of her bare shoulders suggested she had been on her honeymoon in advance. She didn’t even look cold.

‘Are you OK?’ she smiled, caressing her niece’s cheek as her sister walked past.

‘Auntie,’ said Kristiane. ‘Auntie Bride! You look so beautiful!’

‘Which is more than you can say about your mother,’ muttered the bride.

Only Kristiane heard her. Johanne didn’t even glance at her sister. She hurried inside, into the warmth. She wanted to get to her room, crawl under the covers with her daughter, perhaps a bath, a hot bath. Her child was freezing cold and must be thawed out as soon as possible. She staggered across the floor, struggling to breathe. Even though Kristiane, who was almost fourteen, hardly weighed more than a ten-year-old, her mother was almost collapsing beneath her weight. In addition, her skirt was hanging down so much that she stood on it with every other step. Her hair, which she had wound around her head in a braid, had fallen down. The style had been Adam’s suggestion, and she had been sufficiently stressed in the hours before the wedding to take his advice. Just a few minutes into the celebrations she had felt like Brünnhilde in a production from the interwar years.

A well-built man came running down the stairs.

‘What’s happened? What… is she OK? Are you OK?’

Adam Stubo tried to stop his wife. She hissed at him through gritted teeth:

‘Stupid idea! We’re ten minutes from home by taxi. Ten minutes!’

‘What’s a stupid idea? What are we…? Let me carry her, Johanne. You’re dress is torn and it would be…’

‘It’s not a dress! It’s a national costume! It’s called a kirtle! And it was your idea! This ghastly hairstyle and this hotel and bringing Kristiane with us. She could have died!’

She was overcome by tears, and slowly let go of her daughter. The man with the strong arms gently took the child, and together they walked up the stairs. Neither of them said anything. Kristiane carried on singing in her thin, pure voice:

‘Hey hop fallerallera, when Christmas comes let every child rejoice!’

‘She’s asleep, Johanne. The doctor said she was fine. There’s no point in going home now. It’s…’

The man glanced over at the silent TV screen, where the hotel was still welcoming Mr & Mrs Stubo.

‘Quarter past three. It’s almost half past three in the morning, Johanne.’

‘I want to go home.’

‘But…’

‘We should never have agreed to this. Kristiane’s too young…’

‘She’s almost fourteen,’ said Adam, rubbing his face. ‘It’s hardly irresponsible to let a fourteen-year-old come to her aunt’s wedding. It was actually incredibly generous of your sister to pay for a suite and a babysitter.’

‘Some babysitter!’ She spat out the words in a mist of saliva.

‘Albertine fell asleep,’ Adam said wearily. ‘She lay down on the sofa when Kristiane finally went to sleep. What else was she supposed to do? That was why she was here, Johanne. Kristiane knows Albertine well. We can’t expect her to do any more than she was asked to do. She brought Kristiane up here after dessert. This was an accident, a sheer accident. You have to accept that.’

‘An accident? Is it an accident when a child like… like Kristiane manages to get out through a locked door without anyone noticing? When the babysitter – who, incidentally, Kristiane knows so well that she still refers to her as ‘the lady’ – is sleeping so heavily that Kristiane thought she was dead? When the child starts wandering around a hotel full of people? People who were drunk! And then wanders out into the street in the middle of the night without proper clothes and without any shoes and without…’

She put her hands to her face, sobbing. Adam got up from his chair and sat down heavily beside her on the bed.

‘Can’t we go to bed?’ he said quietly. ‘Things will seem so much better in the morning. I mean, it all worked out fine after all. Let’s be grateful for that. Let’s get some sleep.’

She didn’t respond. Her hunched back trembled every time she breathed.

‘Mummy?’

Johanne quickly wiped her face and turned to her daughter with a big smile.

‘Yes, sweetheart?’

‘Sometimes I’m completely invisible.’

From the corridor came the sound of giggling and laughter. Someone was shouting ‘cheers!’ and a male voice wanted to know where the ice machine was.

Johanne lay down cautiously on the bed. She slowly caressed the girl’s thin, fair hair, and put her mouth close to Kristiane’s ear.

‘Not to me, Kristiane. You are never invisible to me.’

‘Oh yes I am,’ said Kristiane with a little laugh. ‘To you, too. I am the invisible child.’

And before her mother had time to protest – as the town-hall clock proclaimed that yet another half-hour had passed on this twentieth day of December – Kristiane fell into a deep sleep.

A Room with a View

As the town-hall clock struck half past three, he decided that enough was enough.

He stood by the window, looking out at what there was to see.

Which wasn’t a great deal.

Ten hours earlier heavy snow had fallen on Oslo, making the city clean and light. In the empty silence of his office he had immersed himself so deeply in his work that he hadn’t noticed the change in the weather. The city lay dark and formless below him. Although it wasn’t raining, the air was so damp that water was trickling down the window panes. Akershus Fortress was discernible only as a vague shadow on the other side of the harbour. The grey, indolent crests of the waves were the only indication that the black expanse between Rådhuskaia and Nesodden, all the way out to Hurumlandet, was actually made up of fjord and sea.

But the lights were beautiful, street lamps and lanterns transformed into shimmering little stars through the wet glass.

Everything lay ready on his desk.

The Christmas presents.

A Caribbean cruise for his brother and sister and their families. On one of the company’s own ships, admittedly, but it was still a generous gift.

A piece of jewellery for his mother, who would turn sixty-nine on Christmas Eve; she never tired of diamonds.

A remote-controlled helicopter and a new snowboard for his son.

Nothing for Rolf, as they always agreed and invariably regretted.

And 20,000 kroner to charitable causes.

That was everything.

The personal gifts were quickly dealt with. It had taken less than half an hour with his regular jeweller in Amsterdam in November, a walk around a mall in Boston the same week, plus twenty minutes on the computer this evening to produce an attractive gift card for his brother and sister’s families. There were plenty of tempting pictures of Martinique and Aruba on the shipping company’s home pages. He was pleased with the result, and he managed to make it personal by lining up the entire family along the railing on board MS Princess Ingrid Alexandra at sunset.

It was the charitable donations that had taken time.

Marcus Koll Junior put his heart and soul into each donation. Dispensing generous gifts was his Christmas present to himself. It always did him good, and reminded him of his grandfather. The old man, who had been the closest thing to God that little Marcus could imagine, had once asked him the following question with a smile. A man helps ten other men who are in need, and takes the credit for doing so. A different man helps one other man in need, but keeps it to himself and gets no thanks for what he has done. Which of the two is the better person?

The ten-year-old replied that it was the first man, and had to defend his position. Marcus stuck to his guns for a long time: the intention of the donor was not the issue. It was the result that mattered. Helping ten people was better than helping one. The old man had stubbornly argued for the opposite point of view – until, at the age of fifteen, the boy changed his mind. Then his grandfather did the same. The argument continued until Marcus Koll Senior died at the age of ninety-three, leaving behind a well-organized life in a pale green folder with the logo of the Norwegian state railway on it. The documents showed that he had given away 20 per cent of everything he had earned throughout his adult life. Not 10 per cent, as was traditional within the labour movement, but 20. A fifth of his grandfather’s earnings had been a gift to those worse off than himself.

Marcus looked through all the documents on the day his grandfather was buried. It was a journey in time through the darkest events of the twentieth century. He found receipts for deposits made to needy widows before the war and Jewish children after it. To refugees from Hungary in 1956. Save the Children had received a small amount each month since 1959, and his grandfather had made decent donations after most disasters from 1920 onwards: shipwrecks in the years between the wars, the famine in Biafra, right up to the tsunami in Southeast Asia. He died on New Year’s Eve 2004, only five days after the tidal wave, but had managed to get to the post office in Tøyen in order to send 5,000 kroner to Médecins Sans Frontières.

As a train driver with a wife who stayed at home, five children and eventually fourteen grandchildren, it couldn’t have been particularly easy to nibble away at his wage packet and later his pension, year after year. But he never took any credit for it. The money had been paid at different post offices, always far enough away from his apartment in Vålerenga so that he wouldn’t be recognized. The name of the donor was always false, but the handwriting gave him away.

His grandfather hadn’t helped one person, he had helped thousands.

Just like his grandson.

Marcus Koll Junior’s contributions to charity and research were of quite a different order from those of the old man. As was to be expected. He earned more in just a few weeks than his grandfather had in his entire life. But he imagined the joy of giving was just the same for both of them, and that there was no real answer to his grandfather’s riddle. Sharing what you had was not a question of being noble for either man. It was simply about being contented with one’s own life. And just as his grandfather had allowed himself the small vanity of letting his grandson know what he had done, when it was all over and the discussion had literally died, Marcus Junior also kept a detailed record of his donations. They were made with great discretion, through various channels which made it impossible for the recipient to identify the real donor. The money was a gift from Marcus himself, not from one of his companies; it was declared and taxed before he passed it on via circuitous routes that only he knew about. And nobody would know, apart from the youngest Marcus Koll, eight years old in two months, who would find out one day, when he turned thirty-five, what his father had been doing every night up to the last Sunday in Advent.

It usually brought him a sense of calm; the calmness he needed.

His heart was beating too fast.

He walked back and forth across the room. It wasn’t particularly large, and there was no evidence of the money generated behind the old oak desk. Marcus Koll’s office was located on Aker Brygge, which had been an impressive address a couple of financial crises ago, but the area was no longer so desirable. Which suited Marcus very well.

He clutched his chest and tried to breathe slowly. His lungs had a will of their own, gasping for air much too quickly, his breathing much too shallow. It was as if he had been nailed to the floor. It was impossible to move: he was dying. His fingertips prickled. His lips were numb, and the stiffness in his mouth made his tongue feel huge and dry. He had to breathe through his nose, but his nose was blocked, he had stopped breathing, he would be dead in a few seconds.

He saw himself in a way that he had read about, a sensation he had experienced so many times before. He was standing outside his body, leaning slightly at an angle with something approaching a bird’s-eye view, and he could see a stocky, 44-year-old man with bags under his eyes. He could smell his own fear.

A hot flush surged through his body, making it impossible for him to shake it off. He staggered over to the desk and grabbed a paper bag from the top drawer. He gathered the top loosely between his right thumb and forefinger, put the bag to his lips and breathed as deeply and evenly as he could.

The metallic taste didn’t diminish.

He tossed the bag aside and rested his forehead against the window.

Not ill. He wasn’t ill. His heart was OK, even though he had a stabbing pain beneath his left shoulder blade and in his arm – his left arm now that he thought about it. No, no pain.

Don’t think about it.

Breathe.

His hands felt as if they were covered in tiny crawling insects and he didn’t even dare to shake them off. His head felt light and alien, as if it didn’t belong to him. His thoughts were whirling so fast that he couldn’t catch them. Fragmented images and disjointed phrases kept spinning by on a carousel that made him sway. He tried to think of a recipe, a recipe for pizza, pizza with feta cheese and broccoli, an American pizza he had made thousands of times and could no longer remember.

Not ill. Not a brain haemorrhage. Not feeling sick. He was perfectly fine.

Perhaps it was cancer. He felt a stabbing pain in his right side, the side where his liver was, his pancreas, the side for cancer and disease and death.

Slowly he opened his eyes. A small part of his mind knew that he was fine. He must focus on that, not on forgotten recipes and death. The dampness on the window pane left its ice-cold impression on his forehead, and the tears began to flow.

It was becoming easier to breathe. His pulse, which had been pounding at his eardrums, against his breastbone, in the tips of his fingers and painfully hard in his groin, was slowing down.

Oslo still lay there on the other side of the window, outside this room with its view of the harbour, the fjord and the islands. Marcus Koll had just donated a fortune to charitable causes and he really wanted to feel the warmth that the last Sunday in Advent always gave him: the contented feeling of happiness because of Christmas, because of the gifts, because his son was looking forward to the holiday, because his mother was still alive, quarrelsome and impossible, because he had done the right thing, and because everything was as it should be. He wanted to think about his life which was not yet over, if he could just manage to calm his breathing.

Calm down. Just calm down.

He caught sight of someone out walking, one of the few people still wandering around down there on the quayside, apparently with no goal or purpose. It was almost five o’clock on Sunday morning. All the bars were closed. The man down below was alone. He was staggering from side to side, having difficulty staying upright on the slippery surface. Suddenly he took a couple of despairing steps off at an angle, grabbed hold of his hat as if it were a fixed point, and disappeared over the quayside.

Suddenly everything was different. His heart was beating normally once more. The pressure on his chest eased. Marcus Koll straightened his back and focused. It was as if his mucus membranes suddenly became slippery and smooth; his tongue shrank; his mouth was lubricated as it was meant to be. His thoughts gradually fell into line, one following the other in a logical sequence. He quickly worked out how long it would take him to get out of the office, down the stairs and over to the edge of the quayside. Before he had finished he could see people running to the scene. Five or six men, including a Securitas guard, yelling so loudly that he could hear them from where he was standing, five storeys above them and behind a triple-glazed window. The uniformed man was already clambering down the side of the quay.

Marcus Koll turned away and decided to go home.

Only now did he realize how tired he was.

If he hurried he might manage three hours’ sleep before the boy demanded his attention. It was Sunday, after all, and it would soon be Christmas. Presumably some of the snow that had fallen yesterday would still be lying on the hills around the city. They could go out. Skiing, perhaps, if they went far enough into Marka.

The last thing Marcus Koll did before leaving was to open the little jar of white, oval tablets in the top drawer. They were probably past their best-before date. It was such a long time ago. He tipped one of them into the palm of his hand. A moment later he put it back, screwed on the lid and locked the drawer.

It was over. For now.

The sirens were already approaching.

‘Are the police on their way? Is that them? Has someone called an ambulance? Those sirens are the police, for God’s sake! Call an ambulance! Give me a hand here!’

The security guard had one arm over the edge of the quayside. One foot was resting on a slippery crossbar no more than half a metre above the surface of the water. The other was dangling back and forth in a desperate attempt to keep the heavy body balanced.

‘Grab hold of me! Get hold of my jacket!

A young lad lay down on his stomach in the slush and seized the guard’s sleeves with both hands. His eyes were shining. He would be eighteen in a couple of months, but was blessed with dark stubble that made it possible for him to go from bar to bar all night without any questions being asked. He was broke, and had mostly stuck to finishing the dregs of other people’s beer. Right now he felt stone-cold sober.

‘That’s not him,’ he panted, getting a firmer grip. ‘The guy who fell in is further out.’

‘What? What the hell are you talking about?’

The guard stared at the body he was desperately trying to haul out of the water. He had a good grip on the collar, but the body inside the clothes was lifeless and as heavy as lead in the water, with the hood pulled up and fastened.

‘Help,’ someone yelled in the dark water further out. ‘Help! I…’

The cry died away.

The boy with the stubble let go of the guard.

‘You’ll have to hang on yourself!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll get the other one!’

He stood up, kicked off his shoes, pulled off his padded jacket and dived into the dark water without hesitation. When he came up he was in the exact spot where he had seen the drunken man splashing around.

‘Were there two of them? Did two people fall in? Did you see? Did anyone see?’

The guard was still hanging on with one arm over the quayside, bellowing. His other hand was clutching something that was definitely a body: a head facing away from him, two arms and a dark jacket. It was just so heavy. So bloody heavy. His arms were aching and he had no feeling in his fingers.

He didn’t let go.

The young man who had just jumped in was gasping for air. The first paralyzing shock of the cold water had given way to an agonising pain so fierce that his lungs were threatening to go on strike. He was treading water so frenetically that half his body was above the surface. Beneath him he could see nothing but a dark, colourless depth of water.

‘There!’ shouted an out-of-breath police officer from the quay.

The boy turned around and made a grab. He couldn’t actually see anything. It was more of a reflex action. His fingers closed around something and he pulled. The half-drowned drunk broke the surface of the water with a roar, as if he had already started screaming underwater. His rescuer had a firm hold on his hair. The drunk tried to wrench himself free and clamber on top of the younger man at the same time. Both of them disappeared. When they came up a few seconds later, the older man was lying on his back, his arms and legs outstretched on the water. He screamed with pain as his rescuer refused to let go of his hair, and, in fact, clutched it more tightly as he wound a rope four times around his other arm, without considering where it had come from.

‘Have you got it?’ shouted the police officer up above. ‘Can you hold on?’

The boy tried to answer, but ended up with a mouthful of water. He managed to give a sign with the arm that was attached to the rope.

‘Pull,’ he groaned almost inaudibly, swallowing even more water.

Never in his life had he imagined that the cold could be so intense. The water seared its way into every pore. Needles of ice pierced him all over. His temples felt as if someone were trying to push them into his brain, and it seemed as if his sinuses were packed with ice. He could no longer feel his hands, and for one moment of pure, sheer terror he thought his testicles had disappeared. His crotch was on fire, a paradoxical warmth spreading from his balls and out into his thighs.

He was finding it more difficult to move. He knew his eyes were dead. Somebody must have unscrewed them. There was nothing but wetness, cold and darkness. It couldn’t have been more than a minute since he dived in, but it occurred to him that this was the last thing he would ever experience, losing his balls in the depths of the December sea, because of some fucking idiot on Aker Brygge.

Suddenly he was out.

He was lying on the ground on a blanket that looked as if it were made of aluminium foil, and somebody was trying to remove his clothes.

He held on tight to his trousers.

‘Take it easy,’ said a police officer, presumably the same one that had thrown the rope. ‘We need to get those wet clothes off. The paramedics will soon be here to look after you.’

‘My balls,’ whimpered the boy. ‘And my fingers, they…’

He turned away. Two police officers – the place was crawling with them now – were just laying a person down on the ground a few metres away. Streams of water poured from the figure as they struggled, but he didn’t move. As soon as they had put him down, an ambulance driver came running over with a trolley. The older police officer pushed him away when he tried to help move the body again.

‘He’s dead. Look after the living.’

‘Fuck,’ groaned the boy.

‘He’s dead? He didn’t make it?’ ‘He’s not the one you saved,’ the police officer said calmly, still struggling to undress the boy. ‘I think it was too late for him. Your man is over there. The one who’s put his hat back on.’

He grinned and shook his head. His movements were rapid, and soon the reckless young man realized his sexual organs were still intact. He gave in and allowed himself to be undressed. Three police officers were busy cordoning off the area with red-and-white tape, and one of them placed a tarpaulin over the body on the trolley.

‘H-h-h-hey you there,’ said the man in the hat, moving closer. ‘W-w-w-w-were you trying to sc-sc-scalp me?’

He was still fully dressed. Someone had placed a woollen blanket around his shoulders. Not only were his teeth chattering, but his entire body was shaking, droplets of water cascading from the clumps of hair sticking out from beneath his sodden hat.

The boy on the ground didn’t remember any hat.

‘I s-s-s-s-saved my hat,’ the other man grinned. ‘I h-h-h-held on to it as hard as I could.’

‘Shift yourself,’ the police officer said wearily. ‘Over there!’

He pointed to an ambulance parked at an angle on the quayside, casting its blue flashing light across the melee of uniformed figures.

‘Who-who-who’s that?’ asked the man, completely unmoved as he gazed with interest at the lifeless form on the stretcher. ‘I d-d-d-didn’t s-s-s-see h-h-h-him in the wa-wa-water.’

‘That’s nothing to do with… Arne! Arne, can you take this guy over to the ambulance? He’s pushing his luck here.’

The shivering man was led away to the ambulance with a certain amount of brute force.

‘He could at least have thanked you,’ said the police officer, waving over one of the paramedics. ‘It was pretty brave, jumping in like that. Not everybody would have had the courage. Over here!’

He stood up and placed his hand on the shoulder of a man in a high-visibility yellow uniform.

‘Look after our hero,’ he said with a smile. ‘He needs warming up.’

‘I’ll just go and get another stretcher. Two seconds and…’

The boy shook his head and tried to get to his feet. He was naked beneath a thick blanket, and without his even noticing somebody had pushed his feet into a pair of trainers that were far too big. The paramedic grabbed him under one arm as he swayed.

‘I’m fine,’ mumbled the boy, pulling the blanket more tightly around him. ‘I’m just so fucking cold.’

‘I think we’d be better with a stretcher,’ the paramedic said doubtfully. ‘It’s just…’

‘No.’

The boy wobbled towards the ambulance. When he had almost reached the edge of the quay, he stopped for a moment. The salty gusts of wind blowing in from the fjord suddenly made him realize how close he had been to death. He was on the point of bursting into tears. Embarrassed, he pulled the blanket over his eyes. He had to take a little sidestep, and tripped over the edge of the blanket. In order to keep his balance, he grabbed hold of the nearest thing. It was the tarpaulin covering the body on the stretcher.

Things took a definite turn for the worse.

It couldn’t have been more than five minutes since he came ambling along Aker Brygge, alone, fed up and with no money for a taxi home. During those paltry 300 seconds he had swum in icy water, been certain he was going to die, saved a man from drowning, been praised by the police and almost frozen to death. In that same period of time, two fully equipped ambulances and three police cars containing a total of six uniformed officers had arrived at the scene. Which was almost incomprehensible, given the brief time span. In addition, as soon as he was pulled up on to the quay and the police had taken responsibility for the lifeless body he had held in a grip of iron, the security guard had called in no less than five of his colleagues from the nearby office buildings.

In the midst of this chaotic crowd of uniformed men and one lone woman, some thirty members of the public were milling about, all in various states of intoxication and all paying little attention to the temporary police cordon. Those who were still around in the early hours of this Sunday morning were drawn to the dramatic scene like moths to a flame. And since no more than five minutes had passed since Aker Brygge had been more or less deserted, the police had yet to grasp the connection between the security guard, the young swimmer, the drunk in the hat and the dead body that two of them had struggled to haul out of the water. The police had their procedures, of course, but it was dark, it was chaos, and the most important thing had been to get the drunk out of the water alive. For that reason, and perhaps also because one of their own had managed to fall in while they were heaving the body out, only two officers had taken a closer look at the corpse. One of them, a young man, was bent over and throwing up ten or fifteen metres beyond the cordon without anyone even noticing.

The other had covered the body and was quietly explaining the situation to a detective inspector when the young man with the stubble lost his balance due to sheer exhaustion.

He fell backwards. His blanket started to slip off. For a little while he was more preoccupied with not revealing his nakedness than regaining his balance, so he grabbed hold of the tarpaulin with both hands as he fell. It had got stuck on the far side of the trolley, which started to tip over. For a moment it looked as if the weight of the corpse would be enough to prevent total disaster, but the boy didn’t let go. He went down wearing nothing but the oversized trainers. The back of his head struck the icy ground with an audible thud. The pain made him cry out, then he lost consciousness for a couple of seconds.

When he came round, he noticed the smell first of all.

Something was lying on top of him, something that was suffocating him, taking his breath away with the stench of rotten flesh and sewers. Someone screamed and it occurred to him that he ought to open his eyes. The corpse was lying in perfect symmetry with his own body, as if in a kiss of death, and he found himself staring straight into the opening in the hood.

There was something in there that from a purely logical point of view had to be a head.

After all, it was inside the hood of a padded jacket.

In the police report which would be written some hours later it would emerge that for the time being the police were assuming that the body had been in the water for approximately one month. In the same report they would stress the fact that in all probability it was the clothes that were holding the body together, by and large. From a purely clinical point of view the corpse would be described as ‘badly swollen, partly disintegrating’, whereupon the writer of the report briefly pointed out that it was impossible to establish with any certainty whether it had been a man or a woman. However, the clothes might possibly indicate the former.

The boy, who had spent the whole of Saturday night trailing round Oslo in his quest for girls and booze, and who had thrown himself fearlessly into the fjord in the middle of winter to save another person’s life, passed out once more. This time he remained unconscious for a considerable period; he didn’t come round until he was lying in a bed in the hospital at Ullevål, his mother sitting beside him. He started to cry as soon as he saw her. The poor lad sobbed like a child, clinging tightly to her warm, safe embrace as he tried to suppress the memory of the last thing he had seen before the blessed darkness had borne him away from the sea monster.

From a hole in the formless mass, right where there had once been an eye, a fish had suddenly poked its head out. A tiny shimmering silver fish, no bigger than an anchovy, with black eyes and quivering fins; they had stared at one another, the boy and the fish, until it suddenly flicked its body and fell from the dead head, straight into the boy’s bellowing mouth.

On the Way to a Friend’s House

‘From now on we shall always have fish on Christmas Eve!’

Adam Stubo picked up the cod’s head from his plate with his fingers before sucking out the eye and chewing thoughtfully. His mother-in-law, who was sitting opposite him at the oval dining table, pursed her lips and turned her head away, raising her eyebrows. Her husband had already had a little too much to drink. He pointed at his son-in-law with both his knife and fork.

‘That’s my boy! Real men eat every bit of the fish.’

‘Actually,’ his wife began, ‘spare ribs on Christmas Eve has been a family tradition since-’

‘I’m sorry, Mum.’ Johanne put down her knife and fork. ‘It was a mistake, OK? A stupid and completely insignificant mistake. Can’t you just forget the spare ribs? The Middle East is in flames and we’re in the middle of a major financial crisis and you’re sitting here making a song and dance about the fact that Strøm-Larsen lost my sodding order. Everybody around this table likes cod, Mum, it’s not such a bloody-’

‘I hardly think it’s necessary to use language like that, dear. And I have to say that in my personal experience I have never known Strøm-Larsen to forget one single thing. I’ve been shopping with this city’s best butcher since before you were born, and I’ve-’

‘Mum! Can’t you just…?’ Johanne closed her mouth, forced a smile and looked at her younger daughter Ragnhild. She was almost five, and was looking with curiosity at her father, who was eating the other eye.

‘Is that good, Daddy?’

‘Mmm… strange and interesting and delicious.’

‘What does it taste like?’

‘It tastes like a fish’s eye,’ said Kristiane, hitting her plate rhythmically with her fork. ‘Obviously. Fish’s eye, high in the sky.’

‘Don’t do that,’ her grandmother said gently. ‘Be a good girl for Granny and stop making that noise.’

‘Some people think fish is delicious,’ said Ragnhild. ‘And some fish think people are delicious. That’s only fair. Sharks, for example. Do sharks celebrate Christmas Eve, Daddy? Do they have little girls for dinner before they open their presents?’

She laughed uproariously.

‘It isn’t only sharks that eat people,’ said Kristiane.

As usual her little sister’s sense of humour had completely passed her by. Miraculously, she seemed untouched by the events of Saturday, apart from the odd sniffle and a blocked nose. It was more difficult to say how the whole thing might have affected her mentally. So far she hadn’t said a single word about any of it. The only minor change Johanne thought she perceived was that in the four days since her sister’s wedding Kristiane repeated texts learned by heart for longer periods than usual. Characteristically, Adam was looking at things from a positive point of view: the child was also in a phase where she asked more questions, reasoned more. She was curious, not merely repetitive.

