In the hallway, he turned round.

‘By the way, who called the police?’

‘It was me,’ Vibeke said. ‘I rang while Anders went to fetch the caretaker.’

‘Before you’d found her? How did you know…?’

‘There was blood dripping into the pan.’

‘Oh? How did you know that?’

Anders Nygard gave a loud, exaggerated sigh and rested a hand on Vibeke’s neck: ‘It was red, wasn’t it.’

‘Well,’ Harry said, ‘there are other things than blood which are red.’

‘That’s right,’ Vibeke said. ‘It wasn’t just the colour though.’

Anders Nygard threw her a look of astonishment. She smiled, but Harry noticed that she moved away from her partner’s hand.

‘I used to live with a chef and we ran a little eating house together. That’s when I learned a few things about food. One of which was that blood contains albumin, and if you pour blood into a pan of water over sixty-five degrees, the blood coagulates and becomes lumpy. Just like when an egg cracks in boiling water. When Anders tasted the lumps in the water and said that they tasted of egg, I knew it was blood. And that something terrible had happened.’

Anders Nygard’s mouth fell open. He went suddenly very pale under his tan.

‘Bon appetit,’ Harry mumbled and left.

5

Friday. Underwater.

Harry hated theme pubs: Irish pubs, topless pubs, novelty pubs or, worst of all, celebrity pubs where the walls were lined with portraits of regular customers of some notoriety. The theme of Underwater was a vaguely nautical mix of diving and the romanticism of old wooden ships. But at some point, well into his fourth beer, Harry couldn’t care less about gurgling aquariums of green water, diving helmets and the rustic interiors of creaking wood. It could have been worse. The last time he had been here people had suddenly burst into a round of operatic favourites; for a moment he had the feeling that the musical had finally caught up with reality. He took stock and confirmed with some relief that none of the four guests in the pub looked as though they were considering breaking into song for the time being.

‘Everyone on holiday?’ he asked the girl behind the bar as she put his beer in front of him.

‘It’s seven o’clock.’ She gave him change for a hundred-kroner note although he had given her two hundred.

He would have gone to Schroder if he could, but he had a hazy recollection that he was banned there and he didn’t have the nerve to go and find out. Not today. He remembered fragments of some scene there on Tuesday. Or was it Wednesday? Someone had dragged up the time when he had been on TV and had been referred to as the ‘Norwegian Police Hero’ because he had shot a gunman in Sydney. Some guy had made a few remarks and called him names. Some of what he said had been spot on. Did they end up coming to blows? It was not impossible, but of course the injuries to his knuckles and nose that he woke up with could just as easily have been caused by a fall on the cobblestones in Dovregata.

Harry’s mobile phone rang. He stared at the number and saw that it wasn’t Rakel this time, either.

‘Hello, boss.’

‘Harry? Where are you?’ Bjarne Moller sounded concerned.

‘Underwater. What’s up?’

‘Water?’

‘Water. Fresh water. Salt water. Tonic water. You sound… What’s the word? Frazzled.’

‘Are you drunk?’

‘Not drunk enough.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. The battery keeps going, boss.’

‘One of the officers at the crime scene threatened to write a report on you. He says you were visibly intoxicated when you arrived.’

‘Why “threatened” and not “is threatening”?’

‘I persuaded him not to. Were you intoxicated, Harry?’

‘Of course I wasn’t, boss.’

‘Are you absolutely positive that you are telling me the truth now, Harry?’

‘Are you absolutely positive that you want to know?’

Harry heard Moller’s groan at the other end.

‘This cannot go on, Harry. I’ll be forced to put a stop to it.’

‘OK. Begin by taking me off this case.’

‘What?’

‘You heard me. I don’t want to work with that bastard. Put someone else on the case.’

‘We haven’t got the personnel to…’

‘Then give me the boot. I don’t give a monkey’s.’

Harry put his phone back in his inside pocket. He could hear Moller’s voice gently vibrating against his nipple. Actually it was quite a pleasant feeling. He drained the rest of his glass, stood up and staggered out into the warm summer evening. The third taxi he hailed in Ullevalsveien stopped and picked him up.

‘Holmenkollveien,’ he said, settling his sweaty neck back against the cool leather of the back seat. As they went along he gazed out of the window at the swallows as they dissected the pale blue sky in their search for food. The insects had come out now. This was the swallows’ window of opportunity, their chance to live. From now until the sun went down.

The taxi pulled up below a large, dark timber-clad house.

‘Shall I drive up?’ the taxi driver asked.

‘No, we’ll just wait here for a bit,’ Harry said.

He stared up at the house. He thought he caught a glimpse of Rakel in the window. Oleg would probably be going to bed soon. He was probably making a fuss right now to stay up longer because it was…

‘It is Friday today, isn’t it?’

The taxi driver took a cautious look in his mirror and gave a slight nod.

The days. The weeks. My God, how quickly young lads grew up. Harry rubbed his face, tried to massage a bit of life into the wan death mask he walked around with. Last winter hadn’t been so bad. He had solved a couple of biggish cases, he had appeared as a witness in the Ellen Gjelten case, he was on the wagon, and he and Rakel had gone from being just a couple of new loves to doing family things together. And he had liked it; he liked the weekend trips and the company of children. Harry did the barbecuing. He liked having his father and Sis over for a Sunday meal, and seeing his sister, who had Down’s syndrome, and nine-year-old Oleg playing together. And best of all: they were very much in love. Rakel had even begun to throw out hints that it might be an idea if Harry moved in. She had used the argument that the house was too big for her and Oleg. Harry had not gone to any great pains to find counter-arguments.

‘We’ll see when I’ve done with the Ellen Gjelten case,’ he had said. The trip to Normandy that they had booked – three weeks on an old farm and a week on a riverboat – would be a kind of test to see if they were ready for it.

Then things started happening.

He had spent the whole winter working on the Ellen Gjelten case. It was intensive, too intensive, but that was the only way Harry knew how to work. Ellen Gjelten was not just a colleague; she was his closest friend and kindred spirit. Two years had gone by since the two of them had been on the heels of an arms smuggler going by the code name of Prince and since the day a baseball bat had knocked the living daylights out of her. The evidence at the scene of the crime by the Akerselva pointed to Sverre Olsen, an old neo-Nazi the police knew well. Unfortunately they never got to hear his explanation as he was shot through the head when he was alleged to have fired at Tom Waaler during his arrest. Regardless of this, Harry was convinced that the real man behind the murder was Prince, and he had persuaded Moller to let him conduct his own investigation. It was personal, so it went against all the principles they worked by in Crime Squad, but Moller had given him permission, short-term, as a kind of reward for the results that Harry had achieved on other cases. The breakthrough had finally come last winter. Someone had seen Sverre Olsen sitting in a red car in Grunerlokka with another person on the night of the murder, just a few hundred metres away from the scene of the crime. The witness was a Roy Kvinsvik, a convicted former neo-Nazi, now a recent Pentecostal convert to the Philadelphian sect. Kvinsvik was not exactly what you would call a model witness, but he had taken a long, hard look at the photograph Harry had shown him and said, Yes, this was the person he had seen in the car with Sverre. The man in the photograph was Tom Waaler.