Selma travelled back to London and picked up a larger sum of money than she had ever had in her hands. Everyone knew about it. Friends and teammates laughed with delight. Jesso went almost mad with excitement. Selma’s own reaction was both frightening and exhilarating, and she concealed it from everyone. Smiling broadly, she allowed herself to be congratulated, but kept the rest to herself.

The stimulation. The delightful, suffocating, intoxicating feeling that life itself was at stake when Denmark scored their second goal in the final. The amazing elation until the whistle blew and it was all over and she suddenly realized that her impulsive bet’s highest value was not all the money she had won.

It was the feeling that something had been at stake the whole time.

From the moment she had handed over the hundred pounds in exchange for a receipt from a bookmaker in South London, she had felt it. Everything was exciting. What the UN would decide to do. Whether UEFA would follow it up. Whether Sweden would manage to beat England in their final game, which Denmark depended upon in order to progress. For weeks and months she had gone around with an unfamiliar, euphoric sense of being present in her own life. The entire time.

An interminable Olympic thriller of a final without any greater potential loss than one hundred pounds sterling. That brought a dizzying profit and an intense craving to do it all over again.

A taxi with a light on its roof came driving from the south on Snarøyveien. She flagged it down and crept into a compartment that smelled of pepper. The boy behind the wheel, he couldn’t possibly be more than twenty-five years old, had fair hair and had pushed a pair of incongruous sunglasses on top of his head.

‘Sinsenkrysset,’ Selma said curtly. ‘No, change that. Drive me to the Narvesen kiosk in Vogts gate. We’ll drive on from there, I just need to do some shopping first.’

She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes.

Everything was unravelling.

Selma herself was falling apart. She was trying to be a detective without the slightest idea of how to go about it. Her strength was to unpick evidence. Not to locate it. She was good at building a valid case from known facts. Not finding facts when she had no idea where they were hidden.

She simply couldn’t do it. Her thoughts were going round in circles, they had no beginning or end, and they twisted around in a circular pattern she neither understood nor recognized.

Selma Falck was a trademark. A brand fashioned from memory and stringency, frames and straight lines. Logic. She was resilient and strong, intelligent and streetwise.

And she never gave up.

Now she was about to capitulate.

Somewhere in everything that had happened in this past short week, all the same, lay something she hadn’t quite grasped, something annoying, a tiny stone in her shoe that she had never had time to stop and get rid of.