‘Many species of fish have a varied diet,’ she said slowly, her gaze fixed on some distant point. ‘Under the right conditions they would feed extensively on human flesh, given the opportunity.’

‘I think we could talk about something a little more pleasant,’ said her grandmother. ‘Now, what are you really, really hoping to find among your presents after dinner?’

‘You know perfectly well, Granny. We gave you our lists ages ago. That dead man they pulled out of the harbour at the weekend, that night when Mummy got so cross with me because I-’

‘Granny’s right,’ Johanne said quickly when Adam didn’t notice the pleading look she had given him. ‘It’s Christmas Eve and I think we could talk about something-’

‘He’d been in the water for a really, really long time,’ said Kristiane, swallowing before she piled more food on to her fork. ‘It was in the paper. That means you swell up. Like a great big balloon. This is because the human body is made of salt, and draws the water surrounding it. This is called osmosis. When two fluids with different osmotic pressures, or salt balance, are separated by a thin membrane, for example the cell walls in a human being, the water seeps through in order to even out…’

Her grandmother had turned noticeably paler. Her grandfather’s mouth was hanging open, and he closed it with an audible smack.

‘That kid,’ he grinned. ‘You’re quite a girl, Kristiane.’

‘Most impressive,’ said Adam calmly, wiping his mouth with a large white serviette. ‘But your grandmother and your mother are absolutely right. Death isn’t exactly a topic-’

‘Hang on, Adam,’ his father-in-law broke in. ‘Does that mean a human corpse swells up even more in fresh water than it does in the sea?’

‘What’s a corpse, Mummy?’

Ragnhild had picked up the cod’s head from her father’s plate. She slipped it over her nose, peering out through the empty eye sockets.

‘Booooo!’ she said, laughing. ‘What’s a corpse?’

‘A corpse is a dead person,’ said Kristiane. ‘And when dead people are in the sea for a long time they get eaten. By crabs and fish.’

‘And sharks,’ her little sister interjected. ‘Mostly sharks.’

‘Had the corpse been eaten?’ asked her grandfather with obvious interest. ‘It didn’t mention that in the paper. Is this one of your cases? Tell us all about it, Adam! As I understood from Aftenposten today, they still haven’t identified the body.’

‘No, it’s a case for the Oslo police, and all I know is what’s been in the paper. As you know I work for NCIS.’ He gave his father-in-law a strained smile. ‘We rarely help the Oslo police with anything other than technical matters. And circulating information on missing persons. International co-operation. That kind of thing. As I’ve told you several times in the past, in fact. Time for a change of subject, OK?’

Adam got up decisively and started clearing the table.

Silence fell. Only the sound of plates and cutlery being loaded into the dishwasher mingled with the muted voices of the Sølvguttene boys’ choir on television in the apartment below. The remains of the fish made Johanne feel slightly sick as she scraped the plates into the bin.

As usual she had gone to buy the spare ribs at the last minute. When she got to the butcher’s at ten o’clock that morning, they had already sold out. Nobody had any knowledge of the order she could swear she had phoned through two weeks earlier. The staff were full of apologies and expressed the greatest sympathy for the unfortunate situation that had arisen, but they had sold out of ribs. The owner couldn’t help coming out with a faint reproach: Christmas dinner should be purchased in good time, well before Christmas Eve itself. The thought of serving her mother cheap ribs from Rimi or Maxi on Christmas Eve had seemed even more alien than the idea of serving cod.

‘I should have bought that cheap pork from Rimi and sworn blind it came from Strøm-Larsen,’ she whispered to Adam as she put the last plate in the dishwasher. ‘She’s hardly eaten a thing!’

‘That’s her loss,’ he whispered back. ‘Calm down.’

‘Could we perhaps open a window?’ her mother suddenly said in a loud voice. ‘Of course, I’m not criticising the cod, it’s tasty and nutritious, but, after all, the smell of freshly cooked spare ribs is the smell of Christmas itself.’

‘Well, we’ll soon have the smell of coffee,’ Adam said cheerfully. ‘We’ll have coffee with the dessert, shall we?’

The choir had reached ‘Härlig är jorden’ in the apartment downstairs. Ragnhild joined in, and ran over to the TV to switch it on.

‘No TV, Ragnhild!’

Johanne tried to smile as she looked across from the open-plan kitchen.

‘We don’t watch TV on Christmas Eve, you know that. And definitely not while we’re eating.’

‘Personally, I think it’s an excellent idea,’ her mother protested. ‘After all, this meal is far too early in any case. It’s so lovely to watch Sølvguttene first. Those wonderful voices bring so much of Christmas. Boy sopranos are the most beautiful sound I can think of. Come along, Ragnhild, Granny will help you find the right channel.’

A red wine glass fell on the kitchen floor with a crash.

‘Nothing to worry about, everything’s fine!’ Adam shouted with a laugh.

Johanne dashed to the bathroom.

‘The soul weighs twenty-one grams,’ Kristiane announced.

‘Does it indeed?’

Her grandfather filled his schnapps glass to the brim for the fifth time.

‘Yes,’ Kristiane said seriously. ‘When you die, you become twenty-one grams lighter. You can’t see it. Can’t see can’t be can’t see can’t be.’

‘See it?’

‘The soul. You can’t see it leaving.’

‘Kristiane,’ Adam said from the kitchen. ‘I really mean it this time. Enough. We are not having any more talk about death and destruction. Besides which, that stuff about the weight of the soul is just nonsense. There’s no such thing as a soul in any case. It’s just a religious concept. Would you like some tea and honey with your pudding?’

‘Dam-di-rum-ram,’ Kristiane said in a monotone.

‘Oh no…’ Johanne was back from the bathroom. She crouched down beside her daughter. ‘Look at me, Kristiane. Look at me.’

She gently cupped the girl’s chin.

‘Adam asked if you wanted tea with honey. Would you like that?’

‘Dam-di-rum-ram.’

‘I don’t think it’s a very good idea to give the child tea when she’s in that… state. Come to Granny and we’ll listen to those clever boys. Come here, sweetheart.’

Adam was standing in the kitchen where his mother-in-law couldn’t see him. He waved to Johanne, silently forming words with his lips: ‘Take no notice. Pretend you can’t hear her.’

‘Dam-di-rum-ram,’ said Kristiane.

‘You can have whatever you want,’ Johanne whispered. ‘You can have the very thing you want most of all.’

She knew it didn’t help at all. Kristiane made her own decisions about where she was. During the course of fourteen years with this child so close to her that she sometimes found it difficult to tell which was her and which was her daughter, she still had no idea what made her go from one state to the other. They had learned simple patterns, Johanne and Adam and Isak, Kristiane’s father. Routines and habits; foods to be avoided and food that had a particular effect on her; drugs they had tried before agreeing they were unsuitable… specific paths had been cleared that made life with Kristiane simpler.

But for the most part her daughter was in a world of her own, following her own map and making her own incomprehensible choices.

‘Mummy loves you all the way to the stars and back,’ Johanne whispered quietly, her lips tickling her daughter’s ear and making Kristiane smile.

‘Daddy’s coming,’ she said.

‘Yes, Daddy will be here soon. When he’s had dinner with Grandma and Granddad he’s coming to see his little girl.’

Kristiane’s face was completely expressionless. It looked as if her eyes were moving independently of one another, and it frightened Johanne. Usually they were just fixed on something no one else could see.

‘The lady was-’

‘Her name is Albertine,’ Johanne interrupted. ‘Albertine was asleep.’

‘It was so cold. I couldn’t find you, Mummy.’

‘But I found you. In the end.’

Johanne was so focused on the child that she hadn’t noticed her mother. She caught the scent first, a present from her sister that cost more than Johanne spent on cosmetics and personal hygiene in an entire year.

Go away, she tried to convey with every fibre of her being. She arched her back and made a tiny movement to the side, still crouching beside her daughter.

‘Kristiane,’ the child’s grandmother said in her calm, firm voice. ‘Come to Granny, please. First of all we are going to open the red present with the pink ribbon on it. It’s for you. Inside is a box with a lid. When you open the box and lift the lid, you will find a microscope. Which is just what you wanted. Now take my hand…’

Johanne was still sitting with her hands resting on Kristiane’s narrow thighs.

‘Microscope,’ said Kristiane. ‘From the Greek micro, small, and skopein, to look at.’

‘Quite right,’ said her grandmother. ‘Come along.’

Sølvguttene were no longer singing. Ragnhild switched off the television, as did the neighbours down below. The aroma of coffee drifted from the kitchen, and the world outside was silent in the way it was only on this night of the year, when the churches had emptied, the bells had fallen silent and no one was on the way to or from anything or anyone any longer.

Her grandmother’s long, slender hand crept into Kristiane’s.

‘Granny,’ the girl said with a smile. ‘I want my microscope.’

But her eyes were fixed on Johanne. Her gaze was steady, and remained so until she went over to the sofa with her grandmother to open a Christmas present, the contents of which she already knew.

Johanne got stiffly to her feet and remained where she was.

An unaccustomed shiver of happiness ran through her body, only to disappear before she really had time to work out what it was.

For Eva Karin Lysgaard, happiness was a solid concept.

Happiness was her faith in Jesus Christ. Every day since she had met the Saviour while walking in the forest when she was sixteen she had experienced the joyous feeling of His presence. She spoke to Him often, and frequently received answers. Even in times of sorrow – and, of course, a woman of sixty had lived through such times – Jesus was with her, giving consolation and support and endless love.

It was almost eleven o’clock on the night of His birthday.

Eva Karin Lysgaard had an agreement with Jesus. A pact with her husband Erik and with her Lord. When life had been at its darkest for both her and Erik, they had found a way out of all their difficulties. It was not the simplest way. It had taken time to find it and it must always remain a matter between her, Erik and the Saviour.

Now she was here, on her way.

The rain blew in off Vågen, tasting of salt. Behind many of the windows in the picturesque development of small houses a soft light was still visible; Christmas Eve was not over for most people. She tripped on a paving stone as she turned the corner, but quickly regained her balance. Her glasses were wet and misted over, and it was difficult to see clearly. It didn’t matter. This was her path, and she had walked this way so many times before.

Taken by surprise, she stopped for a moment.

She could hear footsteps behind her.

She had already been walking for over twenty minutes and hadn’t seen another living soul apart from a stray cat and the sea birds, screaming so faintly above Vågen.

‘Bishop Lysgaard?’

She turned towards the voice.

‘Yes?’ she said in an enquiring tone, and smiled.

There was something about his voice, something strange. Harsh, perhaps. Different, anyway.

‘Who are you? Is there something I can help you with?’

When he struck her with the knife she realized she had been wrong. During the sixteen seconds it took her from the moment of realizing that she was going to die until she was no longer alive, she offered no resistance. She said nothing, and allowed herself to fall to the ground with the strange man leaning over her, the man with the knife; he was of no relevance to her. She was the one who had been wrong. During all these years, when she had thought Jesus was by her side in her vain belief that He had forgiven and accepted, she had been living a lie that was impossible to live with in the future. It was too big.

And at the moment of her death, when there was no longer anything to see and all perception of existence was gone, she wondered what He who has eternal life had been unable to accept. Had it been the lie or the sin?

It all came down to the same thing, she thought.

And died.

‘Baby Jesus can’t possibly be two thousand and eight years old,’ said Ragnhild with a yawn. ‘Nobody lives for ever!’

‘No,’ said Adam. ‘He actually died when he was quite young. We celebrate Christmas because that’s when he was born.’

‘In that case we should have balloons. It’s not a proper birthday without balloons. Do you think baby Jesus liked balloons?’

‘I don’t think they had balloons in those days. But it’s time you got some sleep, my girl. It’s almost one o’clock in the morning! It’s already Christmas Day, in fact.’

‘My personal best,’ Ragnhild rejoiced. ‘Is one o’clock later than eleven o’clock?’

Adam nodded and tucked her in for the fourth time in two hours.

‘Time to sleep.’

‘Why is one later than eleven when one is a little number and eleven is a big number? Can I stay up this late on New Year’s Eve?’

‘We’ll see. Now go to sleep.’

He kissed her on the nose and headed for the door.

‘Daddy…’

‘Go to sleep. Daddy’s going to get cross if you don’t try. Do you understand?’

He flicked the switch and the room was filled with a reddish glow from a string of small red hearts around one window.

‘But Daddy, just one more thing.’

‘What?’

‘I think it’s a bit stupid for Kristiane to have that microscope. She’ll only break it.’

‘Perhaps. But that was what she wanted.’

‘Why didn’t I get a micro-?’

‘Ragnhild! I’m getting really cross now! Settle down at once…’

The rustling of the duvet made him break off.

‘Night night, Daddy. Love you.’

Adam smiled and pulled the door to.

‘I love you, too. See you in the morning.’

He crept along the corridor. Kristiane had fallen asleep long ago, but the sound of a feather falling on the floor could wake her. As he passed her door he held his breath. Then he gave a start.

The telephone? At one o’clock on Christmas morning?

In two steps he had reached the living-room door in order to silence the ringing as quickly as possible. Fortunately, Johanne had got there before him. She was engaged in a quiet conversation next to the Christmas tree, which was looking somewhat the worse for wear after Jack – Kristiane’s yellowy-brown dog – had gone berserk and knocked it over in a tangle of garlands and tree lights. Johanne’s mother had wrapped up a bone and put it at the bottom of the pile of presents, so you could hardly blame the dog.

‘Here he is,’ Johanne said, handing Adam the phone.

She had the resigned expression that always felt like a punch in the stomach. He spread his arms apologetically before taking the phone.

‘Stubo.’

Johanne wandered aimlessly around the room, picking up a toy here, a book there. Putting them down where they didn’t belong. Moving a Christmas rose and spilling soil on the tablecloth. Then she ambled into the kitchen, but couldn’t bring herself to start emptying the dishwasher in order to load it with the dirty dishes piled everywhere. She was exhausted, and decided to finish off the last drop of red wine left in the bottle her sister had given her for Christmas. According to her mother it had cost more than 3,000 kroner. Talk about casting pearls before swine. Johanne topped up her glass from a box of cheap Italian wine on the worktop.

‘OK,’ she heard Adam say. ‘See you in the morning. Pick me up at six.’

He ended the call.

‘Six,’ Johanne groaned. ‘When we have the chance of a lie-in for once?’

She took a swig of her wine and sat down on the sofa.

‘We’ve had a really lovely evening,’ said Adam, flopping down beside her. ‘Your father was both pleasant and enervating, as usual. Your mother… your mother…’

‘Was vile to me, kind to Ragnhild, good with Kristiane and patronizing to you. And utterly charming to Isak when he finally turned up. As usual. Who’s dead?’

‘What?’

‘Work.’

Johanne nodded at the mobile on the coffee table.

‘Oh. It’s a difficult one.’

‘When they ring you on Christmas Eve, I assume it’s going to be difficult. What’s it about?’

Adam took her glass and raised it to his lips with such fervour that he had a red moustache when he put it down. Then he hesitated, looked at his watch and hurried into the kitchen. Johanne heard him spitting into the sink.

‘I might have to drive tomorrow,’ he said, wiping his mouth with his sleeve as he came back. ‘In which case I need to be able to think clearly.’

‘You always think clearly, don’t you?’

He smiled and sat down heavily by her side. The coffee table was still covered in wrapping paper, glasses, coffee cups and empty soft drinks bottles. With a degree of care you might not expect from such a big man, he slid his feet among the whole lot and crossed his legs.

‘Eva Karin Lysgaard,’ he said, sipping at a bottle of Farris mineral water he had brought from the kitchen. ‘She’s dead.’

‘Eva Karin Lysgaard? The bishop? Bishop Lysgaard?’

He nodded.

‘How? I mean, if they’ve called you it has to involve a crime? Has she been murdered? Has Bishop Lysgaard been murdered? How? And when?’

Adam had another drink and rubbed his face, as if that might sober him up.

‘I don’t know much at all. It must have happened just…’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Just over two hours ago. Killed with a knife, that’s all I know. Well, we can’t say for certain that she was stabbed to death, but so far the cause of death appears to be a stab wound in the area of the heart. And she was murdered in the open air. Outdoors. I don’t know much more. The Hordaland police wouldn’t normally ask for our help in a case like this, at least not so soon. But this is going to… Anyway, Sigmund Berli and I are going over there in the morning.’

Johanne sat up and put down her wine glass. After a while she pushed it resolutely further on to the table.

‘Jesus,’ was all she could think of to say.

They sat in silence. Johanne felt a cold draught on her skin, giving her goosebumps. Eva Karin Lysgaard. The well-known, gentle bishop of Bjørgvin. Murdered. On Christmas Eve. She tried to follow a train of thought through to the end, but her brain just wasn’t working properly.

Only the previous Saturday – the day of that wretched wedding – there had been a profile of Bishop Lysgaard covering four pages of the Dagbladet supplement. Johanne hadn’t had time to read a newspaper that day, but she bought it so that she could save the article for later. She still hadn’t got round to reading it.

Suddenly she reached over the arm of the sofa and rummaged around in the magazine rack.

‘Here,’ she said, placing the newspaper on her knee. ‘A BISHOP WITHOUT A WHIP.’

Adam put his arm around her and they both leaned over the article. The cover photo was a close-up of a woman growing old. Her eyes were almond-shaped, but sloped down slightly. This made her look sorrowful, even when she was smiling. The irises were dark brown, almost black, with strong, dark eyebrows and lashes that looked unusually long, in spite of the wrinkles surrounding her eyes.

‘Quite good-looking,’ Adam mumbled, wanting to turn the page.

‘Not good-looking exactly. Special. Different. She looks just as nice as she seemed to be when… when she was alive.’

Johanne stared and stared. Adam gave an enormous yawn.

‘Sorry,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘But I think I’d better try and get some sleep. We really ought to tidy up before we go to bed, because otherwise you’ll have to do it all tomorrow, and that might-’

‘Outdoors,’ said Johanne. ‘Did you say she was killed outdoors? On Christmas Eve?’

‘Yes. Miraculously it was a police patrol that found her. One of the few that were out tonight. She was lying on the street. From that point of view we have a major advantage. For once it seems as if the press haven’t got wind of a murder within two minutes. And there won’t be any papers tomorrow.’

‘The Internet press is just as bad,’ Johanne muttered, still gazing at the photo of the bishop of Bjørgvin. ‘Worse, actually. And then there’s the radio and the TV. With a case like this it doesn’t make any difference if everybody’s on holiday. Anyway, why are you involved? Surely the Bergen police are perfectly capable of handling something like this?’

Adam smiled.

NCIS certainly wasn’t what it had been. From being a kind of elite group of investigators known as the Murder Squad almost fifty years ago, the National Criminal Investigation Service had gradually developed into a much larger organization with the highest level of competence in tactical and particularly technical investigation. Gradually, the organization was allocated more and more tasks of a significantly greater import, both nationally and internationally. To the public, they were mainly visible as a support network for the police service in major cases, particularly murders, right up to the turn of the millennium. But as times changed, so too did criminal activity. In 2005 NCIS had effectively been scrapped in order to rise again as an organization called The National Unit for the Prevention of Organized and Other Serious Crime. The objections to the new name were vociferous. The acronym would have been TNUFPOOAOSC, which a number of people pointed out sounded like an onomatopoeic expression for vomiting. The members of the team won in the end, and NCIS was able to look forward to its golden jubilee in February 2009 under its old familiar name.

But the work they did had changed, and it remained that way in accordance with the name that had been rejected.

The police forces around the country had become bigger, stronger and much more competent. The great paradox when it came to combating crime was that an increase in the amount and professionalism of criminality led to a larger and more skilled police force. As more murder cases occurred in even the smaller police districts, the officers involved became more skilful. They could manage on their own. At least when it came to the tactical aspects of the investigation.

Adam put his mouth right next to Johanne’s ear.

‘Because I’m so good.’

She smiled in spite of herself.

‘And besides, there’s going to be a hell of a lot of fuss about this one,’ he added with a yawn. ‘I assume they’re pretty worried over there. And if they want me, they can have me.’

He stood up and looked despondently around the room.

‘Shall we tackle the worst of it?’

Johanne shook her head.

‘What was she doing outside?’ she said slowly.

‘What?’

‘What on earth was she doing out on the streets, so late on Christmas Eve?’

‘No idea. On the way to a friend’s, maybe.’

‘But-’

‘Johanne. It’s late. I know virtually nothing about this case, apart from the fact that I have to set off for Bergen far too early in the morning. It’s pointless to speculate based on the minimal information we have. You know that perfectly well. Let’s tidy up and go to bed.’

‘Bed,’ said Johanne, getting to her feet.

She went into the kitchen, picked up a bottle of mineral water and decided to take the newspaper supplement to bed. She would deal with tomorrow when it arrived.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Adam when she suddenly stopped dead in the middle of the floor, seemingly incapable of moving one way or the other.

‘I just felt so terribly… sad.’

She looked up, her expression surprised.

‘It’s natural for you to feel sad,’ said Adam, placing his hand on her cheek.

‘Not really. I’m not usually affected… I don’t allow myself to be affected by your cases. But the bishop always seemed so… so good, somehow.’

Adam smiled and kissed her gently.

‘If there’s one thing you and I both know,’ he said, taking her hands, ‘it’s that good people are murdered too. Come on.’

It was a sleepless night. When the day finally claimed her, Johanne had read the article about Bishop Eva Karin Lysgaard so many times she knew it off by heart.

And it didn’t help in the slightest.

A Man

Nothing helped.

Nothing would ever help. They had offered to stay with him, of course. As if they were what he needed. As if life would be bearable again for one moment if strangers sat with him, in her armchair, the shabby, yellow armchair at an angle in front of the TV, a half-finished piece of knitting in a basket beside it.

They had asked if he had someone.

Once upon a time he had someone. A few hours ago he had Eva Karin. All his life he had had Eva Karin, and now he had no one.

Your son, they reminded him. They asked about his son. Did he want to tell his son or should they take care of things? That was how she put it, the woman who sat down on Eva Karin’s chair. Take care of things. As if it was a thing. As if there was anything else to take care of.

He felt no pain.

Pain was something that hurt. Pain hurt. All he could feel was the absence of existence. An empty space that made him look at his own hands as if they belonged to someone else. He clenched his right hand so tightly that the nails dug into his palm. There was no pain anywhere, no existence, just a huge, colourless nothingness where Eva Karin no longer existed. Even God had abandoned him, he realized now.

Time had stopped.

Her watch had stopped. She shook her wrist crossly and realized she was much later than she wanted to be. She had to get the children inside and in their best clothes without Kristiane playing up.

She went over to the window.

In the courtyard in front of the house, behind the fence on Hauges Vei, Ragnhild and Kristiane had scraped together enough rime frost to build the smallest snowman in the world. It was no more than ten centimetres high, but even from the second floor Johanne could see that it had been kitted out with a yellow oak-leaf hat and a mouth of tiny pebbles.

Johanne folded her arms and leaned on the window frame. As usual Ragnhild was directing operations and taking care of the construction. Kristiane was standing up straight, completely motionless. Although Johanne couldn’t make out the words, she could hear Ragnhild chattering away as if addressing the most spellbound audience in the world.

Perhaps she was.

Johanne smiled as Ragnhild suddenly got up from her small work of art and began to sing with great enthusiasm. Now Johanne could hear her voice inside the apartment. Å leva det er å elska rang out over the neighbourhood. Wherever had she learned that particular hymn? At any rate, it had most likely been Kristiane’s idea to sing it once the snowman was complete.

A figure caught Johanne’s attention. It looked like a man, and she wasn’t sure where he had come from. Nor did it seem as if he was sure where he was going. For some reason this made her uneasy. Of course, there were youngsters in the area who turned up out of nowhere from time to time, but if she saw adults walking the streets they were always heading somewhere with a purpose. She recognized most of them after living for so many years in this little side road.

The man was strolling along with his hands in his pockets. His hat was pulled down over his eyes and his tightly knotted scarf obscured the lower half of his face. But there was something about the way he walked that told her he wasn’t all that young.

Johanne shook her right arm again. Her watch still wasn’t working. It must be the battery. They were probably running late. She was about to turn away from the window when the man stopped by the bins.

By their bins.

Johanne felt the fear racing inside her, as always when she didn’t have full control over Kristiane. For a moment she stood there, not knowing whether she should run downstairs or stay where she was and see what happened. Without making a conscious decision, she stayed where she was.

Perhaps he called out to them.

At any rate, both girls looked at him, and Ragnhild’s gestures indicated that she was talking to him. He made some reply and waved her over. Neither of the girls went towards him. Instead, Ragnhild took a step back.

Johanne ran.

She raced through the apartment, out of the living room, along the hallway, out through the extension that had become the girls’ playroom, she ran, half-stumbled down the stairs and hurtled out into the cold wearing neither shoes nor slippers.

‘Kristiane!’ she shouted, trying to inject a calm, everyday tone into her voice. ‘Ragnhild! Are you there?’

As she came around the corner of the house she saw them.

Ragnhild was once again crouching down in front of the little snowman. Kristiane had spotted a bird or a plane. She was gazing up at the sky and without taking any notice of her mother she stuck out her tongue to catch the feather-light flakes that had begun to fall.

There was no sign of the man.

‘Mummy,’ Ragnhild said sternly. ‘You are not allowed outside in your stocking feet!’

Johanne looked down at her feet.

‘Goodness me,’ she said with a smile. ‘What a silly mummy you have!’

Ragnhild laughed and pointed at her with a toy spade.

Kristiane carried on catching snowflakes.

‘Who was that man?’ Johanne asked casually.

‘What man?’

Ragnhild licked the snot trickling from her nose.

‘The man who was talking to you. The man who-’

‘Don’t know him,’ said Ragnhild. ‘Look what a brilliant snowman we’ve made! And without any snow!’

‘It’s lovely. But now it’s time to come in. We’re going to a Christmas party, remember. What did he ask you?’

‘Dam-di-rum-ram,’ said Kristiane, smiling up at the sky.

‘Nothing,’ said Ragnhild. ‘Are we going to a party? Is Daddy coming?’

‘No, he’s in Bergen, isn’t he? But that man must have said something. I mean, I saw him-’

‘He just asked if we’d had a nice Christmas,’ said Ragnhild. ‘Aren’t your feet cold, Mummy?’

‘Yes, they are. Come along, both of you. Time to go inside.’

Amazingly, Kristiane started to walk. Johanne took Ragnhild by the hand and followed her.

‘And what did you tell him?’

‘I said it was absolutely the best Christmas ever – with bells on!’

