‘Yes. But that won’t help you much in this case.’

Yet again there was silence between them. Only now did Selma notice that she was starting to feel cold: Einar had given her a brand new fleece blanket he claimed to have bought at the Nille store earlier that day.

At least it didn’t smell too bad.

‘Make use of what you’re good at,’ he said, almost impatient now. ‘Use your systematics. Those analytical abilities of yours. Your memory. The fact that you’re no stranger to human traits. Your contacts, for Christ’s sake! You know everyone.’

‘Yes, of course, but how?’

Einar gave a loud, almost theatrical, sigh. Scrambled up and out of his sleeping bag. The customary odour of dirty male over-whelmed Selma, and she had to struggle not to show it. He was wearing nothing but long underpants. He planted his feet inside a pair of safety boots and stood in front of her, legs straddled.

‘What you’ve actually told me,’ he said, raising his voice, as if standing in an auditorium, ‘is that you can’t find a motive for sabotaging Hege. To be even more precise, for each motive you’re able to come up with, you can find counter-arguments that undermine its probability.’

Selma tucked the blanket more snugly around her.

‘The most obvious one,’ Einar continued, ‘which we discussed as recently as the evening you accepted the assignment, is that someone wants to hound the Chinese girl off the ski trail.’

‘Hege,’ Selma murmured.

‘Hege, right,’ Einar replied, nodding his head. ‘The Winter Olympics are round the corner, she’s the favourite in most of the distances, and lots of people could benefit from Hege not lining up at the start of any of them. On the other hand …’

He lost his balance for a second, and had to use a nearby boulder to steady himself. The startled magpie took flight.

‘On the other hand, Norway doesn’t only have the best female cross-country skier. We have four or five of the best. At least, we have plenty who could win. For a foreigner to get rid of Hege, it would have a limited effect. To put it mildly. There’s a queue of potential Norwegian gold medal winners behind her. The foreigners would have to drug the whole gang of Norwegians to improve their own chances significantly. For a Norwegian skier …’

He drew his unbelievably filthy fingers through his beard.

‘Each and every one of them has a chance, in fact. They could all beat Hege Morell on a good day. At least most of them could. To run the risk of sabotaging a teammate would be crazy when you think of how uncertain the gain would be.’