She just had no idea what it was.

‘Deli de Luca,’ she leaned forward and addressed the driver. ‘Not Narvesen.’

‘They’re both at the same fucking intersection,’ the ill-tempered driver said as he accelerated along the E18 towards the city.

THE CORPSE

He wasn’t ill.

Vanja had said that he wasn’t ill.

Just affected, as she said. Influenced by an extremely traumatic event in his childhood that had never been cleared up. Nothing was really wrong with him. He had grown up. Behaved well. Never done anything worse than incurring two points on his driving licence. Obtained an education and got a job. A dream job, in fact. He earned good money, had a house and even friends. Sort of friends. He didn’t really need them. The best thing was his work, because he was good at that, and going skiing.

He was still an expert skier, and he wasn’t ill.

Vanja had said that, but Vanja wasn’t here now to see how bad it was. All of it. Haakon’s death, which made him sad, and Haakon’s positive drugs test, which confused him and aggravated his headache.

Vanja was in pain herself.

It wasn’t his fault.

‘Cunt,’ he snarled, and washed down four Paracet tablets with water.

It was a double dose, but his headache was really killing him.

The silence from the cell was bothering him too. Up here in the living room he had never heard anything, the work of installing the insulation had taken several weeks, but the absence of entreaties from the other side of the door when he had been down there cutting off the water supply earlier that evening made him more anxious than ever. He could have made the wall move, just to force a reaction. Or at least have looked in through the hatch.

He must go down. Just to check.

Always best to be on the safe side.

Not allowing himself time to change his mind, he got up abruptly and went out into the hallway. He opened the basement door and went downstairs.

It was still very quiet. Now that the water had been turned off, there wasn’t even the sound of the low susurration from the pipes. He tramped extra hard across the floor, lifted the bolt on the hatch and opened it.

The man was asleep.

He was lying on his side on the bunk, with his legs at a strange angle. It looked as if he had decided to stand up, but hadn’t had the strength and half of him had lain down again. One foot reached all the way to the floor. His arms were clamped to his chest, totally flat and crossed.

‘Hey!’ the silver-haired man called out.

It occurred to him immediately that he should disguise his voice. That was the plan. That was how he had written it down, in the manuscript, the precise plan that would ensure everything went smoothly, and that no one would ever find out who he was.