He thought he could hear sounds, but it was difficult to know whether they came from the apartment or from the noisy city outside. He was tempted to put his ear to the door. The two uneven, apparently sticky, stripes of indeterminate colour that ran diagonally across the timber deterred him from doing so.

It had been unusually difficult to track down the address. That sort of thing seldom took more than half an hour. Jan Morell’s private detective, or security consultant as was stated on his payslip, had spent a day and a half laying his hands on a Norwegian Turk in Ensjø. The guy ran a car wash and repair workshop in an obscure establishment by day and a poker den by night. He had been obstinate, the brief note said. Jan Morell preferred not to know what the security consultant had done next. He turned a blind eye. The main point of the report was that Selma Falck had been permitted to rent this apartment for three months for next to nothing. Strictly speaking, it was really a loan. The Turk was a former, and obviously extremely grateful, client of hers.

Exactly like Jan Morell. If he wasn’t especially grateful these days, he was at least decidedly former.

No one opened up.

Jan Morell thought he heard a cat meow. He hammered loudly on the filthy door and rang the doorbell again. Now he heard footsteps.

Someone inside touched the door handle. The security chain rattled. In a slender gap between the door and the frame, Selma’s right eye and the corner of her mouth came into view.

She said nothing. Just stood there, as if she needed time to comprehend that he had found her. He glanced down. A cat’s face, he concluded. The animal looked as if it had been involved in a head-on collision: its nose was like a flat button just below its ice-blue, over-large and fairly prominent eyes.

‘Open up,’ he said brusquely, nudging the door with his elbow. ‘I have an offer you can’t refuse. One last, substantial wager.’

Resolutely, he shoved open the door and strode inside.

THE TUBE

Hege was at home alone. In the small cul-de-sac outside the house in Vettakollen, behind a tall hedge of Serbian spruce, a pack of journalists and photographers had set up camp. Earlier that evening she had heard them and their vehicles, left with the engines running. The police came. Called by the neighbours, she assumed. The photographers, who had squeezed through the hedge and come terrifyingly close, were shown off the premises by four uniformed men with barking dogs.

It would soon be ten p.m.