Scattered chuckles. Ivarsson came to a halt behind Beate's chair. 'Beate, you will join Harry.'

Beate blushed. Ivarsson placed a paternal hand on her shoulder: 'If it doesn't work, all you have to do is say.'

'I will,' Harry said.

***

Harry was about to unlock the front door to his apartment building when he changed his mind and walked back ten metres to the little grocery shop, where Ali was carrying in boxes of fruit and vegetables from the pavement.

'Hi, Harry! Are you better now?' Ali had a broad grin on his face and Harry closed his eyes for a second. It was as he feared.

'Did you help me, Ali?'

'Just up the stairs. When we opened your door, you said you could manage.'

'How did I get home? On foot or…?'

'Taxi. You owe me a hundred and twenty.'

Harry groaned and followed Ali into the shop. 'I apologise, Ali. Really. Can you give me an abridged version, without too many embarrassing details?'

'You and the driver were arguing in the street. And our bedrooms face that way.' He added with a winning smile: 'Bloody awful to have the window there.'

'And when was that?'

'In the middle of the night.'

'You get up at five o'clock, Ali. I don't know what people like you mean by the middle of the night.'

'Half past eleven. At least.'

Harry promised it would never happen again. Ali kept nodding in the way that people do when listening to stories they know off by heart. Harry asked how he could thank Ali, who answered that Harry could rent him his unused cellar storage space. Harry said he would give the matter more thought and paid Ali the money for the taxi, a bottle of Coke, a bag of pasta and meatballs.

'We're quits then,' Harry said.

Ali shook his head. 'Quarterly rates,' said the chairman, treasurer and Mr Fix-it of the housing co-op committee.

'Oh shit, I'd forgotten.'

'Eriksen.' Ali smiled.

'Who's that?'

'Someone I got a letter from last summer. He asked me to send the account number so that he could pay his rates for May and June 1972. He reckoned that was why he hadn't been able to sleep for the last thirty years. I wrote back saying no one in the block remembered him, so he didn't need to pay.' Ali pointed a finger at Harry. 'But I'm not going to do that with you.'

Harry raised both arms in surrender: 'I'll transfer the money tomorrow.'

The first thing Harry did when he was in his flat was to call Anna's number again. The same ex-presenter as the previous time. But he had barely emptied the bag of pasta and meatballs into the frying pan when he heard the telephone ringing above the sizzling noises. He ran into the hall and snatched at the phone.

'Hello!' he yelled.

'Hello,' said the familiar woman's voice at the other end, somewhat taken aback.

'Oh, it's you.'

'Yes, who did you think it was?'

Harry squeezed his eyes shut. 'Work. There's been another robbery.' The words tasted like bile and chilli. The numb ache behind his eyes was back.

'I tried to catch you on your mobile,' Rakel said.

'I've lost it.'

'Lost it?'

'Left it somewhere, or it's been stolen. I don't know, Rakel.'

'Is something wrong, Harry?'

'Wrong?'

'You sound so…stressed.'

'I…'

'Mm?'

Harry breathed in. 'How's the court case going?'

Harry was listening, but was unable to order the words into sentences which made sense. He picked up 'financial status', 'the best for the child' and 'arbitration' and gathered that there wasn't much news. The next meeting with the lawyers had been postponed until Friday; Oleg was fine, but was sick of living in a hotel.

'Tell him I'm looking forward to having you back,' he said.

When they had rung off, Harry stood wondering if he should ring back. But what for? To tell her he had been invited to dinner by an old flame and he had no idea what had taken place? Harry rested his hand on the telephone, but then the smoke alarm in the kitchen went off. And when he had taken the frying pan off the hob and opened the window, the telephone rang again. Later Harry was to reflect that a lot would have been different, if Bjarne Mшller had not chosen to ring him that evening.

***

'I know you've just gone off duty,' Mшller said, 'but we're a bit short-staffed and a woman has been found dead in her flat. Appears she shot herself. Could you take a look?'

'Of course, boss. I owe you one for today. By the way, Ivarsson presented the parallel-investigation approach as his idea.'

'What would you have done, if you were boss and had received such an order from above?'

'The idea of me as a boss is mind-boggling, boss. How do I get to this flat?'

'Stay where you are. You'll be picked up.'

Twenty minutes later there was a harsh buzzing sound that Harry heard so seldom it made him jump. The voice, metallic and distorted by the intercom, said the taxi had arrived, but Harry could feel the hairs on his neck rising. When he got downstairs and saw the low-slung, red sports car, a Toyota MR2, his suspicions were confirmed.

'Good evening, Hole.' The voice came from the open car window, but it was so close to the tarmac that Harry couldn't see who was speaking. Harry opened the car door and was welcomed by a funky bass, an organ as synthetic as a blue boiled sweet and a familiar falsetto: 'You sexy motherfucka!'

With difficulty, Harry heaped himself into a narrow bucket seat.

'It's us two tonight then,' Inspector Tom Waaler said, opening a Teutonic jaw and revealing an impressive row of impeccable teeth in the centre of his suntanned face. But the arctic-blue eyes remained cold. There were many at Police HQ who disliked Harry, but as far as he knew there was only one person who actually nourished a hatred of him. In Waaler's eyes, Harry knew he was an unworthy representative of the police force and therefore a personal affront. On several occasions, Harry had made it clear he didn't share Waaler's and some other colleagues' crypto-fascist views on homos, commies, dole cheats, Pakis, chinks, niggers, gyppos and dagos, while Waaler, for his part, had called Harry a 'pissed-up rock journo'. However, Harry suspected that the real reason for his hatred was that Harry drank. Tom Waaler could not tolerate weakness. Harry assumed that was why he spent so many hours in the fitness studio practising high kicks and punches against sacks of sand and a stream of new sparring partners. In the canteen, Harry had overheard one of the younger officers, with admiration in his voice, describing how Waaler had broken both arms of a karate kid in a Vietnamese gang by Oslo Central station. Given Waaler's view on skin colour, it was a paradox for Harry that his colleague spent so much time in the solarium, but perhaps it was true what one wag had said: Waaler wasn't actually a racist. He was just as happy beating up neo-Nazis as blacks.

Over and above what was common knowledge, there were some matters no one knew as such, but a few had a gut feeling about nevertheless. It was more than a year ago now since Sverre Olsen-the only person who could have told them why Ellen Gjelten was murdered-was found lying on his bed with a warm gun in his hand and a bullet from Waaler's Smith amp; Wesson between his eyes.

'Be careful, Waaler.'

'I beg your pardon?'

Harry reached out and turned down the love-making groans. 'It's icy tonight.'

The engine purred like a sewing machine, but the sound was deceptive; as the car accelerated Harry experienced for himself how hard the back of the seat was. They raced up the hill by Stenspark along Suhms gate.