‘Cabins shrink in the cold,’ he muttered.

Inside it was pitch black and smelt of paraffin and a wood-burning stove. Kaja inspected the cabin. She knew the lodging arrangements were very simple. You came, entered details in the guest book, took a bed, or a mattress if it was crowded, lit the fire, cooked your own food in the kitchen where there was a stove and cooking utensils, or – if you used the food provided in the cupboards, you put some money in a tin. You paid for your stay in the same tin or you filled in a bank authorisation slip. All payments were a matter for your own conscience and moral integrity.

The cabin had four north-facing bedrooms with four bunk beds in each. The sitting room faced south and was kitted out in traditional manner, that is, with solid pine furniture. There was a large open fireplace for a homely effect and a wood burner for more efficient heating. Kaja calculated that there was seating space for twelve to fifteen people around the table, and sleeping space for double that if people squeezed up and used the floor and mattresses. She visualised the light from candles and the fire flickering over familiar and unfamiliar faces as conversation covered the day’s skiing and the morrow’s plans over a beer or a glass of wine. Even’s ruddy complexion smiled at her, and he toasted her from one of the darkened corners.

‘The guest book’s in the kitchen,’ Utmo said, pointing to one of the doors. Still standing by the front door with hat and gloves on, he seemed impatient. Kaja was holding the door handle and about to press when an image flashed into her mind. County Officer Krongli. He had looked similar. She had known the thought would reappear, she just hadn’t known when.

‘Can you open the door for me?’ she said.

‘Eh?’

‘It’s stuck,’ Kaja said. ‘The cold.’

She closed her eyes as she listened to him approach, heard the door open without a sound, felt his astonished gaze on her. Then she opened her eyes and went in.

There was a smell of slightly rancid fat in the kitchen. Her pulse raced as her eyes skimmed over the surfaces, cupboards. She spotted the black, leather-bound register on the worktop under the window. It was attached to the wall by a blue nylon cord.

Kaja breathed in. She walked over to the book. Flicked through.

Page after page of handwritten names, scribbled by the guests. Most had observed the rule and noted down their next destination.

‘In fact, I’d been going to come here over the weekend to check the book for you,’ she heard Utmo say behind her. ‘But obviously the police couldn’t wait, could they.’

‘No,’ said Kaja, thumbing through the dates. November. 6 November. 8 November. She flicked back. And forward again. It wasn’t there. 7 November was gone. She laid the book flat. The jagged edges of the torn sheet stood upright. Someone had taken it.

31

Kigali

The airport at Kigali, Rwanda, was small, modern and surprisingly well organised. However, it was Harry’s experience that international airports said little or nothing about the country in which they were situated. In Mumbai, India, there was total calm and efficiency; at JFK in New York, paranoia and chaos. The passport queue took a tiny lurch forward, and Harry followed. Despite the pleasant temperature, he could feel sweat trickling down between his shoulder blades under the thin cotton shirt. He thought again about the figures he had seen at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam where the delayed Oslo plane had landed. Harry had worked up a sweat running through the corridors, the alphabet and the ever larger numbers of the gates to catch the flight to Kampala, Uganda. As corridors crossed he had seen something out of the corner of his eye. A figure that had seemed vaguely familiar. He had been looking into the light and the figure was too far away for him to make out the face. Once on board the plane, the last passenger, Harry had concluded the patently obvious: it had not been her. What were the chances of it happening? There was no chance the boy next to her had been Oleg. He couldn’t have grown that much.

‘Next.’

Harry stepped forward to the window, presented his passport, landing card, copy of the visa application he had printed off the Net and the crisp sixty dollars the visa had cost.

‘Business?’ the passport official asked, and Harry met his eyes. The man was tall, thin and his skin so dark that it reflected light. Probably Tutsi, Harry thought. They controlled the national borders now.

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘The Congo,’ Harry said, then used the local name to distinguish the two Congo countries.

‘Congo Kinshasa,’ the passport official corrected.

He pointed to the landing card Harry had filled in on the plane. ‘Says here you’re staying at Gorilla Hotel in Kigali.’

‘Just tonight,’ Harry said. ‘Then I’m going to the Congo tomorrow, one night in Goma and then back here and home. It’s a shorter drive than from Kinshasa.’

‘Have a pleasant stay in the Congo, busy man,’ the uniformed official said with a hearty laugh, smacked the stamp down on the passport and returned it.

Half an hour later Harry filled in the hotel registration card at Gorilla, signed it and was given a key attached to a wooden gorilla. When Harry went to bed it was eighteen hours since he had left his at home in Oppsal. He stared at the fan howling at the foot of the bed. It provided hardly a puff of air even though the blades were rotating at a hysterical speed. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep.

The driver asked Harry to call him Joe. Joe was Congolese, spoke fluent French and rather more halting English. He had been hired by contacts at a Norwegian aid organisation based in Goma.

‘Eight hundred thousand,’ Joe said, guiding the Land Rover along a potholed but perfectly navigable tarmac road winding between green meadows and mountain slopes cultivated from top to bottom. Occasionally, he was charitable and braked so as not to run down people walking, cycling, wheeling and carrying goods at the edge of the road, but as a rule they made a life-saving leap at the very last second.

‘They kill eight hundred thousand in just few weeks in 1994. The Hutus invade their kind, old neighbours and cut them down with machetes because they Tutsis. The propaganda on the radio say that if your husband is Tutsi it is your duty as Hutu to kill him. Cut down the tall trees. Many flee along this road…’ Joe pointed out of the window. ‘Bodies pile up. Some places it is impossible to pass. Good times for vultures.’

They drove on in silence.

They passed two men carrying a big cat bound to a pole by its legs. Children were dancing and cheering beside it and sticking pins into the dead animal. The coat was sun-coloured with patches of shade.

‘Hunters?’ Harry asked.

Joe shook his head, glanced in the mirror and answered in a mixture of English and French: ‘Hit by car, je crois. That one is almost impossible to hunt. It is rare, has large territory, only hunts at night. Hides and blends into environs during the day. I think it is very lonely animal, Harry.’

Harry watched men and women working in the fields. At several points there was heavy machinery and men repairing the road. Down in a valley he saw a motorway under construction. In a field children in blue school uniforms were kicking a football about and shouting.

‘Rwanda is good,’ Joe said.

Two and a half hours later Joe pointed through the windscreen. ‘Lake Kivu. Very nice, very deep.’

The surface of the huge expanse of water seemed to reflect a thousand suns. The country on the other side was the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mountains rose on all sides. A single white cloud encircled the peak of one of them.

‘Not much cloud,’ Joe said as if intuiting what Harry was thinking. ‘The killer mountain. Nyiragongo.’