What Jan had felt when his wife died could at best be read between the lines. To be honest, there was little to find there either.

The oldest photograph was from DG and was ten years old, while Dagens Næringsliv had caught him making a speech when MCV had bought one of Sweden’s largest consultancy companies and suddenly doubled in size as a consequence. This had happened in 2012. Selma read both of these articles twice over without becoming any the wiser.

In truth, Jan Morell was a very discreet man.

Selma still had no idea about his upbringing apart from that it had taken place in Kjelsås in Oslo. And that he had also been fond of winter sports as a child. This snippet of information had come from an article that wasn’t directly about him, but about the opening of a new exhibition at the Ski Museum. King Harald had been present, and was pictured laughing in front of a showcase full of fibreglass skis from the late seventies. Jan Morell stood beside him, pointing at a pair of plain black skis with rattrap bindings.

These were the very Madshus-brand skis that financier Jan Morell had longed for more than anything else as a teenager. As the son of a single mother, he had to make do with secondhand wooden skis until he was an adult, as he told the ebullient king.

On second thoughts, it occurred to her that the text accompanying the photo did tell her something after all. What the word ‘adult’ conveyed was not terribly specific, but since Jan was born in 1962, he would not have turned eighteen until 1980.

Selma had been fourteen that year and had owned her first pair of fibreglass skis for a long time by then. Black and pale-blue skis from Skilom, she well remembered, and those were her second pair, now she came to think of it. At that age she had not known anyone who still used wooden skis.

At last she could write down something in the Moleskine notebook she had found in one of the boxes Darius had refrained from peeing in.

Poor?

She chewed the pencil.

You couldn’t exactly be called poor just because you didn’t have fibreglass skis. At that time, everyone had less money to spend than nowadays.

Without hesitation, she circled the word and scored through the question mark.

Single mother. Wooden skis, at least until 1980, despite his obvious interest in skiing. Jan Morell had grown up in more impoverished circumstances than most of his contemporaries.

Poor. She stared at the word.

It really told her very little. Her fingers automatically logged in to Facebook. She hadn’t updated her page for the past four weeks. Her feed was, as usual, a blessed mixture of sports videos, offers of sports clothing and equipment, and stories about people she did not know at all and cared even less about.