‘Did he want… did he try to get you to go over to him?’

They reached the gravel path and walked along by the building towards the stairs. Kristiane was talking to herself, but seemed happy and contented.

‘Yeees…’

Ragnhild was taking her time.

‘But we know we mustn’t go up to strangers. Or go off with them or anything like that.’

‘Quite right. Good girl.’

Johanne’s toes felt as if they were about to drop off with the cold. She pulled a face as she left the gravel and put her foot on the ice-cold stone staircase.

‘He asked if I’d got any nice Christmas presents,’ Kristiane said suddenly as she opened the outside door, which had blown shut behind Johanne. ‘Just me, not Ragnhild.’

‘Oh? And how do you know he was only asking you?’

‘Because he said so. He said-’

All three of them stopped. Kristiane had that strange look on her face, as if it were turned inward, as if she were searching an archive inside her head.

‘What are you doing out here, girls? Did you have a nice Christmas? And what about you, Kristiane, did you get anything nice?’

Her voice was expressionless, and was followed by complete silence.

‘I see,’ said Johanne, forcing a smile. ‘That was nice of him. And now we need to put on our best clothes as quickly as we can. We’re going to see Grandma and Grandpa, Kristiane. Daddy will soon be here to pick us up.’

‘Oh…’

Ragnhild immediately sat down and started whining.

‘Why does Kristiane get to have her daddy when I can’t have mine?’

‘Your daddy has to work, I told you that. And you always have a lovely time when we go to see Kristiane’s grandma and grandad.’

‘Don’t want to. Don’t want to!’

The child pulled back and started to slide down the stairs head first, her arms stretched out in front of her as if she were swimming. Johanne grabbed her arm and pulled her up, slightly more firmly than she had intended. Ragnhild let out a howl.

The only explanation Johanne could cope with was that Kristiane must have remembered wrongly.

‘I want my own daddy!’ Ragnhild screamed, trying to twist free of her mother’s grasp. ‘Daddy! My daddy! Not Kristiane’s stupid daddy!’

‘We do not say that kind of thing in our family,’ Johanne hissed, nudging Kristiane in through the door while dragging the little one behind her. ‘Do you understand?’

Ragnhild immediately stopped crying, stunned by her mother’s fury. She started laughing instead.

But Johanne had only one thought in her head: Kristiane never, ever remembered wrongly.

‘We all make mistakes. Don’t get so cross about it.’

Marcus Koll Junior smiled at his son, who was studying the instructions.

‘Come over here and we can work it out together.’

The boy sulked for a little while, but eventually stomped over and threw the little booklet on the coffee table. The helicopter was still on the dining table, only half-completed.

‘Rolf promised to help me,’ the boy said, pushing out his lower lip.

‘You know what Rolf’s clients can be like.’

‘They’re rich, stupid and they have ugly dogs.’

His father tried to hide a smile.

‘Yes, well. When an English bulldog decides that her puppies are coming out on Christmas Day, then out they have to come. Ugly or not.’

‘Rolf says that bulldogs have been totally overbred. That they can’t even feed properly. Shouldn’t be allowed. Animal cruelty.’

‘I couldn’t agree more. Now, let’s have a look at this!’

He picked up the booklet and leafed through it as he walked over to the imposing dining table. He had had the instructions translated by an authorized technical translator in order to make it easier for the boy to build the helicopter. The model in front of him was so big that he now regretted his purchase. Even if the boy had an unusual talent for mechanics, this was a little over the top. The man in the shop in Boston had stressed that the toy wasn’t suitable for children under the age of sixteen, not least because it weighed almost a kilo and would constitute a risk to anyone around it the moment it rose in the air.

‘Hm,’ said his father, scratching his stubble. ‘I don’t really get it.’

‘It’s the rotor blades that are the problem,’ said the boy. ‘Look here, Dad!’

The eager fingers tried to put the blades together, but something wasn’t right. The boy soon gave up and put down the pieces with a groan. His father ruffled his hair.

‘A bit more patience, little Marcus. Patience! That’s what you should have got for Christmas.’

‘I’ve told you, don’t call me that. And I’m not doing anything wrong, there’s something the matter with the instructions.’

Marcus Koll pulled out a chair, sat down and took his glasses out of his breast pocket. The boy sat down beside him, keen to help. The blonde, curly hair tickled Marcus’s face as his son leaned over the manual. A faint smell of soap and ginger biscuits made him smile, and he had to stop himself from hugging the boy, holding him close, feeling the glorious warmth of the son he had managed to have in spite of everything and everyone.

‘You’re the best thing in my life,’ he said slowly.

‘Yeah, yeah. What does this mean? Insert the longest batten through the unhooked ring at the bottom of rotor blade four. I mean, there is only one batten! So why does it say the longest? And where’s the stupid ring?’

The December sun filled the room with a calm, white light. Outside it was cold and clear. The trees were completely covered with crystals of rime frost, as if they had been sprayed for Christmas. Through the white branches beyond the window he could see the Oslo fjord far below, grey-blue and still, with no sign of life. The crackling of the open fire blended with the snores of two English setters, curled up together in a big basket by the door. The smell of turkey was beginning to drift in from the kitchen, a tradition Rolf had insisted on when he eventually allowed himself to be persuaded to move in five years ago.

Marcus Koll Junior lived his life in a cliché, and he loved it.

When his father died nine years ago, just before Marcus Junior turned thirty-five, he had at first refused to accept his inheritance. Georg Koll had given his son nothing but a good name. That name was his grandfather’s, and it had enabled him to pretend that his father didn’t exist when he was a boy and couldn’t understand why Daddy couldn’t come and see him at the weekend now and again. When he was just twelve years old he began to realize that his mother didn’t even receive the maintenance to which she was entitled for him and his two younger siblings. When he turned fifteen he resolved never again to speak to the man responsible for his existence. His father had wasted his opportunity. That was the year Marcus received 100 kroner in a card on his birthday, sent through the post and with five words in handwriting he knew wasn’t his father’s. He became a grown man when he put the money in the envelope and sent the whole lot back.

Severing all contact was surprisingly easy. They saw each other so rarely that the two or three visits per year were easy to avoid. Emotionally, he had chosen a different father: Marcus Koll Senior. When he was able to grasp the fact that his real father simply didn’t want to be a father and would never change, he felt relieved. Liberated. Free to move on to something better.

And he didn’t want his inheritance. Which was considerable.

Georg Koll had made a lot of money in property in the sixties and seventies. The majority of his fortune had been moved to other, much safer arenas in plenty of time before the crash in the housing market during the last financial crisis of the twentieth century. When it came to looking after his money he more than made up for his great inadequacies as a father and provider. Unlike others, he had used the yuppie era to secure his investments rather than risking them for short-term gain.

When Georg Koll died he left behind a medium-sized cruise-ship company, six centrally located and extremely well-maintained properties, plus a skilfully compiled share portfolio which had provided the majority of his very respectable income for the past five years. Death had obviously surprised him. He was only fifty-eight years old, slim and apparently fit when he had a massive heart attack on his way home from the office one day in late August. Since he hadn’t remarried, and no will was found, his entire estate went to Marcus Koll, his sister Anine and his younger brother Mathias.

Marcus wanted no part of it.

When he was fifteen years old he had returned his father’s blood money, and when he was twenty he had received a reply. His father had heard that his son was a homosexual. Marcus had glanced through the letter and realized all too quickly what his father wanted. For one thing, he expressly dissociated himself from Marcus’s lifestyle, which was a not uncommon attitude in 1984. What was worse was that his father, who had never been well in with any God, went on to paint a picture of Marcus’s future along the lines of the blackest descriptions of Sodom and Gomorrah. He also reminded him of a new and dangerous plague from America, which affected only homosexual men. It led to an agonizing death, complete with boils, like the Black Death itself. Of course, Georg Koll didn’t believe this was a punishment from any higher power. No, this was Nature herself taking revenge. This fatal disease was a manifestation of natural selection; in a couple of generations people like him would have been eradicated. Unless he changed his ways. Life as a homosexual meant a life without a family, without security, without ties, obligations and the happiness that came with being a good member of society and someone who made a real contribution. Until his son realized this and could guarantee that he had seen the error of his ways, he was disinherited.

Since the obligatory bequest to his own children was a mere bagatelle in comparison to Georg Koll’s entire fortune, there was a reality behind this threat. It made no difference whatsoever to Marcus. He burned the letter and tried to forget the whole thing. And when the estate was divided up fifteen years later, in 1999, it turned out that his father, convinced of his own immortality, had omitted to make a will.

Marcus stuck stubbornly to his guns. He still wanted nothing to do with his father’s money.

He gave in only when his grandfather, who never mentioned Georg either, managed to convince Marcus that he was the only one of the three siblings capable of managing the family fortune in a professional way. His brother was a teacher, his sister an assistant in a bookshop. Marcus himself was an economist, and when both siblings insisted that the best thing would be to set up a new company with the combined assets of their father’s estate, with all three of them as joint owners and Marcus as director and administrator, he allowed himself to be persuaded.

‘Just look at it as a bloody good joke,’ Mathias had said with a grin. ‘The bastard did Mum and us out of money all his life, and now we can live very well on the proceeds he worked so hard to keep from us.’

It was ironic, Marcus had gradually come to accept. A splendid irony.

‘Dad,’ little Marcus said impatiently. ‘What does that say? What does it mean?’

His father smiled absently and dragged his gaze away from the ridge, the fjord and the white sky. He was feeling hungry.

‘Right,’ he said, fixing a tiny screw in place. ‘There, that’s the rotor finished. Then we do this… Do you want to do it?’

The boy nodded, and slotted in the four blades.

‘We did it, Dad! We did it! Can we go outside and fly it? Can we do it now?’

He picked up the remote control in one hand and the finished helicopter in the other, tentatively, as if he didn’t quite trust it not to fall apart.

‘It’s too cold. Much too cold. As I said yesterday, it could be weeks before we can take it outside.’

‘But Dad…’

‘You promised, Marcus. You promised not to go on about it. Why don’t you ring Rolf instead and ask if he’s coming home for our special lunch?’

The boy hesitated for a moment before putting everything down without a word. Suddenly he brightened up with a smile.

‘Granny and the others are here!’ he shouted, running out of the room.

The door slammed behind him. The sound rang in Marcus’s ears until once again only the faint snoring of the oblivious dogs and the crackling of the fire filled the enormous room. Marcus’s gaze rested on the fire, then swept around the room.

He really did live in a cliché.

The house in Åsen.

It was large, but set back from the road so that only the top floor was visible to passers-by. When he bought the house he had decided to remove the ridiculous wooden panelling on the outside, along with the turf roof and the portico in front of the garage, which bore the legend Home Sweet Home, roughly carved and with a dragon’s head at either end. Just when he was about to tackle the panelling, Rolf had entered his and young Marcus’s lives. Rolf had laughed until he cried when he saw the house in all its glory for the first time, and he refused to move in unless Marcus promised to keep the more eccentric and what one might call rustic elements.

‘We’re an extended family with a twist,’ Rolf would laugh.

A little bit richer than most, Marcus thought, but he said nothing.

Rolf wasn’t thinking about the money. He was thinking about their family life, with little Marcus and a wide circle of aunts and uncles and cousins, his grandmother and friends who came and went and were almost always at the house in Åsen; he was thinking about the dogs and the annual hunting trip in the autumn with friends, old friends, boys Marcus had grown up with and never lost contact with. Rolf always laughed so heartily at the happy, ordinary, trivial life they led.

Rolf was always so happy.

Everything had turned out the way Marcus had hoped.

He had even managed to use his father’s money for something good. His father had consigned him to oblivion and regarded him as a lost soul. By condemning his son’s future, Georg Koll had paradoxically given him a new one. The first, wild years lay behind him, and Marcus had managed to avoid the disease that had brutally taken so many of those he knew, in pain and embarrassment and often loneliness. He was deeply grateful for this, and when he burned the letter from his father he resolved that Georg Koll would be wrong. Utterly and emphatically wrong. Marcus would be what his father had never been: a man.

‘Dad!’

The boy came running into the room, his arms flung wide.

‘They’re all coming! Rolf said the bulldog had three puppies and everything was fine and he’s on his way home and he’s looking forward to-’

‘Good, good.’ Marcus laughed and got up to accompany the boy into the hallway. He could hear several cars in the courtyard; the guests were arriving.

He stopped in the doorway for a moment and looked around.

The doubt which had tormented and nagged him for several weeks had finally gone. He had a sharp instinct, and had made a fortune by following it. In the early summer of 2007 he had spent weeks fighting a strong urge to sell up and get out of the stock market. He had sat up night after night with analyses and reports, but the only sign he could see that something was wrong was the stagnation of the US property market. When the first downgrading of bonds linked to the unsafe sub-prime loans came later that summer, he made his decision overnight. Over a period of three months he cashed in more than a billion in US shares at a significant profit. A few months later he would wake in the middle of the night out of sheer relief. His fortune remained in the bank until interest rates began to fall.

Marcus Koll was now buying properties at a time when everything was cheap. When he sold them in a few years, the profit would be formidable.

He had to protect himself and his family. He had a right to do so. It was his duty.

Georg Koll had reached out from beyond the grave to try to destroy Marcus’s life once again, and he simply could not be allowed to do that.

‘May I?’

Adam Stubo nodded in the direction of a yellow armchair in front of the television. Erik Lysgaard showed no sign of reacting. He just sat there in a matching chair in a darker colour, staring straight ahead, his hands resting in his lap.

Only then did Adam notice the knitting and the long, almost invisible grey hairs stuck to the antimacassar on the back of the armchair. He pulled out a dining chair and sat on that instead.

He was breathing heavily. A slight hangover had been plaguing him since he got up at half past five, and he was thirsty. The flight from Gardermoen to Bergen had been anything but pleasant. True, the plane was almost empty, since there weren’t many people desperate to get from Oslo to Bergen at 7.25 on Christmas morning, but the turbulence had been a problem and he had had far too little sleep.

‘This is not a formal interview,’ he said, unable to come up with anything better. ‘We can do that later, down at the police station. When you’re…’

When you’re feeling better, he was about to say before he stopped himself.

The room was light and pleasant. It was neither modern nor old-fashioned. Some of the furniture was clearly well used, like the two wing-backed armchairs in front of the TV. The dining room also looked as if it had been furnished with items that had been inherited. The sofa, however, around the corner in the L-shaped living room, was deep and cream-coloured, with bright cushions. Adam had seen exactly the same one in a Bohus brochure that Kristiane absolutely insisted on reading in bed. Along one wall were bookshelves built around the window, full of titles indicating that the Lysgaards had a wide range of interests and a good knowledge of languages. A large volume with Cyrillic letters on the cover lay on the small table between the armchairs. The pictures hanging on the walls were so close together that it was difficult to get an impression of each individual work. The only one that immediately caught his attention was a copy of Henrik Sørensen’s Kristus, a blonde Messiah figure with his arms open wide. Actually, perhaps it wasn’t a copy. It looked genuine, and could be one of the artist’s many sketches for the original, which was in Lillestrøm Church.

The most striking item was a large Nativity crib on the sideboard. It had to be more than a metre wide and perhaps half a metre deep and tall. It was contained in a box with a glass front, like a tableau. The baby Jesus lay on a bed of straw among angels and little shepherds, sheep and the three wise men. A bulb shone inside the simple stable, so cleverly hidden that it looked as if Jesus had a halo.

‘It’s from Salzburg,’ said Erik Lysgaard, so unexpectedly that Adam jumped.

Then he fell silent again.

‘I didn’t mean to stare,’ said Adam, venturing a smile. ‘But it really is quite… enchanting.’

The widower looked up for the first time.

‘That’s what Eva Karin says. Enchanting, that’s what she always says about that crib.’

He made a small snorting sound as if he were trying to stop himself from crying. Adam edged his chair a little closer.

‘During the next few days,’ he said quietly, pausing to think for a moment. ‘During the next few days many people will tell you they know how you’re feeling. But very few actually do. Even if most people of our age…’

Adam had to be ten years younger than Erik Lysgaard.

‘… have experienced the loss of someone close, it’s completely different when a crime is involved. Not only has the person been snatched away all of a sudden, but you’re left with so many questions. A crime of this kind…’

I have no idea what kind of crime this is, he thought as he kept talking. Strictly speaking, nothing had been established so far.

‘… is a violation of far more people than the victim. It can squeeze the strength out of anyone. It’s-’

‘Excuse me.’

Erik’s son Lukas Lysgaard opened his mouth for the first time since he had shown Adam into the living room. He seemed tired and looked as if he had been crying, but was quite composed. So far he had stood in silence by the far window looking out over the garden. Now he frowned and moved a little closer.

‘I don’t really think my father needs consolation. Not from you, anyway, with respect. We would prefer to be alone. When we agreed to this interview…’

He quickly corrected himself.

‘… to this conversation, which is not an interview, it was, of course, because we would like to help the police as much as we can. Given the circumstances. As you know I am willing to be interviewed by the police as soon as you wish, but when it comes to my father…’

Erik Lysgaard straightened up noticeably in his armchair. He stretched his back, blinked hard and raised his chin.

‘What is it you want to know?’ he asked, looking Adam straight in the eye.

Idiot, Adam thought about himself.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Of course I should have left you both in peace. It’s just that… For once we haven’t got the media hot on our heels. For once it’s possible to get a little ahead of the pack out there.’

He jerked his thumb over his shoulder as if there were already a horde of journalists on the front step.

‘But I should have known better. I’ll leave you alone today. Of course.’

He stood up and took his coat from the back of one of the dining chairs. Erik Lysgaard looked at him in surprise, his mouth half-open and a furrow in his forehead, just above the thick glasses with their heavy, black frames.

‘Haven’t you got any questions?’ he asked, his tone gentle.

‘Yes. Countless questions. But as I said, they can wait. Could I possibly use your bathroom before I leave?’

He directed this request to Lukas.

‘Along the hallway. Second on the left,’ he mumbled.

Adam nodded briefly to Erik Lysgaard and headed for the door. Halfway across the room he turned back.

Hesitated.

‘Just one thing,’ he said, scratching his cheek. ‘Could I ask why Bishop Lysgaard was out on her own at eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve?’

An odd silence filled the room.

Lukas looked at his father, but there wasn’t really any kind of enquiry in his eyes. Just a wary, expressionless look, as if he either knew the answer or thought the question was of no interest. Erik Lysgaard, however, placed his hands on the arms of the chair, leaned back and took a deep breath before looking Adam in the eye once more.

‘That’s nothing to do with you.’

‘What?’ Somewhat inappropriately, Adam started to laugh. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said that’s nothing to do with you.’

‘Right. Well, I think we’ll have to…’

Silence fell once more.

‘We can talk about this later,’ he added eventually, raising a hand in Erik’s direction as he left the room.

The surprising and absurd answer had made him forget for a moment how much he needed the bathroom. As he closed the door behind him he could feel that it was urgent.

Along the hallway, second on the right.

He mumbled to himself, placed his hand on the knob and opened the door.

A bedroom. Not large, maybe ten square metres. Rectangular, with the window on the short wall facing the door. Under the window stood a neatly made single bed with lilac bed linen. On the pillow lay a folded item of clothing. A nightdress, Adam assumed, inhaling deeply through his nose.

Definitely not a guest room.

The sweet smell of sleep mingled with a faint, almost imperceptible perfume.

It wasn’t possible to open the door fully, it bumped against a cupboard on the other side.

He ought to close the door and find the toilet.

There was no desk in the little room, just a fairly large bedside table with a pile of books and a lamp beneath a shelf containing four framed family portraits. He recognized Erik and Lukas straight away, plus an old black-and-white photograph which presumably showed the little family many years ago, when Lukas was small, on a boat in the summer.

On the wall between the cupboard and the bed there was a painting in strong shades of red, and a number of clothes hung on the back of a wooden chair at the foot of the bed. The curtains were thick, dark, and closed.

That was it.

‘Excuse me! Not in there!’

Adam stepped back into the hallway. Lukas Lysgaard came quickly towards him, hands spread wide. ‘What are you doing? Snooping around the house? Who gave you permission to…?’

‘Along the hallway, second on the right, you said! I just wanted to-’

‘Second on the left. Here!’

Lukas pointed crossly at the door opposite.

‘Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to-’

‘Could you get a move on, please? I’d like to be alone with my father.’

Lukas Lysgaard must be around thirty-five. A man with an ordinary appearance and unusually broad shoulders. His hair was dark with deep waves, and his eyes were presumably blue. It was difficult to tell; they were narrow and hidden behind glasses reflecting the glow of the ceiling light.

‘My mother had problems sleeping sometimes,’ he said as Adam opened the correct door. ‘When that happened she liked to read. She didn’t want to disturb my father, so…’ He nodded towards the small bedroom.

‘I understand,’ said Adam, smiling before he went into the toilet. He took his time.

He would give a great deal to have another look in that bedroom. It annoyed him that he hadn’t been more alert. Noticed more. For example, he couldn’t remember what kind of clothes had been hanging over the chair: dressy clothes for Christmas Eve, or ordinary everyday clothes. Nor had he noticed the titles of the books on the bedside table. There was no reason to assume that anyone in this family had anything whatsoever to do with the murder of a wife and mother who was obviously loved. But Adam Stubo knew better than most that the solution to a murder was usually to be found with the victim. It could be something the family knew nothing about. Or it could be a detail, something neither the victim nor anyone else had picked up.

But it could be important all the same.

At any rate, one thing was certain, he thought as he zipped up his trousers and flushed the toilet. Eva Karin Lysgaard must have had serious problems when it came to sleeping if she sought refuge in that little bedroom every time she had a bad night. A better explanation was that husband and wife slept in separate rooms.

He washed his hands, dried them thoroughly and went back into the hallway.

Lukas Lysgaard was waiting for him. Without a word he opened the front door.

‘No doubt you’ll be in touch,’ he said, without offering his hand.

‘Of course.’

Adam pulled on his coat and stepped into the small porch. He was about to say Merry Christmas, but stopped himself just in time.

The Stranger

‘All the best!’

Detective Inspector Silje Sørensen ran up the steps, waving goodbye to a colleague who had stopped for a chat after leaving the police headquarters, which was now virtually empty. All the public departments were closed apart from the main desk, where a yawning officer had nodded to her through the glass wall as she dashed in through the entrance to Grønlandsleiret 44.

‘I’ve got the kids in the car!’ she shouted by way of explanation. ‘Just going to fetch my skis, I left them in the office and…’

Silje Sørensen ran up to her floor. She was out of breath as she rounded the corner and set off along the corridor, then slowed down as she approached the door of her office. She fumbled with her keys. They were ice cold after lying in the car for a whole day. Besides which she had far too many keys on the bunch; she had no idea what half of them were for. Eventually, she found the right one and unlocked the door.

Once upon a time the architect had won an award for this building. It was hard to understand why. Once you were inside the narrow entrance, you were fooled into thinking that light and space were key. The vast foyer extended several floors up, surrounded by galleries in an angular horseshoe formation. The offices, however, were little cubes linked to long, claustrophobic corridors. Silje always felt it was cramped and stuffy, however much she opened the windows.

From the outside, police headquarters looked as if it had not withstood the changing seasons well, but simply clung on at an odd angle to the hill between Oslo’s main prison and Grønland Church. During her fifteen years with the police service, Silje Sørensen had seen the community, the state and optimistic city enthusiasts slowly attempt to upgrade the area. But the beautiful Middelalder Park lay much too far away to cast its glow over the battered building housing police headquarters. The Opera House was no more than a slanting white roof, just visible from her office beyond seedy areas beneath a lid of exhaust fumes.

She would have liked to open the window, but she didn’t have much time.

Her eyes swept over the desk. She was pedantically tidy when it came to her office, unlike every other area of her life. The overfilled in-tray at the edge of the desk had pricked her conscience when she left on the Friday before Christmas. Her out-tray was empty, and she shuddered at the thought of the stress that was waiting for her on the first day back after the holiday.

In the middle of the desk lay a file she didn’t recognize. She leaned over and read the yellow Post-it note stuck to the front.

DI Sørensen

Enclosed please find documentation relating to Hawre Ghani, presumed date of birth 16.12.1991. Please contact me asap.

DCI Harald Bull tel. 937***** / 231*****

The kids would be bad-tempered and impossible if she was away too long. On the other hand, they were sitting quietly, each with their Nintendo DS when she left them in the back of the car, illegally parked and with the engine running. They had received the games yesterday and were still fascinated by something new, so she thought she might be OK for a while.

She sat down, still wearing her coat, and opened the file.

The first thing she saw was a photograph. It was black and white and grainy, with pronounced shadows. It looked like an enlargement of a picture from some kind of ID document, but didn’t exactly fulfil the new criteria for passport photographs. The boy – because this was definitely a boy rather than a grown man – had his eyes half-closed. His mouth was open. Sometimes people who had been taken into custody pulled faces when they had their photo taken in order to make themselves unrecognizable. For some reason she didn’t think this boy had been playing up. It struck her that the picture had been taken in a rush, and that the photographer simply couldn’t be bothered to take another one.

Hawre Ghani was of no significance.

He hadn’t been important enough.

The photograph moved her.

The boy’s lips were shining, as if he had licked them. There was something childish and vulnerable about the full upper lip with its pronounced Cupid’s bow. The skin around his eyes was smooth, and there was no sign of stubble on his cheeks. The shadow of a moustache beneath a nose that was so large it almost obscured the rest of his face was the only indication that this was a boy well on his way through puberty. In general there was something youthfully disproportionate about the face. Something puppyish. A quick calculation told her that Hawre Ghani had just turned seventeen.

As she looked through the papers she realized he hadn’t, in fact, lived long enough to do so.

Despite the fact that Silje Sørensen had worked in the violent crime and sexual offences unit for many years, and had seen more than she could have ever imagined when she was a young police cadet, the next picture came as a shock. Something that must be a face lay inside a hood made of dark fabric. All the features had been smoothed out, the skin was discoloured and badly swollen. One eye socket was distended and empty, the other barely visible. The corpse’s upper lip was partially missing in a ragged tear, revealing four white teeth and one made of silver. At least she assumed it was silver; in the photograph it was more like a black, illogical contrast to the rest of the chalk-white teeth.

She moved on quickly.

The penultimate sheet in the thin file was a report written by an officer from the immigration squad. She had never heard of him. The report was dated 23 December 2008.

Two days ago.

