One of them was of his own daughter, in a pose he had never been able to forget since then. Anette was maybe eight years old in the picture. She would have been eighteen if she had still been alive, but Anette Falsen had committed suicide two years earlier. She had never told anyone about what had happened to her and had, despite her parents’ tenacious efforts, vanished into a fog of drug-taking and despair before, unable to take any more, she had hanged herself.

Einar, who ever since his daughter’s death had seemed a tad unstable to some of his colleagues, killed Anders on the spot. The policewoman could later say that she had stood as if paralysed, and that the whole incident had taken less than a minute. She had heard the noise, she related in the witness box, a loud crack as the suspect’s neck snapped.

The next morning, Selma Falck was appointed Einar’s lawyer.

Selma could never leave Einar.

The Nille blanket and a pillow were clearly visible on top of the IKEA bag, and she grabbed both of them. She made herself as comfortable as possible among the big, reddish-brown stones. She took out her phone. Einar didn’t move a muscle. He must be already in a deep sleep. Selma wanted to watch a film, but discovered that she had only eight per cent juice left. Einar’s power bank was somewhere in the bags strewn around him, but it felt wrong to rummage through his belongings. She stuffed her phone back in her bag and began to talk instead.

She talked about Jan Morell. About his daughter, Hege. She told of the break-in at Sølve Bang’s apartment, about Lars Winther’s photo of her on her way into the Poker Turk’s. In a low, singsong voice, she spoke of everything she had experienced in this past week. Of Maggi, whom she liked, and Benedicte Selhus, whom she thought a sad figure. She talked about someone out there in the night, whom she thought had avenged himself on three boys in an old photograph. She spoke of Haakon, who would be cremated tomorrow, at a funeral that, after the events of recent days, probably wouldn’t take place in a crowded Trefoldighetskirke, the Trinity Church, in the presence of royalty. Only close family and a few friends would be there. And in a completely different venue from the one originally planned, in a possibly vain attempt to keep the press at bay. She talked about her frustration at not being able to understand what Haakon had to do with Hege’s case. Maybe she had been right all along: everything was coincidental, but at the same time she couldn’t quite put his case out of her mind.

She didn’t mention her own children.

She thought of them, all the time, and felt a painful gnawing in her diaphragm that never let up, and of her sorrow that they no longer even sent her hateful text messages.