Einar Falsen stood up, unsteady through rheumatism and eleven years as a down-and-out. He stretched his arms up into the air with a grimace before shaking his legs, one at a time.

‘This isn’t us, Mariska. We don’t sit here lying to each other. If there are things you don’t want to talk to me about, that’s fine. But don’t tell lies.’

‘I’ve been given a case,’ she said quickly.

‘I assume you get cases all the time.’

He sat down again, on a pile of newspapers and with the rolled-up sleeping bag at his back.

‘It’s actually not as a lawyer that I’ve received this particular case,’ she said, taking a bottle of cola from her pocket. ‘I’ve to be more of a sort of … investigator, in a sense.’

‘You? Investigate? You’re a lawyer, damn it.’

Chuckling, he shook his head and sank his teeth into the sandwich.

‘What’s it about?’ he went on with his mouth full of food.

‘A drugs case.’

‘Boring.’

‘Not necessarily. It’s to do with Hege Chin Morell.’

The chewing stopped momentarily.

‘That Chinese girl? The cross-country skier?’

A slice of red pepper trailed from the corner of his mouth. It looked like a dribble of coagulated blood. He swiftly poked it in again with a finger covered in ingrown grime. Selma handed him the cola bottle.

‘She’s not Chinese, Einar. She’s Norwegian.’

‘Yeah, yeah. But originally Chinese. No surprise that she was never popular.’

‘She is popular. She’s a winner.’

‘No. She’s tolerated because she wins. Admired. That’s something else entirely. And now she’s gone and taken drugs into the bargain. Sic transit gloria mundi.’

‘She claims it’s not true. That it must be a mistake.’

‘They all do.’

He was still talking with food in his mouth. The sandwich was soon all eaten up.

‘Good,’ he said, swallowing and putting his hands back into a pair of enormous construction workers’ mittens from Mesta, black with yellow reflective stripes. ‘Thanks.’

‘They all don’t.’

‘Almost,’ he insisted, stashing the cola bottle between two rocks. ‘There aren’t many penitent sinners. Even I don’t repent. And I killed a man. With my bare hands.’

He lifted the mittens up in front of his eyes and stared almost in bewilderment at them before adding: ‘That’s far worse than taking drugs. In the eyes of other people, I mean.’

‘Well, judging by the media attention, that’s debatable.’

Selma waved her iPhone, which immediately began to light up.

‘Hey! Keep that murder weapon away from me!’

He half-rose and drew back on the large boulder. The cardboard box behind him wobbled. Selma returned her mobile to her pocket.

‘Einar,’ she said gently. ‘Where do I begin? I mean …’

Reassuringly, she patted the jacket pocket into which the phone had disappeared.

‘Switch it off,’ he ordered.

Selma complied.

‘If we assume she’s telling the truth,’ she began again. ‘Just for the sake of hypothesis. It seems incontrovertibly correct that she provided a urine sample that showed a tiny amount of the banned substance Clostebol.’