I was at police headquarters this morning in order to transfer two illegal immigrants to the detention centre in Trandum. During the arrest I happened to hear two colleagues discussing an unidentified body which had been found in the harbour early on Sunday 20 December. One of them mentioned that the corpse, which had partially disintegrated, had a silver tooth in the upper jaw. I reacted immediately, because for the past six weeks I have been trying without success to track down Hawre Ghani, a Kurdish asylum seeker below the age of consent, in connection with his application to remain in Norway. During a fight between gangs in Oslo City in September (see my report number 98*****37/08), the right front tooth in Hawre Ghani’s upper jaw was knocked out. He was brought in after this incident, and I accompanied him to the dentist’s the following day. He requested a silver tooth instead of a porcelain crown, and as far as I am aware this was arranged in collaboration with social services, the asylum seekers’ council and the aforementioned dentist.

Since no registered enquiries have come to light regarding a missing person who might correspond to the body found in the harbour, I would suggest that the officer leading the investigation should contact the dentist, Dag Brå, Tåsensenteret, tel. 2229*****, in order to compare the dead man’s teeth with his X-rays / records.

Silje Sørensen turned to the final page in the file. It was a copy of a handwritten document addressed to Harald Bull.

Hi Harald!

Due to the Christmas holiday I ran a quick and highly unscientific check today, Christmas Eve, based on the tip from the immigration squad. Dag Brå agreed to meet me at his surgery this morning. I showed him some pictures of the deceased’s teeth which I took myself (I took a few shots on Aker Brygge on Sunday morning, not brilliant quality but worth a try). He compared these with his own notes and X-rays, and we can assume until further notice that the deceased probably is the underage Kurdish asylum seeker as indicated. All documents have been copied to forensics. I presume that a formal identification will take place immediately after New Year – or perhaps between Christmas and New Year if the gods are on our side. I’ll write a report as soon as I’m back in the office. But now I need a HOLIDAY!

Merry Christmas!

Bengt

P.S. I spoke to forensics yesterday. There are indications that the deceased was killed using something resembling a garrotte. The guy I spoke to said it was a miracle the head was still attached. Perhaps we should consider sending the case over to the violent crimes squad straight away.

B

Silje Sørensen closed the file and leaned back in her chair. She was sweating. The good mood she had been in on her way to work had been swept away, and she wished she had left the damned file alone.

Now she felt a strong urge to open it again, just to look at the young man: this rootless, homeless Kurdish boy without any parents, with his silver tooth and smooth cheeks. Regardless of how many times she came across these children – and God knows it happened all too often – she just couldn’t distance herself. Sometimes in the evenings, when she looked in on her own two sons who had now decided they were too old for goodnight kisses, but who still couldn’t get to sleep until she had tucked them in, she experienced something that resembled guilt.

Perhaps even shame.

The sound of a car horn shattered the silence, making her heart miss a beat. She opened the window and looked down at the turning area in front of the entrance and the main desk.

‘Mum! Mum, will you be much longer?’

Her youngest son was hanging out of the car window, yelling. Silje immediately felt cross. Quickly she placed Hawre Ghani’s file on top of her in tray, pulled off the Post-it note with Harald Bull’s number and tucked it in her pocket.

As she locked the door behind her and ran towards the foyer in the hope of reaching the car in time to stop her son sounding the horn again, she had completely forgotten why she had gone to the office early on the afternoon of Christmas Day on the way to dinner with her in-laws.

The skis.

They were still behind the door of her office. By the time she eventually remembered them, it was too late.

It wasn’t too late yet, the duty editor established. The bulletin was going out in two minutes, but since this was anything but a lead story, they could easily put together a short item from the studio with a picture of the Bishop towards the end of the broadcast. He quickly rattled off a message to the producer.

‘Get something written for Christian right away,’ he ordered the young temp. ‘Just a short piece. And double check with NTB that it’s correct, of course. We can do without announcing someone has died when they haven’t, even on a slow news day.’

‘What’s going on here?’ said Mark Holden, one of NRK’s heavyweights on home affairs. ‘Who’s died?’

He grabbed the piece of paper from the temp, read it in one and a half seconds and shoved it back in the young woman’s hand. She didn’t really have time to realize he’d taken it.

‘Tragic,’ said Mark Holden, without a scrap of empathy. ‘She can’t have been all that old. Sixty? Sixty-two? What did she die of?’

‘It doesn’t say,’ the news editor replied absently. ‘I hadn’t heard she was ill. But right now I need to concentrate on this broadcast. If you could…’

He waved away the much older reporter, his gaze fixed on one of the many monitors in the large room. The brief news headlines were shown, with all the captions as agreed. The presenters were more smartly dressed than usual, in honour of Christmas.

The editor leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk.

‘Are you still here?’ he said to the young woman. ‘The idea is to put out the item today, not next week.’

Only now did he notice that her eyes were about to brim over with tears. Her hand was shaking. She took a quick breath and forced a smile.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it right away.’

‘Did you know her?’ There was still no warmth in Mark Holden’s voice, just a deeply rooted curiosity and almost automatic desire to ask everybody questions about everything.

‘Yes. She and her husband are friends of my parents. But it’s also the fact that she…’

Her voice broke.

‘She’s… she was very popular after all,’ said the news editor gently. He chewed on his pencil and lowered his feet to the floor. ‘Give that to me,’ he said, holding out his hand for the small piece of paper. ‘I’ll write the piece, and you can start putting together an item with archive pictures for the nine o’clock bulletin. A minute, something like that. OK?’

The young woman nodded.

‘The Bishop of Bjørgvin, Eva Karin Lysgaard, passed away suddenly on Christmas Eve, at the age of sixty-two.’ The editor spoke the words out loud as his fingers flew over the keys. ‘Bishop Lysgaard was born in Bergen and was a student priest in the town before later becoming a prison chaplain. For many years she was the pastor of Tjenvoll parish in Stavanger. In 2001 she was anointed bishop, and has become well known as…’

He hesitated, smacked his lips then suddenly continued.

‘… a mediator within the church, particularly between the two sides in the controversial debate on homosexuality. Eva Karin Lysgaard was a popular figure in her home town, something that was particularly evident when she held a service at Brann Stadium after Brann won their first league title in forty-four years in 2007. Bishop Lysgaard is survived by her husband, one son and three grandchildren.’

‘Is it absolutely necessary to mention that business with the football match?’ asked Mark Holden. ‘Not entirely appropriate in the circumstances, is it?’

‘I think it is,’ said the editor, sending the text to the producer with one click. ‘It’s fine. But listen…’

Mark Holden was scrabbling around in a huge bowl of sweets.

‘Mmm?’

‘What does a person die of at that age?’

‘You’ve got to be joking. Anything, of course. I haven’t a clue. It’s odd that it doesn’t say anything about it. No “after a long illness” or something like that. A stroke, I suppose. A heart attack. Something.’

‘She was only sixty-two…’

‘So what? People die much younger than that. Personally, I give thanks for every single day on earth. As long as I can have some chocolate now and again.’

Mark Holden couldn’t find anything he liked. Next to the bowl lay three rejected liquorice sweets and two coconut chocolates.

‘You’ve taken all the best ones,’ he mumbled sourly.

The editor didn’t reply. He was deep in thought, and bit on his pencil so hard that it broke. His eyes were fixed on the monitor in front of him, although he didn’t really seem to be following what was going on.

‘Beate!’ he suddenly shouted to the young temp. ‘Beate, come over here!’

She hesitated for a moment, then got up from her desk and did as he said.

‘When you’ve finished your little piece,’ he said, pointing the broken pencil at her, ‘I want you to make a few phone calls, OK? Find out what she died of. I can smell…’

His nose twitched like a rabbit’s.

‘… a story. Maybe.’

‘Phone people after the programme? That late on Christmas Day?’

The editor sighed loudly. ‘Do you want to be a journalist or not? Come on. Get going.’

Beate Krohn’s face was expressionless.

‘You said your parents knew her,’ the editor insisted. ‘So give them a call! Ring whoever you damn well like, but find out what the bishop died of, OK?’

‘OK,’ mumbled the young woman, dreading it already.

Johanne never really dreaded doing anything. It was just so difficult to get going. Since she took her doctorate in criminology in the spring of 2000, she had completed two new projects. After submitting her thesis on ‘Sexualized violence, a comparative study of conditions during childhood and early experience among sexual and financial offenders’ she was awarded a grant which enabled her to write an almost equally comprehensive study of miscarriages of justice in Norway. Ragnhild came along towards the end of this project. She and Adam agreed that Johanne would stay at home with their daughter for two years, but before her maternity leave was over she had made a start on her latest project: a study of underage prostitutes, their background, circumstances and chances of rehabilitation.

Last summer she had been given a piece of work to do for the National Police Directorate.

Ingelin Killengreen herself had contacted Johanne. The Commissioner had obviously been given clear political directives on the issue of putting hate crime on the agenda.

The problem was that this particular type of criminal activity hardly existed at all.

Well, of course it did.

But not when it came to figures. Not statistically speaking. Working in tandem with the Oslo police force, the National Police Directorate had already started mapping all reports made during 2007 where the motive for the crime could be linked to race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. The final report was just around the corner and Johanne had already seen most of the material.

The number of crimes was small, and dwindling.

During 2007 in the whole of Norway 399 cases of hate-motivated crime were registered. Of this number more than 35 per cent were simply the result of an incorrect code being entered in the police register. In other words, just over 250 cases could be classified as hate crime.

For an entire year, in a country with a population of almost five million. Compared with the total number of reported crimes, 256 cases was too small a number to be of any interest.

But it was, at least to politicians. Since just one hate crime was one too many; since the hidden statistics for hate crime must be significant; and since the Red-Green coalition government wanted to enter the election in autumn 2009 with a trump card up its sleeve when it came to minority groups that sounded off whenever a homosexual was assaulted in the street or a synagogue was sprayed with graffiti. That’s why Johanne had been asked to undertake a closer study of the phenomenon.

The task was formulated so vaguely that she had spent the entire autumn defining her parameters and limiting the work that lay ahead. She had also started collecting the relatively comprehensive quantities of data available from other countries. Mainly the United States, but also several European countries had been cataloguing and to some extent working on this particular form of law breaking for quite some time. The material was growing, and she still didn’t really have a proper grasp of what she was going to do and where she wanted to go.

Then came the financial crisis.

And all those billions in public money.

Certain branches of Norwegian research were drowned in funds. Since the police were included in the many initiatives aimed at keeping the wheels moving and preventing economic collapse, Johanne found herself with four times as much money at her disposal as a few weeks before. This opened up new opportunities, including the possibility of hiring younger researchers and scientific assistants. At the same time, this extra money created fresh problems. She had been on the point of finalizing a framework for her project, and now she had to start all over again.

It was hard work, and it was always difficult to get going. But she was looking forward to it.

It was evening. Kristiane had been unusually co-operative while they were visiting Isak’s parents, and Ragnhild had cheered up as soon as the children each received a big bag of Christmas sweets. As Kristiane was staying with her paternal grandparents so that she could spend the next three days with her father, Ragnhild had also insisted on staying. As usual, Isak had smiled broadly and said that was fine. Presumably he had realized the same thing as Adam and Johanne quite some time ago: Kristiane was calmer, slept better and was more cheerful when Ragnhild was around.

The building was quiet. The neighbours downstairs must have gone away. When Johanne got home at about eight o’clock, the ground floor was in darkness. In her own apartment she went from room to room, switching on all the lights. She left all the doors open; the dog liked to wander around if he wasn’t shut in Kristiane’s room at night. The soft pattering of his paws and the cheerful thud every time Jack settled down on the floor always made her feel slightly less lonely on the rare occasions when she actually was alone. Eventually she took her laptop into the living room, sat down on the sofa and sipped a glass of wine as she surfed the net, without concentrating on anything in particular. She was looking for some kind of Scrabble game when the phone rang.

‘Hi, it’s me.’

It was a long time since she had been so pleased to hear his voice.

‘Hi darling. How’s it going up there?’

Adam laughed.

‘Well, basically I’ve trodden on the toes of the Bergen police; I called to see the widower just a few hours after he’d been told that his wife was dead. I’ve already fallen out with his son, I think, and on top of all that I’ve eaten so much for dinner that I feel ill.’

Johanne laughed too.

‘That doesn’t sound good. Where are you staying?’

‘At the SAS Hotel on Bryggen. Nice room. They moved me to a suite when they found out where I was from. It’s not exactly packed out here at Christmas.’

‘So did they know why you were there?’

‘No. It’s a miracle. It’s almost exactly twenty-four hours since Bishop Lysgaard was murdered, and so far not a single bloody journalist has got wind of it. All that Christmas food must have finished them off.’

‘Or the schnapps. Or maybe it’s just that the Bergen police are better at keeping quiet than their colleagues in Oslo. By the way, I’ve just been watching the evening news. They had a little piece about the case, but they more or less just said she was dead.’

On the other end of the line she could hear noises that indicated Adam was taking off his tie. She suddenly felt quite emotional. She knew him so well she could hear something like that on the phone.

‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to take off my shoes and this damned noose around my neck. That’s better. What kind of a day have you had? Was it horrible having to do all that clearing up with the kids around? You must be worn out. I’m sorry I-’

‘It was fine. As you know I can get by perfectly well without one night’s sleep. The kids played in the garden for a couple of hours and I just…’

She had managed to push away the thought of the strange man for the entire afternoon and evening. Now a feeling of unease stabbed through her, and she fell silent.

‘Hello? Johanne?’

‘Yes, I’m here.’

‘Is something wrong? Johanne?’

Adam would simply dismiss it. He would sigh his weary sigh and tell her not to be so worried about the children all the time. Adam would have very little understanding of the fact that Johanne had discovered that a complete stranger knew the name of her elder daughter. Besides which, the man had been so well wrapped up in his overcoat, hat and scarf that Adam would maintain it could have been a neighbour if she told him about the incident; and that horrible little coldness would come between them and make it more difficult for her to get to sleep later, alone, with no other sounds around her apart from Jack’s snuffling and constant farting.

‘No, no,’ she said, trying to make her voice smile. ‘Except that you’re not here, of course. Ragnhild wanted to stay over with Isak’s parents.’

‘That’s good. Isak really is generous. He puts-’

‘As if you weren’t every bit as kind to his daughter! As if-’

‘Calm down, Johanne! That wasn’t what I meant. I’m glad you all had a nice evening, and that you’ve got some time for yourself. That certainly doesn’t happen very often.’

She moved the laptop on to the coffee table and drew the blanket more tightly around her.

‘You’re right,’ she said, this time with a genuine smile. ‘It’s actually really nice to be all on my own. Apart from Jack, of course. By the way, there must be something wrong with his food. He’s farting like mad.’

Adam laughed. ‘What are you up to?’

‘Doing a little bit of work. Surfing the net a little bit. Drinking a little drop of wine. Missing you.’

‘That all sounds good. Apart from the work – it’s Christmas Day! I’m just about to go to bed. I’m worn out. Tomorrow I’m hoping to interview the Bishop’s son. God knows how that will go – he’s already taken a dislike to me.’

‘I’m sure he hasn’t. Everybody likes you. And because you are the very best detective in the whole wide world, I’m sure it’ll be fine.’

Adam laughed again.

‘You mustn’t keep saying that to the kids! Just before Christmas when we were queuing at the checkout in Maxi, Ragnhild suddenly stood up in the shopping trolley and announced at the top of her voice that her daddy was the very, very, very best – I think she must have said “very” ten times – detective in the world. Embarrassing. People laughed.’

‘But she’s right,’ said Johanne with a smile. ‘You’re the best in the world at most things.’

‘Idiot. Night-night.’

‘Night-night, my love.’

Adam’s voice disappeared. Johanne stared at the telephone for a while, as if she was hoping he might still be there and would reassure her that the man by the fence posed no threat. Then she got up slowly, put down the phone and went over to the window. The new moon was suspended at an angle above the apartment block next door. There was still frost on the ground. The cold had sunk its teeth into Oslo, but the sky was clear, day after day, and all week there had been the most breathtaking sunsets. The few sparse snowflakes that had fallen during the afternoon covered the garden like a thin film. The sky was clear once again, it was dark, and after a while Johanne felt ready for bed.

A woman stared out of a window, not knowing if she would ever sleep again. Perhaps she was already sleeping. Everything was strange and unreal, like a dream. She had been born in this house, in this room, she had always lived here and looked out of this leaded window, a cross dividing the view into four different parts of the world, as her father had told her when she was little and believed every word he said. Now everything was twisted and distorted. She was used to the rain against the window pane. It often rained, almost all the time. It was raining in Bergen and she wept and didn’t know what she was seeing. Life had been chopped into pieces. The view from the little house was no longer hers.

She had waited for twenty-four hours – a long night and an even longer day – in a state of not knowing which she could do nothing about. Just as her life had followed a course that had been determined by circumstances beyond her control, so these endless hours of waiting had been something she just had to suffer. There had been no way out, not until the woman on TV had told her what she had, in fact, already known when she woke up in the armchair in front of the screen exactly twenty-four hours earlier, with a fear that grasped her by the throat and made her hands shake.

Because she had waited before.

She had waited all her life, and she had got used to it.

This time everything was different. She had felt a confirmation of something that couldn’t be true – shouldn’t be true – and yet she still knew, because she had lived like this for such a long time, utterly, utterly alone.

The doorbell rang, so late and so unexpectedly that the woman gave a little scream.

She opened the door and recognized him. It was an eternity since they had last met, but the eyes were the same. He was weeping, like her, and asked if he could come in. She didn’t want him to. He wasn’t the one she wanted to see. She didn’t want to see anyone.

When she let him in and closed the door behind him, she asked God to let her wake up.

Please, please God. Please be kind to me.

Let me wake up now.

‘Surely nobody’s awake at this time of night?’

Beate Krohn looked at the news editor with a resigned expression. It was almost midnight. They were alone in the news office among silent, flickering monitors and the quiet hum of computers and the ventilation system. Here and there someone had hung up the odd Christmas decoration: a strand of red tinsel, a garland of little Norwegian flags. In one corner stood a sparse Christmas tree with a crooked star on top. Most of the chocolates and biscuits that had been provided as a consolation for those who had to work over Christmas had been eaten. Sheets of paper and old newspapers were strewn all over the place.

‘What about your parents?’

He just wouldn’t give up. He had lit a cigarette – such a blatant breach of the rules that she was quite impressed in spite of herself.

‘They’ll be asleep, too,’ she said. ‘Besides which, I’d frighten the life out of them if I rang this late. We have rules about that kind of thing in our family. Not before seven thirty in the morning, and not after ten at night. Unless somebody’s died.’

‘But somebody has died!’

‘Not like that. I mean-’

He interrupted her with a deep drag on his cigarette and an impatient wave of his hand.

‘Let me show you how it’s done,’ he grinned, the cigarette clamped between his teeth. ‘Watch and learn.’

His fingers flew over his mobile before he put it to his ear.

‘Hello Jonas, it’s Sølve.’

Silence for three seconds.

‘Sølve Borre. At NRK. Where are you?’

Beate Krohn had once read that the most common opening remark in the entire world when it came to mobile phone conversations was ‘Where are you?’ After that she had sworn never to ask the question herself.

‘Listen, Jonas. Bishop Lysgaard died last night, as you’ve no doubt heard. The thing is-’

He had obviously been interrupted, and took the opportunity to have another deep drag on his cigarette.

‘Sure. Sure. But the thing is, I just wanted to check what she died of. Just to satisfy my curiosity. I’ve got one of those feelings, you know…’

Pause.

‘But can’t you give one of them a ring? There must be somebody there who owes you a favour. Can’t you-?’

Once again he was interrupted. By now the cloud of smoke surrounding him was so dense Beate was afraid it would set off the alarm. She took a step back to avoid getting the smell in her clothes.

‘Nice one, Jonas! Nice one. Give me a ring later. Doesn’t matter what time it is!’ He ended the call. ‘There you go,’ he said, his fingers moving over the keys. ‘Come here and I’ll teach you something. Look at these messages.’

Beate leaned hesitantly over his shoulder and read the message saying that Bishop Lysgaard was dead. It hadn’t changed since she last saw it.

‘Notice anything odd?’ asked the editor.

‘No.’

She coughed discreetly and turned away.

‘I don’t know how many messages like that I’ve read in my life,’ he said, completely unmoved. ‘But it has to be a lot. By and large, they’re all exactly the same. The tone is slightly formal, and they don’t really say much. But they almost always say more than the fact that the person concerned is dead. “So-and-so passed away unexpectedly at home.” “So-and-so passed away after a short illness.” “So-and-so died in a car accident in Drammen last night.” That kind of thing.’

His fingers drew so many quotation marks in the air that ash went all over the keyboard. It was already so worn that the letters were barely visible.

‘But this one,’ he said, pointing at the display. ‘This one just says “Bishop Eva Karin Lysgaard died yesterday evening. She was sixty-two years old…” And so on and so on, blah blah blah.’

‘That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,’ she said firmly.

‘Oh no,’ said the news editor, still smiling broadly. ‘Probably not. But it needs checking. How do you think a guy like me became a journalist at NRK before I was twenty-one, with no training?’

He pointed meaningfully at his nose.

‘I’ve got it, that’s how.’

The telephone rang. Beate Krohn stared at it in surprise, as if the editor had just shown her a conjuring trick.

‘Sølve Borre,’ he yapped, dropping his cigarette stub into a mineral water bottle. ‘Right. Exactly.’

He sat in silence for a few seconds. The mischievous expression disappeared. His eyes narrowed. He reached for a pen and made a few illegible notes in the margin of a newspaper.

‘Thanks,’ he said eventually. ‘Thank you, Jonas. I owe you big time, OK?’

He sat staring at his phone for a moment. Suddenly he looked up, completely transformed.

‘Bishop Lysgaard was murdered,’ he said slowly. ‘She was fucking murdered on Christmas Eve.’

‘How…?’ Beate Krohn began, sinking down on to a chair. ‘How do you know…? Who was that you were talking to?’

The chief news editor leaned back in his chair and looked her straight in the eye.

‘I hope you’ve learned something tonight,’ he said quietly. ‘And the most important thing of all is this: you’re nothing as a journalist without good sources. Work long and hard to cultivate them, and never, ever give them away. Never.’

Beate Krohn struggled in vain to control her blushes.

‘And now,’ said the editor with a disarming smile as he lit yet another cigarette, ‘now we’re really going to hit the phones. Time to start waking people up!’

Small Keys, Big Rooms

‘Good grief,’ said Adam Stubo, stopping dead in the doorway. ‘Did I wake you up?’

Lukas Lysgaard blinked and shook his head.

‘No,’ he mumbled. ‘Or rather, yes. I hardly slept last night, so I sat down here and…’

He raised his head, smiling wanly. Adam hardly recognized him. The broad shoulders were drooping. His hair was getting greasy, and he had dark, puffy bags around his eyes. A blood vessel had burst in his left eye, staining it bright red.

‘That’s understandable,’ said Adam, pulling out a chair on the opposite side of the table.

Lukas Lysgaard shrugged his shoulders. Adam didn’t really know whether it meant he didn’t care whether Adam understood or not, or if it was a kind of apology for the fact that he had fallen asleep.

‘The wolves are out,’ Adam said as he sat down. ‘After all, it was only a matter of time before the press found out.’

The other man nodded.

‘Have they been after you already?’ Adam asked, glancing at the clock which showed that it was a few minutes after half past eight.

The man nodded dully.

‘Anyway, I’m very grateful to you for coming in,’ said Adam, gesturing with one hand. ‘I see my colleague has taken care of the formalities. Has anyone offered you something to drink? Coffee? Water?’

‘No thanks. Why are you actually here?’

‘Me?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you mean?’

Lukas leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk.

‘You work for NCIS.’

Adam nodded.

‘NCIS is no longer what it was.’

‘No.’

Adam couldn’t understand what the man was getting at.

‘As far as I understand it, NCIS exists primarily to combat organized crime. Do you think it was the Mafia that killed my mother?’

‘No, no, no!’

For a brief moment Adam thought the man was serious. A humourless, almost imperceptible smile made him change his mind.

‘The very best resources have been allocated to this enquiry,’ he said, pouring himself a coffee from a Thermos. ‘Including me. How’s your father?’

No reply.

‘My intention is to give you some information to begin with,’ said Adam, pushing a thin file across the desk.

Lukas Lysgaard showed no sign of wanting to open it.

‘Your mother died of a stab wound. To the heart. This means that she died very quickly.’

Adam watched the other man’s face, looking for any indication that he ought to break off.

‘She had no other injuries apart from a few grazes, which in all probability are due to the fall itself. Therefore it seems likely that she did not offer any form of resistance.’

‘She was…’ Lukas raised a clenched fist to his mouth and coughed. ‘She was sixty-two years old. You can hardly expect her to put up much resistance when some man attacked her.’ He coughed again, then quickly added: ‘Or woman. I assume that happens from time to time.’

‘Absolutely.’ Adam nodded and stroked his cheek, wondering whether he ought to take back the untouched file. The silence between them went on for just a little bit too long. It became embarrassing, and Adam realized that Lukas Lysgaard’s fairly unfriendly attitude had hardly changed over the past twenty-four hours. He was staring at the desk with his arms folded.

‘My wife is a criminologist,’ Adam said suddenly. ‘And a lawyer. And she’s studied psychology as well.’

Lukas at least looked up, a furrow of surprise creasing his brow.

‘She’s quite a lot younger than me,’ Adam added.

Neither the most reluctant witness nor the most hostile thug could manage to remain unmoved when Adam started talking about his family for no particular reason. It seemed so unprofessional that the person being interviewed was annoyed, surprised, or quite simply interested.

‘She sometimes says…’ Adam picked up his cup and took a slow, noisy slurp. ‘She would rather her nearest and dearest died after a long, painful illness than as the victim of a crime, however quick it might be.’

As he spoke he felt the usual pang of conscience as he misrepresented Johanne, saddling her with views she didn’t hold. It disappeared when he saw Lukas’s reaction.

‘What does she mean…? What do you mean by that? It’s terrible to wish something like that on someone you love, and-’

‘It is, isn’t it? I agree with you. But what she means is that the family of someone who has been the victim of a crime is subjected to a detailed investigation, and that can be a terrible strain. When someone dies of other causes, then…’

Adam held up his hands, palms facing outwards.

‘… then it’s all over. The family is overwhelmed with sympathy, and no one asks questions. Quite the reverse, my wife stubbornly maintains. A death from natural causes has the effect of laying to rest any secrets the family might have. However, when the deceased is the victim of a crime…’

He shook his head ruefully and stuck an imaginary key in an imaginary keyhole.

‘Everything has to be brought out into the open. That’s what she means. Not that I agree with her, as I said, but she is right to a certain extent. Don’t you think?’

Lukas peered at him without giving any indication of whether he agreed or not. Adam held his gaze.

