‘Do you know what name the table’s reserved under?’ the waiter asked with a little smile that told Harry all the tables had been booked weeks ago.

The woman who had answered when Harry rang the Social Services Committee office in City Hall had at first been willing to tell him only that Isabelle Skoyen was out having lunch. But when Harry had said that was why he was ringing, he was sitting at the Continental waiting for her, the secretary had in her horror blurted out that the lunch was at Sjomagasinet!

‘No,’ Harry said. ‘Is it alright if I go and have a look?’

The waiter hesitated. Studied the suit.

‘Don’t worry,’ Harry said. ‘I can see her.’

He strode past the waiter before the final judgement was passed.

He recognised the face and the pose from the pictures on the Net. She was leaning against the bar with her elbows on the counter, facing the dining room. Presumably she was waiting for someone but looked more as if she were appearing on stage. And when Harry looked at the men around the tables he understood she was probably doing both. Her coarse, almost masculine face was split into two by an axe-blade of a nose. Nevertheless, Isabelle Skoyen did have a kind of conventional attraction other women might call ‘elegance’. Her eyes were heavily made up, a constellation of stars round the cold, blue irises, which lent her a predatory, lupine look. For that reason her hair was a comical contrast: a blonde doll’s mane arranged in sweet garlands on either side of her manly face. But it was her body that made Isabelle Skoyen such an eye-catcher.

She was a towering figure, athletic, with broad shoulders and hips. The tight-fitting black trousers emphasised her big, muscular thighs. Harry decided that her breasts were bought, supported by an unusually clever bra or simply impressive. His Google search had revealed that she bred horses on a farm in Rygge; had been divorced twice, the last from a financier who had made a fortune four times and lost it three; had been a participant in national shooting competitions; was a blood donor, in trouble for having given a political colleague the boot because he ‘was such a wimp’; and she more than happily posed for photographers at film and theatre premieres. In short: a lot of woman for your money.

He moved into her field of vision, and halfway across the floor her stare still hadn’t relinquished him. Like someone who considers it their right to look. Harry went up to her, fully aware that he had at least a dozen pairs of eyes on his back.

‘You are Isabelle Skoyen,’ he said.

She looked as if she was about to give him short shrift, but changed her mind, angled her head. ‘That’s the thing about these overpriced Oslo restaurants, isn’t it? Everyone is someone. So…’ She dragged out the ‘o’ as her gaze took him in from top to toe. ‘Who are you?’

‘Harry Hole.’

‘There’s something familiar about you. Have you been on TV?’

‘Many years ago. Before this.’ He pointed to the scar on his face.

‘Oh yes, you’re the policeman who caught the serial killer, aren’t you?’

There were two ways to play this. Harry chose to be direct.

‘I was.’

‘And what do you do now?’ she asked without interest, her gaze wandering over his shoulder, to the exit. Pressed her red lips together and widened her eyes a couple of times. Warm-up. Must be an important lunch.

‘Clothes and shoes,’ Harry said.

‘I can see. Cool suit.’

‘Cool boots. Rick Owens?’

She looked at him, apparently rediscovering him. Was about to say something, but her glance caught a movement behind him. ‘My lunch date’s here. See you again perhaps, Harry.’

‘Mm. I had hoped we might have a chat now.’

She laughed and leaned forward. ‘I like the move, Harry. But it’s twelve o’clock, I’m as sober as a judge and I already have a lunch date. Have a nice day.’

She walked away on her click-clacking heels.

‘Was Gusto Hanssen your lover?’

Harry said it in a low tone, and Isabelle Skoyen was already three metres away. Nevertheless, she stiffened, as if she had found a frequency that cut through the noise of heels, voices and Diana Krall’s background crooning, and beamed into her eardrum.

She turned.

‘You rang him four times the same night, the last was at twenty-six minutes to two.’ Harry had taken a bar stool. Isabelle Skoyen retraced the three metres. She towered over him. Harry was reminded of Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. And she was not Little Red Riding Hood.

‘What do you want, Harry boy?’ she asked.

‘I want to know everything you know about Gusto Hanssen.’

The nostrils on Axe-Nose flared and her majestic breasts rose. Harry noticed that her skin had large black pores, like dots in a comic strip.

‘As one of the few people in this town concerned about keeping drug addicts alive I’m also one of the few to remember Gusto Hanssen. We lost him, and that’s sad. These calls are because I have his mobile number saved on my phone. We had invited him to a meeting of the RUNO committee. I have a good friend whose name is similar, and sometimes I hit the wrong key. That sort of thing can happen.’

‘When did you last meet him?’

‘Listen here, Harry Hole,’ she hissed under her breath, stressing Hole and lowering her face even closer to his. ‘If I’ve understood correctly you are not a policeman, but someone who works with clothes and shoes. I see no reason to talk to you.’

‘Thing is,’ Harry said, leaning back against the counter, ‘I’m very keen to talk to someone. So if it isn’t you, it’ll be a journalist. And they’re always so pleased to talk about celebrity scandals and the like.’

‘Celebrity?’ she said, turning on a radiant smile aimed not at Harry but a suit-clad man standing by the head waiter and waving back with his fingers. ‘I’m just a council secretary, Harry. The odd photo in the papers doesn’t make you a celebrity. Look how soon you’re forgotten.’

‘I believe the papers see a rising star in you.’

‘Do you indeed? Perhaps, but even the worst tabloids need something concrete, and you have nothing. Calling the wrong number is-’

‘-the sort of thing that can happen. What cannot happen, however

…’ Harry took a deep breath. She was right; he had nothing on her. And that was why it was not a great idea to play it direct. ‘… is that blood of the type AB rhesus negative appears by chance in two places on the same murder case. One person in two hundred has that group. So when the forensics report shows the blood under Gusto’s nails is AB rhesus negative and the papers say that’s your group, an ageing detective cannot help but put two and two together. All I need to do is ask for a DNA test, then we’ll know with a hundred per cent certainty who Gusto stuck his claws into before he died. Does that sound like a somewhat above-average interesting newspaper headline, Skoyen?’

The council secretary kept blinking, as though her eyelids were trying to activate her mouth.

‘Tell me, isn’t the Crown Prince in the Socialist Party?’ Harry asked, scrunching up his eyes. ‘What’s his name again?’

‘We can have a chat,’ Isabelle Skoyen said. ‘Later. But then you’ll have to swear to keep your mouth shut.’

‘When and where?’

‘Give me your number and I’ll phone you after work.’

Outside, the fjord glinted and flashed. Harry put on his sunglasses and lit a cigarette to celebrate a well-accomplished bluff. Sat on the edge of the harbour, enjoying every drag, refused to feel the gnawing that persisted, and focused on the meaninglessly expensive toys the world’s richest working class had moored alongside the quay. Then he stubbed out the butt, spat in the fjord and was ready for the next visit on the list.

Harry confirmed to the female receptionist at the Radium Hospital that he had an appointment, and she gave him a form. Harry filled in name and telephone number, but left ‘Firm’ blank.