When she had approached him tonight, jumping from boulder to boulder beneath the continuous noise of the interchange, he had looked so peaceful. Tucked away under the concrete construction, with all his bags and baggage, he had sat in his sleeping bag reading the newspapers in the glow of a flickering, flaming torch. The yellow light had fallen upon his face, making it look even coarser. The wrinkles deeper, the eyes even darker. His beard wilder than ever. He had smiled at her, the usual reception, found a cushion and bin bag and welcomed her as the close friend he obviously believed her to be.

The secret had spilled out by itself.

‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘I haven’t yet fallen as low as that.’

‘Tell me about it,’ he had said, with a smile, as he dropped four pieces of chocolate into his mouth.

She told Einar about it. Told him all about it. Nearly all. Not about the footprints in the slush, that was still too recent, unexplained and frightening. But about everything else. About the beginning, the bookmaker in London, and about the end, the exposure when Jan Morell had come along to her office one Monday in November and reduced her life to rubble. She told him about everything in between, the years when hell-bent was the only course to take, and luck was usually on her side. In between it all she wove the story of her unsuccessful efforts to find out what had happened to Hege Morell. About Sølve Bang and hidden tubes of Trofodermin, about faint-hearted home helps and a Jan Morell who seemed increasingly knackered and surly with each day that passed without any progress. She confided in him about the embezzlement, about that galloping embezzlement, that unplanned, arrestable offence that had virtually snowballed all by itself, and that only an idiot would have thought she could get away with.

‘You’re not an idiot,’ Einar said once Selma had unburdened herself. ‘You’re just stark, raving mad with gambling fever.’

‘Don’t tell anyone.’

He gave a wide grin. Selma noticed he had lost yet another tooth since the last time they’d met, the right upper canine. The gap caused him to struggle slightly to pronounce the letter ‘s’.

More than an hour had passed since her arrival. Einar had lit his gas burner. Selma had brought a bag full of small gas canisters when she had still been on top of the world and could bring him more than coffee, food and chocolate. Six weeks ago, in fact. Now he had only two left, she noticed. One of these was now burning red and a beautiful shade of pale blue between them, and gave off a little heat when they curled their hands around the flame. The torch had burned down. The food was all eaten up. The traffic above their heads seemed more muted than she could ever recall.

‘What do you want now?’ he asked her.