‘I assume,’ Lukas said suddenly, leaning across the desk, ‘that what you’re trying to tell me is that there are secrets in my family that could explain why my mother was stabbed and murdered out in the street!’ His voice cracked at the end of the sentence. ‘That she’s the guilty party, somehow! That my mother, the kindest, most thoughtful…’

His voice broke and he started to cry. Adam sat motionless with the coffee cup in his right hand and a pen balanced between the index and middle fingers of his left hand.

‘I don’t think my mother had any secrets,’ said Lukas in despair, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘Not my mother. Not her.’

Still Adam said nothing.

‘My mother and father loved each other more than anything in the world,’ Lukas went on. ‘They’ve had their disagreements, just like everyone else, but they’ve been married since they were nineteen. That’s…’ He sobbed as he worked it out. ‘That’s more than forty years! They’ve been married for more than forty years, and you come along claiming there are all these secrets between them! It’s… it’s…’

Adam made a few brief notes on the pad in front of him, then pushed it away so that it fell on the floor. When he picked it up, he put it back on the table face down.

‘You’ve got a nerve,’ Lukas said harshly. ‘Insinuating that my mother-’

‘I apologize if that’s the way you see it,’ Adam said. ‘That wasn’t my intention. But it’s very interesting that you immediately defend your parents’ marriage when I talk in completely general terms about the fact that everyone has experiences they don’t want to share with other people. Something they’ve done. Something they haven’t done. Something that might have made them enemies. Something that has harmed others. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that…’

He let the sentence dangle in the air in the hope that it was sufficiently vague.

‘My parents don’t have any enemies,’ said Lukas, clearly making an effort to pull himself together. ‘On the contrary, my mother was regarded as a mediator, an advocate of reconciliation. Both in her profession and in her private life. She never said anything to me about anyone wanting to kill her. That’s just…’

He swallowed and ran his fingers through his hair over and over again.

‘As for my father…’

He was finding it difficult to breathe.

‘My father has always been in my mother’s shadow.’

His voice altered as he slowly exhaled. Suddenly he seemed resigned. It was as if he was actually talking to himself.

‘I mean, that’s obvious. My mother with her career, and my father who never got any further than his degree. I don’t suppose he wanted to…’

He broke off again.

‘How did they meet?’ Adam asked gently.

‘At school. They were in the same class.’

‘High-school sweethearts,’ said Adam with a little smile.

‘Yes. My mother was saved when she was sixteen. She came from a perfectly ordinary working-class family. My grandfather worked at BMW.’

‘In Germany?’

Adam leafed through the file in front of him, looking somewhat surprised.

‘No. Bergen Mechanical Workshop. He was a member of the Norwegian Communist Party and a wholehearted atheist. My mother was the first member of the family to go to the grammar school. It was difficult for my grandfather to see his daughter reading theology, but at the same time he was incredibly… proud of her. Unfortunately, he didn’t live long enough to see her become a bishop. That would have…’

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘My father, on the other hand, came from a totally academic environment. His father was a professor of history, at the University of Oslo first of all. They moved to Bergen when my father was around eight years old. His mother was a lecturer. In those days it was quite unusual for women to…’

Once again he broke off.

‘But you know that,’ he added, eventually.

Adam waited.

‘In many ways my father is regarded as… how shall I put it? A weak person?’

He sobbed out loud as he said it, and the tears began to flow again.

‘Which he most definitely isn’t. He’s a wonderful father. Clever and well-read. Very thoughtful. But he just couldn’t… do everything… become the kind of person who… The thing is, his parents had great hopes for him. They expected a great deal of him.’

He sobbed and wiped his mouth.

‘My father is more of a thinker than my mother was. In religious terms he’s… stricter, in some ways. He’s absolutely fascinated by Catholicism. If it hadn’t been for my mother’s position I think he would have converted a long time ago. Last autumn my mother attended an ecumenical conference in Boston, and my father went with her. He visited every single Catholic church in the city.’

Lukas hesitated for a moment.

‘He’s also more strict with himself than my mother was. I don’t think he’s ever really got over the fact that his parents were disappointed in him. He’s their only child.’

He added this final comment with an expression that suggested it explained most things.

‘So are you, I notice.’ Adam looked at his papers again, turned over his pad and quickly scribbled down a couple of sentences.

‘Yes.’

‘You’re… twenty-nine years old?’

Adam was surprised when he saw Lukas’s date of birth in the file. The previous day he had assumed the bishop’s son was well into his thirties.

‘Yes.’

‘So your parents had been married for fourteen years when you were born.’

‘They studied for a long time. Well, my mother did, anyway.’

‘And they never had any more children?’

‘Not that I know of.’

The acidic alertness was back.

Adam smiled disarmingly and quickly asked: ‘When you say they loved each other more than anything in the world, what are you basing that on?’

Lukas looked stunned.

‘What am I…? What do you mean?’ Without waiting for an answer he went on. ‘They showed it a hundred times a day! The way they spoke to one another, the experiences they shared, everything… for God’s sake, what kind of a question is that?’

His expression was almost frightening, with the blood-red eye wide open. Suddenly he stiffened, holding his breath.

‘Is something wrong?’ Adam asked after a few seconds. ‘Mr Lysgaard! What’s the matter?’

Slowly the man expelled the air from his lungs.

‘Migraine,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve just started to get visual disturbance.’ He spoke in a monotone, and was blinking rapidly. ‘One half is shimmering…’ He held up one hand, forming a barrier between his right and left eye.

‘It means that in exactly twenty-five minutes I will get a headache so severe that it’s indescribable. I have to get home.’

He stood up so quickly that his chair fell over. For a moment he lost his balance and steadied himself against the wall. Adam looked at his watch. He had allocated the entire day to this interview, which had hardly begun. Although he had already learned enough to give him something to think about, it was difficult to hide his irritation at this interruption. But that was of no consequence. Lukas Lysgaard was already lost to this world.

‘I’ll drive you home,’ he said quietly. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’

‘No. Home. Now.’

Adam fetched Lukas’s coat from a hook on the wall. The man showed no sign of wanting to put it on. He simply took it and dragged it along behind him as he headed for the door. Adam moved quickly and got there first.

‘I can see you’re not well,’ he said, his hand resting on the door handle. ‘We will, of course, postpone the rest of this interview until a more suitable time. Unfortunately, however, there is one question I do have to ask. You heard it yesterday, in fact.’

Lukas Lysgaard’s expression remained unchanged. It almost seemed as if he was no longer aware that Adam was in the room.

‘What was your mother doing out walking on Christmas Eve?’

Lukas raised his head. He looked Adam straight in the eye, licked his lips and swallowed audibly. It was clearly taking a huge amount of effort to steel himself against the pain he knew would come.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I have no idea why my mother was out so late.’

‘Did she usually go out in the evening? Just before bedtime? I mean, was it normal for her to…’

Lukas was still holding his gaze.

‘I have to get home,’ he said hoarsely. ‘No. I have no idea where my mother was going or what she was doing. Take me home. Please.’

You’re lying, Adam thought as he opened the door. I can see that you’re lying.

‘I’m telling the truth,’ said Lukas Lysgaard, wobbling into the corridor.

‘You couldn’t tell a lie if you were being paid for it,’ Lina Skytter said with a laugh as she tucked her legs up on the sofa.

‘Leave it out,’ said Johanne, surprised that she felt slightly insulted. ‘I’m actually a specialist in lies!’

‘Other people’s lies, yes. Not your own. If you’d bought spare ribs at Rimi and told your mother they were from Strøm-Larsen, your nose would have grown from here to Sognsvann. Just as well you went for cod instead.’

‘My mother didn’t think so,’ Johanne mumbled into her wine glass.

‘Give over,’ said Lina. ‘Your mum’s lovely. Good with the kids and really kind. She’s just a little… emotionally incontinent, that’s all. It’s as if whatever’s on her mind has to come out of her mouth right away, kind of. Forget it. Cheers!’

Johanne raised her glass and tucked her feet underneath her. Her best and oldest friend had turned up just an hour ago, with two bottles of wine and three DVDs. Johanne had felt slightly irritated for a few minutes; she had actually been looking forward to an evening on her own with the computer. But now they were sitting at either end of the big sofa, and Johanne couldn’t remember when she had last felt so relaxed.

‘God, I’m so tired.’ She smiled and gave an enormous yawn. ‘I don’t notice it until I relax.’

‘You have to stay awake. We’re going to watch…’ Lina shuffled through the pile of films on the coffee table. ‘… What Happens in Vegas first. Ashton Kutcher is just gorgeous. And no critical comments. We’re just going to have a nice time.’

She kicked out at Johanne, who shook her head, her expression resigned.

‘How much time do you actually waste on stuff like this?’ she asked.

‘Don’t be so bloody tight-arsed. You like it, too.’

‘Well, can I at least watch the news first? Just so that we have some kind of basis in reality before we dive into a vat of syrup?’

Lina laughed and raised her glass in agreement.

Johanne switched on the TV and just caught the last few seconds of the opening headlines. The top story was as she expected: Bishop Eva Karin Lysgaard murdered in the street – the police have no leads so far.

‘What?’ said Lina, her mouth falling open as she sat up straight on the sofa. ‘Murdered? But how the hell…?’

She put her feet on the floor, put down her glass and leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees.

‘It’s been all over the net and on the radio all day,’ Johanne said, turning up the sound. ‘Where have you been?’

Christian Borch was wearing a dark suit and a serious expression.

‘The police have today confirmed that the bishop of Bjørgvin, Eva Karin Lysgaard, was murdered on the evening of the twenty-fourth of December. Yesterday it was announced that Bishop Lysgaard had died, but the circumstances surrounding her death were not made public until this morning.’

The picture changed from the studio to a rain-soaked Bergen, where a reporter gave a summary of the case, which was basically two minutes about nothing.

‘Is that why Adam’s away?’ Lina asked, turning to Johanne.

She nodded.

‘As far as we are aware, the police have no leads regarding the identity of the killer at this stage.’

‘Which means they have lots of leads,’ said Johanne. ‘But they have no idea what to do with them.’

Lina shushed her. They sat in silence and watched the entire item, which lasted almost twelve minutes. This was not only because the Christmas period was somewhat short on news as usual; this was something very special. You could see it in everyone who was interviewed – the police, church officials, politicians and ordinary people on the street, everyone was moved in a way that Norwegians didn’t normally show in public. Many had difficulty speaking. Some burst into tears while being interviewed.

‘It’s almost like when King Olav died,’ said Lina, switching off the TV.

‘Hmm. He died of old age, in his own bed.’

‘I know, but the atmosphere is kind of the same. Who in the world would want to kill a woman like that? I mean, she was so… kind, somehow. So good!’

Johanne recalled that she had reacted in exactly the same way almost two days ago. Not only had Eva Karin Lysgaard seemed to be a good person, she was also clearly blessed with a talent for diplomacy. In theological terms she was right in the middle of the fragmented landscape that comprised the Church of Norway. She was neither radical nor conservative. On the question of homosexuality, which had raged within the church for many years – constantly moving Norway closer to a non-denominational constitution – she had been the principal architect of the fragile peace agreement. There would be room for both points of view. Bishop Lysgaard had nothing against marrying homosexuals. At the same time, she had defended the right of her opponents to refuse to do so. Bishop Lysgaard stood out as an open, tolerant person, a typical representative of a broad and popular state church. Which, in fact, she was not. On the contrary, she had strong, fundamental misgivings when it came to the unsatisfactory self-regulation within the church, and never missed an opportunity to put forward her opinion.

Always pleasant. Always calm, with a subtle smile that smoothed the edges of the odd sharp word that might slip out on those rare occasions when Eva Karin Lysgaard became too involved.

As a rule, this concerned the issue of abortion.

Eva Karin Lysgaard held extreme views in only one area: she was against abortion. Totally and completely and in all circumstances. Not even after a rape or when the mother’s life might be in danger could she countenance interference to put an end to a life that had been created. For Bishop Lysgaard, God’s creation was sacrosanct. His ways were unfathomable, and a fertilized egg had the right to life, because God willed it so.

Strangely enough she was respected for her views, in a country where the debate on abortion had actually ended in 1978. The small minority that had continued to oppose the law legalizing abortion were largely regarded as ridiculously conservative and – at least in the eyes of the general public – fairly extreme. Even the feminists toned things down when they were in a debate with Eva Karin Lysgaard. By sticking so firmly to her principles, she distanced herself from the idea that the issue of abortion was anything to do with women’s liberation.

For her, abortion was a question of the sanctity of life, and nothing to do with gender.

‘I wonder what happened to her out there in the forest?’ Johanne said suddenly.

‘The forest? I thought she was murdered on the street?’

‘I don’t mean the murder, I meant that time… there was a profile of her in the Saturday supplement last week, did you see it?’

Lina shook her head and topped up her glass.

‘We were up at the cottage over the weekend. We did lots of skiing, but didn’t read a single newspaper.’

You never do anyway, wherever you are, thought Johanne, smiling as she went on.

‘She said she met God in the forest when she was sixteen. Something special happened, but she didn’t say what it was.’

‘Isn’t it Jesus they usually meet?’

‘What?’

‘I thought when somebody was saved they said they “met Jesus”.’

‘God or Jesus,’ Johanne muttered. ‘Same thing.’

She got up quickly and went into the bedroom. She came back with the supplement, and turned to the interview as she sat down again.

‘Here,’ she said, taking a deep breath.

‘I was in a very difficult situation. We human beings often find ourselves in this position when we are teenagers. Things become too big for us. And that’s what happened to me. Then I met Jesus.’

‘Ha!’ Lina exclaimed. ‘I was right!’

‘Shut up. What actually happened? That’s the journalist asking.’

Johanne glanced quickly at Lina over the top of her glasses and went on:

‘That’s a matter between me and God, the Bishop says with a smile, revealing dimples deep enough to hide in. We all have our secret rooms. That’s the way it should be. That’s the way it will always be.’

She slowly folded up the magazine.

‘And now I want to watch a film,’ said Lina.

‘We all have our secret rooms,’ Johanne repeated, gazing at the close-up of Eva Karin Lysgaard on the cover.

‘Not me,’ Lina said breezily. ‘Shall we watch What Happens in Vegas, or would you rather go straight for The Devil Wears Prada? I haven’t actually seen it yet, and I can watch Meryl Streep in anything.’

‘I’m sure even you have a couple of rooms with secrets in them, Lina.’ Johanne took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, then added: ‘It’s just that you’ve lost the keys.’

‘Could be,’ Lina said amiably. ‘But what you don’t know can’t hurt you, as they say.’

‘You’re completely wrong there,’ said Johanne, pointing half-heartedly at The Devil Wears Prada. ‘It’s actually what we don’t know that does hurt us.’

Vanity Fair

The worst thing of all would have been not knowing, thought Niclas Winter. He had lived on the verge of financial collapse for so long that the certain knowledge his buyer was no longer interested had once again made him drink a little too much, a little too often. Not to mention all the other stuff he took to keep his nerves under control. In actual fact he had knocked all that crap on the head long ago. It dulled his senses and made him lazy. And listless. Unproductive.

Not the way he wanted to be.

When the financial crisis hit the whole world in the autumn of 2008, it didn’t have the same effect in Norway as in many other countries. With billions in the bank, the Red-Green coalition government introduced the sort of expensive counter-measures that few could have imagined a few months earlier. Norway had been pumping money out of the North Sea for so long that it seemed more or less fireproof after the financial collapse in the United States. The property market in Norway, which for some time had been over-inflated and overactive, did indeed hit rock bottom in the early autumn. But it had already recovered – or there were signs of life, at least. The number of bankruptcies had rocketed in recent months, but many people regarded this as a healthy cleansing process, stripping away the companies that were never really viable. Unemployment was growing in the building industry, which was naturally taken very seriously. However, it was an industry that relied largely on an imported workforce. Poles, Swedes and workers from the Baltic states had one especially attractive quality: they were happy to go back home when there wasn’t any work – at least, those who hadn’t actually realized that they could pick up plenty of money through the Norwegian social security system. There were also enough economists who, quietly and in private, regarded an unemployment rate of around 40 per cent as good for the flexibility of the total labour market.

On the whole, Norway plc was moving forward; things may have changed, but at least the global financial crisis had not been a major catastrophe for the country and its people. They were still buying food; they still needed clothes for themselves and their children; they treated themselves to a bottle of wine at the weekend as usual and they were still going to the cinema just as often as before.

It was the luxury goods that were no longer attracting a significant number of buyers.

And, for some reason, art was regarded as a luxury.

Niclas Winter tore the foil off the bottle of champagne he had bought the day his mother died. He tried to remember if he had ever purchased such a bottle before. As he fumbled with the wire around the cork, he decided this was the first time. He had certainly drunk his fair share of the noble French wine, particularly in recent years, but always at others’ expense.

The champagne foamed up and he laughed to himself as he poured the bubbling, gently fizzing drink into a plastic glass on the edge of his overfilled desk. He put the bottle down on the floor to be on the safe side and raised the glass to his lips.

The studio, which measured almost 300 square metres and had originally been a warehouse, was flooded with daylight. To an outsider the room would have given an impression of total chaos, with light coming in from above and from the huge bay windows in the wall facing south-east. Niclas Winter, however, was in complete control of everything. There were welding torches and soldering irons, computers and old toilets, cables from the North Sea and half a wrecked car; the studio would be a paradise for any eleven-year-old. Not that such a person would ever have been allowed through the door. Niclas Winter, installation artist, suffered from three phobias: large birds, earthworms and children. It had been difficult enough to get through his own childhood, and he couldn’t cope with being reminded of it by seeing children playing and shouting and having fun. The fact that the studio lay just 200 metres from a school was a tragedy that he had somehow learned to live with. In every other way the location was perfect; the rent was low, and most of the kids kept out of the way once he put a BEWARE OF THE DOG sign with a picture of a Dobermann on the door.

The room was a slight rectangle, sixteen by eighteen metres. Everything was gathered along the walls, a frame of scrap and other necessities surrounding a large space in the middle. This was always clean and empty, apart from the installation Niclas Winter was working on at the time. Along one of the shorter walls stood installations which were more or less finished, but which he had not yet shown to anyone.

He sipped the champagne, which was too sweet and not cold enough.

This was the best thing he had done.

The piece was entitled I was thinking of something blue and maybe grey, darling and had actually been bought by StatoilHydro.

A monolith of shop window dummies rose up in the centre of the art work. They were wound around each other as in the original in Vigeland Park, but because the dummies were so rigid apart from their knees, elbows, hips and shoulders, the six-metre-high installation was positively spiky. Heads on almost broken necks, stiff, dead fingers and feet with painted nails stuck out on all sides. A thin, shimmering length of silver barbed wire was wound around the whole thing. Real silver, of course; the barbed wire alone had cost a small fortune. On closer inspection you could see that the naked, lifeless dummies were wearing expensive watches on their wrists, and almost every one was adorned with a necklace. The dummies had been literally sexless when he bought them. Only the broad shoulders and lack of breasts distinguished the men from the women, as well as a small, undefined bulge at the crotch. Niclas Winter had come to their rescue. He had bought so many dildos in a porn shop that they had given him a considerable discount, and he had mounted them on the castrated dummies. The dildos were marketed as being ‘natural’, which Niclas Winter knew was nonsense. They were colossal. He sprayed them in fluorescent colours, making them even more striking.

‘Perfect,’ he murmured to himself, emptying his glass in one swig.

He took a few steps back and shook his head.

His last exhibition had been an enormous success. Three outdoor installations had stood on Rådhuskaia for four weeks. People were enthusiastic. So were the critics. He sold the lot. For the first time in his life, he was almost debt-free. And best of all, StatoilHydro, who had already bought Vanity Fair, reconstruction, ordered I was thinking… on the basis of a sketch. The price was two million. He had been paid half a million in advance, but he had already spent that money and considerably more on materials.

Then the bastards changed their minds.

He hadn’t much of a clue about contracts, and when he went to see a solicitor with the letter which had arrived in October, beside himself with rage, he realized it was time to get himself an agent. StatoilHydro were, in fact, perfectly within their rights. The contract had a cancellation clause. Niclas Winter had hardly even glanced through the document before signing it, dizzy with joy.

In the current financial climate, they wrote apologetically. An unfortunate side-effect on employees and owners, they babbled on. Moderation. A certain level of restraint with regard to unnecessary outlay.

Blah, blah, blah. Fuck.

The bloody letter arrived four days before his mother died.

As he sat with her during those last hours – more for appearance’s sake than because he actually felt any sorrow – everything changed. Niclas Winter walked out of his dead mother’s room at the Lovisenberg Hospice with a smile on his lips, fresh hope and a riddle to solve.

And he had done it.

It had taken time, of course. His mother had been so vague that it had taken him several weeks to find the right office. He had got too stressed and made a couple of mistakes along the way. But now he had done it. The appointment had been made for the first working day after the New Year, and the man he was going to meet would make Niclas Winter a very rich man.

He poured himself more champagne and drank.

The tiny, tiny feeling of intoxication did him good, and his piece was finished. If StatoilHydro didn’t have the sense to take the opportunity, there would be other buyers. With the money that was due to come to him he could accept the offer of an exhibition in New York in the autumn. He could give up all those other jobs that sucked the energy and creativity out of him. And he would finally give up the drugs. And the booze. He would work all day long, with no worries.

Niclas Winter was almost happy.

He thought he heard a noise. An almost imperceptible click.

He half-turned. The door was locked, and there was no one there. He drank a little more. A cat on the roof, perhaps. He looked up.

Someone grabbed hold of him. He understood nothing as someone’s hands pulled at his face, forcing his mouth open. When the syringe was pushed into his left cheek, he was surprised more than afraid. The needle caught his tongue, and the pain as it touched the sensitive mucus membrane was so agonizing that he cried out at last. A man was still standing behind him, gripping his hands. An intense heat spread from his mouth at lightning speed, and it was difficult to breathe. The stranger caught him as he fell. Niclas Winter smiled and tried to blink away the film that was covering his eyes like oil. He couldn’t get any air. His lungs were no longer working.

He was hardly even aware of his left sleeve being pushed up.

The second needle ate its way into the blue vein in the crook of his arm.

It was 27 December 2008, and the time was thirty-three minutes past midnight. When Niclas Winter died, thirty-two years old and on the verge of an international breakthrough as an artist, he was still smiling in surprise.

Ragnhild Vik Stubo was laughing her biggest laugh. Johanne smiled back, picked up the dice and threw them again.

‘You’re not very good at Yahtzee, Mummy.’

‘Unlucky at games, lucky in love. I’ll just have to console myself with that.’

The dice landed, showing two ones, a three, a four and a five. Johanne hesitated for a moment before leaving the ones and taking her final throw.

The telephone rang.

‘No cheating while I’m gone,’ she ordered, pretending to sound severe as she got up.

Her mobile was in the kitchen. She pressed the green icon.

‘Johanne Vik,’ she said tersely.

‘Hi, it’s me.’

She felt a stab of irritation at the fact that Isak never introduced himself. It should be Adam’s privilege to take it for granted that she would immediately recognize his voice. After all, it was more than ten years since she and Isak had split up. True, he was the father of her eldest daughter, and it was lucky for all of them that they got on. However, he wasn’t a close family member any more, even if he behaved like one.

‘Hi,’ she said dryly. ‘Thanks for driving Ragnhild home yesterday. How’s Kristiane?’

‘Well, that’s why I’m ringing. Now, you’re not to… you must promise not to be…’

Johanne could feel the skin between her shoulder blades contracting.

‘What?’ she said when he hesitated.

‘Well… I’m at Sandvika Storsenter. I wanted to exchange some Christmas presents and so… Kristiane and I… The problem is… It won’t help at all if you get angry.’

Johanne tried to swallow.

‘What’s happened to Kristiane?’ she said, forcing herself to sound calm.

From the living room she could hear Ragnhild throwing the dice over and over again.

‘She’s disappeared. Well, not disappeared. But I… I can’t find her. I was just going to-’

‘You’ve lost Kristiane? In Sandvika Storsenter?’

She could see the vast shopping centre in her mind’s eye; it was the biggest in Scandinavia, with three floors, more than a hundred shops and so many exits that the very thought made her dizzy. She leaned on the kitchen worktop for support.

‘Just calm down, Johanne. I’ve spoken to the management and they’re looking for her. Have you any idea how many kids get lost in here every day? Loads! She’ll be wandering around on her own in some shop. I’m only ringing to ask if there are any shops in here that she’s particularly fond of…’

‘For fuck’s sake, you’ve lost my child!’ Johanne yelled, without giving Ragnhild a thought. The girl started to cry, and Johanne tried to console her from a distance while she carried on talking.

‘She’s our child,’ said Isak at the other end. ‘And she isn’t-’

‘It’s all right, Ragnhild. Mummy was just a little bit worried. Hang on a minute and I’ll be there.’

The child was inconsolable. She howled and threw the dice on the floor.

‘I don’t want to be lost, Mummy!’

‘Try that teddy bear shop,’ Johanne hissed down the phone. ‘The one where you can make your own bear. It’s at the end of the walkway leading from the old part of the centre to the new part.

‘Mummy, Mummy! Who’s lost me?’

‘Hush, sweetheart. Mummy will be there in a minute. Nobody has lost you, you know that. I’m coming!’

The last comment was snapped furiously down the phone: ‘Keep your mobile on. I can be there in twenty minutes. Call me straight away if anything happens.’

Johanne ended the call, shoved the phone in her back pocket, ran into the living room, scooped up her youngest daughter and comforted her as best she could, while racing through the apartment towards the stairs leading to the outside door.

‘Nobody’s going to lose you, you know that. There’s nothing to be upset about. Mummy’s here now.’

‘Why did you say somebody had lost me?’

Ragnhild was snuffling, but at least she had calmed down slightly.

‘You misunderstood, sweetheart. That kind of thing happens.’

She slowed down as she reached the staircase, and walked calmly.

‘We’re going for a little drive. To Sandvika Storsenter.’

‘Storvik Sandsenter,’ said Ragnhild, smiling through her tears.

‘That’s right.’

‘What are you going to buy me?’

‘I’m not going to buy you anything, sweetheart. We’re just going to… we’re just going to pick up Kristiane.’

‘Kristiane’s coming back tomorrow,’ the child protested. ‘Tonight you and me are going to watch a film with popcorn on the sofa, on our own.’

‘Put your boots on. Quickly, please.’

Her heart was fluttering. She gasped for breath and pulled on her jacket as she forced herself to smile.

‘We’ll take your jacket with us. Off we go.’

‘I want my hat! And gloves! It’s cold outside, Mummy!’

‘Right, there you go,’ said Johanne, grabbing something that was lying on the shelf. ‘You can put them on in the car.’

