‘Why have you moved out? The only thing Jesso would tell me was that you’re no longer living on Ormøya. Where are you living, then? It was fine for us not to talk about this while we were eating, but now I really must insist that …’

The doorbell rang.

Hesitating, Vanja looked in irritation at the clock.

‘Wait a minute,’ she commanded as she got to her feet. ‘Don’t go.’

Selma did not go. She was in no fit state to leave. She was hardly able to do anything at all. She’d been at Vanja’s for more than two hours now without talking to her. Of course, she had chatted nineteen to the dozen. Selma Falck was good at small talk, best of them all; she had prattled her way through a long and extraordinarily successful life. On the other hand, she could barely recall the last time she had talked to anyone. About what should really be talked about, but for which there were no words. The situation had forced out of her bits and pieces of the story about everything that had led her here. It had been impossible to avoid. Jesso had to know something of the truth, of course; she had practically hounded her husband into losing everything and owed him some sort of explanation. The children, too, the nineteen-year-old who still lived at home to some extent and the twenty-three-year-old daughter who was studying law and planned to marry next summer. Selma had revealed very little to her husband and children, a tiny scrap of the true story, hardly anything at all, but enough to have Selma disinvited on the spot from Anine’s forthcoming sumptuous wedding.

Stop. Don’t think about them. Not about the children.

‘You have friends, Selma. Unbelievably many friends who wish you well.’

Vanja’s voice drifted through from the hallway as she apparently fumbled with the lock.

‘And I’m the best of them all. Now we’re going to have a heart-to-heart. We’ve the whole night ahead of us. I’m not letting you leave!’

Selma shut her eyes.

Took a deep breath, and tried to make her face resume its usual contours. She wanted to be her usual self. The competent, glib, popular Selma Falck that everyone knew, and who had been selected as the country’s best dressed woman as recently as 2015. Now she could smell her own body odour. Only faintly, and partially camouflaged by the Penhaligon’s perfume and an ancient hoodie with NORWAY emblazoned on the back, but noticeable all the same. The bathroom in her temporary apartment was, if possible, even more repellent than the living room, and she hadn’t showered for the past two days.

She knew of a poker group in Ensjø. They usually began around midnight.

She had to go.