Jan Morell sat on his dark leather settee, squeezing a tennis ball in each hand. He was speaking more quietly than his words might suggest.

‘To tell the truth, this is the most idiotic thing you’ve done in the whole of your twenty-four-year-old life. Why … why didn’t you come …’

His jaw muscles were bulging under his day-old beard, his knuckles white around the dirty yellow balls. The sweat rings in the armpits of his tennis shirt, pale pink with a white stripe across the chest, had dried into dull stains rimmed with salt.

‘Why didn’t you come to me?’ he asked. ‘Haven’t I said that you must always, always, come to me when you’re faced with a problem?’

Hege did not answer. There was nothing more to say. She sat on the settee directly opposite him and had been in endless floods of tears since she’d come running in from the evening darkness to discover that the tube of Trofodermin was no longer where she had left it, tucked away inside the air vent in the bathroom, hidden behind the broken grate, and forgotten to the best of her ability.

‘I’m so worn out, Dad.’

‘We both are. Even so, that’s of no importance. We have to sort this out, we have to …’

He stood up. Lobbed one of the tennis balls into a corner. Both Maggi and Hege jumped and followed the ball with their eyes as it bounced off the wall and rolled back, to disappear under the nearest settee.

Jan stuffed the other ball in the pocket of his pull-on trousers as he crossed to the fireplace. An overly large fire that filled nearly the entire hearth was burning furiously. The fireguard was not high enough to stop the glowing red flakes that sparked out into the room, and Jan grabbed a Farris bottle he had left on the mantel-piece. Shaking it energetically, he unscrewed the lid and placed his thumb over the spout, before showering a fine spray on the floor beyond the wrought-iron floor panel and then directing a couple of forceful jets on the fire itself.

‘That’s it, then,’ he murmured almost inaudibly, holding out his hand and issuing an order: ‘The tube. Now.’

Maggi had stood upright for more than two hours, halfway between the living room and the kitchen, as she was afraid it would become necessary for her to flee. She approached him. Obviously anxious, Hege saw; every step was hesitant. Finally she withdrew the empty, dented tube of ointment from her apron pocket. Jan had looked at it several times in the course of the evening, but hadn’t wanted to touch it until now. Snatching it from her, he pushed it so far into the flames that he had burned his fingers before he let it go.

‘There,’ he said resolutely, waving Maggi away. ‘In a few minutes it’ll be gone. Completely gone. And we’ve never set eyes on it. Understood?’

The home help nodded energetically, already almost at the kitchen door.