Without even locking the outside door she grabbed her daughter’s hand and ran down the steps and across the gravel to the car, which fortunately was parked just in front of the building.

‘You’re hurting me,’ Ragnhild protested. ‘Mummy, you’re squeezing my hand too hard!’

Johanne felt dizzy. She recognized the fear from the very first time she held Kristiane in her arms. Perfect, said the midwife. Healthy and beautiful, said Isak. But Johanne knew better. She looked down at her daughter, just thirty minutes old, so silent and with something in her that was blowing her to pieces.

‘Jump in,’ she said just a little too sharply, opening the back door. ‘I’ll fasten your belt.’

Her mobile rang. At first she couldn’t remember where she had put it, and started patting her jacket pockets.

‘Your bottom’s ringing,’ said Ragnhild, clambering into the car.

‘Yes, yes,’ Johanne said breathlessly into her phone when she had managed to get it out of her back pocket.

‘I’ve found her,’ Isak said from a long way off. ‘She was in the teddy bear shop, just as you thought, and she’s absolutely fine. A man was looking after her, and they were actually standing chatting to each other when I got there.’

Johanne leaned against the car, trying to slow her breathing. An immense feeling of relief that Kristiane was safe was overshadowed all too quickly by what Isak had said.

‘What man?’

‘What man? I ring up to tell you that Kristiane is perfectly safe, just as I thought, and you start going on about-’

‘Are you aware that shopping centres are an absolute El Dorado for paedophiles?’

Her words turned to grey clouds of vapour in the ice-cold air.

‘Mummy, aren’t you going to fasten my belt?’

‘Just a minute, sweetheart. What kind of-?’

‘No, Johanne, that’s enough! I’m not having this!’

Isak Aanonsen rarely became angry.

Even when Johanne got up from the sofa late one night an eternity ago and explained that she didn’t think their marriage could be saved, and that she’d already obtained the necessary forms to draw a line under it, Isak had tried to be positive. He just sat there for a while, alone in the living room, as Johanne went to bed in tears. An hour later he had knocked on the bedroom door, having already accepted the fact that they were no longer each other’s most intimate confidant. Kristiane was the most important person in all this, he said. Kristiane would always be the most important thing for both of them, and he really wanted them to agree on the practical arrangements regarding their daughter before they tried to sleep. By the time dawn broke they had come to an agreement. Since then he had loyally adhered to it. And she could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times over the years he had shown even the slightest hint of irritation.

But now he was furious.

‘This is just hysteria! The man who was talking to Kristiane was a perfectly ordinary guy who had obviously noticed what kind of… what kind of child she is. He was very kind, and Kristiane smiled and waved to him as we left. She’s standing here now and…’

Johanne could hear Kristiane’s usual dam-di-rum-ram in the background. She started to cry. Silently, so that she wouldn’t upset Ragnhild any more than she already had.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered into the phone. ‘I’m sorry, Isak. I mean it. I was just really, really scared.’

‘I think we both were,’ he said after a moment’s hesitation, his voice back to normal. ‘But everything’s worked out fine. I assume you’d prefer it if I brought her straight home today? What do you think?’

‘Thank you. Thank you so much, Isak. It would be wonderful to have her back home.’

‘I’ll make up my time with her another weekend or something.’

‘Perhaps you could stay as well,’ Johanne heard herself saying.

‘Stay over with you? Great!’

In her mind’s eye she could see a glint in those dark blue eyes that narrowed to slits in his always unshaven face when he smiled that crooked, sweet smile that she had once been so in love with.

‘I’ll be there in half an hour,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to pick up any shopping while we’re here?’

‘No thanks. Just bring yourselves. Just come.’

She ended the call, overwhelmed by an immense weariness. She rested her arms on the roof of the car. The metal was so cold that her skin contracted. Perhaps she could tell Isak about the man in the garden on Christmas Day. If she explained that her fear hadn’t come from nowhere, that she had a good reason to be anxious, that the man had known Kristiane’s name although neither of the children knew him, if she…

No.

Slowly she straightened up and dried her tears with the back of her hand.

‘Out you come,’ she said, bending down to Ragnhild with a smile. ‘We’re not going to Sandvika after all. Isak and Kristiane are coming here instead.’

‘But we were going to watch a film and pretend we were at the cinema!’ Ragnhild complained loudly. ‘Just you and me!’

‘Well, we can do that with the others. It’ll be brilliant. Come on, out you get.’

Raghnild slid reluctantly from her child seat and climbed out of the car. As they walked back across the gravel, she suddenly stopped and put her hands on her hips.

‘Mummy,’ she said severely. ‘First of all we were in a big hurry to get to Storvika Sandsenter. Now we’re going back inside. We were going to pretend we were at the cinema, just you and me, and now suddenly Isak and Kristiane are coming. Daddy’s quite right.’

‘About what?’ said Johanne with a smile, stroking her youngest daughter’s hair.

‘Sometimes you just can’t make up your mind. But you’re still the best mummy in the world. The very best supermummy in the whole wide world, with bells on.’

Detective Inspector Silje Sørensen of the violent crime division in Oslo had drunk two cups of hot chocolate with whipped cream and was feeling sick.

The photographs in front of her didn’t help.

This year Christmas Eve had fallen on a weekday, which was perfect for those who wanted to have the longest possible time off work. The twenty-third of December, when some people also held celebrations, was on a Tuesday, so most people had also taken the Monday off, even though it was a normal working day, and stayed away on Tuesday. Christmas Day and Boxing Day were bank holidays anyway, and today, the day after Boxing Day, it was Saturday, and therefore a working day for those within the public sector, but for the less conscientious Christmas 2008 was an opportunity to take two weeks off work, since there was no point in going in when New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day fell in the middle of the following week.

Norway was working at a quarter speed, but not Silje Sørensen.

The sight of her full in-tray had put her in a foul mood. In the end it was easy to convince the family it would be best for all of them if she put in an extra day at work.

Or perhaps it was the thought of Hawre Ghani that distracted her, whatever she tried to do.

She flicked quickly through the photographs of the body, took out the picture of the boy when he was alive, plus a new document, and closed the file.

On the afternoon of Christmas Day she had phoned DCI Harald Bull, as he had requested. He wasn’t all that interested in discussing work in the middle of the holiday. When he wrote ‘as soon as possible’, he meant 5 January. Despite the fact that the overtime budget had been blown long ago, they agreed to give DC Knut Bork the job of checking the Kurdish asylum seeker’s background. Bork was young, single and ambitious, and Silje Sørensen was impressed by the report he had completed that morning and left in her office.

She glanced through the pages.

Hawre Ghani had come to Norway eighteen months ago, allegedly at the age of fifteen. No parents. Since he had no ID papers, the Norwegian authorities quickly became suspicious of his age.

Despite doubts about the boy’s date of birth, he was placed in an asylum centre in Ringebu. There were several others like him in the centre, asylum seekers who were alone and under the age of eighteen. He ran away after three days. Since then he had been more or less permanently on the run, apart from a few days in custody every time the street-smart youngster wasn’t quite smart enough.

A year ago he turned to prostitution.

According to the report he sold himself at a high price, often to just about anybody. On at least one occasion Hawre Ghani had robbed a punter, something which had been discovered by chance. He had stolen a pair of Nike Shocks from Sportshuset in Storo. A security guard had overpowered him, got him down on the floor and sat on him until the police arrived three quarters of an hour later. When he was searched they found a beige Mont Blanc wallet containing credit cards, papers and receipts bearing the name of a well-known male sports journalist. He wasn’t interested in pressing charges, DC Bork’s report stated matter-of-factly, but several colleagues who had some knowledge of prostitution were able to confirm that both the boy and the robbery victim were known to them.

On one occasion an attempt had been made to link Hawre up with a Kurd from northern Iraq who had a temporary residence permit, but without any right to bring in his family. The man, who had been allowed to stay on in Norway for more than ten years and spoke fluent Norwegian, had been working part-time as a youth leader in Gamlebyn. So far his projects working with difficult refugee children had been very successful. Things didn’t go so well with Hawre. After three weeks the boy had persuaded four mates from the club to help him break into some basement offices; they also tried to empty an ATM with a crowbar, and stole and smashed up a four-year-old Audi TT.

Silje Sørensen stared at the picture of the immature young man with the big nose. His lips looked as if they belonged to a ten-year-old. His skin was smooth.

Perhaps she was naive.

Of course she was naive, even after all these years in the force, where her illusions burst like bubbles as she rose through the ranks.

But this boy was young. Of course it was impossible to say whether he was fifteen or seventeen, but the photograph had been taken after his arrival in Norway, and she could swear that at that point it would be quite some time before he came of age.

However, that didn’t matter now.

Slowly she put the photograph down right on the edge of the desk. It would stay there until she had solved this case. If it was true that someone had taken Hawre Ghani’s life – as the information gathered so far indicated – then she was going to find out who that person was.

Hawre Ghani was dead, and nobody had bothered about him while he was alive.

But at least someone was going to bother about his death.

‘Don’t bother about me,’ said Adam Stubo, waving the man away. ‘I’ve already had three cups of coffee today, and any more would do me no good at all.’

Lukas Lysgaard shrugged his shoulders and sat down on one of the yellow wing chairs. His father’s. Adam still thought it best not to sit on Eva Karin’s, and pulled out the same dining chair as before.

‘Have you got any further?’ asked Lukas, his voice suggesting a lack of interest.

‘How’s the headache?’ said Adam.

The young man shrugged his shoulders again, then scratched his hair and screwed up his eyes.

‘Better now. It comes and goes.’

‘That’s the way it is with migraine, or so I’ve heard.’

A grandfather clock slowly struck twice. Adam withstood the temptation to check the time against his own watch; he was sure it was after two. He felt a slight draught on the back of his neck, as if a window was open. There was a smell of bacon, and something else he couldn’t identify.

‘Not much new information to report, I’m afraid.’

He leaned forward on his chair and rested his elbows on his knees.

‘Quite a lot of material has been sent away for more detailed analysis. It seems highly likely that we will find biological traces at the scene of the crime. Since it was the police who actually found her, and very soon after the murder took place as far as we can tell, we hope we’ve secured the evidence to the best of our ability.’

‘But you don’t know who did it?’

Adam realized he was raising his eyebrows.

‘No, of course not. We still have to-’

‘The newspapers are saying it was random violence. They say they have sources inside the police who claim they’re hunting a lunatic. One of those “ticking time bombs”-’

His fingers drew quotation marks in the air.

‘-that the psychiatrists let out far too soon. Could be an asylum seeker. Or a Somali. That type.’

‘It is, of course, possible that we’re looking for someone who is mentally ill. Anything is possible. But at this stage of the investigation it’s important not to get locked in to one particular theory.’

‘But if that patrol was on the scene so quickly, the killer can’t have got far. I read in the paper today that it was only five or ten minutes from the time she died until she was found. There can’t be that many people to choose from on Christmas Eve. People who are out so late at night, I mean.’

He clearly regretted his words as soon as they were out of his mouth, and grabbed a glass containing yellow liquid, which Adam assumed was orange juice.

‘No,’ Adam said. ‘Your mother, for example.’

‘Listen to me,’ said Lukas, emptying the glass before he went on. ‘I understand your point of view, obviously. I’d give anything in the world to know what my mother was doing out so late on Christmas Eve. But I don’t know, OK? I don’t know! We – my wife and I and our three children – spend alternate Christmases with her parents and with mine. This year my in-laws came to us. My mother and father were alone. I’ve asked my father – of course I have, God knows…’

He pulled a face.

‘I’ve asked him, and he refuses to give me an answer.’

‘I understand,’ Adam said kindly. ‘I do understand. That’s why I’d like to ask you a few questions about this particular issue.’

Lukas spread his hands in a gesture of resignation. ‘Carry on.’

‘Did your mother enjoy walking?’

‘What?’

‘Did she like going for walks?’

‘Doesn’t everybody like…? Yes. Yes, I suppose she did.’

‘At night? I mean, lots of people are in the habit of going out for a breath of fresh air before they go to bed. Perhaps your mother liked to do that?’

For the first time since Adam met Lukas Lysgaard three days ago, the man actually seemed to be giving a question some thought.

‘The thing is, it’s many years since I lived at home,’ he said eventually. ‘I had… We had our children when we were only twenty, my wife and I. We got married the same summer we finished our education, and…’

He fell silent and a smile passed fleetingly over his tear-stained face.

‘That was early,’ said Adam. ‘I didn’t think that kind of thing happened these days.’

‘My mother and father – particularly my father – were dead against the idea of us moving in together without being married. As we were convinced that… But you asked if my mother was in the habit of going out at night.’

Adam gave a small nod and took his notepad out of his breast pocket as discreetly as he could.

‘She was, actually. At least when I lived at home. When she was a priest she often visited her parishioners outside normal working hours. She was the kind of priest who made a point of going to see people, my mother. She sometimes went out in the evening and didn’t get back until after I’d gone to sleep. But I’ve never known her visit anyone on Christmas Eve.’

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘It was actually very good of her to visit people who needed her at night. She was afraid of the dark.’

‘Afraid of the dark?’ Adam repeated. ‘Right. But she liked going out for walks at night? Here in Bergen, I mean. After you moved back?’

‘No… Well… When my mother was appointed bishop I was an adult. I’m not sure she did that many home visits these days. As a bishop, I mean.’

He sighed heavily and picked up the glass. When he discovered it was empty he sat there twirling it around in his hands. His left knee was shaking as if he had some kind of nervous tic.

‘To be honest, when I was young I didn’t know what they did in the evenings. Hadn’t a clue.’

This time the smile was genuine.

‘I suppose I was like most teenagers. Tested the boundaries. Even had girlfriends. I’ve never really thought about it, but maybe my mother was in the habit of going for a walk a little while before bedtime. In Stavanger as well. But when I’m here with my family, of course she doesn’t go out.’

‘You live in Os, don’t you?’

‘Yes. It’s only about half an hour from here. Except at rush hour. Then it can take for ever. But we often come to see them. And they come to us. But she never goes for any of those late-night walks when they visit us or when we’re here, so-’

‘Sorry to interrupt, but do you stay the night? When you come here?’

‘From time to time. Not usually. The children often stay over, of course. Mum and Dad are so good with them. We always stay over on Christmas Eve or other special occasions. We like to have a drink then.’

‘Your parents aren’t teetotal?’

‘Oh no. Not at all.’

‘What do you mean by “not at all”?’

‘What? What do I mean? They like a glass of red wine with their meal. My father likes a whisky on special occasions. They’re perfectly normal people, in other words.’

‘Did your mother ever drink before she went off on one of her walks?’

Lukas Lysgaard sighed demonstratively.

‘Listen to me,’ he said crossly. ‘I’m telling you I’m not sure. In some ways I have a feeling that my mother liked to go for a walk at night. But at the same time I know she was afraid of the dark. Really afraid of the dark. Everybody teased her about her phobia, because she of all people should have felt secure in the presence of God. And His presence is with us all the time…’

He made his last comment with a small grimace as he leaned back in the chair and put down the empty glass.

‘Could I have a look around?’ Adam asked.

‘Er… yes… I mean no… My father is with my family, and I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to be poking around among his things when he hasn’t given his permission.’

‘I won’t poke around,’ Adam smiled, holding up his hands. ‘Definitely not. I just want to take a superficial look. As I’ve mentioned several times already, it’s important for me to gain the clearest possible impression of the victims in the cases I investigate. That’s why I’m here. In Bergen, I mean. I want to try and get a clearer picture of your mother. Seeing her home helps a little. That should be OK, shouldn’t it?’

Once again Lukas shrugged his shoulders. Adam took this as a sign of agreement, and stood up. As he slipped his notepad in his pocket, he asked Lukas to show him around. ‘So that I don’t make a fool of myself,’ he said with a smile. ‘Like last time.’

The house on Nubbebakken was old but well maintained. The staircase leading to the upper floor was surprisingly narrow and unprepossessing compared with the rest of the house. Lukas led the way, warning Adam about a projection from the ceiling.

‘This is their bedroom,’ he said, opening a door. He stood there with his hand resting on the handle, partly blocking the opening. Adam got the message, and simple leaned in to take a look.

A double bed, neatly made.

The quilt was made up of different coloured pieces of fabric, and lit up the large and fairly empty room. There were piles of books on the bedside table, and a folded newspaper on the floor by the side of the bed nearest the door. Bergens Tidende, as far as Adam could make out. A large painting hung on the wall directly opposite the bed: abstract patterns in blue and lilac. Behind the door – so that Adam was only able to see it in the mirror between the large windows – stood a capacious wardrobe.

‘Thank you,’ he said, stepping back.

Apart from the main bedroom, the upper floor consisted of a recently renovated bathroom, two fairly anonymous bedrooms, one of which had been Lukas’s when he was a boy, and a large study where the couple each had a substantial desk. Adam was itching to get a closer look at the papers on the desks. However, he could tell that Lukas was running out of patience, so he nodded in the direction of the staircase instead. On the way they passed a narrow door with a wrought-iron key in the lock; he presumed it led up to an attic.

‘Why do they live here?’ Adam asked on the way downstairs.

‘What?’

‘Why don’t they live in the bishop’s residence? As far as I know, the diocese of Bjørgvin has a bishop’s residence that was designed by an architect.’

‘This is my father’s childhood home. They wanted to live here when we came back to Bergen. When my mother became bishop, my father insisted on moving here. I think he only agreed on that condition – to my mother becoming bishop, I mean.’

They had reached the long hallway outside the living room.

‘But isn’t it a statutory requirement?’ Adam asked. ‘As far as I know, the bishop has an obligation to-’

‘Listen,’ said Lukas, rubbing the top of his nose between his thumb and index finger. ‘There was a lot of fuss about getting permission, but I don’t really know. I’m very, very tired. Could you ask someone else?’

‘OK,’ Adam said quickly. ‘I’ll leave you in peace. ‘I just need to take a look in here.’

He pointed to the little bedroom he had found by mistake a couple of days earlier.

‘Carry on,’ Lukas mumbled, gesturing towards the door with his hand outstretched.

Only when he walked into the room did it strike Adam that Lukas hadn’t stood in his way. Quite the reverse – the bishop’s son had gone back into the living room, leaving Adam alone. He glanced around quickly.

The curtains were open, and the stuffy smell of sleep was less noticeable. The room was cooler than he remembered, and the clothes that had been hanging on the back of the chair were gone.

Otherwise everything seemed the same.

He bent down to read the titles of the books in a small pile on the bedside table. A thick biography of Jens Christian Hauge, the war hero; a crime novel by Unni Lundell, and an old, worn, leather-bound copy of Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil.

Adam stood motionless, all his senses alert. She had spent her nights in this room, he was sure of it. He carefully opened the wardrobe door.

Dresses and skirts hung alongside ironed shirts and blouses in one half; the other was divided into shelves. A shelf for underwear and a shelf for tights and stockings. A shelf for trousers and a shelf for belts and evening bags. And a shelf down at the bottom for everything that didn’t have a shelf of its own.

You don’t keep your everyday clothes in a guest room, thought Adam, silently closing the door.

A sense of revulsion rose within him, as it often did when he surfed into other people’s lives on the wave following a tragedy.

‘Have you nearly finished?’ Lukas shouted.

‘Absolutely,’ said Adam, scanning the room for one last time before returning to the hallway. ‘Thank you.’

At the front door he turned and held out his hand.

‘I wonder when it will pass,’ said Lukas, without taking it. ‘All this bad stuff.’

‘It never passes,’ said Adam, letting his hand fall. ‘Not completely.’

Lukas Lysgaard let out a sob.

‘I lost my first wife and my grown-up daughter,’ Adam said quietly. ‘More than ten years ago. A ridiculous, banal accident at home. I didn’t think it was possible for anything to hurt so much.’

Lukas’s face changed. The hostile, reserved expression disappeared, and he put his hands to the back of his neck in a despairing gesture.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. ‘Forgive me. To lose a child… And here am I…’

‘You have nothing to apologize for,’ said Adam. ‘Grief is not relative. Your grief is deep enough in itself. In time you’ll learn to live with it. There are brighter days ahead, Lukas. Life has a blessed tendency to heal itself.’

‘Yes, but I mean she was only my mother. You lost-’

‘I still wake up sometimes in the middle of the night, thinking that Elisabeth and Trine are still alive. It takes a second or two for me to realize where I am in terms of time. And the grief I feel at that moment is exactly the same as the day they died. But it doesn’t last as long, of course. Half an hour later I am able to sleep, the best and most secure sleep of all.’ He gave a faint smile. ‘But now I must go.’

The raw cold struck him as he walked out on to the low stone steps. The rain came lashing at him from the side, and he turned up his collar as he headed for the gate without looking back.

The only thought he could cope with was that one of the photographs on the shelf in the so-called guest room had disappeared. On Christmas Day there had been four photographs there. Now there were only three. One of Lukas as a child, on Erik’s knee. One of the whole family on a boat. The third was a photograph of a very young, serious Erik Lysgaard in his student cap. The tassel resting on his shoulder. The cap at an angle, as it should be.

When Adam opened the gate, pulling a face at the screeching of the hinge, he wondered if it had been stupid not to ask Lukas what had happened to the fourth photograph.

On the other hand, he probably wouldn’t have got an answer.

At least not one he would have believed.

The idea that anyone could believe such stories was completely incomprehensible.

Johanne was sitting with her laptop on her knee, surfing aimlessly. She had visited both the New York Times and the Washington Post, but was finding it difficult to concentrate. At least the web pages of The National Enquirer were entertaining.

Ragnhild was already fast asleep, and Isak was putting Kristiane to bed. Although she didn’t really like it, she caught herself hoping he would stay. In order to shake off the thought, she checked her e-mail. There were three new messages in her inbox, two of which were irritating adverts; one was for a slimming product made from krill and bears’ claws. There was also a message from someone whose name didn’t ring a bell at first, until she trawled her memory.

Karen Ann Winslow.

Johanne remembered Karen Winslow. They had studied together in Boston, two marriages and an eternity ago. At that time Johanne still thought she was going to be a psychologist, and didn’t know that she was going to ditch her prestigious education in favour of an FBI course that would almost cost her her life.

She opened the message which came from a private address, and didn’t say anything about where Karen was working.

Dear Johanne – remember me? Long time no see! We had some great days back at school and I’ve thought about you now and then. How are you? Married? Kids? Can’t wait to hear.

I googled your name and found this address – hope it’s correct.

Listen, I’m going to a wedding in Norway on January 10th. A dear friend of mine is marrying a Norwegian cardiologist. The wedding is taking place in a small town called Lillesand, not far from Oslo. Are you still living there?

Johanne realized that Karen’s American idea of what constituted ‘not far’ would encounter the grim reality of the winding, lethal E18 to Sørlandet.

I’ll have to go without my husband and three children (two daughters and a son, gorgeous kids!) due to other family activities. I arrive in Oslo three days before the wedding, and would be absolutely thrilled to meet you. Any chance? We have SO much catching up to do. Please get in touch as soon as possible. I’ll be staying at the Grand Hotel, by the way, in the center of Oslo.

Lots of love,

Karen

At least she was right about the location of the hotel, thought Johanne as she closed the message, launched Google and typed Karen’s full name in the search box.

Two hundred and six hits.

There were obviously at least two Americans with the same name, because a lot of the articles were about a seventy-three-year-old writer of children’s books. As far as Johanne remembered, Karen was due to start studying law the same summer that she herself had gone to Quantico. If she knew Karen as well as she thought, she would have passed her exams with flying colours. Many of the hits concerned a lawyer working for an Alabama-based firm called the American Poverty Law Center (APLC). This Karen Ann Winslow – who, a quick glance at several articles confirmed, was the same age as Johanne – had among other things led a campaign against the state of Mississippi to close the huge prison for underage criminals after serious breaches of the most basic rights for children had been proved.

When Johanne looked at their website, she remembered that she had been there before. APLC was one of the leading firms in the United States when it came to prosecuting hate crimes. Apart from offering free support to needy victims – mostly African-Americans – it pursued wide-ranging campaigns on behalf of those who were poor and without means. It was also behind an impressive information service aimed at mapping hate groups all over the huge continent of America.

Johanne clicked around the packed home page. There were no pictures of the employees. For safety reasons, she assumed. However, after reading for ten minutes she was convinced that Karen Ann Winslow, the lawyer at APLC, was identical with her old friend.

‘Perfect,’ she murmured.

‘I agree,’ said Isak, flopping down in the armchair opposite the sofa where Johanne was sitting. ‘Both the kids are asleep, and if you don’t mind I’ll take a look in your fridge and see what I can put together.’

Johanne didn’t even look up from her laptop. She had clicked her way back to Outlook.

‘Carry on,’ she said. ‘Those sausages weren’t exactly filling.’

Dear Karen,

Thanks so much for your message. Of course I want to see you! I live in Oslo and you’re more than welcome to stay with us for a couple of days. Have to warn you, though, I’m blessed with two daughters who are more than a handful!

Her fingers flew over the keys. She wasn’t even thinking. It was as if there were a direct line between her hands and everything she had experienced in the past seventeen years. It was as if nothing needed to be amended or considered, as if she didn’t have to work anything out, she simply told her story. She wrote about the children, about Adam, about her job. Karen Winslow was far away on the other side of the ocean – her old college friend didn’t know anyone here and there was no need to consider anyone’s feelings. Johanne wrote about life as a researcher, about her projects, about her fear of not being a good enough mother to a daughter that no one but Johanne understood. She didn’t understand Kristiane either, if she was honest. She wrote without any inhibitions to a woman with whom she had once been young and free.

It felt almost like making a confession.

‘Voilà,’ said Isak, putting a large plate down in front of her. ‘Spaghetti carbonara with a tiny, tiny variation. You didn’t have any bacon, so I had to use ham. You didn’t have any eggs, so I made a little sauce with some blue cheese I found. You didn’t even have any spaghetti, so it’s tagliatelle instead. And then there’s loads and loads of finely chopped sautéed garlic on top. Not exactly carbonara, I have to say.’

Johanne sniffed the air. ‘Smells fantastic,’ she said absently. ‘There’s wine in the corner cupboard if you want to open a bottle. I’ll have mineral water. Could you possibly bring me one?’

She was staring at the screen, distractedly chewing her lower lip.

Resolutely, she highlighted the entire text apart from the first three lines and pressed DELETE before finishing off the brief sentence that remained:

Let me know the details of your stay as soon as possible. I’m really looking forward to seeing you, Karen. Really!

All the best,

Johanne

‘Who are you so busy writing to?’ asked Isak, putting his feet up on the table and balancing the plate on his stomach as he started shovelling down his food.

