He tried to find a reason for getting up.

The voice on the radio said that since 1975 the average weight of a Norwegian man and woman had increased by thirteen and nine kilos respectively. Harry closed his eyes and was reminded of something Aune had said. Escapism has an undeservedly bad reputation. Sleep came. The same warm, sweet feeling as when he was small and lay in bed with the door open, listening to his father walking around the house switching off all the lights-one by one-and for every light that was switched off the darkness outside his door deepened.

'After the violent robberies in Oslo over recent weeks bank employees have called for armed guards in the city centre's most vulnerable banks. Yesterday's hold-up of the Den norske Bank branch in Grшnlandsleiret is the latest in a series of armed robberies, for which police suspect the man dubbed the Expeditor to be responsible. It is the same person who shot and killed…'

Harry placed his feet on the cold linoleum. The face in the bathroom mirror was late Picasso.

***

Beate was talking on the telephone. She shook her head when she saw Harry in the office doorway. He nodded and was about to go, but she waved him back.

'Thank you for your help anyway,' she said and put down the receiver.

'Am I disturbing?' Harry asked, putting a cup of coffee in front of her.

'No, I shook my head to say there was no luck with Focus. He was the last name on the list. Of all the men we know were at Focus at the time in question, only one vaguely remembers seeing a man in a boiler suit. And he wasn't even sure whether he had seen him in the changing room or not.'

'Mm.' Harry took a seat and looked around. Her office was just as tidy as he had expected. Apart from a familiar potted plant he couldn't name on the windowsill, her room was as free of ornaments as his own. On her desk he noticed the back of a framed photograph. He had an idea who it might be.

'Have you only talked to men?' he asked.

'The theory is that he went into the men's changing room to change, isn't it?'

'Then he walked the streets of Morristown like any normal person, yes. Anything new on yesterday's hold-up in Grшnlandsleiret?'

'Depends on what you mean by new. It's more a carbon copy, I would say. Same clothes and AG3. Used a hostage to speak. Took money from the ATM, all over in one minute and fifty seconds. No clues. In short…'

'The Expeditor,' Harry said.

'What's this?' Beate raised the cup and peered into it.

'Cappuccino. Regards from Halvorsen.'

'Coffee with milk?' She wrinkled her nose.

'Let me guess. Your dad said he never trusted anyone who didn't drink black coffee?'

He regretted it immediately he saw Beate's expression of surprise. 'Sorry,' he mumbled. 'I didn't mean to…that was stupid of me.'

'So what do we do now?' Beate hastened to ask while fidgeting with the coffee-cup handle. 'We're back to square one.'

Harry collapsed in the chair and contemplated the toes of his boots. 'Go to prison.'

'What?'

'Go straight to prison.' He sat up. 'Do not pass GO. Do not collect two thousand kroner.'

'What are you talking about?'

'Monopoly cards. That's what we have left. Trying our luck. In prison. Have you got the number of Botsen prison?'

***

'This is a waste of time,' Beate said.

Her voice echoed between the walls of the Culvert as she jogged along beside Harry.

'Maybe,' he said. 'Like ninety per cent of all investigation work.'

'I've read all the reports and the interview tapescripts that have ever been done. He never says anything. Except for a load of irrelevant philosophical rubbish.'

Harry pressed the intercom button beside the grey iron door at the end of the tunnel.

'Have you heard the old adage about looking for what you've lost in the light? I suppose it is meant to illustrate human foolishness. To me it makes good sense.'

'Hold your IDs up to the camera,' said the loudspeaker.

'What's the point of me coming if you're going to talk to him on your own?' Beate asked, nipping in behind Harry.

'It's a method Ellen and I used when we questioned suspects. One of us always ran the interview while the other just sat listening. If the interview was getting into a rut, we had a break. If I had done the talking, I would go out and Ellen would start up about other mundane things. Like giving up smoking or everything on TV was crap nowadays. Or she noticed how much she paid in rent since she had split up with her bloke. After they had chatted for a while, I would poke my head in and say something had cropped up and she would have to take over.'

'Did it work?'

'Every time.'

They went up the stairs to the barrier in front of the prison concourse. The prison officer behind the thick bulletproof glass nodded to them and pressed a button. 'Warder will be along in a minute,' came the nasal voice.

The prison warder was squat with bulging muscles and a dwarf's waddle. He led them to the cell block. A three-storey-high gallery with rows of light blue cell doors encircling a rectangular hall. Wire netting towered up between the floors. There was no one to be seen and the silence was only broken by a door being slammed shut somewhere.

Harry had been here many times before, but it always seemed absurd to him to think that behind all these doors were the people whom society thought fit to keep locked up against their will. He didn't quite know why he found the thought so monstrous, but it was something to do with seeing the physical manifestation of publicly institutionalised retribution for crime. The scales and the sword.

The warder's bunch of keys jangled as he unlocked a door inscribed with VISITORS in black letters. 'Here you are. Just knock when you're ready to leave.'

They stepped in and the door banged to behind them. In the ensuing silence Harry's attention was caught by the low intermittent hum of a neon tube and the plastic flowers on the wall, which cast pale shadows across the washed-out watercolours. A man was sitting erectly on a chair, placed exactly in the middle of the yellow wall behind a table. His forearms rested on the table on either side of a chessboard; his hair was drawn back tightly behind his ears. He was wearing a smooth overall-like uniform. The well-defined eyebrows and the shadow which fell on the straight nose formed a clear T every time the neon tube blinked. It was predominantly his expression, however, that Harry remembered from the funeral, the conflicting combination of suffering and a poker face which reminded Harry of someone.

Harry motioned to Beate to sit by the door. He took a chair to the table and sat down opposite Raskol. 'Thank you for taking the time to meet us.'

'Time is cheap here,' Raskol said in a surprisingly bright and gentle voice. He talked like an Eastern European with strong 'r's and clear diction.

'I understand. I'm Harry Hole and my colleague is-'

'Beate Lшnn. You're like your father, Beate.'

Harry heard Beate's gasp and half-turned. Her face had not reddened; on the contrary, her pale skin was even whiter and her mouth had frozen into a grimace, as if she had been slapped.

Looking down at the table, Harry coughed, and noticed for the first time that the almost eerie symmetry either side of the axis dividing him from Raskol was broken by one minor detail: the king and the queen on the chessboard.

'Where have I seen you before, Hole?'

'I'm mostly to be seen in the vicinity of dead people,' Harry said.

'Aha. The funeral. You were one of Ivarsson's guard dogs.'