‘Yes?’ he whispered in a strangulated voice.

‘It’s me,’ the man whispered. ‘Harry Hole. Police.’

Wilhelm Barli took his hand away from his mouth and studied Harry’s face in detail.

‘Of course it is,’ he said with relief in his voice. ‘Sorry, Inspector. It’s so dark. I thought…’

The policeman sat down in the seat beside Wilhelm.

‘You thought what?’

‘You’re dressed in black.’

Wilhelm blew his nose in a handkerchief.

‘I thought you were a priest. A priest coming… with bad news. Stupid, isn’t it?’

The policeman didn’t answer.

‘You caught me at a rather emotional moment, Inspector. We have the first dress rehearsal today. Look at her.’

‘Who?’

‘Eliza Doolittle. Up there. When I saw her on the stage, I thought for a moment it was Lisbeth and that

I had only been dreaming she was gone.’

Wilhelm was taking deep breaths and trembling.

‘But then she began to speak, and my Lisbeth disappeared.’

Wilhelm discovered that the policeman was staring at the stage in amazement.

‘A striking resemblance, isn’t it? That’s why I brought her in. It was supposed to be Lisbeth’s musical.’

‘Is it…?’ Harry started to say.

‘Yes, that’s her sister.’

‘Toya? I mean Toy-A.’

‘We’ve managed to keep it secret so far. The press conference is later today.’

‘Right. That ought to create a bit of publicity.’

Toya swung herself round and cursed loudly when she stumbled. Her partner raised his arms in desperation and his eyes sought the director.

Wilhelm sighed.

‘Publicity isn’t everything. As you can see, there is quite a lot of work to do. She has a sort of raw talent, but appearing on the stage of the National Theatre is rather different to singing cowboy songs at the community centre in a small town in central Norway. It took me two years to teach Lisbeth how to behave on stage, but with her up there we’ll have to do it in two weeks.’

‘If I’m disturbing you, I can run through this very quickly, herr Barli.’

‘Run through it quickly?’

Wilhelm tried to read the expression on Harry’s face in the dark. Fear had him in its grip again, and when Harry opened his mouth, instinct took over and Wilhelm interrupted.

‘You’re not disturbing at all, Inspector. I’m just the producer. You know, someone who gets things moving. The others take over now.’

He waved his hand towards the stage where the man dressed in tweeds was loudly proclaiming at that moment:

‘I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe!’

‘Director, stage designer, actors,’ Barli said. ‘As from tomorrow I’ll be a mere onlooker watching this…’ He continued to wave his hand in the air until he found the word. ‘… comedy.’

‘Well, we all have to discover our own talents.’

Wilhelm gave a hollow laugh, but stopped when he saw the silhouette of the director’s head turn suddenly towards them. He leaned over to the policeman and whispered: ‘You’re right. I was a dancer for 20 years. A very bad dancer if you have to know, but there’s always a desperate shortage of male dancers in opera so they take almost anyone who can half dance. Anyway, we’re pensioned off when we reach 40 and then I had to find something new. It was then that I realised that my real talent lay in getting others to dance. Stage management, Inspector. That’s the only thing I can do. But do you know what? We become pathetic at the merest hint of success. Because things happen to go our way on a couple of productions we believe we are gods who can control all the variables and that we are the architects of our fortunes in all areas. And then something like this happens, and we discover how helpless we are. I…’

Wilhelm suddenly broke off.

‘I’m boring you, aren’t I?’

The other man shook his head and cleared his throat.

‘It’s about your wife.’

Wilhelm screwed up his eyes as if waiting to hear an unpleasant, loud noise.

‘We received a package. Containing a severed finger. I’m afraid it belonged to her.’

Wilhelm swallowed hard. He had always seen himself as a man of love, but now he could feel it growing again. The lump under his heart that had been there ever since that day. The tumour that was driving him to the edge of insanity. He sensed that it had a colour, he sensed that hatred was yellow.

‘Do you know what, Inspector? It’s almost a relief. I’ve known it all the time. That he would harm her.’

‘Harm?’

Wilhelm detected a note of anxious surprise in the other man’s voice.

‘Can you promise me something, Harry? Is it OK if I call you Harry?’

The policeman nodded.

‘Find him. Find him, Harry. And punish him. Punish him severely. Will you promise me?’

Wilhelm thought he saw the other man nod, but he wasn’t sure. His tears distorted everything.

Then the man was gone. Wilhelm took a deep breath and tried to concentrate on the stage again.

‘No! I’ll call the police, I will,’ Toya shouted.

Harry sat in his office staring at the desk top. He was so tired he didn’t know if he was capable of doing any more.

The escapades of the previous day – his time in the cell and another night of nightmares – they had taken their toll. It was the meeting with Wilhelm Barli, however, that had really drained him. Sitting there and promising that they would catch the perpetrator, holding back when Barli said that his wife was ‘harmed’. For if there was one thing Harry was certain about, it was that Lisbeth Barli was dead.

Harry had felt the gnawing ache for alcohol from the moment he woke up that morning. First as an instinctive physical craving, then as a panic-stricken fear because he had put a distance between himself and his medicine by not taking his hip flask or any money with him to work. Now the ache was entering a new phase in which it was both a wholly physical pain and a feeling of blank terror that he would be torn to pieces. The enemy below was pulling and tugging at the chains, the dogs were snarling up at him from the pit, somewhere in his stomach beneath his heart. God, how he hated them. He hated them as much as they hated him.

Harry got to his feet. He had stashed away half a bottle of Bell’s in the filing cabinet on Monday. Had that just occurred to him now or had he been aware of it the whole time? Harry was used to Harry playing tricks on Harry in hundreds of ways. He was just about to pull out the drawer when suddenly he looked up. He had spotted a movement. Ellen was smiling at him from her photo. Was he going mad or had her mouth just moved?

‘What are you looking at, you bitch?’ he mumbled, and the very next moment the picture fell from the wall, hitting the floor and smashing the glass to smithereens. Harry stared at Ellen who was smiling imperturbably up at him from the broken frame. He held his right hand where the pain was throbbing under the bandages.

It was only when he turned to open the drawer that he noticed the two of them standing in the doorway. He realised that they must have been standing there for quite a while and that it must have been their reflection in the glass of the picture frame that he had seen moving.

‘Hi,’ Oleg said, looking at Harry with a mixture of wonder and fear.

Harry swallowed. His hand let go of the drawer.

‘Hi, Oleg.’

Oleg was wearing trainers, a pair of blue trousers and the yellow national strip of Brazil. Harry knew that on the back of his shirt there was a number nine with the name of Ronaldo above it. He had bought it at a petrol station one Sunday when Rakel, Oleg and he had been on their way to Norefjell to go skiing.

‘I found him downstairs,’ Tom Waaler said.

He had his hand on Oleg’s head.

‘He was asking for you in reception, so I brought him up here. So you play football then, Oleg?’

Oleg didn’t answer, he just looked at Harry. With those dark eyes of his mother’s that could at times be so unendingly gentle and at others so hard and pitiless. At this moment Harry couldn’t read which they were, but then, it was dark.