The forest north-east of Larvik was called Vestmarka. It was criss-crossed by paths and tracks, but he did not venture very far. Immediately after driving under the motorway again, this time travelling in the opposite direction, he drew to a halt. The noise of heavy traffic on the E18 seemed soothing. He had reversed the car a few metres on to a tractor trail just wide enough to accommodate the Toyota. It was raining heavily. The ground was soft and soaking wet, between pine trunks and the odd slender beech tree in flight from the famous forest further to the south-west. In the course of the ten minutes it took him to heave the body of the world famous photographer, Morten Karlshaug, down into a natural gully and cover him over, he didn’t see a single soul. He drove out of the tractor track once again. The dead body could not now be seen from the road, concealed as it was by a thin layer of leaves and twigs and a couple of boulders he had managed to roll towards it. He broke a heavy branch off a spruce tree and used it to sweep all traces left by him and the car tyres as well as he could. Then he settled behind the wheel again and drove home.

The body had been dumped in an unattractive spot, far too close to the roar of a four-lane highway, nothing but a transportation route. A place to race through in search of the real hiking terrain further inside the forest. The cadaver was hidden, and most dogs would be kept on a leash so close to a built-up area.

There was nothing more he could do.

He drove to Oslo the same way he had come. Stopped in Kongsberg and cleaned the Toyota in a self-service car wash before he drove on, by now both hungry and thirsty.

He reckoned it might take days for the body to be found. If the snow came soon, it might even take all winter.

What he did not know was that the dead photographer was discovered exactly twenty-four minutes after he had left him. By a woman of seventy-nine, in rough seaman’s boots and ancient oilskins, out in the horrible weather in search of some spruce sprigs to decorate her house.

She couldn’t be bothered going very far. Just a short distance into Vestmarka, eight hundred metres from her own little house.

TRAIN OF THOUGHT

The traffic noise made it impossible to concentrate in the living room.