The old down-and-out looked at her. He went on chewing a huge piece of ciabatta without saying a word. When he was finished, he drank the still-hot coffee in greedy gulps. Wiped around his mouth with the Mesta mitten.

‘It had to happen some time,’ he said, unruffled, as he picked up the pack of Smil chocolates.

‘What?’

‘Gambling doesn’t pay off in the long run. If it did, there would be no bookies.’

‘But …’

‘You’ve played for high stakes for years now, Mariska. High and often. You know, even though I was up shit creek at the time you were my lawyer, I wasn’t stupid. Mental illness doesn’t make you any more stupid than you already were. Quite the opposite, I’d say.’

Selma hid her face behind her cup. She felt an unfamiliar warmth on her cheeks, a slightly elevated pulse rate, as if she were seeking absolution for her sins from a priest and still didn’t entirely know whether it would be granted. In the taxi on the way from Fornebu, the idea of confiding in Einar hadn’t yet occurred to her. Neither had it while she sat in the vehicle feeling so miserable. Nor when she had bought some food for him, with chocolate and cola and everything she knew he’d like. Not even when the grumpy taxi driver had dropped her off at the Rema 1000 supermarket just beyond Sinsen subway station, had she envisaged the possibility that the sentence would ever be spoken: ‘My gambling has cost me everything.’

She lowered her cup a little and went on: ‘The house, Jesso and the children. I’ve put myself in a totally impossible situation, I’ve accepted an assignment I’ve no chance of solving, and so really have no chance of earning a sou for. What’s more, I’m of no fixed abode at present.’

Einar Falsen smiled, cocked his head, swept a peremptory hand across the piles of stones and exclaimed: ‘There’s plenty of room here!’

With a low chuckle.

Einar himself had chosen to live as he did. In the first few years, after he was convicted and compelled to submit to obligatory psychiatric treatment, his friends and former colleagues had queued up to look after him. Three years in an institution had impaired his health. Nevertheless he was no longer regarded as presenting any danger to others and was released into a society he could only cope with by withdrawing from it. Countless attempts to move him indoors and give him dignity, as most people understood the term, had all ended in failure. Einar could not endure a normal existence. He began to roam about. One by one his friends gave up. For a number of years, however, he still had a few he could turn to when the winters became too harsh. And whenever he was physically ill, which happened only seldom. He could sleep on a settee for a night or three, before he set off once again, away from everyone who had once cared about him.