Whoever was holding him captive must know him.

Whoever had imprisoned him must know that he would choose death rather than this. And the worst thing, the very worst thing, was that each time the stranger had delivered some food, only now and then and in a pattern that was impossible to work out, that scraping, mechanical noise came from behind one wall.

It then moved closer and made the room steadily smaller.

THE SKIER

In the long series of more or less meaningless events that comprise a life, this day would be included as forgettable, no big deal, Hege Chin Morell thought. In time, she would look back on these days, these weeks that lay ahead of her and this surreal moment, and shrug with indifference.

Just a bump in the road. An annoying but surmountable obstacle on the road towards a brilliant Olympic Games in PyeongChang.

She was twenty-four years old and had decided that everything going on at present had actually not happened. It was too absurd. So obviously untrue. Something had gone wrong, and that something would be identified. The negligence would be corrected. It was simply a question of time; she’d tried to convince herself in the three days plus that had passed since she had received the incredible information.

Every minute of this hell on earth was sixty seconds too many.

The people facing her had become a greyish-blue, noisy mass. She closed her eyes gently and concentrated on picturing herself in her mind’s eye, triumphantly crossing a finishing line. A Christmas tree; a swallow dive into salt water. Her mother’s face, less distinct as the years passed, the smile that Hege could no longer completely catch except in fleeting retrospective glimpses. Mum’s blue eyes and her long, pale blonde curls, so different from Hege’s black, coarse hair that mother and daughter had woven a zebra plait of both their locks when she was little and was allowed to fall asleep in the crook of her mother’s arm once the nights grew too dark.

The most important thing of all, of course, was something she did not remember. Someone, probably her birth mother, had left her outside the absolutely correct children’s home. There was a photo of Hege, barely two months old, in a basket, with scabs in what little hair she had. She was wrapped in clean rags and had a green bear made of hard plastic for company. If she had ended up in some other place, at some other time, it would not have been Jan and Katinka Morell specifically who some months later would have brought that pale baby, suffering from eczema, home to Vettakollen in Oslo on the other side of the globe. Her biological mother, or whoever it had been, had left her early one morning under a half-dead willow tree outside the old mission station, a lucky chance in life, and little Chin would eventually learn to ski.