The unfamiliar tube lay at the very bottom. In a rectangular white box with green and black writing. Together with some sort of ‘no admittance’ mark in red, fairly large, stamped above the words ‘BANNED SUBSTANCE’ in black.

TROFODERMIN was the name of the medication.

Hege dropped the box on the floor.

Her ears were ringing. She tried to blink away the black dots dancing in front of her eyes. She grabbed her inhaler, applied it to her mouth, pressed and took a deep breath.

Open-mouthed, she continued gasping for breath.

She was well aware what Trofodermin was.

On the other hand, she had no idea how the package had ended up in her toiletry bag, in her luggage, after a successful World Cup weekend in Lillehammer.

Absolutely not the foggiest, and the world had stopped spinning.

THE GLASS PALACE

He was freezing.

Arnulf Selhus knew it wasn’t cold in the large room. The temperature and air quality were controlled by an installation so modern that only two years ago, when the king had formally opened the building, it was the only one of its kind in the world. All the public rooms were set at 20.00 degrees Celsius, right down to the decimal point. Nevertheless his teeth were nearly chattering.

Sølve Bang apparently noticed nothing.

‘This is a scandal,’ he shouted. ‘A scandal we simply can’t afford, Arnulf. Taking drugs is completely unacceptable!’

The platitudes sent a shower of fine spittle across the oak table.

‘Of course,’ Arnulf Selhus said apathetically, covering his face with his hands. ‘You’ve said that several times now. But what the hell can we do, eh? Kill the young girl?’

‘That might be an idea,’ was the quick riposte.

Sølve Bang stood up just as abruptly as he had dropped into the pale-blue designer chair only two minutes earlier.

‘She’s never been really popular. That goes without saying. She’s far too …’

‘Give over. Cut it out.’

‘Well, she’s certainly created a catastrophe now. She’s responsible. Someone is responsible. Nothing here in this world happens without someone being responsible, Arnulf. It’s a betrayal. A dreadful betrayal of us all. Of the Federation, of the other team members, of …’

‘Of you,’ Arnulf mumbled into his own hands, so softly that he hardly heard it himself.

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing. But now you should really calm down. Strictly speaking, this doesn’t have anything to do with you, Sølve. We have procedures for this. Protocols. Rules.’

‘Rules? Protocols?’

The small, corpulent man’s voice rose to a falsetto. He began to trot back and forth across the floor, parallel to the glass wall that on some days let the whole of the Oslo Fjord reveal itself out there. Now, as usual for the time of year, a peasouper of a fog weighed down on its huge, cold expanse.