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.

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.