‘Nothing. Sorry. I’m just thinking aloud. That is, I’m not thinking… but I’m doing it aloud anyway. Prattling away, I suppose. I…’

He couldn’t understand why she was still there.

‘They’ve been running up and down our stairs all weekend,’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘The police, I suppose.’

Harry slowly absorbed the information that a weekend had passed since he had stood in Camilla Loen’s flat. He tried to catch a glimpse of himself in the shop window. A whole weekend? What did he look like now?

‘They won’t tell us anything,’ she said. ‘And the papers only say they haven’t got any leads. Is that true?’

‘It’s not my case,’ he said.

‘Right.’ Vibeke Knutsen nodded her head. Then she began to smile. ‘And do you know what?’

‘What?’

‘Actually, it’s probably a good thing too.’

It took a couple of seconds before Harry realised what she meant. He laughed. The laugh developed into a hacking cough.

‘Funny that I’ve never seen you in this shop before,’ he said when he had regained his composure.

Vibeke shrugged her shoulders. ‘Who knows? Perhaps we’ll see each other here again soon?’

She beamed at him and began to walk away. The plastic bags and her backside swung from side to side.

Yes, you and me and a flying pig.

Harry was thinking furiously and for a moment he was afraid that he had thought out loud.

A man with his jacket slung over one shoulder and a hand pressed against his stomach was sitting on the steps outside the entrance to the apartment block in Sofies gate. His shirt had dark, sweaty patches on the front and under the armpits. On seeing Harry, he stood up.

Harry breathed in and steeled himself. It was Bjarne Moller.

‘My God, Harry.’

‘My God to you too, boss.’

‘Have you seen what you look like?’

Harry took out his keys. ‘Not quite peak of fitness?’

‘You were told to assist with the murder case at the weekend and no-one has seen hide nor hair of you. Today you didn’t even turn up for work.’

‘Overslept, boss. And that’s not as bloody far from the truth as you might think.’

‘Perhaps you overslept during those weeks when you only came in on Fridays as well?’

‘Probably. I picked up a bit after the first week. So I rang into work and was told that someone had put my name up on the staff leave list. I reckoned it was you.’

Harry trudged into the hallway with Moller hard on his heels.

‘I had absolutely no choice,’ Moller said, groaning and holding his hand against his stomach. ‘Four weeks, Harry!’

‘Well, just a nanosecond in the universe…’

‘And not one single word about where you were!’

Harry guided the key into the lock with some difficulty. ‘It’s coming now, boss.’

‘What is?’

‘A single word about where I was. Here.’

Harry shoved open the door to his flat and an acrid stench of beer, cigarette ends and stale refuse rose up to meet them.

‘Would you have felt better if you’d known?’

Harry went in, and hesitantly Moller stepped in after him.

‘You don’t need to take your shoes off, boss,’ Harry shouted from the kitchen.

Moller rolled his eyes and tried not to tread on any of the empty bottles, ashtrays full of cigarette butts and old vinyl records on his way across the sitting-room floor.

‘Have you been sitting here drinking for four weeks, Harry?’

‘With some breaks, boss. Long breaks. After all, I am on holiday, aren’t I? Last week I hardly touched a drop.’

‘I’ve got some bad news for you, Harry,’ Moller shouted, releasing the catches on the window and pushing feverishly at the glass. At the third shove the window sprang open. He groaned, loosened his belt and undid the top trouser button. As he turned round he saw Harry standing by the sitting-room door with an open bottle of whisky.

‘That bad, is it,’ Harry said, noticing the Chief Inspector’s slackened belt. ‘Am I going to be whipped or ravished?’

‘Slow digestion,’ Moller explained.

‘Mm.’ Harry put the top back on the whisky bottle. ‘Funny expression that, slow digestion. I’ve been suffering with my stomach a bit myself, so I read up about it. It takes somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours to digest food. For everyone. Whoever and whatever. It might keep hurting, but your intestines don’t need any longer.’

‘Harry…’

‘A glass, boss? Unless it has to be clean, that is.’

‘I’ve come to tell you it’s finished, Harry.’

‘Are you resigning?’

‘Now that’s enough of that!’

Moller banged the table so hard the empty bottles jumped. Then he sank down into a green armchair. He ran his hand across his face.

‘I’ve risked my own job too many times to save yours, Harry. There are people in my life I am closer to than you. People I provide for. This is where it stops, Harry. I can’t help you any more.’

‘Fine.’

Harry sat down on the sofa and poured whisky into one of the glasses.

‘No-one asked you to help me, boss, but thank you anyway. For as long as it lasted. Skal.’

Moller took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

‘Do you know what, Harry? At times you are the most arrogant, the most selfish and the most unintelligent pile of shit on this planet.’

Harry shrugged his shoulders and emptied his glass in one swallow.

‘I’ve written your dismissal papers,’ Moller said.

Harry refilled his glass.

‘They’re on the Chief’s desk. All that’s missing is his signature. Do you understand what that means, Harry?’

Harry nodded. ‘Sure you won’t have a little snifter before you go, boss?’

Moller got up. He paused by the sitting-room door.

‘You have no idea how much it hurts me to see you like this, Harry. Rakel and your work were everything you had. First of all you spat on Rakel, and now you’re spitting on your job.’

I spat on both exactly four weeks ago, Harry declared roundly in his thoughts.

‘I’m really sorry, Harry.’

Moller closed the door gently behind him as he left.

Three-quarters of an hour later Harry was asleep in the chair. He had been visited. Not by his three regular women, but by the head of Kripos. Four weeks and three days ago, to be precise.

The Chief Superintendent himself had asked to meet at the Boxer, a bar for the exuberantly thirsty a stone’s throw from Police HQ and a few teetering steps from the gutter. Just him, Harry and Roy Kvinsvik. He explained to Harry that as long as no official decision had been taken it was best to do everything as unofficially as possible so that he had room for manoeuvre.

He didn’t say anything about Harry’s room for manoeuvre.

When Harry arrived at the Boxer a quarter of an hour later than they had agreed the Chief Superintendent was sitting at a table at the back of the bar with a beer. Harry could feel his eyes on him as he sat down, his blue eyes shining in their deep sockets on either side of his thin, imperious nose. He had thick, grey hair, an upright posture and he was slim for his age. The Chief was like one of those 60-year-olds you could never really imagine ever having been young. Or ever really being old. In Crime Squad they called him the President because his office was oval and also because he – particularly on public occasions – talked like one. But this was ‘as unofficial as possible’. The Chief Superintendent’s lipless mouth opened.

‘You’ve come on your own.’

Harry ordered a Farris mineral water from the waitress, picked up the menu lying on the table, studied the front page and remarked casually as if it were redundant information:

‘He’s changed his mind.’

‘Your witness has changed his mind?’

‘Yes.’

The head of Kripos sipped his beer.

‘For five months he said that he would appear as a witness,’ Harry said. ‘The last time was the day before yesterday. Do you think the knuckle of pork is good?’

‘What did he say?’