‘So I assume it was just an incorrect entry.’

‘Has it ever happened before?’

Elise stood up.

‘No. And I feel terribly tired now. Do you really not believe that Haakon was unfaithful?’

‘I’m completely convinced. Both because I’ve known him since the day he was born, and because I can’t fathom how he would have managed to insert a secret like that into such a transparent and chock-full life. Besides, he loved you.’

‘Are you sure? You can’t really be sure of that. No one can be sure of that kind of thing.’

Her voice grew increasingly weak. Her shoulders were as angular as clothes hangers beneath her chunky-knit sweater. The skin on her knees was dry, Selma saw; the holes in her jeans had enlarged in the past half-hour.

‘Absolutely sure. And Elise …’

She ought to tell her about the drugs test.

When Bottolf Odda had given her the warning during yesterday’s viewing, it was on the cards that she would pass on the information to Vanja and Kristina about the positive result from the post-mortem sample. She hadn’t done so. Selma still couldn’t understand why she had left Pilestredet immediately after the visit by the Federation’s president, without saying a word to anyone. It had something to do with restlessness, she thought. With a picture, the contours of which she was beginning to make out, but the meaning of which she still did not comprehend. When she was visited by Jan Morell on Thursday evening, and offered a wager she could not refuse, she had accepted the craziest odds she had ever bet on. And it was Hege Chin’s life she was supposed to investigate. Hege was the one she was meant to exonerate, and Selma didn’t have any idea where to begin.

This picture was bigger.

Far bigger and far more indistinct.

In a flash she felt a kind of fear, a shot of adrenaline that made her suddenly get to her feet and head out into the hallway.

Elise deserved a warning.

She deserved two, in fact. Both that Haakon had apparently been knocked down on Friday, and that he had died with illegal substances in his bloodstream. Both of these would soon become public knowledge – it could be a matter of merely hours, and it would create an incredible rumpus.

Elise ought to be warned, but in that case Selma would have to stay.

‘Thanks for your hospitality,’ she said, pulling on her coat. ‘We’ll talk again soon, OK?’

A hug, a caress of Elise’s straggly hair, and yet another promise to see her again soon, on Friday at the funeral at the very latest.

And Selma dashed out the door.

THE CERTIFICATE

It was one fifteen p.m.

As usual in Advent, the cold had relented after only a few hours of battle. The world was once again sodden and grey. The clouds were so low above the city that the spire of the Kulturkirken Jacob church had disappeared. Selma stood outside a nine-storey building at Storgata 38.