‘Hello,’ he croaked. ‘Are you awake?’

Still no reaction in there.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said in a loud voice. ‘Wake up!’

He couldn’t open the door. It was far too risky. It could all be an act. Open the door and then, hey presto, the guy jumped up on his feet. Even if he was ever so debilitated after the days spent down here, desperation could bring undreamed-of strength. It was obvious that the man was desperate, and that was nothing to reproach him for.

Instead he hammered on the door with both hands. The cold metal made his fists smart. He stopped. Peered inside.

It looked as if the prisoner was dead.

But he couldn’t be.

‘Hello!’ he bellowed, failing to remember that his voice should be someone else’s. ‘Are you sleeping? Get up! Now!’

Still silence.

His headache was on the verge of bursting his head now, and he felt he was about to lose his temper. He was so unused to this that he forgot his own intentions about taking the greatest caution and instead picked up a wooden ski from the stack behind the carpenter’s bench, lifted the latch on the steel door and opened the cell where the prisoner was still lying as if he were dead.

The prisoner was dead.

He understood that immediately. The man had spewed up, it looked like; a disgusting, unrecognizable mass had seeped out of his mouth and nose. His eyes were only half closed, as he saw when he moved closer. His eyeballs were colourless and completely vacant, as if his life had departed through them in the end.

The man with the grey, thick hair began to cry. He walked over to the cadaver and laid it out on the bed. The legs were already affected by rigor mortis and the corpse would not lie flat.

He fetched a bucket of hot water and a few cloths. And then he carefully washed the naked body, changing the water and using a mild soap, baby soap, he cleaned the dead man before drying him thoroughly and dressing him in the clothes he had been wearing when he arrived.

Closed his eyes.

The man in the house with a cell in the basement cried and cried. When he was finished with the body, he sat with his back to the wall, the construction that was only meant to scare him, and sobbed with his face on his knees and his hands around his ankles. The cell with the movable wall was only intended to torment the man on the bunk, torment him the way he deserved and had to be tormented, before everything could be over and done with and they could call it quits.

He had not meant for anyone to die, and could no longer bear any of it.

THE CONFIDENCE

‘My gambling has cost me everything, Einar.’