The problem was simply that she had never used that bloody cream. An even greater problem was that someone had tried to make it look as if she had done so.

She should, of course, have gone straight to Dad.

Now it was too late, and she went down to the basement to run on the treadmill.

THE DOWN-AND-OUT

He lived in a cardboard box from IKEA.

It was large and had contained a settee called Stockholm. To tell the truth, Einar Falsen lived in several boxes, of varying sizes, in four different places around Oslo.

This particular abode was situated under the Sinsen interchange and was his usual haunt during Advent. The other shacks made of cardboard, scrap wood and bushes were dotted around the wilderness region of Oslomarka, two of them pretty close to populated areas, one of them close to the Katnosa Lake. He headed there during good weather in summer and could stay there for weeks at a time. He got by on what he found. Both in the landscape and at picnic spots, it was really unbelievable what people left behind, even so far inside Marka that only really experienced hikers ventured here. One or two outdoor fanatics eventually got to know him and slipped him a sausage or a few slices of crispbread on their way home through the forest.

Approaching Christmas he settled every year beneath Norway’s busiest traffic machine. More than a hundred thousand vehicles thundered above his head twenty-four hours a day, which he found soothing. This hiding place behind the colossal piles of aggregates and boulders had belonged to him for many years now. It had seemed under threat when the Roma people made their entry into Norway in 2013. Politicians were enraged and set the cops on them. Einar Falsen was allowed to stay as soon as the young, gruff uniformed officers understood who he was. That pre-Christmas period was good, because they brought him coffee prior to repeatedly chasing the gypsies off to a series of different night shelters. Last year some of the seedy Romanians returned, but they kept a safe distance with all their bags and baggage down by the new football pitch at Muselunden.

Einar Falsen was seldom cold.

Cardboard and newspapers, an old sleeping bag, layer upon layer of clothes he regularly fished out of damaged UFF secondhand clothing containers. Aluminium foil and an enormous hat with earflaps. The sum total normally kept out the cold.

But he was hungry. It was fairly late, he thought – the rumble of heavy traffic above his head had abated somewhat. Selma should have been here by now. He pulled off his mittens and took the old mobile phone out from his chest, close to his skin, packed in an old sock wrapped thoroughly in three layers of silver paper to ensure the phone didn’t kill him.