‘Yes, I have,’ Geir Bruun said in answer to Harry’s question. ‘I remember she went to some kind of mountain cabin in the autumn.’ He uttered this as though it were a concept he found fairly alien. ‘But that wasn’t where she disappeared.’

‘We know that,’ Kaja said. ‘Did she go there with anyone, and if so, do you know who?’

‘No idea. We didn’t talk about that sort of thing – it was enough to share a bathroom, if you know what I mean. She had her private life, I had mine. But I doubt she would have gone into the wilds on her own, if I may put it like that.’

‘Oh?’

‘Adele did very little on her own. I don’t see her in a cabin without a guy. But impossible to say who. She was – if I may be frank – a bit promiscuous. She had no female friends, though she compensated with male friends. Whom she kept apart. Adele didn’t live a double life so much as a quadruple life. Or thereabouts.’

‘So she was dishonest?’

‘Not necessarily. I remember she gave me advice on honest ways to finish with someone. She said that once while she was being shagged from behind she took a photo over her shoulder with her mobile, wrote the name of the guy, sent the photo and deleted the addressee. All in one swift operation.’ Geir Bruun’s face was expressionless.

‘Impressive,’ Harry said. ‘We know she paid for two people in the mountains. Could you give us the name of a male friend, so we could start our enquiries there?’

‘’Fraid I can’t,’ Geir Bruun said, ‘but when I reported her missing, you lot checked who she’d been talking to on the phone over the last few weeks.’

‘Which officers precisely?’

‘I don’t remember any names. Local police.’

‘Fine, we have a meeting at the police station now,’ Harry said, looking at his watch and getting up.

‘Why’, asked Kaja, who hadn’t moved, ‘did the police stop investigating the case? I don’t even recall reading about it in the newspapers.’

‘Don’t you know?’ the man said, signalling to two women with a pram that he would attend to them immediately. ‘She sent a postcard.’

‘Postcard?’ Harry said.

‘Yes. From Rwanda. Down in Africa.’

‘What did she write?’

‘It was very brief. She’d met her dream guy, and I would have to pay the rent on my own until she was back in March. The bitch.’

It was walking distance to the police station. An inspector with a squat pumpkin head and a name Harry forgot as soon as he heard it received them in a smoke-infested office, served them coffee in plastic cups that burned their fingers, and cast long looks at Kaja every time he considered himself unobserved.

He began by delivering a lecture about there being somewhere between five hundred and a thousand missing Norwegians at any one time. Sooner or later they would all turn up. If the police were to investigate every missing person case whenever there was suspicion of a criminal act or an accident, they wouldn’t have time for anything else. Harry stifled a yawn.

In Adele Vetlesen’s case they had even received a sign of life; they had it somewhere. The inspector got up and stuck his pumpkin head into a drawer of hanging files and reappeared with a postcard, which he laid before them. There was a photo of a conical mountain with a cloud around the peak, but no text to explain what the mountain was called or where in the world it was. The handwriting was scratchy, dreadful. Harry could just decipher the signature. Adele. There was a stamp bearing the name Rwanda and the envelope was postmarked Kigali, which Harry seemed to recall was the capital.

‘Her mother confirmed it was her daughter’s handwriting,’ the inspector said and explained that at the mother’s insistence they had checked and found Adele Vetlesen’s name on the passenger list of a Brussels Airlines flight to Kigali via Entebbe in Uganda on the 25th of November. Furthermore, they had carried out a hotel search through Interpol, and a hotel in Kigali – the inspector read out his notes: the Gorilla Hotel! – had indeed had an Adele Vetlesen down as a guest the same night she arrived by plane. The only reason Adele Vetlesen was still on the missing persons list was that they didn’t know precisely where she was now, and that a postcard from abroad did not technically change her status as missing.

‘Besides, we’re not exactly talking about the civilised part of the world here,’ the inspector said, throwing up his arms. ‘Huti, Tutsu, or whatever they’re called. Machetes. Two million dead. Get me?’

Harry saw Kaja close her eyes as the inspector with the schoolmaster’s voice and a string of interpolated dependent clauses explained how little life was worth in Africa, where human trafficking was hardly an unknown phenomenon, and how in theory Adele could have been abducted and forced to write a postcard, since blacks would pay a year’s salary to sink their teeth into a blonde Norwegian girl, wouldn’t they.

Harry examined the postcard and tried to block out the pumpkin man’s voice. A conical mountain with a cloud around the peak. He glanced up when the inspector with the forgettable name cleared his throat.

‘Yes, now and then you can understand them, can’t you?’ he said with a conspiratorial smile directed at Harry.

Harry got up and said work was waiting in Oslo. Would Drammen be so kind as to scan the postcard and email it on for them?

‘To a handwriting expert?’ the inspector asked, clearly displeased, and studied the address Kaja had noted down for him.

‘Volcano expert,’ Harry said. ‘I’d like you to send him the picture and ask if he can identify the mountain.’

‘Identify the mountain?’

‘He’s a specialist. He travels around examining them.’

The inspector shrugged, but nodded. Then he accompanied them to the main door. Harry asked if they had checked whether there had been any calls on Adele’s mobile phone since she left.

‘We know our job, Hole,’ the inspector said. ‘No outgoing calls. But you can imagine the mobile network in a country like Rwanda…’

‘Actually I can’t,’ Harry said. ‘But then I’ve never been there.’

‘A postcard!’ Kaja groaned when they were standing on the square by the unmarked police car they had requisitioned from Police HQ. ‘Plane ticket and hotel record in Rwanda! Why couldn’t your computer freak in Bergen have found that, so we wouldn’t have had to waste half a day in fucking Drammen?’

‘Thought that would put you in a great mood,’ Harry said, unlocking the door. ‘Got yourself a new friend, and perhaps Adele isn’t dead after all.’

‘Are you in a great mood?’ Kaja asked.

Harry looked at the car keys. ‘Feel like driving?’

‘Yes!’

Strangely enough, none of the speed boxes flashed, and they were back in Oslo in twenty minutes flat.

They agreed they would take the light things, the office equipment and the desk drawers, to Police HQ first, and wait with the heavy things until the day after. They put them on the same trolley Harry had used when they were fitting out their office.

‘Have you been given an office yet?’ Kaja asked when they were halfway down the culvert. Her voice cast long echoes.

Harry shook his head. ‘We’ll put the things in yours.’

‘Have you applied for an office?’ she asked, and stopped.

Harry kept going.

‘Harry!’

He stopped.

‘You asked about my father,’ he said.

‘I didn’t mean to…’

‘No, of course not. But he hasn’t got much time left. OK? After that I’ll be off again. I just wanted to…’

‘Wanted to what?’

‘Have you heard of the Dead Policemen’s Society?’

‘What is it?’

‘People who worked at Crime Squad. People I cared about. I don’t know if I owe them something, but that’s the tribe.’

‘What?’

‘It’s not much, but it’s all I have, Kaja. They’re the only ones I have any reason to feel loyalty towards.’

‘A police unit?’

Harry started walking. ‘I know, and it’ll probably pass. The world will go on. It’s just restructuring, isn’t it? The stories are in the walls, and now the walls are coming down. You and yours will have to make new stories, Kaja.’