She looked at him with enthusiasm. ‘Have you read Fante?’

‘When I was young and was going through my Bukowski period I read one whose title eludes me. I bought them mostly because Charles Bukowski was an ardent fan.’ He made a show of checking his watch. ‘Whoops, time to go home.’

Kaja looked at him in amazement and then at the untouched cup of coffee.

‘Jet lag,’ Harry smiled, getting to his feet. ‘We can talk tomorrow at the meeting.’

‘Of course.’

Harry patted his trouser pocket. ‘By the way, I’ve run out of cigarettes. The tax-free Camel cigarettes you took through customs for me…’

‘Just a minute,’ she smiled.

When she came back with the carton Harry was standing in the hall, with his jacket and shoes already on.

‘Thank you,’ he said, taking out one of the packs and opening it.

When he was outside on the steps, she leaned against the door frame. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but I have a feeling that this was some kind of test.’

‘Test?’ Harry said, lighting a cigarette.

‘I won’t ask what the test was for, but did I pass?’

Harry chuckled. ‘It was just this.’ He walked down the steps waving the carton. ‘O seven hundred hours.’

Harry let himself into his flat. Pressed the light switch and established that the electricity had not been disconnected. Took off his coat, went into the sitting room, put on Deep Purple, his top favourite band in the category can’t-help-being-funny, but-brilliant-anyway. ‘Speed King’. Ian Paice on drums. He sat down on the sofa and pressed his fingertips against his forehead. The dogs were yanking at the chains. Howling, snarling, barking, their teeth tearing at his innards. If he let them loose, there would be no way back. Not this time. Before, there had always been good enough reasons to stop drinking again. Rakel, Oleg, the job, perhaps even Dad. He didn’t have any of them any more. It couldn’t happen. Not with alcohol. So he had to have an alternative intoxicant. He could control intoxication. Thank you, Kaja. Was he ashamed? Of course he was. But pride was a luxury he couldn’t always afford.

He tore the plastic wrapping from the carton. Took out the bottom pack. You could hardly see that the seal on the pack had been broken. It was a fact that women like Kaja were never checked at customs. He opened the pack and pulled out the tinfoil. Unfolded it and looked at the brown ball. Inhaled the sweet smell.

Then he set about his preparations.

Harry had seen all possible ways of smoking opium, everything from the complicated, ritual procedures of opium dens, which were nothing less than Chinese tea ceremonies, through all sorts of pipe arrangements to the simplest: lighting the ball, placing a straw over it and inhaling for all you were worth as the goods literally went up in smoke. Whatever method you chose, the principle was the same: to get the substances – morphine, thebaine, codeine and a whole bouquet of other chemical friends – into your bloodstream. Harry’s method was straightforward. He taped a steel spoon to the end of the table, placed a tiny particle of the lump, no bigger than the head of a matchstick, in the spoon and heated it with a lighter. When the opium began to burn he held an ordinary glass over it to collect the smoke. Then he put a drinking straw, one with a flexible joint, in the glass and inhaled. Harry noted that his fingers worked without a hint of a tremble. In Hong Kong he had regularly kept a check on his dependency level; seen in that light, he was the most disciplined drug abuser he knew. He could predetermine his dose of alcohol and stop there, however plastered he was. In Hong Kong he had cut out opium for a week or two and only taken a couple of analgesic tablets, which would not have prevented withdrawal symptoms from materialising anyway, but which perhaps had a psychological effect since he knew they contained a tiny amount of morphine. He was not hooked. On drugs in general he was, but on opium in particular: no. Though it is a sliding scale of course. Because while he was taping the spoon into position he could already feel the dogs calming down. For they knew now, knew they would soon be fed.

And could be at peace. Until the next time.

The burning hot lighter was already scorching Harry’s fingers. On the table were the straws from McDonald’s.

A minute later he had taken the first drag.

The effect was immediate. The pains, even those he didn’t know he had, vanished. The associations, the images, appeared. He would be able to sleep tonight.

Bjorn Holm couldn’t sleep.

He had tried reading Escott’s Hank Williams: The Biography, about the country legend’s short life and long death, listening to a bootleg Lucinda Williams CD of a concert in Austin and counting Texas longhorns, but to no avail.

A dilemma. That’s exactly what it was. A problem without a proper solution. Forensics Officer Holm hated that type of problem.

He huddled up on the slightly too short sofa bed that had been among the goods he’d brought from Skreia, along with his vinyl collection of Elvis, the Sex Pistols, Jason amp; the Scorchers, three hand-sewn suits from Nashville, an American Bible and a dining-room suite that had survived three generations of Holms. But he couldn’t concentrate.

The dilemma was that he had made an interesting discovery while examining the rope with which Marit Olsen had been hung – or to be more precise, beheaded. It wasn’t a clue that would necessarily produce anything, but nonetheless the dilemma remained the same: would it be right to pass the information on to Kripos or to Harry? Bjorn Holm had identified the tiny shells on the rope during the time he was still working for Kripos. When he was talking to a freshwater biologist at the Biological Institute, Oslo University. But then Beate Lonn had transferred him to Harry’s unit before the report had been written and, sitting down at the computer tomorrow to write it, he would in fact be reporting to Harry.

OK, technically perhaps it wasn’t a dilemma, the information belonged to Kripos. Giving it to anyone else would be regarded as a dereliction of duty. And what did he owe Harry Hole actually? He had never given him anything but aggro. He was quirky and inconsiderate at work. Positively dangerous when on the booze. But on the level when sober. You could rely on him turning up and there would be no messing and no ‘you owe me’. An irksome enemy, but a good friend. A good man. A bloody good man. A bit like Hank, in fact.

Bjorn Holm groaned and rolled over to face the wall.

Stine woke with a start.

In the dark she heard a grinding sound. She rolled onto her side. The ceiling was dimly lit; the light came from the floor beside the bed. What was the time? Three o’clock in the morning? She stretched and grabbed her mobile phone.

‘Yes?’ she said with a voice that made her seem more sleepy than she was.

‘After the delta I was sick of snakes and mozzies, and me and the motorbike headed north along the Burmese coast to Arakan.’

She recognised the voice straight away.

‘To the island of Sai Chung,’ he said. ‘There’s an active mud volcano I heard was about to explode. And on the third night I was there, it erupted. I thought there would just be mud, but, you know, it spewed good old-fashioned lava as well. Thick lava that flowed so slowly through the town that we could blithely walk away from it.’

‘It’s the middle of the night,’ she yawned.

‘Yet still it wouldn’t stop. Apparently they call it cold lava when it’s so sticky, but it consumed everything in its path. Trees with fresh green leaves were like Christmas trees for four seconds until they were turned to ashes and were gone. The Burmese tried to escape in cars loaded with the chattels they had snatched, but they had spent too much time packing. The lava was moving that fast after all! When they emerged with the TV set, the lava was already up to their walls. They threw themselves inside their cars, but the heat punctured the tyres. Then the petrol caught fire and they clambered out like human torches. Do you remember my name?’