His table manners had always annoyed her.

He didn’t have any.

He grabbed his glass, which was full to the brim, and slurped down the red wine with his mouth full of food.

‘You eat like a pig, Isak.’

‘Who are you writing to?’

‘A friend,’ she said tersely. ‘A really old friend.’

Then she closed the laptop, pushed it away and bent over her plate. The food tasted as good as it smelled. They sat there without speaking to each other until the meal was over.

The glass was empty.

Whisky and soda was Marcus’s weakness.

Hardly anyone of his own generation was familiar with the concept, and his friends wrinkled their noses in disgust when he mixed enormously expensive whisky and soda in a tall glass. It was his grandfather’s standard drink, every Saturday at eight o’clock in the evening after his weekly bath and hair wash. Marcus Junior had been given his first one the day he was confirmed. It tasted bitter, but he swallowed it. Real men drank whisky and soda, in his grandfather’s opinion, and since then this particular drink had become Marcus’s trademark.

He thought about mixing another, but decided against it.

Rolf was out. A dressage horse was experiencing some pain in its left foreleg, and with a purchase price of one and a half million kroner, the owner wasn’t all that keen on waiting until the surgery reopened on 7 January. Rolf’s opening hours were at best a guideline, at worst completely misleading. At least twice a week someone rang him during the evening and he had to go out.

Little Marcus was asleep. The dogs had settled, and the house was quiet. He tried to switch on the TV. A vague feeling of unease made it difficult for him to decide whether to go to bed or watch some kind of TV series. Cold Case, perhaps. Something like that. Anything that could take his mind off things.

The set was dead. He banged the remote against his thigh and tried again. Nothing happened. The batteries, no doubt. Marcus Koll yawned and decided to go to bed. Check his e-mail, brush his teeth and go to bed.

He padded out of the room, across the hallway and into his study. The computer was on. There was nothing of interest in his inbox. Idly he clicked on the national daily newspaper. Nothing of interest there either. He scrolled down the page.

CONTROVERSIAL ARTIST FOUND DEAD .

The headline flickered past.

His index finger stopped scrolling. He moved back up the page.

CONTROVERSIAL ARTIST FOUND DEAD .

His heart started pounding. He felt light-headed.

Not again. Not another attack.

It wasn’t panic this time.

He felt strong. His mind was clear. Slowly he began to read.

When he had finished he logged off and shut down the computer. He took a little screwdriver out of the desk drawer. Then he crouched down on the floor, undid four screws, took off the cover and carefully removed the hard drive. From another drawer he took out another hard drive. It was easy to insert. He put the cover back on, screwed it in place and put the screwdriver away. Finally he pushed the computer back under the desk.

He took the loose hard drive with him when he left the room.

He was wide awake.

The woman standing in the arrivals hall at Gardermoen was surprised at how wide awake she felt. It had been a long drive, and she had slept badly for a couple of nights. For the last few kilometres before she reached the airport she had been afraid of falling asleep at the wheel. But now it seemed as if the same anxiety that had kept her awake at night was back.

For the hundredth time she looked at her watch.

The plane had definitely been delayed, according to the arrivals board. Flight SK1442 from Copenhagen was due at 21.50, but hadn’t landed until forty minutes later. That was now more than three quarters of an hour ago.

She paced up and down in front of the entrance to customs control. The airport was quiet, almost deserted so late on a Saturday evening between Christmas and New Year. The chairs were empty outside the small cafeteria where she had bought a cup of coffee and a slice of inedible lukewarm pizza. But she couldn’t calm herself enough to sit down.

She usually liked airports. When she was younger, in the days when the largest Norwegian airport was actually in Denmark and little Fornebu was the biggest in the country, she sometimes drove out there on Sundays just to watch. The planes. The people. The groups of self-assured pilots and the smiling women who were still called air stewardesses and were stunningly beautiful; she could sit for hours drinking tea from her Thermos and making up stories about all the people coming and going. Airports gave her a feeling of curiosity, expectation and homesickness.

But now she was anxious, verging on irritated.

It was a long time since anyone had come through customs.

When she turned back to look at the arrivals board, she saw that it no longer said BAGS ON BELT after SK1442. She knew what that meant, but refused to accept it. Not yet.

Marianne would have let her know if anything had happened.

Sent a message. Called. She would have been in touch.

The journey from Sydney took over thirty hours, with landings in Tokyo and Copenhagen. Obviously something could have happened. In Tokyo. In Sydney, perhaps. Or in Copenhagen, for that matter.

Marianne would have let her know.

Fear sank its teeth into the back of her neck. She made a sudden decision and rushed over to the corridor leading from customs control. It probably wasn’t advisable to flout the rule forbidding anyone from going further down the corridor. For all she knew, the security measures adopted by the airline industry after 9/11 might mean the customs officers had orders to shoot to kill.

‘Hello?’ she called out, poking her head around the wall. ‘Is anyone there?’

No response.

‘Hello?’ she called again, a little louder this time.

A man wearing the uniform of the customs service came over from the opposite wall, five metres away.

‘You can’t go in that way!’

‘No, I know. I was just wondering… I’m waiting for someone on the flight from Copenhagen. The one that landed an hour ago. SK1442. But she hasn’t turned up. I just wondered if you could…? Could you possibly be kind enough to check if there are any passengers left in there?’

For a moment it looked as if he might say no. It wasn’t his job to run errands for the general public. Then he changed his mind for some reason, shrugged his shoulders and gave a little smile.

‘I don’t think there’s anyone there. Just a minute.’

He disappeared.

Maybe her mobile needed recharging. Of course, she thought, breathing a little more easily. God knows it could be difficult finding a payphone these days. And if you found one, you didn’t have any change. Most took cards, of course, but when she thought about it, there must be something wrong with Marianne’s mobile.

‘Empty. Silent as the grave.’ The customs officer had his hands in his pockets. ‘We’re waiting for two or three more flights tonight, but at the moment there’s no one there. And the luggage carousel for the Copenhagen flight is empty.’

He took his hands out of his pockets and made an apologetic gesture.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Thank you for your help.’

She moved away and set off towards the escalator leading up to the departures hall. Took out her mobile. No messages. No missed calls. Once again she tried to ring Marianne, but it went straight to voice-mail. Her legs started to move of their own accord. The escalator was going too slowly, so she ran up it. At the top, she stopped dead.

She had never seen the departures hall so empty and quiet.

Only a few check-in desks were staffed, the operators looking bored. A couple of them were reading newspapers. At the southern end she could hear the hum of a cleaning machine gliding slowly across the floor, a dark-skinned man at the controls. Only one security post was open, and she couldn’t see anyone there. It was like a scene from a film, a Doomsday film. Gardermoen should be full of life, exhausting and unfriendly, teeming with countless travellers and employees who never did more than they absolutely had to.

Her heart was in her mouth as she headed resolutely for the Scandinavian Airlines desk on the other side of the hall. There was no one there either. She swallowed several times and wiped the cold sweat from her forehead with her sleeve.

A well-built woman emerged from the back room.

‘Can I help you?’

‘Yes, I’m here to meet…’

The woman sat down behind the barrier. She logged on to her computer without looking up.

‘I’ve come to pick up a friend who should have been on the plane from Copenhagen.’

‘Hasn’t he turned up?’

‘She. It’s a she. Marianne Kleive.’

The woman behind the desk looked up in some confusion before she managed to rearrange her expression and went back to concentrating on her keyboard.

‘I understand,’ she said. ‘Quite.’

‘But she didn’t turn up. She’s been in Australia, and the flight was supposed to land in Tokyo and Copenhagen en route. I wonder if you could check whether she was on board?’

‘I can’t, unfortunately. I’m not allowed to give out that kind of information.’

Perhaps it was the threatening emptiness of the gigantic hall. Perhaps it was the sleepless nights or the inexplicable unease that had haunted her all week. Or it could have been the fact that she knew, deep down inside, she had every reason to despair. Whatever the cause, the woman in the red anorak started to cry in public for the first time in her adult life.

Slowly, silently, the tears ran down her cheeks, through the dimples on either side of her mouth that were so deep they were visible even now, and continued over her pointed chin. Slowly the big fat drops landed on the pale wood of the desk.

‘Are you crying?’

The Scandinavian Airlines clerk suddenly looked more sympathetic.

The woman in the red anorak didn’t reply.

‘Listen,’ said the clerk, lowering her voice. ‘It’s late. You must be tired. There’s no one here and…’ She gave a quick sideways glance at the door leading to the back room. ‘Which flight did you say?’

The woman placed a folded piece of paper on the desk.

‘A copy of the itinerary,’ she whispered, wiping her face with the backs of her hands.

She couldn’t see the screen from where she was standing. Instead she fixed her gaze on the other woman’s eyes. They flicked up and down between the keys and the screen. Suddenly the furrow above her eyes became more pronounced.

‘She had a ticket,’ she said eventually. ‘But she wasn’t on the plane. She…’ The keys rattled beneath her dancing fingers. ‘Marianne Kleive had a ticket, but she never checked in.’

‘In Copenhagen?’

‘No. In Sydney.’

It didn’t make sense. It was impossible. Marianne would never, ever have failed to get in touch if something had prevented her from coming home. It was more than thirty hours since the plane had left Australian soil, and in that time Marianne would definitely have found a phone. A computer with Internet access. Something, and none of this made any sense at all.

‘Just a moment,’ said the clerk, picking up the copy of the itinerary again.

The woman in the anorak was forty-three years old and her name was Synnøve. The name suited her perfectly. Her blonde hair was braided, her face completely free of make-up, and she could easily be taken for ten years younger. She had been 140 metres from the top of Mount Everest when she was forced to turn back, and she had sailed around the world. She had encountered pirates off the Canary Islands and had been a hair’s breadth from drowning in a diving accident in Stord. Synnøve Hessel was a woman who could think quickly and constructively, and who had saved both her own life and the lives of others on several occasions with her quick thinking.

Now everything stood still. Utterly, utterly still.

‘I’m sorry,’ the woman behind the desk whispered. ‘Marianne Kleive had a ticket to Sydney last Sunday. But this shows…’

The other woman’s expression stabbed her like a knife.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said anyway. ‘She didn’t actually travel. Marianne Kleive never used her ticket. At least not for the return journey to Sydney. Of course, she could have gone somewhere else. With a different ticket, I mean.’

Without saying thank you for the kind and highly irregular service, without saying anything at all, without even picking up the copy of the itinerary which had not been followed, Synnøve Hessel turned away from the information desk and began to run through the deserted departure hall.

She had no idea where she was going.

The Beloved Son

As she stood there with her hand resting on the door handle, Trude Hansen no longer remembered where she was going. She swayed and realized she had already got hold of enough to see her through until tomorrow. The relief was so great that her knees gave way, and she had to lean on the wall when she let go of the door handle.

It still smelled vile in here.

She must do something about it.

Soon, she thought, staggering into the small room. In the alcove a sleeping bag lay on top of an unmade bed. At the bottom of the sleeping bag lay a red toilet bag with a picture of Hello Kitty on it. Someone had given the cat fangs and a patch over one eye. With hands that somehow didn’t want to obey her she eventually managed to pull out the bag and unzip it.

Everything was there.

Untouched. Three fixes.

Just like countless times before, she was intending to take the whole lot at once. Routinely, dully, she considered the chances that it would all be over if she took an overdose on purpose. She always started thinking along these lines on those rare occasions when she had enough heroin even to contemplate suicide, and it was equally inevitable that she would always reject the idea. She probably wouldn’t die. And when she came round, she would have nothing left.

The thought of running out of drugs was worse than the thought of going on living.

She took the toilet bag and staggered the few steps over to a green sofa against the other wall. It was covered with empty beer bottles from yesterday. Someone had dropped a cigarette on one of the cushions during the night, and she stood for a while looking at the big brown circle with a black hole in the middle.

Above the sofa hung a confirmation photo of Runar.

She grabbed it and threw it among the beer bottles.

Runar stared at her from the large picture in its gold frame. His hair was cut in a mullet, and he’d had a perm. His suit was powder blue. The narrow tie was pink. He had looked so smart, she remembered. He was her big brother, and the most stylish person in the entire church that day. Later, when the ceremony was finally over and her mother really wanted to get away before any of the other parents started asking about the party, he had picked up his sister and carried her in one arm all the way to the bus stop. Even though she was nine years old and much too fat.

They had eaten chicken wings.

Mum, Runar and Trude.

Runar hadn’t received a single present, because all the money had gone on his new suit, his hairstyle and the photographer. But they had eaten chicken wings and chips and Runar had been allowed a beer to go with it. He had smiled. She had laughed. Mum had smelled clean and wonderful.

Slowly she took out the spoon and the Bunsen burner Runar had given her. Soon she would feel better. Very soon. If only her hands would obey her a little better.

Her dull brain tried to work out how long it was since Runar died. Nineteen plus nineteen? No. Wrong. From the nineteenth to the nineteenth was thirty-one days. Or thirty. She couldn’t remember how many days there were in November. Nor how many days had passed since then. She couldn’t even remember what day it was today.

The only thing she knew for sure was that Runar died on 19 November.

She had been at home. He was supposed to come. Runar had promised to come. He was just going to get some money. Score some heroin. Get everything she needed. Runar was going to help his little sister, just like he always did.

He was late. He was so fucking late. Then the cops came.

They came here. Rang the bell, at some ridiculous hour of the morning. When she opened the door they told her Runar had been robbed in Sofienberg Park that night. He had severe head injuries when he was found, and was probably already dead. Someone had called an ambulance, and he was pronounced dead when he arrived at the hospital.

The policewoman was serious, and might possibly have tried to console her.

She didn’t remember anything apart from a piece of paper in her hand. The address and phone number of a funeral director. Five days later she had woken up so late in the day she realized she wasn’t going to make it to the funeral.

Since then the cops had done fuck all.

Nobody had been caught.

She hadn’t heard anything.

As the syringe emptied into a vein at the back of her knee, the blissful warmth spread so quickly that she gasped out loud. Slowly she sank back on the green sofa. She wrapped her stick-thin arms around the photo of Runar. Her last conscious thought before everything became warm clouds of nothingness was that her big brother had given her the last three chicken wings on the day he was confirmed and Mum gave him a beer for the first time.

The cops didn’t care about people like Runar.

People like her and Runar.

‘Do you care about this at all?’

For the first time in more than three quarters of an hour, Synnøve Hessel was on the point of losing control. She leaned towards the police officer, both hands gripping the edge of the table as if she were afraid she might hit him otherwise.

‘Of course,’ he said without looking at her. ‘But as I’m sure you understand, we have to ask questions. If you had any idea how many people just leave their normal everyday lives without-’

‘Marianne hasn’t left! When will you understand that she had absolutely no reason to leave?’

The police officer sighed. He leafed through the papers in front of him, then glanced at his watch. The small interview room was becoming unbearably warm. An air-conditioning unit hummed in the ceiling, but there must be something wrong with the thermostat. Synnøve Hessel took off her knitted sweater and flapped her shirt in an attempt to cool down. A damp oval stain was visible between her breasts, and she could feel the sweat trickling down from under her arms. She decided to ignore it. The police officer smelled worse than she did.

At Gardermoen police station they had at least been friendly. Almost kind, in spite of the fact that all they could do was direct her to a normal police station. They had sympathized, of course, and made her a cup of coffee. An older uniformed female officer had tried to console her with the one thing everyone else seemed to know: people go missing all the time. But, sooner or later, they turn up again.

Later was too late for Synnøve Hessel.

The journey home to Sandefjord that same night had been an ordeal.

‘Let’s sum up what we have,’ suggested the police officer, finishing off a bottle of cola.

Synnøve Hessel didn’t reply. They had already summed things up twice, and it hadn’t brought the man any closer to a realistic understanding of the situation.

‘After all, you are…’

He adjusted his glasses and read:

‘… a documentary film-maker.’

‘Producer,’ she corrected him.

‘Exactly. So you know better than most people what reality looks like.’

‘We were supposed to be summing things up.’

‘Yes. So. Marianne Kleive was supposed to be going to Wollogo… Wollongo-’

‘Wollongong. A town not far from Sydney. She was going to visit a relative. Celebrate Christmas there.’

‘Hell of a short stay for such a long journey.’

‘What?’

‘I just mean,’ the man said deliberately, ‘that if I was going all the way to Australia, I’d stay longer than barely a week.’

‘I don’t really see what that’s got to do with anything.’

‘Don’t say that. Don’t say that. Anyway, she left Sandefjord on Saturday 19 December on the train that leaves at-’

‘Twelve thirty-eight.’

‘Mm. And she was going to meet a friend in Oslo…’

‘Which she did. I checked.’

‘Then she spent the night in a hotel before catching the flight to Copenhagen at nine thirty.’

‘And she never arrived there.’

‘She didn’t arrive in Copenhagen?’

‘She didn’t arrive at Gardermoen. At least, it’s possible that she did arrive there, of course, but she wasn’t on the flight to Copenhagen. Which naturally means that she didn’t fly on to Tokyo or Sydney either.’

The police officer didn’t pick up on her sarcasm. He scratched his crotch without embarrassment. Picked up the cola bottle and put it down when he realized it was empty.

‘Why didn’t you find out about this until last night? Hasn’t she got a mobile, this… your girlfriend?’

‘She is not my girlfriend. She is the person I love. The fact is that she’s my wife. My spouse, if you like.’

The man’s sour expression showed very clearly that he didn’t like it at all.

‘And as I have already explained several times,’ said Synnøve, leaning towards him with her mobile in her hand, ‘I received three messages over the course of the week. Everything indicated that Marianne was actually in Australia.’

‘But you haven’t spoken to one another?’

‘No. As I said, I tried to ring a couple of times late on Sunday, but I couldn’t get through. Last night I tried at least ten times. It goes straight to voicemail, so I assume the battery is dead.’

‘Could I have a look at the messages?’

Synnøve brought them up and passed him the phone.

‘Everything OK. Excitting country. Marianne.’

The man couldn’t even read fluently, but made a big thing of the fact that ‘exciting’ was spelt incorrectly.

‘Not particularly…’ he went on, trying to find the right word before he read the next message. ‘Not particularly romantic. Having a good time. Marianne.’

He looked at her over the top of his glasses. The chewing tobacco had formed black crusts at the corners of his mouth, and he constantly sprayed tiny grains into the air.

‘Are you two usually so… concise?’

For the first time, Synnøve was lost for words. She didn’t know what to say. She knew the question was justified, because it was precisely the unusual brevity, the impersonality in the messages that had made her uneasy. She hadn’t given much thought to the first one, which had arrived on the Monday. Marianne might have been in a hurry. Perhaps her great aunt was very demanding. As far as she knew, there could be thousands of reasons why a message didn’t arrive or was very brief. On Christmas Eve the message she received said only Merry Christmas, which hurt Synnøve deeply. The last message, saying that Marianne was having a good time, neither more nor less, had kept her awake for two nights.

‘No,’ she said, when the pause began to get embarrassing. ‘That’s why I don’t think she wrote them. She would never have misspelt “exciting”.’

The police officer’s eyes widened so dramatically that he looked like a clown at some ghastly children’s party. Tufts of hair stuck out behind his ears, his mouth was red and moist and his nose resembled an almost round potato.

‘So now we have a theeeeeory,’ he said, stretching the e for as long as he could. ‘Someone has stolen Marianne’s mobile and sent the messages in her place!’

‘That’s not what I’m saying,’ she protested, although that was exactly what she was saying. ‘Don’t you understand that… that if Marianne has been the victim of a crime and someone…’

Crime.

‘… and someone wanted to make it more difficult to discover-’

‘Discover?’

‘Yes. That she’d disappeared, I mean. Or that she’s…’

For the second time in twenty-four hours she was close to bursting into tears with someone else looking on.

There was a knock at the door.

‘Kvam! They’re looking for you on the desk.’

A uniformed man smiled and came into the room. He placed a hand on his somewhat smelly colleague’s shoulder and waved towards the door.

‘I think it’s urgent.’

‘I’m in the middle of-’

‘I can take over.’

Detective Inspector Kvam got to his feet with a sour expression. He started gathering up the papers in front of him.

‘You can leave all that. I’ll finish off here. A missing person, isn’t it?’

Kvam shrugged his shoulders, gave a farewell nod and headed for the door. It slammed shut behind him.

‘Synnøve Hessel,’ said the new officer. ‘It’s been a while.’

She half stood up and took the outstretched hand.

‘Kjetil? Kjetil… Berggren?’

‘The one and only! I saw you in here and I was a bit…’

He held out his hand and wiggled it back and forth.

‘… concerned when I saw that Ola Kvam was dealing with the report. He isn’t… he’s actually retired, but over Christmas we bring in a few people to cover… Anyway. You know. We all have our own way of doing things. I came as soon as I’d finished what I had to do.’

Kjetil Berggren had been a year below her in school. She wouldn’t really have remembered him at all if he hadn’t been the school athletics champion. He set a record for the 3,000 metres in Bugårds Park in the very first heat, and was a member of the national junior team before he gained a place at the Police Training Academy straight from high school.

He still looked as if he could run away from just about anybody.

‘I have actually followed your career!’ He grinned, putting his hands behind his neck and leaning back, tipping his chair. ‘Great programmes. Especially that one you did in-’

‘You have to help me, Kjetil!’

She thought his pupils grew smaller. Perhaps it was because the sun was suddenly in his eyes as he allowed the chair to drop back, and leaned towards her.

‘That’s why I’m here. We. The police. To protect and serve, as they say.’

He tried another smile, but she didn’t respond to that one either.

‘I’m absolutely, totally convinced that something terrible has happened to my partner.’

Kjetil Berggren slowly gathered up the papers in front of him and placed them in a folder, which he pushed to the left on the large desk between them.

‘You’d better tell me everything,’ he said. ‘From the beginning.’

He had understood his father in the beginning.

When the police rang the doorbell of the house in Os on Christmas Eve just as everyone was about to go to bed, Lukas Lysgaard’s first thought was for his father. His mother was dead, said the police officer, who seemed genuinely upset at having to deliver the tragic news. They had brought the priest – his mother’s closest colleague – from Fana, but the poor man was in such a state that he just sat in the car while the police took on the heavy burden of telling Lukas Lysgaard that his mother had been murdered three hours earlier.

Lukas had immediately thought about his father.

About his mother, too, of course. He loved his mother. A paralysing grief began to drain away his strength as soon as he grasped what they were telling him. But it was his father that worried him.

Erik Lysgaard was a mild man. Some people found him awkward, while others appreciated his gentle, reserved nature. He didn’t make much of an impact outside the family. Or inside it, come to that. He spoke little, but listened all the more. That was why Erik Lysgaard was a man who improved on closer acquaintance. He had his own friends, of course, some childhood friends and a couple of colleagues from the school where he had worked until his back became so twisted that he was granted early retirement on the grounds of ill health.

But above all he was his wife’s spouse.

He’s nothing alone, was the thought that struck Lukas when he was told that his mother was dead. My father is nothing without my mother.

And in the beginning he had understood him.

That night, that holy, terrible night that Lukas would never forget as long as he lived, the police had driven him to Nubbebakken. The older of the two officers had asked if they wanted company until daylight.

Neither Lukas nor his father wanted anyone there.

His father had shrivelled up into something that was hard to recognize. He was so thin and bent that he hardly even cast a shadow when he opened the door to his son, and without a word turned his back on him and went back into the living room.

The way he cried was terrifying. He cried for a long time, almost silently, then he would emit a low, long-drawn-out howl, without any tears, an animalistic pain that frightened Lukas. He felt more helpless than he had expected, particularly when his father refused all physical contact. Nor did he want to talk. As the day gradually came, a dark Christmas morning heavy with rain, Erik had finally agreed to try and get some sleep. Even then he refused to let his son help him, despite the fact that every single night for more than ten years Eva Karin had taken off her husband’s socks and helped him into bed, then rubbed his bad back with a home-made ointment sent by a faithful parishioner from their years in Stavanger.

But Lukas had understood him.

Now it was starting to get rather wearing.

It was five days since the murder, and nothing had changed. His father had literally eaten nothing during those five days. He was quite prepared to drink water – lots of water – and a couple of cups of coffee with sugar and milk in the afternoon. Lukas brought him to his own house in the hope that the grandchildren would at least arouse some spark of life in the old man, but Erik still refused to eat. The visit had been a complete disaster. The children were scared stiff at the sight of their grandfather crying in such a peculiar way, and the eldest, at eight years old, already had his hands full trying to deal with the knowledge that Grandma was never, ever coming back.

‘This won’t do, Dad.’

Lukas pulled a footstool over to his father’s armchair and sat down on it.

‘We need to think about the funeral. You have to eat. You’re a shadow of yourself, Dad, and we can’t go on like this.’

‘We can’t have the funeral until the police give their permission,’ said his father.

Even his voice was thinner.

‘No, but we need to do some planning.’

‘You can do that.’

‘That wouldn’t be right, Dad. We have to do it together.’

Silence.

The old grandfather clock had stopped. Erik Lysgaard had given up winding the heavy brass weights below the clock face each night before he went to bed. He no longer needed to hear the passing of time.

Dust motes drifted in the light from the window.

‘You have to eat, Dad.’

Erik raised his head, and for the first time since Eva Karin’s death he gently took his son’s hands between his own.

‘No. You have to eat. You have to go on living.’

‘Dad, you-’

‘You were our beloved son, Lukas. Never has a child been more welcome than you.’

Lukas swallowed and smiled.

‘That’s what all parents say. I say the same thing to my own children.’

‘But there’s so much you don’t know.’

Even though the noise of the city was out there, it seemed unable to penetrate the dead house on Nubbebakken. Lukas couldn’t even hear his own heart beating.

‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s so much that disappears with a person. Everything disappeared with Eva Karin. That’s the way it has to be.’

‘I have a right to know, Dad. If there’s something about Mum’s life, about both your lives, that-’

His father’s dry laugh frightened him. ‘All you need to know is that you were a much-loved child. You have always been the great love of your mother’s life, and mine.’

‘Have been?’

‘Your mother is dead,’ his father said harshly. ‘I’m unlikely to live much longer.’

Lukas quickly took his hands away and straightened his back.

‘Pull yourself together,’ he said. ‘It’s high time you pulled yourself together.’

He stood up and started pacing the floor.

‘This has to stop. Now. Right now! Do you hear me, Dad?’

His father barely reacted to this violent outburst. He simply sat there, as he had sat in the same chair with the same blank expression for five days, more or less.

‘I won’t put up with it!’ Lukas yelled. ‘Mum won’t put up with it!’

He grabbed a porcelain ornament from the little table next to the television. Two swans in a delicate heart: a wedding present from Eva Karin’s parents. It had survived eight house moves, and had been one of his mother’s most cherished possessions. Lukas seized the swans by the throat with both hands and smashed them against his thigh, causing himself considerable pain. The ornament shattered. The sharp surfaces cut into his palms. When he hurled the pieces on the floor, blood spattered the carpet.

‘You are not allowed to die! You are not allowed to fucking die!’

That was all it needed.

Lukas Lysgaard had never – not even during his rebellious youth – dared to swear in front of his parents. Now his father got to his feet more quickly than anyone would have thought possible. He reached his son in three strides. He raised his arm. His fist stopped no more than a centimetre from his son’s jaw. Then he stood there, frozen, as if in some absurd tableau, taller now and broader. It was from him that Lukas had inherited his broad shoulders, and it was as if they had suddenly fallen into place. His whole body grew bigger. Lukas held his breath, cowering from his father’s gaze, as if he were a child again. Obstinate and young and Daddy’s little boy.

‘Why did Mum go out?’ he whispered.

Erik let his hand drop.

‘That’s a matter between Eva Karin and me.’

‘I think I know.’

‘Look at me.’

Lukas was examining his own palms. There was a deep gash at the base of both thumbs. Blood was still dripping on to the carpet.

‘Look at me,’ Erik repeated.

When Lukas still couldn’t manage to look up, he felt his father’s hand on his unshaven cheek. Eventually he raised his head.

‘You know nothing,’ Erik said.

Yes I do, thought Lukas. Perhaps I’ve always known. For a long time, anyway.

‘You know absolutely nothing,’ Erik said again.

They were standing so close that their breath caressed each other’s faces in small puffs. And just as bad thoughts turn to solid secrets when they are never shared with anyone, so both of them were absolutely certain about something they thought the other didn’t know. They just stood there, each embarrassed in their own way, with nothing to say to one another.

‘I’m embarrassed to admit it, Synnøve, but we usually take a back seat when it comes to this kind of case.’

Kjetil Berggren had at least managed to lower the temperature in the small interview room. He was sitting with his shirt sleeves rolled up, flouting the regulations, absent-mindedly drumming a pencil against his thigh.

She had told him everything, hiding nothing. The fact that she had made Marianne’s disappearance less and less suspicious with every word was something she hadn’t fully grasped until now.

‘I see,’ she said feebly.

‘For example, you haven’t even spoken to her parents yet.’

‘Marianne hasn’t been in contact with them since we moved in together!’

‘I understand,’ he said, running his hand over his short hair. ‘I agree with you in principle that there is reason for concern. It’s just that…’

He was noticeably less favourably disposed than he had been when he rescued her from Ola Kvam ninety minutes earlier. He was more restless, and hadn’t written a single thing down in more than half an hour.

‘Yes, but I think you have to check with close family first. As far as I understand it, you’ve hardly been in touch with anyone.’

The enervating drumming against the thigh increased.

‘Not even her parents,’ he repeated.

As if the parents of a forty-year-old woman would have the answer to everything.

‘They didn’t come to our wedding,’ Synnøve said wearily. ‘How in the world could they possibly know anything about Marianne now?’

‘But she was supposed to be visiting her mother’s aunt, wasn’t she? Perhaps her mother-’

‘That great-aunt popped up out of nowhere. Listen to me, Kjetil. Marianne hasn’t spoken to her parents since a terrible confrontation more than thirteen years ago. It was to do with me, of course. She’s kept in touch with her brother, but only very sporadically. Both sets of grandparents are dead, and her father is an only child. Her mother keeps her own siblings in an iron grip. In other words, Marianne has virtually no family. And then, last autumn, a letter arrived from this relative. She emigrated before Marianne was born, and has been… persona non grata as far as the family is concerned. Bohemian. Married an African-American in the early sixties when that kind of thing wasn’t exactly popular with the posh families of Sandefjord. Then she got divorced and moved to Australia. She…’

Synnøve broke off.

‘Why am I sitting here giving you a load of totally irrelevant information about an eccentric and remarkable old lady who suddenly discovers that her niece has a daughter who is as excluded from the family as she is? I mean, the whole point is that Marianne never got to her!’

As she waved her arms she knocked over a full cup of coffee. She swore as the hot liquid ran down on to her thigh; she leapt up from her chair, and before she knew it, Kjetil Berggren was standing next to her with an empty water bottle.

‘Did that help? Shall I pour on more cold?’

‘No thanks,’ she mumbled. ‘It’s fine. Thanks.’

He went to fetch some paper towels from a dispenser next to a small sink in the corner.

‘And then there’s the fact that she’d gone off before,’ he said with his back to her.

Synnøve leaned back on the uncomfortable chair.

‘She didn’t go off. She finished with me. That’s something completely different.’

‘Here.’ He gave her a thick bundle of paper towels.

‘You said she was away for two weeks,’ he said. ‘Without getting in touch. The last time, I mean. I think you can see that this has a certain significance, Synnøve. The fact that this girl… that Marianne disappeared only three years ago after a huge row and went to France without even telling you she was going abroad. We have to take that kind of thing into account when we’re deciding whether to put resources into-’

‘But we hadn’t had a row this time. We hadn’t argued at all.’

Instead of returning to his seat opposite her, he hitched his bottom on to the desk, resting one foot on the chair beside her. Presumably this was intended as a friendly gesture.

‘I look like a wreck,’ she said, moving away. ‘And I stink like a horse. Sorry.’

‘Synnøve,’ he said calmly, seemingly unaware that she was absolutely right. His hand was warm as he placed it on her shoulder.

‘I’ll see what I can do, of course. You’ve reported Marianne’s disappearance, and I’ve accepted it. That’s a start, at least. But unfortunately I can’t guarantee that we’ll put much into this in the way of resources. Not for a while, anyway. In the meantime there are some things that you can do yourself.’

She stood up, mainly to break the physical contact, which felt unexpectedly unpleasant. When she reached for her sweater, Kjetil jumped down from the desk.

‘Make some calls,’ he said. ‘You’ve got lots of friends. If there’s any suggestion of… infidelity…’

Fortunately her sweater was over her head at the time. The blush spread quickly. She fumbled with the sweater until she regained control.

‘… then there’s usually someone within a circle of friends who knows about it.’

‘I understand,’ she said curtly.

‘And if you have a joint bank account, you could check if she’s withdrawn any money, and if so, where? I’ll ring you in a couple of days to see how it’s going. Or I’ll call round. Do you still live in the old place on Hystadsveien?’

‘We live on Hystadsveien. Marianne and I.’

The moment she said it, she was sure it was a lie.

‘Apart from the fact that Marianne is dead,’ she said harshly, grabbing her anorak and heading for the door. ‘Thank you, Kjetil. Thanks for fucking nothing!’

She slammed the door behind her so hard that it almost came off its hinges.

Night Before a Dark Morning

Rolf was incapable of closing a car door in a civilized manner.

He slammed it so hard that Marcus Koll could hear it in the living room, even though the car was inside the large garage. Rolf always blamed the fact that he had driven old bangers all his life. He still hadn’t got used to German cars that cost more than a million. Not to mention Italian cars worth twice as much.

Marcus irritably swatted at an overwintering fly. It was big and listless, but it was still alive when Rolf came in.

‘What on earth are you doing?’

Marcus was on his knees on the dining table, flapping his arms around.

‘A fly,’ he mumbled. ‘Can’t you be a bit more careful with our cars?’

‘A fly? At this time of year? Sure.’

Three rapid steps and he slapped his hand down on the table.

‘Got it,’ he said mildly. ‘By the way, shouldn’t this table be laid by now?’

Marcus shuffled down. He felt stiff and had to put one knee on a chair to help him. Just like every New Year’s Eve for the past nine years, he had begun the day swearing that he was going to start exercising. Tomorrow. This was his most important resolution, and this time he was going to stick to it. There was a fully equipped gym in the cellar. He hardly knew what it looked like.

‘Mum will be here soon.’

‘Your mother?’ Rolf said. ‘You’ve asked Elsa to come and do the table for a party she isn’t even invited to?’

Marcus gave a resigned sigh. ‘It was Mum who wanted to have little Marcus stay over at her house tonight. Celebrate the New Year together, just the two of them. It’ll be more fun for both of them this way.’

‘That’s fine, but surely there’s absolutely no reason why she should waste the morning coming over here to lay the table? Ring her right now and tell her I’ll do it. By the way, what’s this?’

Rolf was holding out a small square metal box.

‘It’s a hard drive,’ said Marcus, his tone casual.

‘Right. And what’s it doing in the boot of the Maserati?’

‘That’s my car. How many times have I told you I’d prefer it if you used one of the others? You’re the worst driver in the world and-’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Rolf smiled and leaned forward to kiss him.

Marcus turned away, glancing, without interest, at the hard drive.

‘It’s broken,’ he said. ‘I’ve put a new one in. That one can be thrown away.’

‘OK, I’ll chuck it,’ said Rolf, shrugging his shoulders. ‘And I think you ought to get yourself in a better mood before our guests arrive.’

He still had the hard drive in his hand when he left the room. It was all Marcus could do not to run after him; he wanted to destroy and throw away the bloody thing himself.

It wasn’t really a problem, he thought as he tried to keep his pulse rate down. It had only been a safety measure. Which probably wasn’t necessary. Not necessary at all. His pulse rate increased and he tried to concentrate on something completely different.

The menu, for example.

The fact that Rolf had found the hard drive was of no significance.

He couldn’t remember a thing about the menu.

Forget the hard drive. Forget it. It’s not important.

‘Did you ring Elsa?’

Rolf was back with his arms full of cloths, serviettes and candles.

‘Marcus, are you… Marcus!’

Rolf dropped the whole lot on the floor. ‘Are you ill? Marcus!’

‘I’m OK,’ said Marcus. ‘I just felt a bit dizzy. It’s gone now. Calm down.’

Rolf gently stroked his back. Because he was almost a head taller than Marcus, he had to lean forward in order to meet his downcast eyes.

‘Is it…? Are you…? Was it one of those panic attacks again?’

‘No, no.’ Marcus smiled. ‘That was years ago. You cured me, I told you that.’

It was difficult to make his dry, numb tongue work. His hands were clammy with cold sweat and he put them in his pockets.

‘Would you like a glass of water? Shall I bring you some water, Marcus?’

‘Thank you. That would be kind. A little drink of water and I’ll be right as rain.’

Rolf disappeared. Marcus was alone.

If only he hadn’t been so alone. If only he had spoken to Rolf from the start. They could have found a solution. Together they could have worked out what was the best thing to do; together they could do anything.

Suddenly he inhaled sharply through his nose. He straightened his back, moved his tongue around to get the saliva going and slapped both his cheeks. There was nothing to be afraid of. He decided once again.

There was nothing to worry about.

He had found a short item about Niclas Winter in Dagens Naeringsliv after Christmas. Reading between the lines, it seemed the man had died of an overdose. Of course that sort of thing was never stated directly, at least not so soon after the event. The artist’s death was ascribed to his unorthodox lifestyle, as the writer so tactfully put it. The battle for the rights to his unsold works of art was already under way. They were worth more since the death of their creator; three gallery owners and an exhibition organizer estimated that their value had more than doubled in a week. The article was more interesting than its position in the paper suggested. No doubt more information would be forthcoming.

Niclas Winter had died of an overdose and Marcus Koll Junior had nothing to fear. He held on to that thought and focused on it until Rolf came hurrying back with a glass of water. The ice cubes clinked as he emptied the glass in one.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’m fine now.’

I have nothing to fear, he thought, and started to lay the table. A red cloth, red serviettes with a silver border, red and green candles in silver-plated glass holders. Niclas Winter had only himself to blame, he told himself firmly. He shouldn’t have taken that overdose.

His death has nothing to do with me.

He almost believed it himself.

Trude Hansen was fairly sure it was New Year’s Eve.

The tiny apartment was still a chaotic mess of leftover food, empty bottles and dirty clothes. There were bits of aluminium foil all over the place, and in one corner a pizza box had been used as a litter tray by the terrified animal that was now sitting yowling on the windowsill.

‘There now, Puss-cat! There’s my little Puss-cat! Come to Mummy.’

The animal hissed and arched its back.

‘You mustn’t be cross with Mummy!’

Her voice was fragile and high. She couldn’t remember if Puss-cat had been fed. Not today, anyway. Maybe not yesterday. No, not yesterday, because she’d been so furious that the fucking animal had pissed on the pizza.

‘Shoo! Shoo!’

Trude waved her arms at the cat, which shot across to the sofa like a furry rocket, where it started kneading the cushions with its sharp claws.

It must be New Year’s Eve, Trude thought.

She tried to open the window. It was stuck, and she broke a nail in the attempt. In the end it flew open, suddenly and with a crash. Ice-cold air poured into the musty room, and Trude leaned right out.

She could see rockets above the area to the east, the old buildings that blocked her view of Sofienberg Park. Red and green spheres of light fell slowly to the ground, and sparkling fountains rose towards the sky. The smell of gunpowder had already begun to spread through the streets. She loved the smell of fireworks. Fortunately there was always someone who couldn’t wait until midnight.

She had only one fix left. She had saved it for the evening; the day had been bearable, thanks to a bottle of vodka someone had forgotten about under the bed.

It was difficult to tell how late it was.

As she was closing the window, Puss-cat slipped out. The cat moved quickly along the narrow window ledge before sitting down a metre away, miaowing.

‘Come back, Puss-cat. Come to Mummy.’

Puss-cat was having a wash. Slowly and thoroughly she dragged her tongue over her fur. Rhythmically, after every fourth lick, she rubbed her paw over her ear.

‘Puss-cat,’ Trude snivelled as firmly as she could, stretching out to reach her. ‘Come back here at once!’

She could feel that she was no longer in contact with the floor. If she held on to the windowsill between the two bottom panes in the old-fashioned window, divided into four, she might be able to stretch her other arm out far enough to grab the cat by the scruff of the neck. Her fingers clutched the wood. The bitter wind blew over her bare forearms, and her teeth were chattering.

‘Puss-cat,’ she said one last time before she overbalanced and fell.

As she lived three floors up and hit the asphalt with her head and her left shoulder first, she died instantly. A man was standing at his window having a cigarette on the opposite side of the street, so the police were called immediately. And because the man was able to tell them what had happened, and the door to Trude’s empty flat was locked with a security chain from the inside, there was no reason to investigate the matter further. An accident, nothing more. A tragic accident.

On 31 December 2008, one and a half hours before a new year was due to be celebrated, there was no one in the whole world to give Runar Hansen a thought. He had been murdered in a park on 19 November that same year, aged forty-one. After his sister’s death he wasn’t even a vague, drug-addled memory.

Nor did anyone care about Puss-cat on the window ledge.

Synnøve Hessel was stroking the immensely fat cat. It settled down on her knee, its purr a low-frequency hum as it breathed in and out. There was something calming about the sound and the cat’s affection as it butted her hands with its head as soon as she stopped stroking it.

‘I’m so pleased to be here,’ she said.

‘No problem,’ said the woman sitting at the other end of the sofa with a bottle of beer in her hand. ‘I wasn’t exactly in the mood for a celebration either.’

The apartment was even more elegant than Marianne’s description the very last time she spoke to Synnøve on the telephone. Marianne had spent the afternoon of Saturday 19 December with Tuva on Grefsenkollveien. It had been eight o’clock in the evening, and Marianne had seemed so excited about the long journey. Synnøve had tried to hide her disappointment over the fact that they wouldn’t be celebrating Christmas together, but with limited success. A sharp, chilly tone had come between them before the conversation ended.

It struck her that the end of their conversation was the reason why Marianne’s text messages had been so short and impersonal. The first one, anyway.

‘So you’ve checked whether she arrived at the hotel?’ Tuva asked for the third time in less than an hour.

‘Yes. She arrived, checked in, and the bill has been paid. That’s where the trail ends.’ Synnøve shuddered and pushed the cat on to the floor. ‘That’s where the trail ends,’ she repeated with a grimace. ‘Sounds like something out of a crime novel.’

The room was not large, but the view from the big windows gave the apartment a feeling of exclusiveness. All the furniture faced the spacious balcony, and from where she was sitting Synnøve could look out over the whole of Oslo. She stood up.

‘Shall we go for a walk?’ asked Tuva.

‘What, now? An hour before midnight?’

Synnøve was standing by the window. The old apartment blocks had looked terrible from the outside. A gigantic piece of Lego standing on end, slotted into the side of a hill the same height as the building. Only when she walked into the room on the eleventh floor did she understand her friend’s childish delight over the new apartment.

Synnøve had never seen Oslo looking so beautiful.

Lights were twinkling everywhere. The city lay before her like a Christmas decoration, a gift from the gods, surrounded by dark ridges and black water. Fireworks exploded against the sky with increasing frequency. Synnøve and Tuva had front-row seats for the show that would start in an hour.

‘All right then,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders.

Five minutes later they were on their way up Grefsenåsen, the cold biting into their faces. They had dressed warmly, unlike all the people tripping to and from festivities in party clothes and indoor shoes. A gang of boys aged about twelve or thirteen were amusing themselves by throwing firecrackers into a group of young women, who were screaming and jumping around on their stilettos. An elderly man came walking along the pavement with an old, overweight Labrador. He gave the boys a good telling-off; they swore and whooped and ran off down the hill laughing, before disappearing into a closed-up building site by clambering over a three-metre fence.

‘It’s very strange that she hasn’t withdrawn any money,’ puffed Tuva. ‘Are you absolutely sure about that?’

Synnøve slowed down. She often forgot that she was fitter than most people.

‘The only thing I’ve been able to check is our joint account. Marianne also has a card for a deposit account that only she has access to. I’ll have to get the bloody police to ask the bank.’

She stopped.

There’s no point, she thought.

They were standing at a fork in the road. Tuva pointed upwards, where a deserted track wound its way up towards the top of Grefsenkollen. Synnøve didn’t move.

‘It’s just that I’m so sure she’s dead,’ she whispered.

Ice-cold tears poured down her face.

‘You can’t know that,’ Tuva protested. ‘I mean, she’s only been gone a week! I remember the state you were in when she just took off for France and didn’t get in touch for ages. Marianne is so-’

‘Dead!’ Synnøve screamed. ‘Don’t you start as well! Everything was different then. She didn’t want anything to do with me! That’s not how it is now. Can’t you just…?’

Tuva put her arm around her.

‘Sorry. I’m just trying to cheer you up. Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it.’

‘Of course we should talk about it!’

Synnøve started to walk. Fast. She increased her speed with every step. Tuva scurried along after her.

‘What else would we talk about?’ Synnøve yelled. ‘The weather? I want to talk about that idiotic fucking great-aunt who didn’t even tell anyone that Marianne hadn’t turned up. I want to talk about-’

‘Have you called her?’

Tuva started jogging to keep up.

‘Yes. She just wants to talk to Marianne’s mother, which I can understand perfectly. But the old woman must be…’

She stopped dead. There was an elk standing in the middle of the track.

‘… bloody stupid,’ she snapped. ‘I asked her-’

‘Sssh!’

The elk was no more than twenty or twenty-five metres away from them. The air around its muzzle turned grey as it breathed. Synnøve could see that it was a cow, and she glanced cautiously into the forest on either side of the track in case there was a calf nearby. She couldn’t see one, but that didn’t necessarily mean the female was alone.

‘She’s just on her guard,’ Synnøve whispered. ‘Don’t move.’

The elk stared at them for almost thirty seconds. She held her head high, ears pricked forward. Tuva hardly dared breathe.

‘I’ve never seen a live elk before,’ she whispered, almost inaudibly.

That shows how little time you spend outdoors, Synnøve thought, then she suddenly bellowed and waved her arms. The elk gave a start, turned away and disappeared among the trees with long, graceful strides.

‘Wow,’ said Tuva.

‘That aunt of Marianne’s must be an idiot,’ Synnøve said, setting off along the track once more. ‘I asked her why she hadn’t let me know, and she said she didn’t know what my surname was.’

‘Well, that’s actually a good reason,’ called Tuva, who was on the point of abandoning her attempts to keep up. ‘Wait for me! Don’t go so fast!’

Synnøve stopped. ‘Number one,’ she said, taking off her glove and holding up a finger, ‘Marianne had written and told her that I make documentaries. And number two, she had told her my name was Synnøve. Number three…’

Three fingers were spread in the air.

‘The woman must have access to the fucking Internet somewhere. All she has to do is Google Synnøve plus “documentary”, and she’s bound to find out who I am.’

Tuva nodded, although the idea had never occurred to her.

They carried on walking in silence. Behind them the fireworks were increasing in intensity. As they passed the entrance to Trollvann, Tuva started to wonder how much further she could go. She was gasping for breath, and all she really wanted to do was turn back rather than stagger on.

They had arrived. Soft light shone out from every window of the restaurant at the top of Grefsenkollen. The car park was full of vehicles which would presumably remain there well into the following day. As Tuva and Synnøve moved closer, a large group of people in party clothes spilled out of the main entrance. Most stopped on the wide steps as they raised their glasses of champagne and exclaimed at the view. Three men had their arms full of rockets, and stumbled off around the corner to let them off in the car park.

‘Here,’ Tuva panted, moving over to the fence surrounding the terrace at the bottom of the steps. ‘It’s actually nicer here than back at my place.’

Out in the fjord the boats began to sound their sirens. Behind Tuva and Synnøve the guests were shrieking with delight at the fireworks, at the party, at the new, empty year ahead of them. The entire sky was lit up, fireworks crackling and sparkling, whistling and squealing, howling and banging in front of them and overhead.

‘Happy New Year,’ Tuva said tentatively, slipping an arm around her.

Synnøve didn’t reply. She leaned against the fence and looked out over Oslo. 2009 was only a few seconds old, and if the emotions she was feeling were representative of the new year, the next twelve months were going to be appalling.

What she didn’t know, of course, was that Marianne Kleive was exactly 8,100 metres from the spot where she was standing. If she had known, it is unlikely that it would have made her any happier.

For the first time in her life, Synnøve Hessel cried her way into a new year.

Erik Lysgaard had promised Lukas that he wouldn’t cry.

‘Dad! Dad!’

Erik gave a start. At first he had refused to go home with his son. It was only when Lukas threatened to bring the whole family to Nubbebakken and organize some kind of party for the children that he had agreed to come. He had promised not to cry. He hadn’t promised to talk.

The children had finally fallen asleep. Astrid, Lukas’s wife, was standing in the doorway in her dressing gown. She gave her father-in-law a wan smile and raised a hand in a limp goodnight. The evening had been something of a trial.

Lukas, in blue and white striped pyjamas and with shabby slippers on his bare feet, crouched down next to his father’s chair, but didn’t touch him.

‘Were you asleep?’

‘I think I was. I must have nodded off while you were getting ready for bed.’

‘It’s time you went to bed as well, Dad. I’ve sorted out the guest room for you.’

‘I’d rather sit here, Lukas.’

‘That’s not on, Dad. You need to go to bed.’

‘Actually, I can make my own decisions. I’m perfectly fine sitting here.’

Lukas got up.

‘You’re behaving as if you’re the only one who’s grieving,’ he said wearily. ‘I don’t recognize you, Dad. You’re… you’re just completely self-centred. You don’t even notice that I’m struggling, you don’t notice that the kids are missing their grandma, you don’t notice that-’

‘Of course I do. I notice all of it. I just can’t do anything about it.’

Lukas trudged around the room in the semi-darkness. Blew out a candle in the window. Picked up a teddy bear from the floor and placed it on the bookcase. Bit his nails. Outside everything was silent. From the bathroom he could hear Astrid flushing the toilet, then the faint creak as she closed the bedroom door behind her.

‘Why didn’t you lie?’ he asked all of a sudden.

His father looked up.

‘Lie?’

‘Why didn’t you just make up a story about why Mum was out walking? Why didn’t you say she wanted some fresh air or something? That you’d had a row. Anything. Why did you tell the police it was nothing to do with them?’

‘Because it’s true. If I’d made something up it would have been a lie. I don’t lie. It’s important to me that I don’t lie. You of all people should know that.’

‘But clamming up completely is OK?’

Lukas threw his arms wide in a gesture of resignation.

‘Daddy, why…?’

He stopped himself when his father looked him straight in the eye with something that resembled a smile in his expression.

‘You haven’t called me daddy since you were ten,’ he said.

‘I have to ask you about something.’

‘You won’t get an answer. You must have realized that by now. I’m not going to tell why your mother was out-’

‘Not that,’ Lukas said quickly. ‘It’s something else.’

His father said nothing, but at least he was maintaining eye contact.

‘I’ve always had a kind of feeling,’ Lukas began tentatively, ‘that I was sharing Mum with someone else.’

‘We shared your mother with Jesus.’

‘That’s not what I mean.’

He stood there at a loss for a moment, then sat down on the sofa. It was so deep that leaning forward was uncomfortable. At the same time, he was too tense to lean back against the cushions. In the end he got up again.

‘Have I got a sister or brother somewhere?’

The expression which suddenly came over his father’s face frightened him. Erik’s eyes darkened. His mouth grew strained, surrounded by coarse, deep lines. His eyebrows contracted. His hands, which had been resting on his knee, clenched so tightly that his knuckles turned white.

‘I hadn’t expected that from you,’ he said, his voice unrecognizable.

‘But I… Did you and Mum, or just Mum…? I mean… you’ve always been together, and this business with Jesus in the forest-’

‘Hold your tongue!’

His father stood up. This time he didn’t raise his hand; he simply stood there, his eyes flashing and his lower lip trembling almost imperceptibly.

‘Ask yourself,’ he said, his tone icy. ‘Ask yourself if Eva Karin – your mother, my wife – has a child she refuses to acknowledge.’

‘I’m asking you, Dad! And I’m not necessarily saying that she didn’t want to acknowledge…’

His father started to walk away. ‘I’m going to bed,’ he said, but turned abruptly when he reached the door. ‘And I am never, ever going to answer that kind of question. Ask yourself, Lukas. Ask yourself!’

Lukas was left alone in the room.

‘I’m asking you,’ he whispered. ‘I’m asking you, Dad.’

If his father had just said yes. Couldn’t you just have said yes and made my life infinitely easier?

It was impossible to go to bed. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. He had asked a question and expected an answer. Hoped for an answer. Everything would fall into place if his father had just confirmed that there was a child out there. An older child, older than Lukas, an explanation for everything.

But his father had refused.

Is it because you don’t want to lie, Dad?

Lukas lay down on the sofa without taking off his slippers. He pulled a woollen blanket over him, right up to his chin, the way his mother used to tuck him in when he was little. He lay there without sleeping until the morning came, a pitch-black start to the new year.